Jeffrey Howard is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief at Erraticus, an online publication focused on human flourishing. On this episode, Jeffrey joins Alexsandra and Ross to discuss the ideas in Deneen’s book and compare how communitarians and liberals see the world.
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. My name is Alexsandra Guerra and I’m here in Seattle with my lovely co-host, Ross Kenyon.
Ross Kenyon: Keep getting those lovelys. Stacking up, feeling extra confident.
Alexsandra Guerra: Now take it back. Today you were not so lovely.
Ross Kenyon: Ouch. I might have to edit that so it doesn’t interfere with my public perception as lovely.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah, it’s scary. Just joshing around, as always. Well, we have an old friend of mine who coincidentally moved to Seattle a bit before I did. We’ve been hanging out and talking. We have with us here today Jeffrey Howard, editor and founder of Erraticus, which is an online publication that takes a pragmatic approach to ideas and focuses on human flourishing. We’re very happy to have you here with us, Jeffrey.
Jeffrey Howard: It’s a pleasure.
Ross Kenyon: Welcome. We should also say at the start that for the first time, I think we’re going to call a season break. I think we’re going to take a little break after this episode. I don’t know exactly how long it’ll be, but we have some episodes that we’re planning. We’ve been doing this basically non-stop for close to two years now, and I think it’s time to regroup a bit, strategize.
Alexsandra Guerra: Absolutely. So we hope that you are enjoying your holidays, some time with family, resting, recovering, getting some moments of human flourishing in a community. I know that I will be taking a break. I will be off the grid for like three weeks.
Ross Kenyon: You have well earned it.
Alexsandra Guerra: Going to try to learn how to meditate.
Ross Kenyon: That’ll be fun.
Jeffrey Howard: It’s a good thing to do.
Ross Kenyon: I’m sure that will come up in the show here too. Well, we decided to do this show because — well, where do I even start with this one? Wendell Berry has come up so many times that it’s become a running joke. In fact, we had a fan create a bingo card for Nori, and Wendell Berry himself is one of the bingo squares.
Alexsandra Guerra: I noticed that.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Talking about doing the show with Jeffrey, he’s like, you gotta talk about Wendell Berry. I was like, yeah. And Jeffrey, correct me if I’m wrong: so you just read this book by Dr. Patrick Deneen called Why Liberalism Failed, and this is a book very much in the same school of thought as Wendell Berry. Dr. Deneen is a communitarian — I think he calls himself a Catholic communitarian. But he definitely is a Catholic who speaks in communitarian circles. So I think that’s addressed. I pulled that from Wikipedia, which, as you know, is 100% accurate at all times.
Jeffrey Howard: But I could see that. I could see that fitting.
Ross Kenyon: And we wanted to do an episode that focused on the political philosophy of communitarianism, because it’s strange, it doesn’t break neatly along the political lines that you might expect. Sometimes you’ll be reading Wendell Berry and be like, wow, this is to the left of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. And sometimes you’re like, this is extremely conservative, and I have a hard time mapping this given my political experience as an American in 2019. Which, for no other reason, I think makes it interesting to read, because it isn’t exactly what you would expect all the time.
Like, I know when I read a conservative or libertarian or progressive or Marxist, I know what I’m getting. Communitarians still have that little bit of a surprise in there for me, like a little spice. So we decided to have Jeffrey on to talk about what exactly communitarianism is. Why should we care? What does it have to say? Well, why don’t I put words in your mouth — why don’t you just start off in the broadest terms possible here. What is a communitarian?
Jeffrey Howard: Yeah, so let me offer — I want everyone to envision a square, or rather a diamond. So if you’re comfortable with the left-right paradigm, politically speaking, the northern point you could see as communitarianism, which serves as a contrast sometimes with individualism, or even in some ways with libertarianism. And on the left, you usually have a big focus on equality, and there tends to be a greater comfort with government or state intervention in the market, discomfort with state intervention in, quote unquote, the bedroom, or in people’s private lives.
The converse of that, on the right, you know, more comfortable or traditionally more laissez-faire market approach, but being more comfortable with state intervention into people’s private lives. Whereas south of the border, I guess you could say, is more individualism, or it’s really about removing any means of intervening in people’s private lives, that people are free to do whatever they want, essentially, as long as they’re not harming other people. There’s all sorts of squabbles within that [unclear] corner of the political spectrum.
And then you have communitarians, which is really focused on, ultimately, solutions come from communities, that ultimate meaning comes from community, that things need to be determined through communities. And by community, that’s on the local level, as contrasted with, say, maybe a national or a global community. It’s really about the particulars versus the universal. And, as we’ll talk about, the contrast between liberalism, which focuses on a more universal ethos or a more cosmopolitan view — communitarianism might contrast with that, with a more focus on a local or a particular context.
Ross Kenyon: All right, so if I read this back to you: you have people that are broadly left of center now, who are progressive, they’re pretty comfortable with the state changing various things about the economy, whatever. And you have people that are right of center who tend to be suspicious of the state messing with the market and that sort of thing. But communitarians seemingly are suspicious both of, like, the federal government introducing a new suite of programs ostensibly to help people — they think that’s maybe too big and too distant a solution — but they’re also very suspicious of the market ordering society according to its dictates too. Is that—
Jeffrey Howard: Yeah, I think that’s pretty accurate. Depending on which type of communitarians you’re speaking with, they may also emphasize being comfortable with state intervention in the sense of more local state interventions, or economic solutions that are more locally driven. But, you know, they’re going to be critical of extreme laissez-faire approaches or extreme federal-level mandates.
Alexsandra Guerra: So how do you know that you’re a communitarian?
Jeffrey Howard: It’s fluid. It’s individual. I don’t know. I’m sure there are quizzes online.
Ross Kenyon: Honestly, communitarianism is probably so niche that there probably aren’t any BuzzFeed quizzes for whether you’re a communitarian or not.
Jeffrey Howard: Oh man. But I think a few hallmarks you can look for is, you know, when you’re considering ethical and moral questions, do you see it through the lens of, is this going to be good for my community, or our community? There’s a slogan within sort of communitarianism: I don’t become a me without a we, or something along those lines, right? Like, you cannot exist without being part of a whole. And you can’t just think of what is only good for me, or what I want to do. You’re always thinking in the context of, how does this impact other people? And ultimately, as human beings, we’re relational creatures.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I was hoping I’d have a chance to bring this up. Maybe you’ll like this, Alexsandra, but there’s a very famous Margaret Thatcher quote when she was prime minister of Britain, and she said that there’s no such thing as society, and that this is just an idea. Yeah, I was like, that’s true, the idea of society isn’t something that I could point out, it’s sort of in the idea realm. But I remember people coming back and being like, the individual is an abstraction. Like, great, so now what do I do? It’s useful, it’s easier to think in terms of individuals acting. Or it’s sort of like, is this going to take us down a road that’s too weird?
Alexsandra Guerra: Well, I have a [unclear]. I’m gonna walk you back just to what you were describing, Jeff — Jeff, oh, Jeffrey. A lot of it resonated with me in terms of, okay, you’re going to see something and you ask yourself, is this good for my community, and less so about, like, is it good for me as an individual? I very, very much identified with that, because I have a loss of identity without my whole, my community. Now, here’s the thing, here’s a sticking point. It’s a little bit different from what you were describing with regards to locality.
