Power Lifting from the 19th Century

I've always liked to read.

The vast majority of my adult life I've lived without a television (much to the chagrin of my children, but they survived their neo-Luddite upbringing in fine shape). Reading, playing board games, duplicate bridge, celebration cooking, and listening to live sports—reference my previous blog, Silent Spring—comprise my pantheon of go-to recreational pastimes.

My reading time enjoyed a sharp appreciation when I retired as FIC administrator at the end of 2015. I now average better than a book a week. While I still buy them, I've been steadily working my way through the enormous backlog that I accumulated over decades—of books I always meant to read, but somehow never got around to. Well, now I'm getting around to it. Very satisfying.

I'm an eclectic reader, who constantly mixes up what I tackle. In addition to a healthy assortment of mystery potboilers (Jeffrey Deaver, Michael Connelly, Louise Penny, PD James, and John Le Carré are among my current favorites), I read about one-third nonfiction, and 10% classics. I also have a sweet tooth for science fiction (Neal Stephenson, Vernor Vinge, Dan Simmons) My selections are based on mood and weight. As someone who travels a good deal (one or two out-of-state trips monthly, excepting during pandemics) I need to be prudent about what will fit in my suitcase, and hardbacks rarely make the cut for away games.

Fielding of Dreams
Right now, hunkering at home, I'm reading Henry Fielding's 1849 classic, Tom Jones. The paperback edition I have is not quite as old as the book, but close. It was put out as a Vintage classic in 1950, which is only one year younger than me (who aspires to become a classic himself), and listed for $1.65. Those were the days. Unfortunately, the perfect binding of this tome as also vintage and is no longer perfect. The book is literally decomposing even as I consume the words. While I started out with an intact copy, my edition has now self-divided into three segments and a few loose pages. This will be its last reading. Nonetheless I'm persisting.

Tom Jones is not just a classic; it's an investment. In addition to an oddball style and syntax for the modern reader, Fielding constantly interlards his prose with asides to the reader, often about the interplay of author, reader, and critic, but also to indulge in observations about human nature in general. The book is a whopping 886 pages, broken down into 16 subbooks, all of which are further parsed into anywhere from seven to 15 chapters.

Imagine my surprise last night (reading is typically the last thing I do before turning out the light) as I was breezing along in this satirical romp about the human condition in mid-19th Century England when I encountered chapter XII of book XII (pages 579-588 if you're scoring at home), a lengthy gratuitous segment on the culture of gypsies, facilitated by our hero stumbling into a barn full of them celebrating a marriage around midnight, while Tom and his two traveling companions were traversing the English countryside—in the pitch dark, mind you—in search of the road to Coventry. (Yes, the story wanders a bit.)

Through the author's somewhat strained artifice, Tom engages in a philosophical discussion with the gypsy king (who is conveniently among the celebrants), and the highlight of the chapter (the book?) for me was the royal's observation about how difficult it is for people with great power to resist the temptation to abuse it (some lessons are timeless). This what Fielding has to say:

No limited form of government is capable of rising to the same degree of perfection, or of producing the same benefits to society, with [absolute monarchy]. Mankind have never been so happy as when the greatest part of the then known world was under the dominion of a single master; and this state of their felicity continued during the reigns of five successive princes.* This was the true era of the Golden Age, and the only Golden Age which ever had any existence, unless in the warm imaginations of the poets, from the expulsion from Eden down to this day.

In reality, I know of but one solid objection to absolute monarchy. The only defect in which excellent constitution seems to be, the difficulty of finding any man [sic] adequate to the office of an absolute monarch; for this indispensably requires three qualities very difficult, as it appears from history, to be found in princely natures: first, quantity of moderation in the prince, to be contented with all the power which is possible for him to have; secondly, enough wisdom to know his own happiness; and thirdly, goodness sufficient to support the happiness of others, when not only compatible with, but instrumental to his own.

Now if an absolute monarch, with all these great and rare qualifications, should be allowed capable of conferring the greatest good on society, it must be surely granted, on the contrary, that absolute power, vested in the hands of one who is deficient in them all, is likely to be attended with no less a degree of evil. [I cannot resist an aside here, much in the spirit of Fielding: does this remind you of any President you can think of?]

