Why I Focus on the Importance of Subculture Creation

We are shaped by the norms and ideals of those around us

My father was an elevator repairman who bought a farm in Minnesota when I was ten. My mother was a high school dropout who conceived me when she was 15 and gave birth to me when she was 16. My sister and I are eighteen months apart. While I was always a more capable student than she was, the discrepancy was not especially significant until high school. We were both tremendous readers, living on a farm in northern Minnesota with long winters and almost no TV reception. I was reading an average of about 200 pages every night from sixth grade onward, as did she.

Socially I became an increasingly introverted geek, and escaped the cruelty and boredom of middle and high school by reading more. My sister gradually became more social. In my junior year of high school, her sophomore year, our family farm was failing. Our family moved into my grandparents’ mobile home in Aspen, Colorado, where there were abundant construction jobs for my dad. When we moved to Aspen, I continued to be the socially isolated geek. My sister joined the “party crowd” of wealthy Aspen kids who indulged in abundant drugs and alcohol.

With good test scores and a few more years of serious geekdom than she had, I went to Harvard. With an increasing amount of her time spent as a party girl, she ended up going to a state college and dropping out after a semester. She spent most of the next fifteen years as a stripper, making a significant income and continuing her lifestyle as a party girl. She and her fellow dancer friends would spend a few days in one city until they got bored, then travel to another city until they got bored there. They lived in hotels and ate out, working for a few hours each evening to earn enough cash to take care of their expenses. Eventually she married an abusive man whose mother owned several strip clubs. When she tried to escape him with her children she came to live with me and my family. He threatened to kill all of us unless she came back to him, which she eventually did. Later, after a divorce and a bout of alcoholism, she got her life together and became a concrete worker in her 40s. A bout of cancer followed, after which she went back to school and became a nurse in her 50s.  She is now doing much better, but it is hard to work as a nurse while in one’s 60s.

When I read Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, the pathologies of Fishtown are entirely familiar to me (Robert Putnam documents a similar phenomenon from a different political perspective in Our Kids). My sister was not the only person in my family to have succumbed to a “drugs, sex, and rock’n’roll” lifestyle. Unlike the Appalachian families of Hillbilly Elegy, who had been dysfunctional for decades, or centuries, most of my midwestern Scandinavian relatives had been hard-working Lutherans. They owned homes and farms, raised families, and were (despite a certain amount of family dysfunction) solidly bourgeois middle class. They were frugal, church-going folk right out of Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion. They rarely went to restaurants, made lunch for a week in crockpots, bought clothes either from discount stores or from Goodwill, and owned maybe one suit for weddings and funerals. Some drank, sometimes to excess, but they always woke up early the next day to work. “Partying” never became a lifestyle. Work and family were the center of their “lifestyle.”

But starting roughly with my generation (I was born in 1960), a certain percentage of my cousins became morally and culturally lost. While some of my cousins were successful, educated, “Belmont” residents (to use Murray’s term), others, often siblings just as my sister and I were, fell into a “Fishtown” sort of dysfunction. In my extended family I have several felons, drug addicts, chronic welfare recipients, and plenty of out of wedlock children raised in homes in which drugs and crime are the norm. One cousin sniffed glue as a teen and later stabbed his roommate to death. Another cousin took money from the till, was caught and went to jail. While on bail he escaped by hitchhiking and then threatening one of his rides with a knife unless he took him out of state. In both cases their parents were hard-working, respectable middle-class people.

As a secular intellectual who can no longer believe in the Lutheranism of my youth, I nonetheless recognize the role of religion in keeping many (but not all) of my cousins out of trouble. Thus I came to see the subculture in which one lived one’s adolescence as an essential determinant of adult success and well-being. If one was in a religious subculture, or in a socially-mobile, academically ambitious teen subculture (such as my geek subculture), then one could traverse through a certain amount of party culture harmlessly enough. There were also people who lived several years of partying and then settled down to become responsible parents and wage earners, without religion or geekdom. They simply managed to have control of their lives.