So to describe my situation: I’ve lived in all four corners of the US, so Miami, New York, LA, and now Seattle. Spent three months in Denver. There are people that I have in different places that are my community. I talk to them fairly regularly, very close to my family, and they’re my community. And without the ability to talk to them, to see them, to just continue that connection, I would have a loss of identity. But they’re not local. So can you be a communitarian without locality?
Jeffrey Howard: That’s a great point. I think you can be. There’s definitely — for communitarians, and especially for Patrick Deneen in this book, Wendell Berry — there is a publication called Front Porch Republic, where they talk about place, limits, and community, and markets in a very specific way. But, like, place does matter. But communitarians may talk about three different types of community. You have a community of place, which is what we’ve talked about, it’s your geography-based, right, your neighborhood or your anchor.
You have communities of memory, which is a little bit more broad, sort of like we as a community of Americans, right? We have this memory of the American founding and certain mythologies that we have with that identity in that community. It’s the most abstract of community that communitarians will talk about. Third is communities of psychology, where it’s essentially the face-to-face interaction, the way we get fed by one another emotionally, and those more human elements that we — those really meaningful moments of community.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I would say we should definitely discuss that more, but maybe we should do it through the lens of the book here. So, Why Liberalism Failed. Why did it fail? What were the alternatives? What even is liberalism? I don’t even know that people can recognize it, since we all swim in it. And even if you’re listening right now, you’re Republican or Democrat, you’re both still liberals in the broadest sense of the term. You probably have more in common than you might think. What is liberalism?
Jeffrey Howard: Yeah. So to your first point, Deneen would say liberalism failed because it succeeded, which is sort of a clever play on words. But what he’s saying there is, baked into liberalism are a few tenets that ultimately are going to, or have, or are, leading to its demise. And so liberalism, the way he defines it in the most broad terms — again, it’s not liberal progressive or conservative, it’s a broad philosophical tradition that generally starts back with John Locke, who is considered an Englishman, who is considered the founding father of liberalism. You have liberals like Hobbes and his employer, Sir Francis Bacon.
And the idea is that there is a state of nature, and this is arguably kind of a fiction, maybe a thought experiment, that in that state of nature we were all in our most free state of being, that we are non-relational. We are not beholden to sort of arbitrary things of birth, such as your heritage, the religion of your parents, the boundaries you’re born into, all these things that liberals consider arbitrary and limiting. And then in the state of nature, as the most free being, you are free of all those things, and you have certain rights as an individual. The most liberal maxim is sort of, you’re free to do as you want as long as you’re not harming others. That’s John Stuart Mill’s harm principle, and that’s at the heart of liberalism as well.
And so this idea is that we exist as these non-relational beings, and in order to maintain that, to avoid the sort of short, nasty, brutish life, we enter the social contract, in which we form governments that are there to secure those basic individual rights. A lot of these are contained in, you know, the Declaration of Independence, which was very Lockean, and ultimately later the Constitution for the United States and many other countries. And at the heart of it really is individualism. Deneen also talks about conquest of nature. So this really intersects with what we want to talk about with the Reversing Climate Change podcast: this philosophy that nature is something to be conquered and something to be controlled, and we’re reaping the fruits of that, and the ecological devastation is the logical conclusion. So those are just a few of the tenets.
Ross Kenyon: There’s a lot there. I almost forgot we’re on the Reversing Climate Change podcast.
Jeffrey Howard: We’ll get there, I promise ya.
Ross Kenyon: [unclear] Thank you, Jeffrey. I love the anthropology of this, because it’s clearly just a thought experiment. And if you don’t have language, if you don’t have touch, you can’t even develop your mind, you know. You get attachment disorder, you will not do well in a group setting ever, basically, unless you combat that. In order to even make sense of the universe, you need language to help you develop concepts, to partition the world so it’s not just undifferentiated mass. You only get that by being born into relations, and you don’t just develop that on your own.
But sort of the contractarian view is useful, because it’s about consent, right? About how can people choose to consent to political order, which is otherwise just banditry. Basically, like, states just saying, I rule you, you must consent. And they’re like, no, there’s got to be some consent in here, right? And so they’re trying to work their way into, how could someone consent to a divine monarchy? This is where, like, as I understand, Hobbes is trying to work towards this. Whereas, like, social contract theory and contractarianism is very much like a world like The Walking Dead, where you have the various bands of people encounter each other in a state of nature where there’s no overarching law. It’s like, do we trust each other, do we agree to stuff or not? And then of course they’ll just kill each other. So the point is to — like, go ahead.
Alexsandra Guerra: Or beat each other with bats. Or beat each other—
Ross Kenyon: We hate spoilers. Spoilers!
Alexsandra Guerra: Hey, that was ridiculous. That never happened.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, so that’s part of that tradition, I guess.
Alexsandra Guerra: You literally just said a bunch of words. Like, you’re like, banditry. Like, what was that? Contractarian? Contractarianism? What are these words?
Ross Kenyon: It’s basically just, yeah, like, social contract theory. So, like, people, how do they agree, and how do you consent to a government ruling you? Because right now, like, you’ve never given your consent to be governed. But clearly, like, does implicit consent work in this case or not? People have been fighting this question a very long time. I like David Hume’s Of the Original Contract, where he’s like, implicit consent is like carrying a sleeping man onto a boat and saying, if you don’t like it you can jump off. So, not so good. And also explicit consent is impossible, and we would never all agree to the same rules. So it’s like, does consent matter as a political principle at all? Clearly we want consent, you don’t want the idea of, like, being governed without your consent. But then how do you make it work? So, like, social contract thinking is trying to square the circle to this day. I still don’t know how it works.
Jeffrey Howard: I see it on a spectrum, and I also don’t see quite how it works. Consent’s very important, it doesn’t work anywhere.
Ross Kenyon: That’s like, maybe the seasteading people who want to, like—
Alexsandra Guerra: That’s what I was going to say. Like, if you could truly opt in, like, that’s explicit consent.
Jeffrey Howard: But so, like, communitarians might come back and say, consent is not nearly as important as you think it is. Being born into these relations — you didn’t choose your family, but that’s not arbitrary. That doesn’t mean you can just throw them to the curb as garbage. You owe them some bonds of affection and love. Or unless they’re, like, horribly abusive, unless you choose not to, unless you’re like, okay, this is something — but you have to make that choice very consciously and explicitly, like, okay, I want to dump them, and now I burn this bridge and I will never walk back.
These are some of the downsides of liberalism that Deneen sees, quoting the French aristocrat who came to visit America, Alexis de Tocqueville, in 1829 and 1830, had a couple of volumes, Democracy in America, in which he talks about, at the heart of liberalism is this idea of freeing ourselves from the chains that bound the aristocrats all the way down to the peasants. But what has happened, from Deneen’s perspective, is that these other chains that bind us — family, the community, faith communities, cultural, ethnic communities, you name it — that we inherit, our inheritances, even down to — Deneen likes to talk about last names. So he’ll give presentations on this book, and he’ll talk about how Deneen means of Neen, it’s like an aristocratic name, or like de Tocqueville. That’s a name. Smith.
