Evening Walk

Tonight I had nothing to do after 8. At that point, it is usually easy for me to slip into the worn-out ruts that automatically contour my life. However, this evening, I made the decision to leave the cool of my melancholically lit apartment and take a walk through the San Joaquin neighborhood of Provo. Today was hot, frightfully so, yet the the twilight hours offered a fresh respite. As I walk down 700 N and turn onto 500 E, I observe my community’s crepuscular habits. Many a denizen of a dreary apartment wakes from their partially conscious existence to venture out into hospitable evening. In that moment I seem connected with them. The men working to install a sink in what looks to be a pop-up camper, the young woman testing out a tire swing in her front yard, the man sitting in his car’s passenger seat with his legs stretched out sideways to rest his feet on the sidewalk. The imagined community becomes so much more. In that moment each person’s fragile humanity seems so poignant. So effortlessly recognizable. I know this moment of clarity to be fleeting, passing as rapidly as the shadows lengthen and shades of color fade out into subtler, darker hues.

I decided to take my book “Settled in the Wild” by Susan Hand Shetterly with me. Quite in the same vein as Edward Abbey or Henry Thoreau, the book is a perfect companion even to verge on cliche. As I walk south down 500 E, I let my thoughts take the foreground in my mind. During the day, at work or in mundane tasks, my thoughts sometimes become a burden, a distraction. I push any unrelated thoughts to subterranean levels. However, in this ephemeral twilight, my thoughts aren’t a burden and I let them wander as far as they can go. Perhaps it is in movement that my thoughts are truly at home. A sense of exploring, of feeling around new notions and ideas, that is paralleled and complemented by physical motion.

When I get closer to Center Street I call my brother Josh. Any time of solitude for me is always uneasily balanced between transcendent calmness and loneliness. I almost unconsciously feel the need to call him. He picks up and we talk for ten minutes about his work, my job search. Actually, mostly my job search. He asks caring and thoughtful questions. The conversation reaches its conclusion in the grass of Memorial Park. After I hang up, I lie in the grass looking up at the sky and the soaring evergreen above me. There is utter calm in that moment.

I read a few pages from the book I brought along and I’m struck by Shetterly’s ability to capture the natural world with a simple yet elegant diction. A perfect example is this. “One of the best things I could think to give my child was this: the woods first, then to emerge from their whisper and shadow onto the smooth clean sweep of Ida’s field in winter just before dark.” Her turns of phrase are so clear and vivid without any pretense at all. After a ten or fifteen minutes I sit up, and then stand, and then begin to walk, slowly, back to my apartment. I try to slow my mind down. To inhale deeply of this moment.

I slowly remember that I needed to make a stop at the small grocery store on the south-eastern edge of BYU campus to pick up cereal, and take my route straight down 800 N. When I arrive at the small store I am immediately jolted back into a more frenetic environment, not unhappily though. I buy my cereal (and a bag of cheap tortilla chips) and return home.

Utilitarian Dystopia

We have constructed our brave new world, but at what cost? Some less over-wrought variation of this theme usually plays on loops in my head as I look across the suburban landscape I call home. More specifically, while riding the train from Provo to Salt Lake City, or when driving on the freeway in that same stretch of development–which apparently exemplifies the triumph of modern day society after 4,000 years of civilized progress, scientific architecture, and urban planning. Any time-traveling ancient would be surprised, even shocked, to see how we have “perfected” the art of physical human development. Of course, this shock would presumably be negative, an awful wonder at how the speeding up the physical construction and creation process in no way indicates a parallel advancement in design or beauty.

Just today I rode the train from Provo to Salt Lake. It is a stretch of land that is, or was, exquisitely beautiful. The mountains loom up magnificently over the valley. Even today, summer solstice, there remains plenty of snow up on the highest peaks–Timpanogos, Lone Peak, etc. The lower slopes are green and vibrant, and the bright blue sky contrasts tremendously with the greens, browns, and grays adorning the mountains. But the scenery lower down in the valley isn’t quite breath-taking. The valley appears a motley and discordant collection of cookie-cutter houses with no imagination and little community planning, office buildings with tacky glass walls (variously tinted blue or black), and a general overabundance of cement. We seem to live in an age of cement and plastic–a fitting coat of arms for a society apparently unable to differentiate the artificial from the genuine.

Maddeningly, we weren’t satiated by our domination of the valley. As the train moved toward the Point of the Mountain and Salt Lake County, it was impossible to miss two glaring examples of landscape vandalism. The Point of the Mountain is gradually ceasing to exist, giving way slowly to the mountain-side removal process as practiced by Geneva Rock. Proudly, Geneva Rock proclaims that at least half of the roads from Brigham City to Santaquin were built with Geneva Rock material. But am I alone in preferring that rock in place on the mountain, instead of pulverized slowly into oblivion by hordes of harried drivers, zooming thoughtlessly on by? Across the valley to the west lies the massive Rio Tinto Kennecott Copper Mine. The tailings are piled high and deep across the mountain range and appear otherworldly and utterly barren. Rio Tinto’s website trumpets it as the single largest economic contributor in Utah history, but I just can’t help wonder if we really needed all that copper. I try to picture the mountains as they would have looked before they were objectified and leveled in pursuit of profit–but I find it nearly impossible.

