Paying the piper: fragmented families cost billions
     The good life and the market state

In the old republic of virtue we had moral crusades to try to get people to do the right things for the right reasons. In the new market state in which we more and more live, moral crusades seem too, well, moralistic.

So we get economic crusades. We are lectured not about the content of our character, but about how our actions impact the public purse.

Though it’s never been hard to see the connection between good marriages and the good life, those people whose attention has been on other things, such as fighting the threat of morality (judgmentalism} in the public discourse, may still believe that such practices as divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing are merely private matters.

They would be mistaken. The market state is also a nanny state. As more of your behavior can be tracked through the miracle of computing, many things that were once in the private real have become public. If you over-indulge your fondness for hot fudge sundaes, for example, you increase your chances of saddling your neighbors with the medical costs of treating your obesity or diabetes, and we can track just how much your indulgence is likely to cost us.

So now we have moral crusades about fast food. The school where I work just paid all staff members $25 to complete a risk assessment survey. This survey allows the health insurance company to target specific interventions to people who are at risk of increasing medical costs for the group. It’s all quite voluntary and pleasant, for now. As with all modern bureaucracies, they speak as though they care about me, but their presentation led off with lots of charts about how some bad habits are affecting the bottom line.

In the market state, the only measure we have in common is dollars. So it makes good sense that a new report calculates the financial costs associated with divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing to be $112 billion per year. Georgia State University economist Ben Scafidi completed the study with sponsorship by the Institute for American Values, the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, Families Northwest of Redmond, and the Georgia Family Council, an ally of Focus on the Family.

“Marriage is more than a moral or social institution,” according to the study. “It is also an economic one, a generator of social and human capital, especially when it comes to children.” The figures will be unsurprising to ordinary people. Most people try to organize their own lives around stable marriages, understanding that this has obvious practical as well as spiritual benefits.

The practical and spiritual are not, after all, unrelated. In his important essay ”Discipline and Hope,” Wendell Berry shows some of the linkages between moral values and ecological values and economic values. “Morality is long-term practicality,” he concludes.

Unfortunately, we now live with millions of people who feel empowered to make up their own rules when it comes to morality. Unsurpisingly, many of them make costly mistakes. Fortunately, most of them remain very interested in money. Therefore, we share enough common ground to permit a conversation to continue.

Because talking about money is safer and easier than talking about morality, I expect more and more conversations about such topics as casual sex and cohabitation to be grounded in dollar talk.

Show us the real work
     Education gurus engage in hollow rhetoric

Science teacher Annie Chien reacts with skepticism to all the talk she hears at education conferences and workshops. Such gatherings have “become stagnant to me,” she says. Though she hears speakers gush about student voice and student involvment, she “can’t seem to find the evidence” that anything important is happening.

I don’t hear or see students talking about math, science, English and Social Studies. I don’t see students working out problems in math, and I don’t see students engaging in debates about our government. Where are the abundant great student work in science and English that these student-centered institutions are supposedly creating? I don’t see a slew of student inventions and original work where they demonstrate mastery and creativity. Where is the hard core evidence that supports student centered organizations?

What she wants from those who would advise us on how to teach is “raw evidence of student learning.” Instead of pious phrases we need evidence of student accomplishment.  “No more shiny bells--I want student work and performance as my guiding light to perfect my teaching practice.”

Montana and North Dakota heading into oil boom?
     The Saudi Arabia of America?

click to enlarge

The much awaited US Geological Survey (USGS) report has been released. The agency increased by 25 times its estimates of how much recoverable oil exists beneath the Northern Plains. The report stated that the Bakken Formation in Montana and North Dakota contains 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil, instead of the 151 million barrels the agency estimated in 1995. The crude oil is locked away in rocks that are buried miles underground, but recent technological advances have made it easier to get at. “Technically recoverable” oil resources are estimates of products that can be recovered using the technology and procedures that are currently available.

The estimate is larger than any other estimate for the lower 48 states and ranks as the largest oil discovery in the past 50 years.  A new black gold rush has already begun. So far Marathon Oil has acquired about 200,000 acres in the area and expects to spend $1.5 billion drilling about 300 oil wells within five years. According to Next Energy News, Marathon sees this as “one of the greatest booms in Oil discovery since Oil was discovered in Saudi Arabia in 1938.

The Kiplinger Report states we are still a few years away from a large increase in drilling:

Figure on at least five years before the oil starts flowing in large volumes. A lot of work will need to be done first. In addition to installing drilling gear, firms must build supporting infrastructure, including roads, pipelines as well as new water, sewage and sanitation systems to meet the needs of workers and other area residents.

Still, the activity already underway is transforming the windy gold and slate landscape of MonDak, the area along the Montana and Dakota border. Zach Dundas sketched the story in an article for Good Magazine:

Sidney and its hinterlands are a hive of activity. Oil-tanker trucks patrol the narrow highways and gravel farm roads day and night. The cafs, casinos, and bars are full of guys wearing coveralls emblazoned with oil-company logos, most prominently those of “Team” Halliburton and that notorious company’s rival Schlumberger, the outfit BusinessWeek calls “the stealth oil giant.” Ubiquitous “help wanted” signs testify to the most open job market anyone around here can remember--if you can work, you’re working in oil. A genuine boom is in full swing.

