I don’t know if I am a fossil, living in a world no longer existing, yet not connected into unsure of the future and present that lies ahead.
In recent times I have been thinking about how much the values of my youth and upbringing are different from that of what you see in the public internet square, the major cities, and the general demeanor of the young today.
Where this culture was once the majority: it was what had built up the post WW2 order and I had grown up in the trailing vestiges of it, I no longer see it in my daily life in the United States.
You feel a little bit of it on some university campuses: the quiet bubble of life and community that still exists in the country.
Naming it “Western European” is sensible for it was a pattern of building different from the Interstate-Internet-Suburb superstructure present in large areas of the United States today but also the PRC. I remember walking to school and going around the city as if I was a person, not some car in a superstructure. This will always be normal to me.
To replace what is natural with what is artificial—to atomize community in the name of money—to create environments where children only know punishment rather than curiosity and love—
I cannot advocate for that.
Buildings faced a commons together: rather than each mowing their own lawn, causing continuous noise, it was something done only once.
The pattern of ideas were different. There are numerous examples and attitudes I could give:
- I remember being told by a woman in Metz, France, that the vegetable garden was genuinely for the poor, and that it was actually discounted and normal produce. I was wondering if there was some sort of condition, like the produce would be lower quality (which makes sense from economic reasons), though the assumption seemed to offend her.
- Many years ago due to my birth in Finland, the Finnish baby cardboard box is something that I have never forgotten. It is the tiniest bit of goodwill, given to those who ask for nothing despite their lack, that brings one to tears from the deepest stirrings of their soul. I can only imagine how the Germans felt after WWII.
For the reasons of my origins and upbringing, I have never seen government as something to tear down in the way that many young who frequent protests do.
Values I remember fondly are respect for the individual, the diversity of ideas, and a responsibility for the community. Carroll Quigley, who had grown up in this culture as well, I think explains it better than no other with his copious amounts of writing as expected for a history teacher. Though I’ve seen some people speak about him as if he were some visionary prophet, rarely have I met anyone who yearns for the culture and way of life that was once present.
This modern destructive system and its people have destroyed nature in favor of more roads, apartments, and artificial constructions such as pools and gyms. I feel nobody specifically asked for it, but they have an idea that housing “has this” therefore they build it and certain people orient around the idea of being “pool and gym people.”
Why do people love personality tests? Maybe they want to be told who they are. But I never felt a categorization could be right, only a linear combination, the sum of all events can make up a person. And if multiple people have similar combinations, then perhaps they could be considered the same.
Nobody sits down and asks what is beautiful and what is right rather than what is legal. There are numerous stop signs and crosswalks that end in a grass field. Dollar Generals and parking lots spring up like mushrooms.
I recently thought about Tom Cavanaugh who was principal of my elementary school. We students walked to it from what was once public housing, and in this was the idea of a green space and a commons. The houses faced a central area where distractions such as cutting the lawn were once-in-a-while rather than each for their own. The respect for the individual, the animals, and those with no such power to protect themselves was so ingrained in the moral fabric of society: that one should Make Way for Ducklings and the idea of a Boston “Commons.”
This was a Christian society. A phrase I still remember: He who does not work does not eat. Though in my youth I believed religion to be superstition, when I look back: these Christian values were the source of everything good I remember growing up with. My piano teacher on Ash Wednesday; the stability and developed personalities of those deeply devoted.
It might be that such a thing just comes with age. But the younger teachers and younger students seem so much less set, prone to temperaments no different than the vicariousness of the world they now inhabit.
To say that the future of America is a “White” society rather than a Christian society: I can only say that the demographics and balance in the world don’t add up. And to see color in this way is opposite of what Martin Luther King, Jr. would’ve said.
All of this causes division, which is what a parasitic class would want. They then drum up fear in the population to hide themselves. Do not fear those who take the necessary action to save their country.
Except for English ones most countries say you are either the foreigner or the in-group. Well, what should be the in-group? Here’s a proposal: are you constructive or destructive?