On the other hand, if one’s peer environment increasingly came to consist entirely of people who devoted most of their non-working hours to some form of hedonism and impulsiveness, then many (but again, not all) became more likely to experience increasing numbers of life challenges. At the end of the day, a flourishing life requires impulse control. There is nothing wrong with pleasure per se, but if one is habituated into giving in to impulses, it is impossible to build healthy relationships, a meaningful career, or to find fulfillment.

I learned frugality from my grandparents. As Depression-era adults, their frugality was astonishing. My grandfather would buy a bushel of barley at the feed store. Each evening he would put some barley in a thermos with hot water. It would soak overnight and in the morning he would eat it for breakfast. He calculated the cost of each breakfast at about 2 cents.

To save on water, my grandparents would collect grey water in their sinks. They would use the grey water to flush the toilet after urinating. The theme was: Waste nothing. I don't know what their water bill was, but I'm sure it was minimal.

When I brought my girlfriend to visit while in college, they took us out to the local grocery store on Saturday. The grocery store was serving free hot dogs and cokes in the parking lot. That was how they "took us out for dinner."

None of these are "normal" behaviors by the standards of our culture today. But that was how I learned frugality. I am by no means frugal by their standards. But I can live well on almost nothing. I learned how to do so from them. They were happy living that lifestyle. I learned how to be happy within such a world.

Note that in my anecdote about my grandparents' frugality, I did not mention shame. Many teens, knowing contemporary standards, would have felt shame. Taking a girlfriend to meet the family so that we can go out to a grocery parking lot for a free hot dog? This does not pass the cool test in most teen cultures. But frugality is not consistent with coolness.

But I was raised in a family in which frugality was a virtue, in a culture (at least in northern Minnesota) in which frugality was a virtue. For most of the rest of my life I’ve been in places where conspicuous consumption was the norm (certainly Aspen and Harvard), but my tastes, habits, and attitudes were formed in a social environment in which it was an absurd preteniousness to advertise one’s status by means of consumption (It is not a coincidence that Thorstein Veblen was Norwegian-American, we are descended from the same culture).

Today one rarely hears the term “frugality.” I certainly haven’t seen it celebrated in pop culture nor in school curricula recently. It is vanishing as a virtue because there are no longer mainstream cultures in which it is a norm (LDS, Amish, Mennonite, and some immigrant communities may be exceptions).

I use the example of frugality because it is not as morally fraught as are other virtues of self-mastery such as those pertaining to sex, drugs, and other hedonism. But ultimately human flourishing requires self-mastery. The role of traditional cultures prior to modernity all directed young people towards some kind of self-mastery by means of culturally enforced social norms and ideals of human behavior. In the late 20th century, we destroyed all traditional social norms (some of which were harmful and needed to be destroyed). Because government controlled K12 education came to dominate adolescence even as the norms were being ripped up, few families were able to raise their children in communities that preserved the norms needed for self-mastery.

If we want to improve the human condition for all, especially the least well off, we need to support the creation of educational subcultures that systematically develop impulse control within a social and moral environment that is fully united in support of the virtues needed to transcend impulsive hedonism.

How I Think about Education in Light of This Experience

Such a united social and moral environment needs to be developed and sustained by individuals and communities united in their commitments to particular virtues. Every individual within such an educational/cultural universe needs to share similar commitments.  Character education as a poster on a wall or a classroom lesson on “grit” is a joke and the students know it. Only immersion in a human environment in which every interaction reinforces the norms of the community is it possible to develop serious virtues. Given that I share most of Bryan Caplan’s perspective that most schooling is a waste of time and money, the priority becomes raising young people well. 

Yes, high level reading and writing skills are valuable.  Mathematics up to basic personal and business finance are useful to all, and students headed into STEM should study as much math as possible.  But currently the standard education project of marching all kids through years of memorize and forget tasks that alienate them learning and from which they retain almost nothing is not how we should be thinking about education.  

When I hire staff for my schools (most recently The Socratic Experience), moral and philosophical alignment is the most important characteristic.  The ability to work with young people and to build positive mentoring relationships is next.  I’m focused on creating a virtue culture based on Socratic, Buberian (relationships based on mutual respect and recognition), and entrepreneurial virtues.  Ideally every staff member would be exemplary in all three.  Given that that is exceptionally rare, they should be exemplary in at least one of the virtues.  Because we spend roughly four hours per day in dialogue, our guides have an opportunity to build much closer relationships with students than is the norm at most schools.  Our adult to child ratio is 15:1 and every child meets with a mentor 30 minutes every two weeks.  In order to have a positive influence on young people given the gale of internet addictions faced by them all today, we provide a healthy dosage of connection, community, meaning, and purpose.