Alexsandra Guerra: My last name is Guerra, which means war, and I haven’t been wanting to change it. And that’s an inheritance, whether you wish to claim it or not, right?
Jeffrey Howard: Yeah. He talks about how, in trying to liberate the individual from these aristocratic oppressions, we’ve liberated individuals from all other demands that we could place upon one another; that we are so focused on trying to make the individual completely free that we are so non-relational that we are uncomfortable, or not allowed, to make demands upon one another. And communities are based on us being able to make demands on one another, where it’s like, hey, I’m sick and unwell, someone in my community, I can make a demand of them, an unspoken demand perhaps, to come and take care of me. Because that goes the other direction too. And we don’t really have these strong bonds, a lot of us.
Ross Kenyon: Tocqueville. And Robert Nisbet, his book The Quest for Community, came up in this book, which is like an old favorite of mine, because he’s one of the conservative thinkers I think is super interesting. And he has a great section in that book where he talks about how, prior to the Industrial Revolution, literature tended to be about feeling over-defined. Everyone in my small town knows all of my business, there I have no room to be myself. I’m sure if you’ve ever been to, like, a small-town community, or like with your family, and you’re just like, everyone is constantly gossiping and knows everything about me and I hate it. Literature tended to be about being over-defined.
Alexsandra Guerra: Hashtag holiday season. They’re going to be listening to this, like, on their walk away from the Christmas table.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. So you probably know, listeners, especially — you have to live with that, and that’s just your life constantly. But then Nisbet comes back and says, well, after the Industrial Revolution, literature tended to be about alienation and about not feeling connected, and things like, some, like, Franz Kafka, where you’re just sort of like an anonymous person in the city and you don’t have any connections. So basically we’re just doomed to be unhappy, is the point of that whole spiel.
Jeffrey Howard: Well, yeah, that’s the real worry here. As we’ve liberated ourselves so much — and I speak of this from a very liberal perspective — there’s this concern of, where’s my place? Like, we have these very thin communities. So, I think we all, most of us, have communities that we talked about, whether that’s, you know, the people I go bouldering and rock climbing with, the people who maybe share certain political or philosophical views, maybe my family, or faith, or whatever communities we have. Some are thin and some are thick. And by that I mean, really, these stronger bonds that are more difficult to exit. So one of the celebrations, or achievements, of liberalism is that it’s made exiting, quote unquote, arbitrary relations or arbitrary inheritances that much easier.
Alexsandra Guerra: Absolutely. So in this book — well, the book again is called Why Liberalism Failed — in the beginning he starts talking about this point that our relationships are now super loose. And he makes some pretty sweeping statements. I’m not going to get into that, I mean, there’s a lot of, yeah. Anyways.
Ross Kenyon: Hold yourself back and extend it out.
Alexsandra Guerra: Okay. And we’re moving forward. So there’s the looseness in relationships, and he very much implies that this is a terrible thing, like it has led to the demise of, like, social — I don’t know, I wouldn’t even know how to describe—
Ross Kenyon: The capital.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah. But what’s so interesting is, like, I almost see it like a pendulum. So if I take a ball and I swing it this way, they’re over here in an extreme, super constrained, right? They implicitly, or just, we’re bound to some social contract that they never said yes to. And then, okay, then there’s liberalism, we let them go, and that ball swings the other direction. So now we’re so free, we’re like, oh my God, I’m so far off the middle, because now I have thin communities, I have no one to take care of me when I’m sick, to bring me some soup or whatever it is.
And so I think that the feeling that I got, or the idea, from listening to this book was, well, relax. It’s just a normal thing, where we can now come back to the middle, that there might be this natural order swing where we find in the end we’ll settle on a middle where it’s like, you will have community but you have more freedom to define what that community looks like. And we just might be at this particular point in time, at a stage, because of technology, because of global economies, where we’re just so far on the right or left or whatever on the side, that you’re going to swing back and meet us in the middle. I was doing this whole thing with my hands.
Ross Kenyon: I hope so. I wonder how much worse it’ll get until it gets better. I think, if you’re listening, take a catalogue. Be like, do you go to church? Are you a member of any fraternal societies? Are you in a knitting club, or a reading group, or a bowling league, or in any of these? I had to send this to Jeffrey in prep for this. My favorite comedy ever, Peep Show, still the greatest. There’s a great scene, I think I’m gonna send it to you also, and I’ll send it to you though, but they go on a double date and they go to this play, and it’s like local community theater, and they’re like, this is terrible, what a waste of money. We could be watching Heat with Robert De Niro and Al Pacino at home.
It’s like, yes, there’s definitely, like, the competition for my attention after work. Like, I’m sure you get home and it’s like, would I like to go and pray, or go to a Bible study right now? Or would I like to, I don’t know, go and play badminton with people? No, I can watch literally any show in the history of the planet with no effort at all. I think it’s just hard to compete. I think we’re going to see a lot more fighting on the internet in your apartment by yourself before we see people joining this stuff again. I hope I’m wrong.
Jeffrey Howard: Yeah. I like [unclear] what you’re saying, is maybe it is a pendulum. I’m generally an optimist about things, but I do see a lot of this pessimism, where we are both, from market means as well as through government interventions, were able to isolate and not have to invest as much in communities, because we can fall back on something else. And I can think of a couple of examples in my own life.
So, I think, to Ross — and I met in DC during my second stint in DC. It was actually during my first go at DC that, after finishing a semester of teaching, I was, you know, in some sense underemployed, underhoused. I was crashing wherever I could find housing with people, as well as I didn’t have enough money for food. And I grew up, I inherited a very powerful, very thick faith community that I can still — although I’m non-practicing, more culturally a part of this community — I can go in many places across the country and I can tap into people with a shared, this sort of shared story, shared—
Ross Kenyon: Is it the People’s Temple, or—
Jeffrey Howard: Yeah, it’s one of those. No. But I’m in DC, I’m in this hard place, and I’m no longer practicing the faith, but it’s still part of my community, my family heritage. And I go to local clergy, talk about my situation, and being sort of a law of reciprocity, I’ve given so much to this community throughout most of my life that, in speaking with local clergy, they’re able to provide a little bit of help with food for a couple months for me. And that’s something that is a thick community, that is providing support and help to me, that I’ve placed a demand on them because they’ve been able to place a demand on me.
Whereas, in contrast, if I’m not part of a really strong community, I’m not incentivized to have a strong community right now, because, well, if I fall on hard times I can rely on this state intervention or that state intervention, or maybe I can find some other cheaper market means to achieve something that doesn’t require me having to extend myself emotionally or socially with other people. But then that’s the thin — even a thin way of living, superficial, does not speak to your core, does not revive you.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yes. Yes to everything that you’re saying. And what comes to mind in this conversation is, it almost seems like the trigger is moving, is leaving, right? So, assuming, of course, this is not the case for everybody, but assuming you are born somewhere, you’re raised somewhere with a family, and then you move. Like, for example, I moved from Miami to New York when I was 18 for college, and then I had to start a whole new community there in college. Luckily the soil is fertile, and you’re kind of forced to repeat interactions with people, so you’re able to build a community. But again, it’s not as thick as my family home in Miami.