Constructive people treat others equally, speak in ways that are about knowledge accumulation, are able to build things, and tell the truth.
Destructive people play emotional games, exclude people they don’t “like”, focus on gratification rather than future preference, engage in moral grandstanding, and lie.
Destructive people often try to mimic Constructive people to get access to these communities. It makes sense: because they don’t have ability, they can only engage in deception. Once they are in, they try to avoid being found. A company could do purges, but that is bad for morale. So competent people just leave to start something new elsewhere.
Having a mass movement probably requires some level of hierarchy, and promotions within the hierarchy should be just so that people don’t lose faith in the system.
This is an unavoidable choice between two alternatives. Anyone who is constructive, even 1%, will accumulate over time. Anyone who is consumptive and destructive will fall into a deeper and deeper hole. Perhaps one can be neutral: they neither add nor destroy, but I’ve not found many who are able to tread this line easily. And it’s conceivable that one’s balance over time differs based on the communities and environments they find themselves in.
I’m not going to focus on some sort of class-based revolution because it may just be that the society is too big to govern as one, power is distributed across numerous sectors, and the chains and tendrils of influence too long for any direct feedback. Try to make sure knowledge can easily get from the bottom to the top; don’t ignore feedback or people will stop giving it.
What is needed are more words, a deeper contextualization of the society, and an understanding of what groups there actually are. For example, Anglo-Saxon is outdated. Saxony is a state in Eastern Germany. But many Americans do go to London for study, so Anglo-American is more fitting.
In this article I hope to transport some words from that past time into our present day.
Thank you to elementary-school Gianina for writing this Prezi. I believe the first two paragraphs are her own summary.
Biography
Mr. Cavanagh grew up in Hyde Park, Massachusetts and had a brother and a sister. He attended Archbishop Williams High School in Braintree, Massachusetts and went to Providence college in Rhode Island. Mr. Cavanagh had no idea what he wanted to do after graduation, but he was an English major. He traveled to Europe for four months and returned and started substitute teaching mostly in Newton. He taught 5th grade for 3 years and then arrived at Beaver Country Day School. At Beaver Country Day he was a teacher and was also head of the middle school department including 7th and 8th grade. Mr. Cavanagh then went to Brookline and was a teacher for two years and then became the assistant principal of Devotion school for two years. Finally, he landed at Baker School and stayed for an incredible 26 years as principal.
Characteristics of Mr. Cavanagh
- Is on a journey or quest and is seeking something valuable or trying to achieve/accomplish something important
- Shows determination and perseverance
- Is a strong and responsible leader
- Reflects the ideals of a particular society or community
- Has a vision that his/her efforts can make life better
As former principal of Baker school what was your goal?
“The first goal was to survive and not get fired. Although it sounds like a wonderful joke it is also very true. Unless you have a trust fund or are wealthy on you own staying in the job is pretty important.”
“The main goal was to help form a community of people who cared about each other and cared about issues of the world. And as much as possible to excite children about learning. And although that could sound like a cliche I realized it was very difficult. There were somethings I knew that were important. But the idea that I could get children to believe that they were important, at the time was something I knew for my own life, was something easier to say than do. And so, I wanted to make sure I had great teachers around me, because they are they best protection if you are a principal.”
Do you consider your work heroic?
“‘No. I consider teaching and being a principal important work. And not only important, but necessary for a good society to have an educated citizenry and to have kids who care about learning, and can be able to go off on their own and be able to learn on their own. I had one advantage over a lot of people. There are many successful people in Baker, parents. And my wife has some very successful friends, not involved in teaching. I have had conversations with my wife’s friends and they have these regrets. That they don’t feel as idealistic as when they were 20, 25, they don’t feel as if they are serving society, but they are making money. I think teachers, although we all want more, we did reasonably well in terms of making money. But, I never worried about that I thought that I had forgotten my idealism or wasn’t doing something. I felt everyday I was doing something for society.”
After working at Baker for 26 years, what was it like to leave? How did it make you feel?
