Editor's Note: We received the following letter and interesting essay via e-mail at Axis of Logic from the author. - LMB

Dear Les,
 
Someone sent me your article "Capitalist Attacks on Tradition and Culture" this morning and it intrigued me to no end. Born and raised on a Mennonite farm in southern Ontario (Kitchener area), I lived for 20 years as a missionary in Central and South America and am now a member of a Hutterite colony in Tasmania, Australia. While I do not expect our thoughts would run along all the same channels, I did think you might be interested in this piece that appeared in a book I wrote not long ago.

- Peter Hoover

The Phenomenon

I remember it like yesterday. We came in from doing the chores on a winter morning in southern Ontario. While we washed our hands at the corner sink and my sisters scurried about, getting the last of the breakfast on, Dad already sat at the table reading The Budget.[1] Suddenly he began reading out loud and we paused to listen. “The Lancaster Conference Mennonites,” he read, “have divided into two groups. The smaller of the two, led by bishops Isaac Sensenig, Aaron Shank and others, has taken a stand against worldly influences coming back with their missionaries from Africa: a push for higher education, conformity to the world in attire, the acceptance of divorce and remarriage, to name a few.”

Sitting at our breakfast table we discussed what had happened in Pennsylvania and began to relate it to other situations closer at hand. Mom and Dad began talking of how things were during the 1920s, and longer ago. “Everyone used to look and live pretty much alike,” they told us. “You could hardly tell the difference between a plain person or a Lutheran or a Catholic or a Methodist. All the women wore nice dresses and didn’t cut their hair. Everyone farmed with horses, and we all helped each other. We used to have Lutherans and Catholics in our threshing rounds!”

For us children, growing up in the 1960s, that already seemed strange. Only “we plain people” did such things anymore. But it was not hard for us to see that some of our people were heading the same direction as the Lutherans, the Catholics and the Methodists around us.

Everything, everyone, it seemed, was heading into greater independence and isolation. As farmers got bigger machinery they needed more and more land to pay for it—but they no longer needed each other. The same was true of factory workers and business people. The less people needed one another, the more time and more money they spent on themselves.

During the 1960s Ontario consolidated its schools. Children no longer sat in rural classrooms where everyone knew each other and the teacher (like Mrs. McKay who taught at our school, S.S. 13 Wellesley, while her husband farmed just around the corner from our place). Now they got massed by the hundreds into vast new “educational centres” in town. 

Then the grocery stores closed up in the villages around us. Little places where the bells jingled when you pushed the door open with its Borden Ice Cream signs, where the wooden floor creaked when you walked in beneath all manner of utensils hanging from the ceiling while Rebecca Horst or Grant Schnurr, standing behind their glass-topped counters, would ask what you needed today. Conestoga Mall opened on the outskirts of Kitchener-Waterloo and everyone started shopping in the city.

During the 1960s we still drove into Kitchener with our horses and buggies, careful not to let our wheels wedge into the tracks of the tram cars in the brick pavement of Victoria Street, where we put up our horses at the livery stable. But the horses and buggies went, and the roads (and the trams) went with the coming of super highways. And farms and fields and entire villages and regions went as the cities grew and merged to become a megalopolis of many millions of people from Kitchener and Hamilton to Toronto and Niagara Falls.

As all this happened we suddenly needed quotas and licenses to buy or sell. Our people balked at first. We continued shipping our milk but they sent us warnings again and again to get our license or they might not collect it anymore. The last warning came when we all got our milk returned with dark green food colouring in it. We had dark green custard and dark green cheese on dark green butter in our school lunches for a long time afterward. But we stopped shipping milk, and only the big farmers—those that co-operated with “the system”—survived.

Then came the Canada Pension Plan, provincial health care (OHIP), the Social Insurance Numbers without which no one could hold a job, and a host of other legal benefits, duties and regulations affecting almost every area of life from birth to the moment one died—all funded through a tax and legal system that kept rising and expanding like my mother’s bread-dough on the bench beside the stove.

My father, with half a dozen other leaders of Mennonite and Amish communities travelled to Ottawa to plead for exemption from it all. “We do not need the government to care for us,” he told the prime minister (Pierre Trudeau) and the Canadian Parliament when they gave him a hearing in the House of Commons. “We trust in God. We work together. We care for our own. We have never needed a ‘pension plan’ and we do not want one now.”

We children found it highly amusing to see Dad’s speech published in the Hansard in English and French and his picture in the papers (we had only heard him preach in German at home and we did not take pictures of ourselves). But “the system” kept right on rising and growing without a hitch. The first time I got my Social Insurance card, to begin teaching in a Mennonite School, my Dad found it and burned it. Later he got one too.

I married a girl of the Old Colony Mennonites from Mexico, thousands of whom left their villages for new opportunities in Canada during the 1950s and 60s, where all the same things happened to them. They lost their sense of “peoplehood.” Their extended families fell apart.