… As the examples of all ages show us that mankind in general desire power only to do harm, and, when they obtain it, use it for no other purpose, it is not consonant with even the least degree of prudence to hazard an alteration, where our hopes are poorly kept in countenance by only two or three exceptions out of a thousand instances to alarm our fears. In this case it will be much wiser to submit to a few inconveniences arising from the dispassionate deafness of laws, than to remedy them by applying to the passionate open ears of a tyrant.

* Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius, who were the Roman Emperors in sequence from 96 CE to 180 CE.

This topic interests me a great deal, as power and its healthy use are a central and ongoing challenge in cooperative groups. As a close observer of intentional communities the past 45 years, my sense is that it is embarrassingly rare for people who are accorded great power to use it without abusing it—by which I mean using their power for personal gain (generally involving money or sexual misconduct) or the marginalization of individuals or subgroups (people who don't share their philosophy or with whom they don't get along or otherwise disapprove).

If we substitute "charismatic leader" for "absolute monarchy" in the Fielding passage above we arrive at a fairly cogent observation about cooperative groups. Fielding makes the case, which I support, that there is nothing inherently wrong with governance based on submission to the will and wisdom of a charismatic leader. The challenge is finding one with the right qualities, and there is the very devil to pay when you get it wrong. Amen.

Thus, reliance on a charismatic leader is fraught with danger. While groups have, I believe, a right to self-determination when it comes to governance, they are often trying to navigate a difficult passage  between the Scylla of consensus and the Charybdis of a governing oligarchy (of which the charismatic leader is a particular example—an oligarchy comprised of a party of one).

In the case of Scylla the challenge is educating the entire membership to think and act in the best interest of the whole (warning: this is harder than it looks, both because not everyone comes to cooperative life with this habit and may not be interested in altering the ones they have, and because it is often confusing to distinguish between differences in views that are based on legitimate disagreements about what's good for the group, and what's only a personal preference).

In the case of Charybdis—where, presumably, the uneducated (per the prior paragraph) are excluded from the decision-making elite (be it a single individual or a ruling core group) there invariably arises an us-them tension between those with power and those without, that becomes a sea anchor that retards smooth sailing and complicates group cohesion.

The key distinction between Scylla and Charybdis is that with the latter there is an explicit, acknowledged difference between those with decision-making authority and those without—in effect, a two-class system. Before anyone mounts a high horse, I should note that we have many mainstream models for just such systems: family, employment, school, and church all come to mind—all of which proceed with varying degrees of success and dysfunction. In fact, it is the intended deconstruction of a two-class system that makes consensus so radical.

But let's go back to Fielding and his criteria for good leaders, which I translate as follows:

a) Persons who are content with the power they have, rather than coveting more. Fielding styles this moderation.

b) Persons who are able to find happiness in what they have, rather than basing it on the endless acquisition of more. That is, their ambition is in check, and they are able to enjoy the journey.

c) Persons who support the happiness of others, whether it's compatible with the leader's personal joy or not. They consistently think and act in service to the perceived good of the whole.

To be sure, this is a high bar. Even if a person succeeds in meeting this standard (praise the lord) it is all the more difficult to sustain it—especially when they are fed a constant diet of sycophantic pap ("we're so blessed to have you for our leader") accompanied by high trust and low scrutiny of their behavior.

Having said that, I have also had the pleasure of meeting and working with a handful of exemplary community leaders—ones who have either met the stringent standards that Fielding has proposed, or are close. If you reflect on the criteria, you can infer that humility—not to be confused with a lack of courage or a dearth of self confidence—is also in the mix. That is, they are open to receiving critical feedback and continue to engage in personal work. This generally results in this person being in a leadership role—rather than being the leader, an important distinction. It means the person can cycle off duty, and the group must develop a breadth of leadership capacity among its membership.

Typically they're happy for others to take a turn at the wheel. While they may have high standards and demand sound thinking of their groups, they are fine with others serving as alpha dog (like geese in formation, it's prudent to rotate who's flying point because it's exhausting eating wind and generally not humane to ask one person to sustain all the blows). So it doesn't have to be them in the lead, and they aren't particularly motivated by full-time in the limelight. The reward, simply, is doing good and being helpful.