We speak of progress, but at what price? Is progress to be measured by how many Provo residents can speed up to Salt Lake City in less than an hour to shop and eat? We talk about the need for infrastructure, and it most assuredly has a place, but when is it enough? We build and build and build because that is the easiest part; far harder is assessing what the use was. What actual necessity was provided for. Why another prefabricated “Silicon Slope”-style “tech” building was deemed necessary. Why another over-sized road needed to be carved through the mountain foothills. Why we need another sprawling office park. In all our getting, where is our understanding?

Too often we invent tasks for ourselves. We over-complicate and over-think our lives, perhaps to compensate for our own lack of satisfaction, or perhaps a vestige of the so-called ‘Protestant work ethic.’ Whatever the root, this sort of frenzied production (too often unaccompanied by real thought) leaves scars and work for future generations. In hundreds of years what use will our posterity have for buildings that only a few years after their construction are veritable eyesores (the UCCU building in Lehi comes to mind as a ready example). Our development seems insistent on scarring and marring the landscape, on obliterating any natural refuge, on using up every square foot of ground. In diametrical opposition is the notion exquisitely expressed by Teddy Roosevelt, “Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it.” He was speaking expressly of the Grand Canyon, but I find it universally applicable.

The Chaos of Certainty

What seems to define our current era is a tendency toward chaos, a collective feeling that the center will not hold. Edward Luce brilliantly lays out this thesis in his short book, “The Retreat of Western Liberalism.” He maintains that our modern world is defined by chaos and underlain by great uncertainty.

As I look towards the future, I sometimes find myself thinking about how long this mass hysteria will last. Will it define my generation? What is it that triggers such fear and collective self-doubt? The responses to these questions will define my generation (and beyond), and these queries necessitate thoughtful and reasoned research and discussion. Beyond any single specific policy proposal, I think that the manner we view our proposed solutions to be an integral part of the answer.

Any policy or program designed to lead to a more enlightened, peaceful, and prosperous community is based on a specific way of knowing and explaining the world. The paradigms through which we evaluate, analyze, and sort through these competing, and often conflicting, societal blueprints are so personal to our ideology, experience, education, and religion. And they are susceptible to innumerable biases, errors, and incomplete information. As the Apostle Paul wrote, we “see through a glass, darkly.” This seems to be one of the defining characteristics of human existence. Consequently, what political views we hold may be less important than how we hold them.

This lesson has been gradually unfolded to me since 2016. That summer I returned home from a two year mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I saw a sort of visible and shocking poverty that I had never fathomed growing up in an affluent northern Virginia town. I had known wealth and comfort and peace and plenty for all my life. At home we left our doors unlocked and our bikes and sports equipment strewn across the lawn day after day. Yet, I came home almost precisely at the moment that Donald Trump secured the Republican nomination for president, a man who had run on the idea of a sick, enfeebled, impoverished, insecure America. I sat staring at the TV, completely shocked, when Trump spoke of “American carnage” at his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. The picture he painted reminded me not at all of the community that was America for me. Not surprisingly, he did not win my community, or state, in the election.

Yet, there were many communities that cast their vote for him because, symbolically or literally (or both), they were devastated. And not a ‘developing world’-type devastation. For in many measurable ways they were doing much better, but in another less-measurable sense, much worse. The coffee farm laborer in Nicaragua may be desperately poor, yet tragically this poverty is mirrored all around them and, excepting an escape from the county, this fate may seem unavoidable. On the other hand, a steel worker in Pennsylvania was born with the “American Dream” of self-advancement and material prosperity almost preternaturally, and after seeing other Americans achieve prosperity and fortune, was eventually laid off after 30 years of work with only meager savings. This steel worker is likely to feel a visceral sense of relative deprivation, especially when compared with the idealized wealth of the “coastal elites.”

In one sense the “correct” evaluation of America’s economic and political condition is incredibly relative and subjective. The truth for an unemployed former steel worker in the Rust Belt may be that America is in real and undeniable decline, that any national economic growth hasn’t delivered for them, and that the government only works for the privileged and wealthy. However, the truth for me in 2016 was that America was in a much better political and economic state than most other nations, and that ours was truly a government for the people, by the people.

These diametrically opposed paradigms (neither completely right nor wrong) collided on November 6, 2016. The result was an incredibly uncomfortable awakening to the reality that since the 1970’s our nation was becoming more and more unequal, that there was one America in which advancement and socio-economic progression were realistic, and another in which it was increasingly unlikely. Among many things, some of these symptoms and not necessarily causes, the meritocracy broke down, over-arching macroeconomic policy shifted from full employment to low inflation, capital controls eased, and (as Wolfgang Streeck notes) capitalists employed ‘investment strikes.’

