These undergrads at Columbia are surpassing every other effort I have seen at green living. Regardless of what is or is not happening with the climate, this short news article inspires me to think once again about what it means to be given the mandate of caring for that which God called "good." I'm embracing the the 5-minute shower and unplugging unused appliances, but I'm afraid I have to draw the line at worm bins in my bedroom.

creation care, cultivation and creation, environmentalism

Christy:

Todd Nelson, a Columbia sophomore, plans a double major in environmental science and history with a focus on industrialization and the rise of consumerism. He sleeps next to a worm bin where he composts food scraps.

He’s one of 13 students in Columbia’s GreenBorough dorm, where an experiment in sustainable living launched this semester is a competitive sport.

Showers are limited to five minutes (Nelson’s personal record is 1:50). A chart on the wall keeps track of offenders who forget to turn off lights and unplug appliances.

“We’re semi-paranoid about leaving on lights,” Nelson said. “We try to implement social pressure.”

The house won’t buy anything wasteful — like plastic cups — so its “off-the-grid” party two weeks ago had acoustic-only bands, flashlights, and was BYOC — Bring Your Own Cup.

This week, I visited with Nick Wolterstorff at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, a think tank connected to the University of Virginia and housed in a beautiful, unmarked building on University Circle (I found it by deductive reasoning: it was the one building that did not even remotely resemble a frat house). As we sat in the dining area enjoying homemade soup and bread, which is available at the Institute most Tuesdays courtesy of a lovely woman who prepares the feast as an act of generosity, Nick pointed out some detail in the wooden molding that ran along the ceiling in the room. He helped me to see how that detail, unremarkable to the average eye, changed the entire feel of the room. The conversation quickly turned to woodworking and craftsmanship, and I remembered this essay of Nick's reviewing Richard Sennett's book The Craftsman. I am grateful for craftsmen who understand how small details can open up an entire room, and I am likewise grateful for those whose "'primordial mark of identity' is that he or she is focused on achieving quality, on doing good work."

craft, cultivation and creation, nicholas wolterstorff

Christy:

Mine is a family of craftsmen—woodworkers, to be specific. My grandfather was a cabinetmaker, my father was a cabinetmaker, I have done woodworking, my sons work in wood. I have always resented the many ways in which those who work with their hands are demeaned. R. G. Collingwood’s aesthetic theory is shaped by his contrast between “mere craft,” as he calls it, and true art; the attitude expressed is typical.

I spent thirty years of my life teaching philosophy at Calvin College and fifteen teaching philosophy at Yale University. At both institutions there was a pecking order (these institutions are typical in this regard, not unique), more evident to those at the bottom of the order than to those at the top. If you use your hands or teach those who use their hands—“hands” being used both literally and metaphorically here—you are inferior to those who use only their heads: practicing musicians are inferior to musicologists, painters are inferior to art historians, teachers of business are inferior to economists, teachers of preaching are inferior to theologians. The basic attitude was stated crisply by Aristotle at the opening of his Metaphysics: “We think the master-workers in each craft are more honourable and know in a truer sense and are wiser than the manual workers.”

It’s a strange attitude for Christians to hold, since Jesus was the son of a carpenter and since God is presented in the opening pages of Scripture as a maker, not a thinker. Sennett observes, correctly, that “early Christianity had from its origins embraced the dignity of the craftsman.” That dignity was vigorously reaffirmed by the early Protestant reformers.

A craftsman, for Sennett, is someone who is dedicated to doing good work for its own sake. This good work will normally have desirable consequences; if things go well, the craftsman will get paid for what he does or makes, for example. But the craftsman is not content to aim at those external consequences; if consequences become his preoccupation, he will think in terms of getting by rather than getting it right, in terms of good enough rather than good. The craftsman’s “primordial mark of identity” is that he or she is focused on achieving quality, on doing good work. Craftsmanship is quality-driven work.