Then I go to grad school and I’m like, oh, that’s even harder, because there’s no social, there’s no help from the university for, like, PhD students to hang out. Which is like, oh, it’s the other PhD students that were in your lab, but they’ve been working together for three years. Then you have, like, an awkward one year of, like, working in the lab and trying to be friends with people. And then, like, just moving, to me, seems to be a pattern that triggered my loss of thickness in community or connection, and it takes a lot of intention and effort to rebuild that wherever you go. And you have to start from scratch every time you move. I still don’t feel like I’ve done a very good job here in Seattle of figuring it out.
Ross Kenyon: Like, a bit of a hermit. Getting me out to do basically anything is still an endeavor, I need a lot of talking into, and it’s bad. It’s like, think about how hard it is to make friends as an adult. You really — and not even to make them, but to preserve those relationships, because you can just, like, stop. Or you can say, like, maybe turn down an invitation two or three times, maybe that’s the last one you get, until you don’t do it. So you really gotta try. I don’t feel like I’ve been trying very hard, and I don’t know that it’s been the best thing for me. Are you from here, Jeff?
Jeffrey Howard: No. So, a little bit of my personal history. I’ve lived in California, Utah, [unclear]. Yeah, I mean, Ross and I followed similar geographic changes, just in parallel, unbeknownst, just bouncing around.
Ross Kenyon: Wait, we’re like the rootless, fungible, disaffected liberal extreme.
Jeffrey Howard: Yeah, well, right, like, it’s the — you don’t know what you have until you lose it. And, you know, as someone who used to have such strong community, and also being a bit of a hermit myself, I’ve — and how much I’m invested in, interested in, reviving community and the loss of it. You know, it’s hard. You come home from a long day of work and you’re just like, I just want to make dinner and crash. I’ve got to take my dog out for a walk. And we’re inundated with content, consumed on every other streaming device, and just like the one we left behind, it’s easier.
Ross Kenyon: Moratorium on new content, guys. Too much content. I got through months, I’m like, no, no more. Like, oh, you should watch this show. Nope, not gonna do it. There’s a new edgy serial drama that’s only seven seasons, with anti-heroes, morally ambiguous. I’m still finishing Game of Thrones, I’m out.
Alexsandra Guerra: Oh my God. Okay. My friends, I’ve seen every episode.
Ross Kenyon: With time. You guys are part of the problem right there.
Alexsandra Guerra: I am part of the problem. But you know what I’ve been doing recently?
Jeffrey Howard: I mean, you mentioned Seattle. Seattle’s a tough one. Like, Jesus, it’s hard to make friends as an adult. Just live in Seattle. Like, the Seattle Freeze is a real thing. But at least I can find more and more people who also moved to Seattle and are struggling with the freeze. And so most of my friends are not local to Seattle.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah, but it takes so much time. I moved here two years ago, so December 4th. Was the fifth of December, in 2017. And I finally have friends, where now I get — this is the level, this is the measure of success for community. When you’re going from failure, [unclear] I’m pinching myself. Yes.
Ross Kenyon: The spaces. When do you transition from, like, oh, we have to, like, hey, do you wanna go to brunch someday? Like, let’s do Sunday this time. Okay. And everything scheduled, super thin. Then you go to thick, like that medium thickness, where it’s like, hey, I’m going home now, do you want to come hang out? Yeah, sure, I’ll be over. That is success.
Alexsandra Guerra: That’s a sweet spot. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: We should maybe get closer to the book again too, because I think, do we?
Jeffrey Howard: I think that’s a good idea.
Ross Kenyon: All right. I think that’s terrific. Dr. Patrick Deneen heard this, he’d be like, what the heck, guys? Like, mention my book, and barely, then you start talking about making friends in Seattle. This is the Reversing Climate Change podcast, it’s our last one of the year, we’ve gotten to none of that, but we sure will. Okay, so maybe let’s just do our due diligence here and catch us up. So, Francis Fukuyama, The End of History. He says — this is a famous thing — like, after the Cold War, after the Berlin Wall came down, he was saying, like, liberalism is where we’ll all head. So, like, broadly we believe in trade and private property and in markets, and this is going to be the thing.
It’s not going to be fascism, which is another big alternative in the 20th century that has been thoroughly discredited — less so now, but let’s hope it stays discredited. Likewise, communism was very discredited after the Soviet Union collapsed, although it still has its admirers in certain circles. But liberalism was ascendant. We all sort of thought, this is the best we can do, this is what we’re going after. And then now we’re all staring into it, and it seems like Deneen thinks that we’ve sort of hollowed it out. Like, we spent hundreds of years building these communities that were actually quite robust, and then liberalism was so successful that it no longer required the communities that made liberalism possible. Just by having people grounded and contextualized and a part of things, it removed the need for those.
And now all you have is people whose primary identity is national politics, or, like, identifying with a political party, and, like, yelling at people online, and there’s nothing but that. So, like, liberalism was so successful that it might undermine itself, because now people have nothing but this, and it isn’t very good. Is that a good job?
Jeffrey Howard: Yes. And I would add, essential to that, what he’s talking about, this hollowing out, are the more civic and social institutions that I think Robert Putnam highlights very well in his book Bowling Alone, which Deneen talks about as well. It was first an article, I think, that came out in the 80s, later became a book, where he highlights, although the numbers of those who bowl, back then into the past few decades of now, are still the same, the number of those who bowl in bowling leagues have mostly disappeared. And he uses that as this imagery to show we’re isolated, we’re doing things not in associations. And so part of why that’s a problem is because these associations create norms and cultural expectations that temper some of the extremes in our human nature, and they’re also part of what makes liberalism succeed. But Deneen would say that this individualism that’s baked into liberalism has slowly replaced those, that market logic and large-scale state interventions have hollowed out those intermediary spaces.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, and that’s true. That sounds maybe small town, or, all you guys are going to exist in large urban environments too. But especially if you read Wendell Berry, so much of it is about, you know, bucolic life out in the countryside and these small towns. You get the Port William, if you read those novels, which are lovely. If you just want pure distilled nostalgia, just read any of those. Port William makes me nostalgic for something I’ve never experienced. They’re beautiful.
Jeffrey Howard: I know you like them a lot.
Ross Kenyon: I do, but we’re just not going back, I think. This century we’re going to increasing urbanization. This is not even something that’s that disputed, as far as I know. Everyone is moving to the city, and they’re doing it globally. And we’re not going to have these sort of, like, small towns, farming lifestyles anymore. Those are increasingly mechanized and something that you don’t have to deal with unless you really, really want to, or you’re just born into it and you don’t want to leave. And even still, it seems quite hard to stay there.
So I read this book recently by Peter Enns called How the Bible Actually Works. It was written about — people oftentimes read the Bible as a rule book, but this is actually not a very good way to read the Bible. There are passages right back to back, even in Psalms, because you’re supposed to read holy books as a way of generating wisdom, not to, like, just get an answer and be like, oh, what does the Bible say about X? And you look it up, there it is, that’s the end of it.