I will be interested to see what people make of these sudden changes. Montana, of course, has long experience with boom and bust economics, which is a way of saying it’s always had a marginal economy. Modern economies are all boom and bust, but fortunate places mitigate the busts in one sector with new booms in other sectors.

In any case, boom and bust is better than bust and bust.

Here’s a technical discussion of what is publicly known about the Bakken Field so far.

And here‘s Alexandra Fuller’s contrarian take on oil booms, based on her Wyoming observations.

Is English literature dying?
     No, but university English departments are not well

Literary criticism as a university discipline may be dying. What implications does this have for secondary teachers?

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Does it matter to high schools that the teaching of literature at universities seems to have reached a dead end?

It seems odd that as English declines at the university level, it remains the most taught subject in high school. All but a half-dozen states have state-wide requirements for high school graduation and nearly all of them require four years of English. Most require three years of social studies and two or three years of math and science--but four years of English.

English, it’s true, has always been the most heterodox of subjects in high school, including grammar and writing and speech and media studies and all manner of social and political meanderings. But mostly, it’s been about literature. I sometimes wonder to what extent the teaching of literature in high school is mostly a habit, like homecoming and prom.

The Nation has joined the widespread lament about the death of literary criticism as an academic profession. “The real story of academic literary criticism today is that the profession is, however slowly, dying,” says William Deresiewicz in his review of a new edition of Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature. In brief, the story of the decline of the profession goes like this: “Classicists had been deposed by humanists, humanists by historians, historians by critics and now critics by theorists. . . .” This has been accompanied by “a steep, prolonged and apparently irreversible decline” in the number of students studying English literature.

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Sunflower after winter
     Early spring garden

This sunflower “volunteered,” growing beside the arbor from a seed that fell from the bird feeder. Very few new flowers have bloomed this reluctant spring which keeps reverting to snow flurries. So I’m still enjoying the stark beauty of a winter garden.

Andrew Wyeth: “I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.”

I wouldn’t say I prefer it, but I do love it. Of course, the “whole story” doesn’t show in other seasons either, except to the experienced imagination, which moves toward seeing the whole story in each of its moments.

Sabbaths 1
     Shot taken on my front steps

Looking east from where I live along Mission Creek, I gaze straight into the Mission Mountains, jutting 8,000 feet above the valley floor. They remind me that the reality I clunk my way through down here in town is not all the case that is. This time of year the peaks rise dazzingly graced with winter’s snows, tempering the urgency of my mundane tasks, inviting me to pause and consider the spring gusts of warmness and the occasional sunshine.

I grew up here, with the mountains maybe the most reliable daily presence. I live just a couple miles from where novelist D’Arcy McNickle also grew up. Although that was almost a century ago, the view above has changed little in that time.

Years ago while reading his first novel, The Surrounded, I was struck by how at home I felt in the story--not in any of its particulars so much as in the psychological geography. In McNickle’s book, the young hero gets into serious trouble with civilization and he runs just a few miles east into the mountains, where he can vanish from the world the officials know and control. Reading the story was like revisiting the daydreams and fantasies I had sitting in school, looking out the window at those mountains. I’ve always been aware that civilization ends four miles east and that it’s possible to disappear into an invisible world.

Imagine the psychology of people who grew up in places where human civilization stretched away seemingly forever, where one couldn’t simply walk a couple miles to the edge of organized society and head up into the wilderness and into a primal sort of freedom. It must be easy for them to begin thinking of the government as a sort of god, the maker and breaker of dreams and the shaper of realities. It must be easy for them to be preoccupied with symbols of status and mechanisms of fame.

American dreams 2
     St. Ignatius Mission, Flathead Reservation

“The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.” William Faulkner

American dreams 1
     1959 Chevy, Flathead Reservation

“Dreams are nothing but incoherent ideas, occasioned by partial or imperfect sleep. . .” Benjamin Rush

Change
     A between time

Yesterday’s morning snow melted quickly except where there was shade, so it’s spring in sunshine but winter a few inches away in the shade. 

Thoughts on getting home from scoring 2000 essays
     Musing on MUS (Montana University System) Writing Assessment

A writer should be of as great probity and honesty as a priest of God. He is either honest or not, as a woman is either chaste or not, and after one piece of dishonest writing he is never the same again.

Ernest Hemingway

Giambattista Vico

What are we teaching our kids? I wondered driving home from Missoula, where with about eighty other teachers I helped score 2,000 or so of the 7,000 essays juniors wrote as part our state’s writing assessment. When I got home, I turned to old books, where I often go when my sense of reality goes dim from too much devotion to the hurly burly of school.

Giambattista Vico, I read, claimed that the aim of education should be to achieve a heroic mind. A hero is one forever seeking the sublime.

He knew something of the eros of learning. Maybe he was thinking about Plato’s Cratylus and the claim that “hero” (heros) derives from love (eros), a desire to be completed that can link us to the divine. “Make your way,” Vico continues, “. . .through all three worlds, of things human, things natural, and things eternal.” He intimates that someone rapt in a long moment of learning can reach, in his yearning to be whole, the creator.

One with a heroic mind will strive to be eloquent. Through eloquence the learner avoids being alone in wisdom, which would be to fall into foolishness. Wisdom requires eloquence—and “eloquence is none other than wisdom speaking.” It is the binding together of heart and tongue, and its work is to draw us into each other.

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