In a sense, then, I was incorrect in my evaluation of the U.S. economy and consequently our democracy, for it was not working for all Americans. Although I still believe Donald Trump was, and is, wrong to blame this on immigrants and trade deals while not acknowledging the deeper roots, he (or his advisers) was right that there is something nagging many in Middle America, something that pushes towards frustration, resignation, resentment, and anger.

Now, nearly three years into Trump’s presidency, the political certainty on either ideological side is irrational and untenable. We hold onto partially true, or even completely flawed tropes to steady ourselves, not realizing that this grasping doesn’t connect us with reality, but rather to a sort of tribal mythology. To combat this, I believe, to paraphrase a college classmate, each of us has a sacred moral obligation to doubt. And not in some sort of fatalistically depressed way, but rather in a honest and searching manner. With the intellectual humility necessary to admit when you are wrong, when your logic is flawed, when your ideas don’t bear fruit. I don’t wish to say that the truth is unknowable or unattainable. I happen to believe in certain unchanging truths, nonetheless, the unchanging beliefs I hold onto happen to be relatively few in number (compared to what I don’t know or yet understand). For any given political question this uncertainty leads to sincere questioning, honest searching, and a gradual shift in perspective. Ultimately, our political models are only as useful as they approximate the world around us. So, if we perversely intend to twist and coax the world down to the comfortable ideological model we built for ourselves, then we should not be surprised to live in a rather twisted up, knotty, and chaotic world that bulges and contorts in all the wrong directions.

We must find ways to work within our ideological frame without being consumed by it. It is for the 21st century citizen to doubt while they believe. Not to cast away these frames, beliefs, or foundations, but to understand that the world is infinitely more complex than our finite vision. To understand that at certain times we must re-order, re-examine, or re-work our paradigms, no matter how long-held or cherished. I am convinced that any re-weaving of the social fabric–the one being torn apart by culture wars, rhetorical battles, and self-interested politicking–must begin with the intellectual humility of doubt, a doubt that enables one to see past ideology and begin to understand another’s arguments. This will combat the chaos of certainty, the delirium of the echo chamber. Meanwhile, as Pastor Jeffers tells Revered Toller in “First Reformed”, “Jihadism is everywhere–even here.”

Suburbia and Authenticity

I have lived in Provo, Utah for the past four years. In that time I have seen remarkable growth and development in this college town and in the surrounding areas. Although I have seen the changes in only the past few years, it is apparent to long-time residents that this growth is anything but new. It has been a long steady crawl towards suburbia. I see an uncomfortable parallel here with the incessant development occurring in my hometown and throughout northern Virginia.

Confronting the same patterns throughout my adolescent and young adult life has led me to accept society’s trudge toward suburbia with a grim resignation. The sort of uneasy burden that can only be thrown off with a quick drive-thru run, a mindless comedy, or a memorable YouTube clip. However, recently, I have tried to be more cognizant of my long-suppressed frustration with the status quo. In a way I have tried to consciously channel my irritability, not for its own sake (no matter how cathartic in its own way), to put words to these often nameless emotions. Heavy and ancient they may be– the vestigial yearning for the peace and quiet of a meadow, a forest edge, or craggy mountainside. The very naming of these emotions and frustrations may be as extinct as the passenger pigeon.

How do we maintain our collective sanity in the plastic and concrete lives we have constructed for ourselves? Or are are we in fact losing our sanity? Can we trace a portion of the global crisis of confidence, and rejection of the status quo, to a growing detachment from ourselves, from nature? Claiming such a connection may sound fanciful, although many political scientists would be hard-pressed to name any cause for this global political meltdown. I don’t mean to say that it all stems from a lack of connection with nature, but it could very well be a symptom of what David Brooks asserts is a lack of connection in community. And what more vital part of community than the backdrop in which it is situated, the plants and animals that share the space with our so-called “advanced” society.

Can we truly have a connection with each other entombed in our climate-controlled catacombs, messaging each other virtually, all the while binging on Netflix? No, I don’t believe it is possible. We need to be uncomfortably present in each other lives, just as we need nature to be uncomfortably present in our own. The authenticity that is present in these experiences is glaringly absent in many modern lives. The genuineness of the pleasant discomfort of a cold evening in the frigid desert with only your sleeping bag around you, the reality of talking with someone whose opinions and views are so opposed to your own that it forces you to scrape for the slightest phrase to hang a conversation on. Why are we so intent on destroying authenticity for the sake of comfort? How do we convince ourselves that this was the way it was meant to be?

Introduction: Purposeful Musing

I intend to post some loosely associated thoughts once or twice a month. I hope to detail at least a portion of my experience as a Mormon Millennial and amateur naturalist. I will mix the themes of nature, politics, and religion to examine my lived experiences, evaluate current events, and sketch out the questions I have. I want to keep in these musings a sense of wonder, to find times to just dwell in moments of simple exhilaration, but to never shy away from the emotions and questions we don’t seek out but seem to eventually find us. Essentially, I want to revel in my humanity, even–or especially–my simpleness.