One of the greatest tragedies I encounter in working with cooperative groups is witnessing good leaders being misunderstood and expected to suffer the abuse and mistrust of members who have not done sufficient personal work to distinguish their personal agenda from what's best for the group, and then project nefarious motivations and level accusations of power mongering on the leaders—because they can't believe that anyone can be that selfless. Even though the leaders generally understand what's happening, they cannot defend themselves without running the risk of being labeled defensive, and too often are left to twist in the wind because the group's other members lack of courage to object to the calumny. Believe me, it's awful to watch.

While I was excited to find this insight about power buried two-thirds of the way through Tom Jones, it's sobering to reflect that Fielding had this aspect about human nature pretty well mapped out 170 years ago. What does it say about the species that we're not much further advanced today?

Booked in Duluth

Wednesday and Friday I went into work with Susan. She's been the office manager for St Paul's Episcopal Church in Duluth since 2010, and works 8-1 every weekday.

While it's unusual for me to provide anything more than chauffeur duty when it comes to backstopping Susan's church routine, this week I was pressed into service to help organize the book donations for St Paul's annual rummage sale, which came off yesterday without a hitch, and raised over $3000. 

(We were lucky with the weather. The monster spring snowstorm that slammed into Minneapolis Saturday stayed south of us. We experienced high winds out of the northeast—there were eight foot waves on Lake Superior, large enough to entice some local nutballs to assay surfing in insulated bodysuits—but snow accumulation was modest and we had a good turnout for the sale.)

Organizing the books was an interesting job (both logistically and thematically) that ate up about 10 hours. Starting with 30 or so bags and boxes on random titles, it was my task to sort the contents by type, display them, and create signage.

While doing the same thing with used clothes, dishes, or household knickknacks—regular rummage sale staples—is just as noble in God's eye, laboring among those flea market genres would bore me to tears. Books, however, are another matter. I have a great fondness (weakness?) for them and unpacking each container was akin to opening a box of Cracker Jack to see what treasure might be inside. It was also fascinating to see what people had been reading and were willing to part with.

While everyone assisting with the sale was volunteering their time, there was one major perk: as the book organizer, I got the pick of the litter. Here are ten gems (all paperbacks) that I gleaned from the sea of donations that flooded in over the transom:
 A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Dead Wake by Erik Larson
The Coffee Trader by David LissMirror Mirror by Gregory Maguire
Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi 
State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
The Full Cupboard of Life by Alexander McCall Smith
Fifty-five, Unemployed, and Faking Normal by Elizabeth White

• • •

When I got together with Susan in 2015 we were both eligible for Medicare, and we made a mutual pact to downsize our worldly possessions—rather than leave so much dross it to our adult kids to sort through when we depart this vale of tears. While some things have been easy to cut back on (how many t-shirts does one need anyway?), books are hard for me to let go of.

Fortunately I started facing the music on my book fetish four years ago, when I took the pledge: going forward I would release more books than I captured. More precisely, this was a commitment to achieve a net deficit each year, and does not prohibit me from acquiring the occasional new title (or 10) along the way. Among other things, this meant reading the books I had already acquired (in some cases decades ago) and steering clear of the temptation of bookstore window shopping. It takes discipline.

So far, I'm succeeding. On average, I consume a book a week (it's amazing how much time you liberate for reading if you: a) don't have cable television; b) don't do Facebook; and c) travel by train), and that affords me more than enough slack to cover for my annual indulgence at the St Paul's rummage sale.

While Susan has an iPad (and therefore e-reader capacity), I tried reading a book electronically and I simply don't derive the same joie de vie. There is something viscerally pleasurable about holding paper and turning pages that an e-reader lacks. Fortunately, books are still being printed and used bookstores—though not as prevalent as they once were—are still around. We have three in Duluth and I do business with two of them.

It's a happy day when your partner asks you to help out in ways that are a joy to deliver. Everyone feels good (and I have 10 more titles to add to my diminishing horde).

The Descent of Winter

Earlier this year I moved to Duluth MN, which for many weeks of the year can claim to be the icebox of the US. While there's no telling where the heart will lead, in my case it was here. Susan has been here since 1979 and that was good enough for me.