Jeffrey Howard: Except if you’re in Leviticus.
Ross Kenyon: Exactly. Yeah, but even, there’s still stuff in there too that he goes into. I thought it was a really, really compelling book. But so, like, a lot of the people who get really into Christianity and the Bible, they’ll go back and say, we’re, like, reclaiming primitive Christianity and going back to basics and just looking at, like, what exactly does it mean to be a Christian. I found my answer, and done. But he makes the case in there that, actually, like, you can never go back. A lot of that was historically contextual, you’re probably missing a lot of it. It’s more about, what can you take from that and move it forward? So, given that Wendell Berry and Patrick Deneen seemingly have this aesthetic that is very much small-town living, rural America, that might be the ideal, but we’re going farther and farther away from that. How do we learn from that, knowing that we probably aren’t actually going to go back to it?
Jeffrey Howard: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think it’s a major tension. I believe statistically, what is it, like, two percent of Americans are actually farmers nowadays? That may even be high. Maybe it’s one percent.
Ross Kenyon: I think it might be below that.
Jeffrey Howard: Yeah. And so, you know, for the last century and a half or more, we’ve been consolidating farms, larger scale. That’s where we get the big questions around big agriculture. And so most of us just don’t want to be farmers. Those of us who didn’t grow up with it read Wendell Berry or someone else and go, oh yeah, I think I want to just find my little parcel of land and just farm it and live this idyllic life. And farming is really hard work. So I don’t think there’s a way of going back. I like the idea of more and more people wanting to try and get back to earth, back to the soil, as Wendell Berry will talk about. There’s a Berry, I think, Institute in Kentucky, where they actually have free scholarships where people can learn to be farmers who are really wanting to revive a little bit of this lifestyle.
And I’m personally not as invested or optimistic of loads of people just suddenly getting into farming, but I think it’s really going back to that community ethos, that doesn’t necessarily require everyone to be farmers. But we have this real crisis of the rural-urban divide, which I think is probably one of the biggest divides that we can consider, at least in the United States, North America, where there’s such big differences in lifestyles, values, how rural and urban folks view each other, or fail to talk to one another. And I think that’s a really big crisis, is trying to cross that divide.
Alexsandra Guerra: So we’ve talked about the thing that is happening. What are the consequences of it? Like, the why it failed. What is failing, what are the consequences of all the loose relationships, the lack of connection between rural and urban people? But what are the consequences of it failing? Is it just the state of today? Or why are we even having this conversation?
Jeffrey Howard: So I think a few of these things, and some of them are hard to pin solely on liberalism, and I’m not sure Deneen would say all these can be put on liberalism, but we now talk about this alienation. We look at these rising numbers of people who deal with loneliness, especially the more elderly or more vulnerable populations, who are just like, oh, you’re not economically fruitful, you’re not useful, you’re sort of discarded. But even those of us who are economically productive, we still live pretty solitary lives, a lot of us, and we deal with the depression and loneliness that comes from that, the lack of human flourishing that, you know, we’re facing.
So you’ve got Steven Pinker, who contrasts this in his book Enlightenment Now, where he’s talking about, we live in this most prosperous time, most peaceful, least violent time in human history. And largely a lot of those statistics, metrics, are true. But immaterially speaking, there’s a lot of unrest. There’s a lot of distrust of one another. We don’t trust our democratic institutions. We don’t know how to speak to one another politically, or even emotionally. A lot of us lack the emotional intelligence to be able to communicate our alienation and loneliness to one another. Some of us don’t even know how to recognize it, because we’re so distracted by all of the content that we consume, or so distracted by, you name it.
And so there are these, some could say they’re sort of spiritual deficiencies, psychological, emotional, you name it. And those are coming out in ways of suicide, opiate crisis. You can connect it to a lot of these, which are hard to show causation, and you can probably show some correlation. But those, I think, are some of the things that he’s trying to point toward, is as we’ve been so radically focused on liberating individuals from everything we relate to and we inherit, this is what we’re seeing. And maybe it is a pendulum that can swing back. Deneen thinks the nature of liberalism as an ideology, this is its success, it has been achieved, and we can’t — trying to use liberal solutions to liberalism is trying to pour gasoline on a fire. And maybe he’s right.
Ross Kenyon: I am skeptical. I mean, I’m open to it, but I think maybe there are some, quote unquote, liberal solutions that we can use. Like Nori, maybe. Like, Nori, maybe. I don’t know. I don’t know if he would — I really don’t know. Maybe we should just talk about, what does communitarianism have to say about climate change and the environment? I could see them thinking something that was more small-scale. Us trying to commoditize carbon removal — I feel like commoditize and communitarianism are just sort of anathema in the same sentence, to start.
Jeffrey Howard: They could be. I’m not as expert on communitarianism to know a lot of the conversations around ecological crisis, climate change and those things, but I think your intuition is probably right. There is similar to, on the criticisms further on the left, of this commodification of nature and soil and earth and air, is a problem, and that it’s not just some material thing that can be controlled. There’s people that are attached to it. And part of, whether you want to call it more of a Marxist critique or more of a communitarian ethos, is that we lose something when we are so separated from where our food comes from.
You know, Wendell Berry talks about how urban centers are colonizers of the farmlands, that farmlands continue to be left behind, they continue to become poor, and they deal with all these issues we’ve talked about, but on a more severe scale, as urban centers such as Seattle, DC, many of these cities that I’ve lived in and been able to benefit from, that we are kind of these colonizers benefiting off of the earth. And we don’t know where most of our food comes from. This is where we get into these ethical questions as to the people who are doing this farming: are they under good working conditions, are they contributing to more sustainable farming practices? We’re mostly just looking at a price tag in a grocery store, most of us. And I think that’s problematic down the road.
Ross Kenyon: It is in some ways, but in others too. How much extra time do you want to devote to researching every product that you buy? And especially, like, the economy’s so interconnected, it’s just sort of like everything produces everything else.
Alexsandra Guerra: I don’t know if it’s about researching every product that you buy, because, no, not under that, absolutely not. But it’s more, I think, what I’m hearing from you, Jeff, is being connected to it. So, I don’t know, the tomatoes that I grew in my garden versus the tomatoes that I buy, man, I just love my salad so much better. It’s like a whole experience, like, I’m sitting there, I’m mindful, I’m savoring it. Like, there’s just, that is life.
But more so, everything is just so easily prepared, and we pick it off a shelf and we pay for it, and we’re numbing ourselves out, and then we’re watching Netflix, and then we’re doing this, and then it’s all, oh, I’m busy, and then I gotta go to this, and I got to go to this website, and I got to do this thing for work, and then I’m going to just get back on the bus. It’s almost like, well, what’s the point at all, if we’re not stopping for a second to think about the things that I’m experiencing?
Ross Kenyon: Oh yeah, I just spewed all that devil’s advocate at Jeffrey here, and I’m, like, thoroughly alienated person, and also I could be happier.
Alexsandra Guerra: How fast paced everything is. We do not have the time.