“I felt a combination of great happiness, some sense of accomplishment, and a substantial amount of regret. That I knew that I’d never again be able to have the relationships with the faculty. I’d never be able to walk the halls and high-five kids in the younger grades, and then at the 7th and 8th grades have serious conversations about things that they were getting into. And I knew that I had become friends with so many parents, that I was leaving all that.”
“I knew that I was going to retire for two years. What I came to the conclusion about was that with every benefit in life there is a cost. The benefit was, not to get up at 6:30 every morning, not to do two hours of extra work every night, not to have the stress of endless meetings and to prepare for them. That I would have my own time and be able to travel and not to worry. The cost was, that I was I was going to miss children, teachers, and parents, in that order.”
What was something that your students taught you while working at Baker?
“One day after some awful, awful thing some boy had done. I was talking with the world language teacher and she said to me “Tom calm down, and just remember this, all children including us Tom are works in progress. And as works in progress we are all going to make mistakes.” For some reason that profoundly affected me. I learned that people are works in progress, and to judge somebody for something they did on Tuesday is to forget on Friday.”
How would you define a hero?
“Well, this isn’t entirely true, there is a level to this. I think that heroism for me now involves two things: Being a moral person and doing the right thing in the circumstances that you live in. Too many people talk about heroism as what they would have done during the Nazi Era, or how they would have reacted on behalf of the American Indians, if they could go back a century. Well, so part of heroism is doing the right thing were you live, in the context of were you live. And the second thing is, well this is more in terms of politics, it is people that are willing to be physically brave. I admire Martin Luther King Jr. because he put his life on the line all the time. It is the mixing of standing up for a moral principle and showing physical bravery for it, that is on the big national scale.”
“My classical American hero is Abraham Lincoln. There is a wonderful essay written about Lincoln by great writer named Edmund Wilson he says that “If the Civil War is Americas defining play, it is necessary for the lead actor in a tragedy like the Civil War to die in the last act” and Lincoln died in the last act. It has always stayed with me that he completed his mission that he died as a result of it. But, the reason I care so much for Lincoln is that at its best heroism can make us better, as of people. And the best kind of heroism- I think that the three most celebrated people is the last 200 years are Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, and Martin Luther King Jr. And what they have in common is that they helped make the people behind them better as a result of their heroism. I’d like to think that I made the Baker community better by my longevity, and so you could put me down as a junior varsity hero.”
Be Kind. Work Hard. Help Others.
Concluding Thoughts
I think Mr. Cavanaugh was a good man in the sense that he could not really be a bad man. And for a stable society whether it is better to be composed of goods who cannot be bad or those who can be bad but choose to be good, I don’t know.
The former is a pyramid shaped structure accepting of others but the latter is a pack. Both of these are different from the herd-shape of modern society where differences are not tolerated at all.
The federalism of independents coming together for their own sake is less prone to exploitation than clueless people following a leader who considers only their own interests.
In Quigley’s time and in the past people were believed to be naturally good. You see it too in Chinese classics such as the 三字经. But I am beginning to think that morality has relations upon metabolism, biology, ethnicity, and sex in the developmental, Ray Peat sort of way—not the eugenicist way.
There must be some separation of the constructive from the destructive. Yet we must be both open and closed. We open our worlds and hearts so that many still yet emotionless others beyond the splendid garden gates may see a hope for their future should they work for it; closed in that one cannot be so kind as for guests to tread in soil when they should be sweeping it out.
Closed so that we do not let the false words of evil deceive us, yet open enough to consider them should we be in the wrong.
Society naturally is walls upon walls of levels that agree with each other: each cell, the human body as a whole, the house of a family, a neighborhood, a community, a country. Can this present state: all sorts of people scattered in all sorts of places—persist?
Without walls, different mental awarenesses will come into the same field, leading to conflict. Haitians are in Chile and other parts of South America, Mexicans are in California, the US Navy is in the Western Pacific, Chinese farmland is in the United States.
Maybe it would be better for everyone to sort to where they believed was the best fit. Yet the India-Pakistan border is still a source of conflict. And like Aurelius said: there is no true purity of descent.