To be sure, others come for the salt-of-the-earth people, for the thriving art scene along the North Shore, for the glorious views of Lake Superior, or for easy access to the output of Bent Paddle Brewing—but what people don't do is to come for the balmy weather. (There are better locations for working on your tan.)

Although here it is October 6th and we still haven't experienced a killing frost (Susan and I harvested fresh basil this afternoon), the "high" tomorrow—and I use that term loosely—is projected to be a crisp 45 degrees. So here we go; time to make sure that the furnace filters are clean.

Fortunately, I like winter. To be sure, I don't particularly like ice, but I love creating a warm cave in our double bed each night, snug beneath the down duvet. I love hot soup for dinner, accompanied by cold butter melting on steaming rolls. I love how the diamantine stars dance on a clear new-moon night in January, sometimes accompanied by a curtain call from the Aurora Borealis.

In Duluth we expect the summers to be shorter and the winters to be longer. Even knowing that however, it's hard maintaining a good attitude in the face of spring's shy appearance. April is the cruelest month of all—when the calendar says it's spring but the ice persists in the harbor, delaying the start of the shipping season, as well as gardening. In anticipation of that Susan and I have finagled a Schaub sibling rendezvous in San Antonio for the first weekend of April in 2017, which we expect will net us a 30-degree gain in differential ambient temperature (we'll be trading 40 degrees in Duluth for 70 degrees in San Antonio—quite the upgrade). Will we be ready or what?

It was interesting this summer (when I was in Rochester for five weeks, getting my stem-cell transplant) that whenever I told folks that I was from Duluth, most southern Minnesotans commented on how lovely it is up here. This stood in sharp contrast with the opinions offered by most of my friends (living in balmier climes) who immediately expressed sympathy for what they considered my Nordic exile. (Oh, you poor boy.) Over and over I've had to explain that I like living in Duluth. Winters have never been a  problem for me, as long we've had enough dry firewood and good caulking around the windows.

As the thermometer drops, Susan and I start turning our attention toward holiday cooking opportunities: there will be Thanksgiving next month, followed by Christmas. Those are chances to warm the house from the kitchen outward, with good food marinating with family and good company. Somehow the food tastes better when it's cold outside.

Winter is also the best time for reading. For a couple years now I've been on a serious campaign to reduce my material possessions, with special attention being given to the enormous volume of books I've gradually aggregated over the years. Essentially I'm trying to turn around my habit of buying books faster than I read them. As a frame of reference I've plowed through 23 titles in the last quarter. As soon as I complete a title (I tend to alternate between fiction and nonfiction and have very eclectic tastes) I turn it over to Susan: either she can hang on to it to read herself (maybe one in four), we send it on to Goodwill, or I deposit it in one of the free lending libraries sprouting up in Amtrak depots these days. Slowly but surely, we're debooking the house, and I'm having a lot of fun getting exposed to all manner of ideas and wordcrafting.

You just gotta like winter.

Economic Leverage in Hard Times: Part 6—Entertainment

This is the sixth and final installment of my series (started Feb 5) on how everyone can get more out of the life they want while at the same time spending less money to make it happen. My motivation is that most folks today need to be more careful about their economic choices, and I have some good news.

Through what's been learned about cooperation and sharing in community living, it's possible for most of us to continue to enhance the quality of our life while at the same time cut back on cash outlays. To be sure, my suggestions will require some lifestyle changes. Yet what I'm offering is meant to be widely accessible, and does not involve a change in personality or altering one's core values. In Part 1 I focused on Housing; in Part 2 I looked at Food; Part 3 was about Transportation; Part 4 spotlighted Energy; and Part 5 examined Health. Today I'll tackle Entertainment and Recreation.

• • •

The typical American family’s budget devotes 5% to Entertainment, yet there is another 7% that goes to the Three Legal Evils of alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine, and I'll include them in today's focus. What's more, you have to figure that a healthy chunk of the 17% used for Transportation is travel for the purpose of recreation (including both the accumulation of small trips to the movies—or Blockbusters—or the annual family vacation to the beach). So all together, this catchall category probably represents something in the 15% range, and is well worth a closer look.