Jeffrey Howard: I mean, to look at so deeply into the supply chain as to where everything comes from, part of minimizing that is going local. I think that’s part of the local movement, is you can more easily discern the sourcing of all this food and where it’s coming from. So it’s not realistic to say, every single product that I consume, I know every single thing about every single source. No one knows, that’s impossible. But it’s trying to find the more tangible areas of the things that we consume, and trying to pinpoint, what are the things that are more ethically sourced, things that are more green and more sustainable, the things that we can connect to? Because, with your point with the tomatoes, right, when you invest something into it, you’re seeing literally the fruits of your labors, right? We still use that phrase.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah, because it matters.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’ve been trying to — we all do a lot of intellectual labor over here, and I sort of wish that I had some outlet that was a bit more hands-on. I used to play music back in the day, and I just fell off of that. But occasionally I would go in the car, start fixing things, working with your hands. It was really good.
Alexsandra Guerra: I feel like transforming things in a tangible kind of way, or interacting with it, definitely brings more pleasure than just buying it. Although, who doesn’t love that sweet chemical rush of buying something off of Amazon, and just a [unclear].
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, exactly. It’s the pleasure of having accomplished a task. I set out to buy this thing, it has been done. And I compare that to writing a book. Not even a possible comparison.
Alexsandra Guerra: I think that the phrase that popped out in my mind that you just said was fast paced. It’s like, go, go, go, go, and stopping to experience the world a little more, and in community. So, this last weekend was Thanksgiving weekend, and so we had three days off. I was like, I’m just going to work through, because I’m going to take a long break, I got to just work, work, work, work, work. But then, because I was scrolling Instagram, I found that there was a Salsa Congress, which is like a salsa festival, it’s for three days. They do, like, all-day workshops from 10 a.m., and then there’s social dance at 10 p.m. until like 6 a.m.
And I did that instead, and it was literally the best thing, and made new connections and built the community. And then, at the end of this three days of non-stop — like, I slept four hours a night, probably, I was so exhausted — so now I’m sitting there on my couch, and I’m like, why don’t I ever do this? Why? Like, because I’m constantly thinking, oh, I got to do this thing, I got to do that thing.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it’s a hard, hard life, a lot of stuff to do. But for the environment, I guess this might apply, for thinking as a communitarian might, that we sort of treat nature or the environment as a means to an end, or as something that’s fungible. Like, one of the ultimate critiques of carbon markets that we’ve heard so many times is this, like, you know, one mangrove is not fungible with another. So, like, if you just destroyed some wetlands and you bought some mangrove restoration credits, you’re like, you still destroyed the original one, you can’t just create one in your head.
And it’s like the communitarian critique in anything that’s place-based. And Wendell Berry is super famous for this, being attached to a very specific set of hills and dales and where he lives, and he’s had generations on that land. There’s something that’s just not — you just can’t swap it out for something else. I don’t know what that’s like, because I grew up moving, right? You’re closer, because you’re, like, [unclear] Miami.
Alexsandra Guerra: It’s Miami, but I don’t live there.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, you’re a traitor. A traitor to your people.
Alexsandra Guerra: And I fly. Okay, listeners, guilty, dirty laundry, I fly a lot to Miami. But I’m keeping track of my flights, so now that we have Nori I can negate my emissions.
Ross Kenyon: Traitors. Love you, environmentalists. Hate you. [unclear] Every airline loves me.
So I guess, what do we do with that? So, like, one of the great parts of this book, I love this imagery he attributes to Wendell Berry, about there’s a sort of strip-mining process of talented youth in various communities. Wherever you’re from, like Akron or Temecula or wherever you’re from, if you’re really talented academically, you will leave those places. You will get a scholarship to some school, you aren’t coming back, you’re going to move on to whatever big city you go to, get some fancy job, and you’ll come back and you’ll be one of the people, you’ll see your townie friends and say, hey guys, how’s it going? And some people go back, some people do. The Onion had the most savage take on this I’ve ever seen. It was like, big city comedian who makes 30 grand a year returns home for Thanksgiving, sees well-adjusted friends who have time to spend with their family. There’s nothing like that, it’s just like, with less.
Jeffrey Howard: That’s good. I will say, statistically, I think most Americans, I saw this recently, live within 40 miles of their parents, on average, which is kind of crazy when you think of that so many people are so transient, right? Like, there’s a lot of us are living or moving to these big urban centers, we’re leaving behind — that’s another big concern, of the brain drain, where these communities have literally been left behind. Some of them are farming communities, others are just small towns that people thought, well, there’s nothing happening here for me, I want to go to the place where the action’s happening. And I think one way forward can be having more of us who leave our communities, the ones who are there, maybe we’re in a lot of opportunities, and coming back and giving.
So I think of, in mythology and lots of great stories, there’s the monomyth, or the hero’s journey, where you have this individual as an individual, and maybe in the liberal sense, who is pursuing their self-chosen mission, and they feel called to something, and they go onto it individually, on their own, they take on challenges, they go through these, and they come out on the other side with this great gift that they’ve achieved, that they didn’t know they needed. But the end of the story, it doesn’t go there. It continues. They come back to their community, and it’s a gift for them and their community. And that’s something a lot of us aren’t completing, that hero’s journey. We’re lost, right? So it doesn’t necessarily mean we have to all move back to our hometowns.
Alexsandra Guerra: Well, why are we lost?
Jeffrey Howard: And it might be that we’re called to go home. We’ve done this thing, we’ve accomplished the journey, the road home is calling us and we feel pulled there.
Ross Kenyon: But there’s Instagram, and so God knows, if you move back home then you’re a failure and you’re just going the opposite direction, and this is a constant need to achieve and achieve and level up, level up.
Alexsandra Guerra: You just tell those people, be like, here, read this.
Ross Kenyon: Joseph Campbell. I wasn’t surprised you brought that up, Jeff. It was only a matter of time.
Jeffrey Howard: Anyone who knows me. But I would like to say, I think a solution for some of these communities that have been left behind is remote work, which not every industry is able to do, but more and more are allowing, I think encouraging, more remote work. Including the housing crisis that a lot of us are facing, is being able to move to smaller communities where it is more affordable, especially for millennials. Most millennials can’t afford homes. Move to a community where not only can you afford to live there, but you can bring your skill set and knowledge and the talents you’ve been gifted with, to bless whatever those communities are. Maybe it’s your own community, or maybe it’s one that you’re being adopted into, but you’re saying, hey, this is my place, I see some needs that I can meet for other people, and I’m going to allow people to make demands on me and vice versa, and I’m going to really dig in, put some roots here.
Alexsandra Guerra: But even that, like, remote work is still confrontational, I don’t know. Like, we’re split at Nori too on the opinion of remote work, and we’re all millennials. There’s a benefit to it, and there’s just a downside to, like, the human interaction, human connection. Do I want to be working at my desk, in my den, all day long, and feel isolated from my co-workers, don’t really know what’s going on? So, yeah, it is a solution, but, and maybe that middle ground—
Jeffrey Howard: Because, where I work, I’ll say I work with a much more aged population, my co-workers, and they’re a bit more resistant to remote work. But I think remote work, that’s, you know, maybe you’re within 50, 60 miles of your actual office, in one of these smaller communities, and you’re able to come in once or twice a week, where it’s a little bit more bearable.