Sennett holds that in thinking about craftsmanship it helps to begin by looking closely at those crafts in which one uses one’s hands to make something. But if craftsmanship is doing good work for its own sake, then craftsmanship obviously extends far beyond manual crafts. It extends to the craft of writing book reviews. It extends to the craft of governing well that I mentioned at the beginning.

Changes in the ease of access to different cultural sources are definitely shifting what it means for something to be cool or uncool—especially, of course, for those with some amount of cultural power. I often wonder, though, whether this is a forward or a lateral shift. True, the old and the foreign can now be hip, but—if my own music tastes offer judgment—it just means that the new and mainstream are just correspondingly less interesting. (See also Jody Rosen's takedown of NPR's taste in black music, the "Dead-Old-Retro-Foreign Matrix") An age of cherry-picking might provide for a lot of desserts and clever mixed drinks, but not, alas, much meat.

brian eno, cool, horizons of the possible, music

Nate:

We’re living in a stylistic tropics. There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It’s all alive, all “now,” in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.

I think this is good news. As people become increasingly comfortable with drawing their culture from a rich range of sources—cherry-picking whatever makes sense to them—it becomes more natural to do the same thing with their social, political and other cultural ideas. The sharing of art is a precursor to the sharing of other human experiences, for what is pleasurable in art becomes thinkable in life.

This is an intriguing historical treatment of the phrase "social justice," which Michael Novak (here writing in deliberately non-partisan mode) traces to the shift from agrarian serfdom to urbanized democracy. We need more careful work on overused words like these (and in the coming days, you can read Novak's take on two others, "the common good" and "personal liberty").

agrarianism, catholic social thought, catholicism, cities, immigration, justice

Andy:

The scholar Friedrich Hayek finds that the first writer to use the term [“social justice”] was an Italian priest, Taparelli D’Azeglio, in his book Natural Rights from a Historical Standpoint (1883). It is in this book that Leo XIII (1878–1903) first encountered the term. The context was one of the most enormous social transformations in human history: the end of the agrarian age that had begun before the time of Christ, and the fairly abrupt entry into an age of invention, investment, urban growth, manufacturing, and services. No longer did families have an inherited roof over their heads and daily food from their own land. Now they were uprooted and dwelling in cities, dependent for shelter and food on the availability of jobs and their own initiative. Traditional social networks were cut to shreds, and the associations of a lifetime were torn asunder. . . .

I know from the experience of my own family over four generations how stressful the great transformation of society has been. Most of the gospel texts are cast in agricultural metaphors—seeds, harvests, grains, sheep, land, fruit trees—and so resonate with the economic order of most of human history until the nineteenth or twentieth century. My family served as serfs on the large estate of the Hungarian Count Czaky, whose own ancestor was a hero in the turning back of the Turks near Budapest in 1456. My relatives were subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and, as near as I can determine, were not able to own their own land until the 1920s. Men, women, and children on the estate were counted annually, along with cattle, sheep, goats, and other livestock, for purposes of taxation.

My ancestors were taught to accept their lot. Their moral duties were fairly simple: Pray, pay, and obey. What they did and gained was pretty much determined from above. Beginning in about 1880, however, because farms no longer could sustain the growth in population, almost two million people from eastern Slovakia—one by one, along chains of connection with families and fellow villagers—began to migrate to America and elsewhere. Usually the sons left first and sent back later for wives. This was one of the greatest—and most unusual—mass migrations in history, with people migrating, not as whole tribes, but as individuals.

In America my grandparents were no longer subjects, but citizens. If their social arrangements were not right, they now had a duty (and a human necessity) to organize to change them. They were free, but they also were saddled with personal responsibility for their own future. They needed to learn new virtues, to form new institutions, and to take their own responsibility for the institutions they inherited from America’s founding geniuses.

In this context the term social justice can be defined with rather considerable precision. Social justice names a new virtue in the panoply of historical virtues: a set of new habits and abilities that need to be learned, perfected, and passed on—new virtues with very powerful social consequences.