Here are a half dozen suggestions for how to you can make a serious dent in your Entertainment expenses, without any sacrifice in enjoyment:

1. Celebration Cooking
This is one my favorites, and when done in season—relying mostly on local raw ingredient—you'd be amazed at how inexpensively you can produce a gourmet meal. Even if you decide to indulge in exotic ingredients, buying them raw (or at least less processed) will save substantially over the price you'd pay at a restaurant. What's more, if you cook with others, that can provide high-quality social time in addition to the camaraderie enjoyed in the eating. Kind of like double dipping.

One of the highlights of Sandhill's culinary calendar is the 10-day window in late-April/early May when we can wildcraft morel mushrooms in the neighboring woods (see my blog of May 7, 2008 for more about this). No one misses those meals, and the cost is simply the time it takes to walk in the woods with a bread sack. Even if you come back empty-handed (which happens), how bad can it be spending a couple hours amidst the transitory explosion of spring wildflowers, watching the trees buds unfurl from their winter doldrums? (Stan feels the same way bout deer huntign each fall: either you get some meat for the family table or you've had a lovely day in the woods. You can't lose.)

For a handful of years when I was growing up (in La Grange, a bedroom suburb on the west side of Chicago) my family would host an annual summer block party, where everyone on our street was invited to wheel their barbecue units into our backyard and cook a meal together. While families were mostly cooking their own food (rather than a potluck), my family would supply drinks for everyone, and the kids would race around while the adults schmoozed and grilled. It was terrific fun, with everyone contributing only what they were going to cook for dinner anyway, and there was no driving involved at all (except maybe to buy ice to keep the drinks cold).

Going back to 2005, I've been devoting the first Saturday night in Novermber to preparing and consuming a slow food dinner for 12-14 friends (see my blog of Nov 10, 2008 for more about this). The last three years I've been doing this with my partner, Ma'ikwe. We essentially start cooking as soon as we hit town (late Thursday or early Friday) and take about 12 hours to prepare a meal enjoyed over four hours. We do the cooking and the guests divvy up the bill for the ingredients. It's so much fun that Ma'ikwe and I have already begun reviewing recipes vying for a spot on the 2009 menu.

What if you're not a great cook? Find someone local who is, and volunteer to organize the dinner and help chop vegetables! Hell, everybody eats.

2. Salons
No, I'm not suggesting getting your hair done as a mood elevator. I'm talking about conversation salons. While you can set this up any way you want, I encourage you to pick a group of people (preferably local, to keep travel costs down—think bicycle, not automibile) who don't see the suggested theme of the conversation the same way. Rather than only having the liberals over to discuss Obama, think about inviting some thoughtful Republicans or Libertarians into the mix, and getting interested in the possibility that someone's mind might be changed (rather than existing views reinforced or defended) and that participants might discover new insights (read hope) about how to bridge between positions that are traditionally better bunkered than the Maginot Line. World peace has to start somewhere. Why not in your living room?

Another version of this is the book club, where everyone agrees to read a certain interesting title and then gets together (once a month?) to discuss what the reading stirred up for them. Perhaps a more contemporary version of this might be a movie club, where people agree to linger after a joint showing, to discuss what they just saw. Did you see Crash, the 2004 Best Picture? If you get the director's cut of this provocative film, John Waters explians that he was expressly trying to create a movie that viewers would want (need?) to talk about afterwards. Instead of trying to create escapist fluff or fantasy; he was aiming to get audiences to reflect on the complexities and incongruities of everyday life. I thought it was a terrific film, and every bit as thought provoking as Waters intended.

3. Walking
Under Point 1 I mentioned my once-a-year sojourns in the woods hunting morels. But that's only the exotic tip of the pedestrian iceberg. You can walk every day. In addition to accomplishing commuting and errands—if you live close enough to where you work, or your kids go to school, or where you shop—walking can be both exercise and entertainment.

Sandhill is located on a ridge that drops off sharply to the southwest, affording us breathtaking views of the sunset. If the clouds are just right, an after-dinner walk along the ridge road on a June evening can be the highlight of the day. You can literally watch the sky run through its full range of palette options in 30 minutes. You can watch the barn swallows come out, and slash through the sky on their evening forage for the latest hatch of mosquitos. When the light drops too low for them to sight targets, the swallows abandoned the skies and are immediately succeeded by brown bats, who hunt by echolocation. Their flitting, darting movements are more abrupt and erratic, though no less beautiful or effective.