By means of reading difficult texts (mostly classics), we can get plenty of reading in (with superior gains on SAT verbal).  Given hours of intellectual dialogue, it is much easier to develop their interest and ability in learning to write.  Math consists of both a self-paced component on math apps as well as group problem solving of challenging problems.  With self-paced math, it is trivial for the top 20% of math students to cover two years of math per year thus becoming much more advanced than the norm.  Meanwhile, entrepreneurial or creative students can spend more time developing their skills and projects.  By allowing everyone to spend time on something that is meaningful to them, embedded in a community of rich relationships, school takes on more of a sense of community and less of a prison.  When teens have mutually respectful relationships with adults, then those adults can have a moral influence on them. Standing in front of 30 teens at a time as they churn from 50 minute class to 50 minute class does not allow that kind of moral influence.

The distinctive virtue culture that I’m working to build is challenging because it is a new mixture of cultural elements.  Those working to revive traditional religious virtues have a much smoother pathway.  But even many Catholic schools are no longer building deep virtue cultures.  In the 1990s I was consulting for a Catholic school and I mentioned that we had a responsibility to affirm to students the importance of moral judgments.  I mentioned a situation in which an older teen had taken a younger teen’s backpack and was holding it out in front of traffic such that the younger (and shorter) one had stepped into the busy street to try and get his backpack out.  I used it as a clear example of a case in which we should make moral judgements.  The older nuns were all cheering me on.  The younger teachers, most of whom had gotten education degrees and did not have the deeper religious background, had been taught that we should not make moral judgments - even at a Catholic school.  This is obviously one anecdote, but there is broader dissatisfaction among those who take their Catholicism seriously about the secularization of much of Catholic education.

Most secular intellectuals are anti-religious.  I’m at the point at which I see the threat of relativism, hedonism, and nihilism as greater than the threat of religion.  Young people need to be raised among adults who have some kind of moral sensibility, some sense of moral conviction and direction, some shared belief in ideals, the heroic, and the sacred.  Without it they are prone to mindless political activism in part because that is the closest to something meaningful most have been exposed to.  They suffer from social media and gaming addictions because they have no sense of purpose. Those who are ambitious develop self control in order to achieve their ambitions.  The rest are lost unless they are raised in a particularly strong home or subculture.

I saw many members of my extended family collapse over the 70s and 80s.  The cultural erosion that destroyed much of that generation is long gone, the cultural wars from that era are long over.  The conservatives lost their battles against drugs, sex, and rock’n’roll.  Most of those who flourished through these cultural revolutions tend to ridicule the conservatives of the time who stood athwart history yelling “Stop.”  We who flourished were the ones who did not need the broader cultural constraints to flourish.

Because I don’t see the U.S. as a whole reconstructing the earlier cultures of restraint, I see recreating the k12 experience around self-mastery through the development of distinctive virtue cultures (some of which will be sexually liberal, some of which will not, some of which will be secular, some of which will not, etc.) as the most promising hope for the next generation.  The standard didactic model of existing government controlled K12 is completely unsuited for creating new virtue cultures.  Many religious schools, the classical education movement, Montessori, Waldorf, Acton Academies, and many more are fitfully headed in the direction of creating virtue cultures. 

I’m working to create a much greater social, cultural, and entrepreneurial awareness of the need and potential of this direction.  I believe creating better subcultures in which we raise our young is one project that can unite us all even as we allow it to happen in thousands of diverse ways through new initiatives.  We need to legalize markets in happiness and wellbeing, allowing thousands of entrepreneurs to provide healthier, better virtue cultures for young people (in lieu of schooling as we know it). It is at once a revival of the Tocquevillian localism that created an organic civic society in the 19th century while also serving as an early prototype for a Nozickian utopia of utopias for the 21st.