This is a valuable portrait of the Yale professor who is famously hard to describe ("technological guru, conservative polemicist, Unabomber target"), who "occupies a unique spot in American intellectual life, at the intersection of technology, art, politics, and religion," and who always, always makes me think.

Andy:

In an unusual and overlooked epilogue to Mirror Worlds, Gelernter imagined two fictional professors—his alter egos: a composer and an electrical engineer—walking and talking in the woods north of Yale’s campus. “Remember running, when you were a kid, just for the hell of it? Just for fun?” asks the technologist. “That’s why we do technology … it feels great, it’s the human thing to do.” But the humanist remains wary. “I’ve never said the possibilities aren’t tantalizing,” he counters. “All I’m saying is that the dangers are also frightening. I’m saying I’m worried and you’re saying sorry, I can’t help it.”

So how did a techno-skeptic awash in nostalgia for a less high-tech age become, in the words of The New York Times, a “rock star” in the world of computer science? “It was natural in the sense that computers were never remote or frightening,” Gelernter says. His father, Herbert, is a professor emeritus of computer science at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence. “I turned to computer science to make a living, but I also did it in the belief that, if I did not depend on painting and writing for income, I would be free to paint and write what I chose.” In Drawing Life, Gelernter dropped an aside that provides a key for entering his thought. In retrospect, he wrote, one of the reasons he wound up in computer science was his dislike of “intellectuals”—and his unwillingness to be one.

Gelernter traffics in ideas, but he despises intellectuals and blames them for irreparably degrading American culture. “Stop any person on the street and ask them to name a living poet, a living painter, or a living composer. There will be complete silence,” Gelernter says. “When I was a child, artists were heroes. Everyday people knew Robert Frost’s poems, and not only people like me, a respected Yale professor. Classical music was moving closer to the middle class, Leonard Bernstein concerts were broadcast on television. It was a marvelous thing to have poets, novelists, painters, and musicians representing the middle and working classes and giving them greater and greater artistic depth. All of this,” he says, sweeping his arm through the air, “was killed or at least dealt a very serious blow by the encroachment of the universities.”

This comes from a quietly amazing book of photographs of San Francisco in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake and fire placed next to images of the same areas today. The destruction enacted by the century-old calamities represents, of course, only a small fraction of the total destructions and creations documented in the photographs, and in Rebecca Solnit's accompanying essay.

cities, creation, destruction, horizons of the possible, ruins

Nate:

In another sense, everything is the ruin of what came before. A table is the ruin of a tree, as is the paper you hold in your hands; a carved figure is the ruin of the block from which it emerged, a block whose removal scarred the mountainside from which it was hacked; and anything made of metal requires earth upheaval and ore extraction on a scale of extraordinary disproportion to the resultant product. To imagine the metamorphoses that are life on earth at is grandest scale is to imagine both creation and destruction, and to imagine them together is to see their kinship in the common ground of change, abrupt and gradual, beautiful and disastrous, to see the generative richness of ruins and the ruinous nature of all change. “The child is the father to the man,” declared Wordsworth, but the man is also the ruin of the child, as much as the butterfly is the ruin of the caterpillar. Corpses feed flowers; flowers eat corpses. San Francisco has been ruined again and again, only most spectacularly in 1906, and those ruins too have been erased and forgotten and repeated and erased again.

Food for thought when one is tempted to skip over the more boring sections of, say, the Book of Numbers.

cultural worlds, language, lists

Nate:

The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order—not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries. ... We also have completely practical lists—the shopping list, the will, the menu—that are also cultural achievements in their own right. ...

The list doesn’t destroy culture; it creates it. Wherever you look in cultural history, you will find lists. In fact, there is a dizzying array: lists of saints, armies and medicinal plants, or of treasures and book titles. Think of the nature collections of the 16th century. My novels, by the way, are full of lists.