We had a couple living with us last year—Kevin & Ann— who were seriously contemplating moving in as next-door neighbors. Over the winter however, they decided they were not yet ready to settle in northeast Missouri. A major hestancy was around not having ready access to wilderness. In Flagstaff, where they had been living before launching their serach for community, they could literally walk from downtown into national forest, and that became precious to them.

Some people meditate; some practive Qigong; others walk. All offer a change of pace, reflective time, and a chance to unclench muscles cramped by sedentary confinement. All can be inexpensive elements of the Good Life, and cost next to nothing.

4. Reading
In addition to the book club idea mentioned in Point 2, reading can be immensely pleasurable, as well as edifying. For most of my adult life, I had been in the habit of reading about 25 books a year, fiction and non-fiction in roughly equal amounts. Then, in my late 40s and 50s I started getting away from it, relying more on videos as entertainment and conversation (and email) for stimulation.

When I married Ma'ikwe in April 2007, we carved our five weeks for a honeymoon in Europe, and I made the decision to leave my laptop at home. (Yes, I occasioanlly got on the web at an internet cafe, but I never checked my email even once.) Instead, I brought books and rediscovered the joys of reading. While I wouldn't say it was the best part of the honeymoon, it was a happy mid-course correction. Now I'm back to reading 25+ books a year and more frequently closing my laptop before I'm exhausted. Now I'm apt to spend the last hour or two of the day curled up with a book instead of subjecting myself to one more stream of electrons.

Don't want to bust your budget on new books (or even used ones from Amazon)? Libraries still work.

5. Singing
Singing is one of the most distinctive human activities. While many of us were shamed as children about not being able to sing well enough to subject others to our attempts, I believe singing is a human birthright, and everyone should indulge themselves as much as they desire, so long as they're reasonably mindful of those around them. (For more on my personal journey with singing, see my blog of Feb 26, 2008.)

At the FIC's Celebration of Community in 1993, one of the keynote speakers was Kirkpatrick Sale, the noted independent scholar and environmentalist. As part of his talk he told the story of Ladakh, a remote mountainous province in northern India that had for centuries developed its culutre substantially uninfluenced by those around them. Among other traditions, the Ladakhi were proud singers and song was a common element of local celebrations, big and small. Then, when radio waves finally penetrated their remote region after Word War II, the Ladakhi learned what "good" singing was by hearing brodcasts from Delhi. in particular, they absorbed the message that their brand of singing wasn't good. Within a generation, Sale reported that the Ladakhi had mostly stopped singing. I get sad every time I tell this story, reflecting on the loss of culture, and the loss of joy.

At neighboring Dancing Rabbit, they have a weekly singing circle, and it's common to witness an a capella choral performance at high celebrations like Equinox and Land Day. At both communities we typically sing a song as part of the blessing before the evening meal, and it's not rare for everyone to break out the Rise Up Singing songbooks for an impromptu hootenanny after Tuesday potlucks.

Top Secret: while an ability to hit the notes and a proficiency at reading music are undoubtedly helpful, the key to enjoying singing is showing up energetically. If you put your heart into the attempt, you'll enjoy yourself, and (mostly) so will those around you. If nothing else, try singing along with CDs of your favorite vocalists while you're in the ktichen or cleaning windows.

It doesn't cost anything, and it's something you can do alone, or with others—whichever strikes your fancy.

6. DIY Drugs
This last piece is not an encouragement to establish your own meth lab in the basement as a way to provide tax-free supplemental income in a flagging economy. I'm talking about brewing your own beer, making your own wine, rolling your own cigarettes, and even roasting your own coffee. We've done all of these things at Sandhill over the years. In addition to forcing us to be more mindful about our consumption of these drugs (legal though they are), the prepartion rituals create yet another social opportunity, substantially reduce costs, and enhance the pleasure of the consumption.

Today there are more home brewers than ever, and if the prospects seems overwhelming, think about trying to find someone else in the nieghborhood who's already doing it. If you like their product (be sure to drink a bottle first—all home brew is not created equal), consider apprenticing with them, or perhaps commissioning them to brew a batch for you. You'll still save money, and be bonding with the neighbors.