Ross Kenyon: Because, right, like, your workplace is a place, and that’s part of what gets lost when everyone’s remote, you don’t have a shared sense of geography, or that community of psychology where you see each other face to face. The arbitrage is so great though, if you can do it. Where I’ve had friends who they’ll be working at a company in DC or New York, and they’ll be living someplace like living in Phoenix, or living in some of the Rust Belt cities, and they’re like, wow, I just bought a house. So if you’re able to pull that off, it’s great.
But I also, I’ve done a lot of remote working, and I used to think telecommuting is the future, in the future everyone’s going to do this. And I was like, I still feel very disconnected calling into stuff like that. It’s so much better just being in the room, even if I’m just, like, at home versus being in the office. It depends what you’re doing, though, too. Like, some of the jobs, to be like, I don’t need to be here, we all know I don’t need to be here, just let me go home.
Alexsandra Guerra: But does it have to be all or nothing? It’s like, oh, you either live in a place and you work there and your whole life is in that community, or you do remote work, you live somewhere else. But what about in between? It’s like, I’m starting to get the idea of, like, well, what if I spent just a good portion of my time, I had multiple homes? I mean, like, what if I just spent a good portion of my time in Miami bonding with my nephew? My God, my listeners must hate me, like, I literally only talk about Noah, my nephew, on this podcast. And then, come to the bingo card.
Ross Kenyon: Yes. Put that on the next bingo card.
Alexsandra Guerra: My nephew Noah, love you. Going home to Miami, but then also coming often to Seattle, but then also being on the road so that I can meet with potential clients, meet with business partners, but having some type of cycle where you are able to be in one community and also in another. Because do you really need me here every day? Like, I don’t know. I think that there’s a, like everything, a point of diminishing returns.
Ross Kenyon: I think I’ve talked to you about this, Jeffrey. I had a friend who wanted to do some travel blogging as a career and make this jump into something that he could travel with. And I’ve traveled a lot, I used to work from my computer and bounced around all over the world, and it was a great experience. But a lot of the time I was like, I can’t wait to get back into a routine, and I can’t wait to build a long-term connection to places and people and whatever, as opposed to endless variety and stimulation.
I don’t know what it is that has so denigrated the stability of, yet, living close to your parents, being able to have that sort of, like, grandparents helping you with the kids, seeing them often, actually building those relationships now that you’re an adult and you can transform them from whatever they were when you were a kid. And sort of, like, because you can’t really grow past that as an adult where you don’t see your parents. Like, you sort of need repeated exposure to that. And I think people have overvalued travel and they’ve undervalued the sort of place-based. That being said, one more thing real quick, as I’d like to make a heretical point—
Alexsandra Guerra: But please. F*ck it, I want it. I want it. I want this heresy.
Ross Kenyon: That being said, I also like the freedom that liberalism has given me to choose these things, and I’ll sign it right now. We were talking about this and discussing the book before you got here, is I like that I have the choice whether to be a part of this community, move back home, so to speak, or to live in the big city, and I’m not, like, bound to the land, like a serf, where I can’t leave and go chase after better opportunities because I have some sort of abstract community benefit of my staying. Well, give me your heresy.
Jeffrey Howard: See, here’s my heresy. So I would like to kind of trash on travel, or maybe just Wanderlust, to dunk on it. I mean, I don’t know what noise that was.
Ross Kenyon: That was a dog.
Jeffrey Howard: Especially for, partially it’s a generational thing, some of it’s an age thing. But there’s this romanticization of seeing the world and travel. Distance travel is a great thing for expanding horizons and being able to do a lot of stuff. Obviously, there’s the carbon footprint concerns with so much travel that so many of us do. That’s part of the communitarian focus on going local, is minimizing a lot of that footprint as well. But part of this thing I have against travel is more of the Wanderlust psyche. I need to go find myself, I need to go Eat, Pray, Love somewhere, right?
Where it’s just like, the reality is that wherever you go, most of your problems are going to go there with you, right? So it’s, if you’re just trying to go wander around — my friends who live in vans would be upset with me, but, you know, just living in a van, wandering around the country, trying to solve your problems, may not be the best way to go, that you have to face those wherever you’re at. And so I think part of the importance, or the benefit, of local is minimizing those carbon footprints. It’s also about not having an outlet to try and escape your problems, that you really have to face them. Now, there are some very real threats in your physical space that do require you to leave. Maybe you do have an abusive relationship, or an abusive community, etc., etc. That’s a different circumstance.
Alexsandra Guerra: It’s funny that you say this, and you make, like, this Eat, Pray, Love reference, and, like, going off and kind of dumping on this Wanderlust. I totally agree. And I say it’s funny because when this airs, I will be, like, meditating in a temple in, like, Chiang Mai, Thailand, and just trying to unplug. So I agree with you wholeheartedly, and I know I might sound like I’m contradicting myself. But I planned this to be right at the end of Techstars, at the end of October, going through a lot of stuff, lost a family member. So, you know, when Ross was talking about being with your parents and appreciating that, I’m like, yeah, you just don’t know when that’s going to end, so enjoy it as much as you can.
And anyways, I decided to do this trip. The stress of Nori, and I’m constantly reminding myself, you know, girl, like, it’s not like the trip is going to solve your problem. So I’ve been meditating every day in the morning and the evening, since I decided to take the trip, in preparation for it. I’m like, yeah, that might allow me to heighten, get a little bit more quiet. No more Slack messages and work emails, no more texts. And it would just give me a sense of just a space, and maybe a little bit of variety, so I could feel refreshed when I come back. But the journey is just going to continue. It’s just like a little blip, because all of the things that you’re working through are just going to come with me.
And so I completely agree with you, and it’s still, like, a weird balance of, yeah, can I give myself a moment to just be really, really still and meditate, and not have to worry about any other things? Because it’s really hard to do that too. I know that if I were to say, okay, well, I’m going to be off the grid in Seattle, no, I would open up my computer, I would come stop by the Nori office, like, I would just find all those little distractions. So to completely pull away, to give yourself some space, is just, like, the alternative view of that. So I’m agreeing with you, but also highlighting some complications of trying to be local. You don’t really get to unplug, if that’s something that you want to do every once in a blue moon.
Ross Kenyon: Well, we should start thinking about how to end this thing.
Jeffrey Howard: And I think we should do a little more on the book. What I would like to cover, which I hope, or think, would be really beneficial to listeners, would be really trying to connect it into the question around solutions to reversing climate change. So, for example, there’s an essay that was actually submitted and published with Erraticus by one of my friends, Charlie Deist. When the Green New Deal came out, this is sort of his response to it: we don’t need a Green New Deal, we need thousands of them. What he’s trying to say is, look, when we have this very top-down approach to solutions, oftentimes they don’t work, one, because they lack the motivation that comes from local affinity, but they also lack the local knowledge that small communities have.
So when you have something that comes from, say, Washington DC, or even something in Seattle that maybe comes from Olympia at the Washington state level, there are norms, there are even, like, legal nuances that aren’t known on these federal levels. And so when you try and bring this top-down, here’s what everyone has to adopt and endorse, you end up having a lot of negative unintended consequences. And so part of the thrust of this argument, I think, can be a very communitarian argument, is that our approach to reversing climate change needs to be thousands of communities working together, as tangible, actual communities who know their norms, their practices, the nature that surrounds them, and that they can come up with solutions. I think of one of your former podcast guests, who I think had a little bit more radical solution, but was it the Blacksheep, who were in, were they Costa Rica?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s right.
Jeffrey Howard: And how they take very much this community, at least in some way, could be interpreted as a communitarian approach, where they’re trying to keep, you know, a very community-focused solution to food sourcing, you know, using permaculture, which is fantastic and a phenomenal thing. I love to think about it, and they’re really focused on what they can do in this more holistic approach, rather than waiting for some federal mandate to make the magic happen, or waiting for large-scale corporations to make the magic happen.
I think all of them can be a solution. And this is a praise I want to give, that I actually wanted to give to you all for your podcast. I think with the many, many perspectives from people that you have on the podcast, there’s tonnes of people doing a lot of different solutions, that as a whole, all these different unique efforts can come together and hopefully address this crisis that touches every aspect of our lives. And rather than having one top-down solution, it’s thousands of communities working together, because you don’t have a community unless you’re building something together. And climate change offers a chance for us to unify as communities to combat something.
Alexsandra Guerra: Drop the mic. That was good.
Ross Kenyon: That was necessary to get that in there. So if you’re listening, you’re saying, why is this podcast called Reversing Climate Change, are they going to get to it? Shut your pie hole right now. That’s it. Jeffrey, what do you think is the best criticism of communitarianism that you know of? I don’t think, like, we painted a picture that was a bit rosy, I think, but it is one view, and there’s plenty of room to challenge basically everything we talked about.
Jeffrey Howard: Yeah. So I’m going to list off a few names. I think communitarianism, the nature of it is such that it doesn’t fit easily into any other political camp, and so it has enemies in a lot of directions. Where, for example, some of the points we brought up, where maybe communitarianism is too limiting, that what if you’re in a community that is so opposed to some aspect of your individual identity, that’s very threatening? Maybe you identify in a non-binary way with gender or sexual orientation, and your community is absolutely against that, to the point of threatening your physical safety, right? That’s an issue that communitarians maybe have to struggle with, because you can’t guarantee that. That’s part of the challenge with liberalism, is trying to offer a universal ethos that preserves the individual, that pushes back against the particulars of different communities. And so there’s plenty of critics for that.
Alexsandra Guerra: I’m sorry, I do not see why the two are in conflict, liberalism versus communitarianism, because liberalism could be a pathway to that. Again, you can break through the expected social contract of what your sexuality is, find your new community. But the problem is, again, like, I think we’re just too far out, that we’re free and we’re, like, going wild, like when you first get to, like, drink alcohol. But now it’s like, okay, find those communities, be able to break free a little bit and reconnect and value really intentionally building community and connections. Because if we just start off and say, okay, liberalism was not working for us, it doesn’t allow us to build communities, then what happens is, you’re bound, and we’re full circle.
Ross Kenyon: I think communitarians don’t like that, because it’s elective. It’s like something that you can do if you want to, but you can get by without it, and the consequences of us not choosing that are bad, and people are not choosing it.
Jeffrey Howard: Some critics, I would say, of communitarianism, one in particular would be effective altruism. Peter Singer’s a big advocate of effective altruism, which the centerpiece of that argument is that, when it comes to charity and what is the ethical thing to do, that you need to find who is the person that is in greatest need of help, and that’s where your charitable focus should go to. So it shouldn’t go to your family, or your local community, even though for most of us that’s natural and reasonable to think.
Oh, if there’s a stranger versus my child and both of them are starving, who do I help? And maybe communitarians say, well, you help your child, that’s your child, they have a natural obligation to you, vice versa. Whereas maybe an effective altruist would say, well, who’s in greater need? Well, if your child ate yesterday, or maybe they ate two days ago, but the stranger down the road hasn’t eaten for a week, you give that food to that stranger. Which is something communitarians are going to have qualms with. But it’s sort of this question of, in our communities, in wealthy Seattle, do we help our neighbors, or do we provide some support to the most impoverished corner of the earth?
Ross Kenyon: I think those are fair criticisms too. I think another criticism that could be made is that you just don’t get scale with a lot of these small things. Like, with the problems we’re facing, we actually need scale, and that scale either comes from the market or states, and that’s what we need right now. We don’t have time to tinker around with little things on farms, we need the gears of industry moving right now. So people can make those claims and fight about them. But whatever, I think it’s a cool perspective. I think it’s worthy of people giving it a chance. Read some Wendell Berry, go hang out in Port William if you want. This book was very interesting too, Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick Deneen. I thought it was good.
I think it’s a very good introduction to — there’s another concept that we didn’t get into called republican virtue, or communitarian thought. It’s like, conservatives love to say, it’s liberty, not license. So I’ve heard that, like, if you can’t be free to choose to be some sort of rabble-rousing ne’er-do-well, you’re supposed to choose good things, if you’re going to govern yourself and live in a self-governing society. You got to be a well-ordered person, you can’t just be a drunk running around doing whatever you want. So, like, what does freedom mean if you can’t choose that? Anyways, this book is a very good introduction to those, if it’s new to you at all. I hope you enjoyed it. We went long, we went long, but I think we covered some good ground there.
So, Jeffrey, if I want to follow your work, if they like you and want to know what’s going on in those mind grapes over there, how might they do so?
Jeffrey Howard: Well, first of all, you can check out Erraticus. Just type in Erraticus into any search engine, it will pull up on top.
Ross Kenyon: Nice. Good SEO. Put them in the show notes. Erraticus, correct?
Jeffrey Howard: Correct.
Ross Kenyon: Cool. Anything else?
Jeffrey Howard: No, start there. I’m on Twitter, you can find me, Jeffrey Howard, as well. But it all goes back to Erraticus.
Ross Kenyon: Nice.
Alexsandra Guerra: I just want to wrap up here with our final show for the year, for the two years.
Ross Kenyon: Oh my God, you’re right, because it is a continuous season. Is that what we’re going to do? This is the end of the first season, and then we’re going to open a new one? A two-year-long season.
Alexsandra Guerra: Speaking of continuous content, it’s more work than it looks like, folks.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah.
Alexsandra Guerra: And you can please send Ross a lovely email, tell him how much you appreciate the podcast. Ross puts a lot, a lot of, I mean, it’s like the driver behind this podcast. So happy New Year, Ross. Thank you so much for having us on this podcast and doing this all the time. And also, I just wanted to say thank you to our listeners. We so appreciate hearing from you. A lot of you send emails to us, they’re lovely to read. We hope you have a beautiful holiday, a blessed new year. And don’t forget to keep tuning in and watch out for season two.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we have some exciting things planned for it. Thanks for the kind words. Yeah, you can reach us at podcast@nori.com or hello@nori.com. If you want to rate and review us on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, please do so. Thanks for listening, and thanks for being here, Jeffrey.
Jeffrey Howard: Thank you, it’s a pleasure. Thank you.
Alexsandra Guerra: Jeff, had a good time.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, okay, well, we’ll see you whenever it is that we return, in 2020. 2020 sometime. Okay, fine.