All across Canada, as our Mennonite people took jobs in the city, as TV and computers and cell phones came into their lives, convictions faltered, morals collapsed, women cut their hair, put on trousers and started trying to act like men. Single parenthood and mixed unions became common as divorce and remarriage entered the churches and rapidly increased. (We also have scores of family members and relatives in “broken homes” by now.) Church attendance plummeted in the younger generation as ever greater numbers of our people lived independent, isolated lives, all looking alike, all acting the same way—but not like Mennonites. Like Hollywood. And all kept looking for something to make them really happy but nothing really did.
 
A World-Wide Phenomenon

It did not only happen in Canada. Or in Pennsylvania. Or in Tanzania. When Susan and I came to Mexico we settled on a vast plateau—the Páramo de Morelos in Chihuahua state—that had not a single electric light. Nothing but coyotes laughing and howling on the plains where mud brick villages, like Bethlehem, lay silent under a sky almost white with stars.

The first Mexicans we knew looked like they might have stepped out of a turn-of-the-century postcard: Friendly village men in giant hats. Wide white smiles under black moustaches. Silver buckles, boots with spurs and cowboy shirts. Even schoolboys, riding bareback, showed off like rodeo experts. Gracious women in simple dresses, with their uncut hair tied up at the back, cooked the world’s best enchiladas in dirt-floored kitchens under mango trees. White-haired men in guayaberas, Don Pánfilo, Don Enrique Sáenz, an old widow lady that always wore a black lacy veil, keeping a tiny shop on the plaza of the Villa Guerrero. 

Then “the system” came, with electricity and TV and computers and cell phones. Everyone started thinking they needed more stuff to make them happy. For that they needed money and started racing about to get it. Instead of helping each other they started competing one with another. The birth rate went down—way, way down. And as families became independent they cared less, one for another. Many left their villages to live in the cities or al otro lado (“on the other side,” that is, in the USA). Organised sports (on TV) took the place of village fun. Women cut their hair and put on jeans, trying to look and act like men. Families fell apart as divorce and remarriage became legal and popular. In the end, vast numbers of people all lived independent, isolated lives, all looking, all acting alike—but not like Mexicans. Like Hollywood. And all kept looking for something to make them really happy but nothing really did.

Then we lived in Costa Rica. High up on the Tilarán Mountains three Tico[2] friends and I (it took us all day to get up there on horseback and down again) visited Don Macedonio Badilla and his wife. They lived that far from the closest vehicle road, from the closest telephone or electric line.

When they saw us coming, still far below them on the zigzag trail up the mountain,  Don Macedonio’s wife ran and caught a chicken to butcher. She slapped up the tortillas, fried the rice and made us a picadillo de aracache to eat with the beans. In the meanwhile Don Macedonio, dignified old man who never went to school, picked avocadoes, and sour oranges to make us a fresco, with a few lemons to go with the meal. By the time we got close enough for him to shout us his greetings, and his sweet wife stood beaming in the open doorway of her bamboo “kitchen” the aroma that came from it overpowered us with sudden appetite. We tethered the horses and ate together while she served us. What a time catching up on the news! Macedonio and his wife knew everyone on the mountain villages, so everyone and everything came up for review. She, in her black print dress and silver hair tied up in a bun, as delightfully modest as he was jovial and gruff. We had to stroll about, looking at all his fruit trees, his bee hives, his cane fields and his cows before they let us go—loaded with as many gifts from the farm as our saddles could hold on the steep way down.

Doña Digna the midwife that delivered a whole generation of babies on the western slope of our mountains above the sea, travelling on foot or on horseback, by day or by night. Don Lolo Cambronero, raising his family with the help of the village, after his wife died on the birth of their twelfth child (when his oldest was twelve years old). Doña Chalina, Doña Sofía, Don Lico and Doña Caridad in their rickety little house below us on the mountain—my life will forever be enriched for having known this generation of Costa Rican villagers. The families that invited us to the pig butcherings (where the whole village came and the entire pig, or two, was eaten on the spot for lack of a place to keep meat). The families that shared with us so many plantains we didn’t know what to do with them all. That served us strong hot coffee with tortillas and sour cream whenever we stepped through their open doors (which was often) and who continually came to our house for one thing or another but repaid us amply with more favours and blessings than we could ever return.

But Costa Rica changed. Every so often we saw the lights of another whole village connected to the grid, twinkling like a new constellation on the unbelievably rugged slopes and spurs of our range, hanging down to the Pacific Ocean. And with the lights came electricity and TV and computers and cell phones. And people started thinking they needed more stuff to make them happy. The birth rate went down—way, way down. Commercialised sports (on TV) took the place of village fun. Almost all the ladies, even the grandmothers, on the mountain cut their hair and started wearing trousers. (Someone started the rumour that wearing long hair causes head-aches.) Families fell apart as many took jobs in the cities and came back only on holidays, painted up like movie stars. Once again we saw it happening all over, people living independent, isolated lives, all looking, all acting alike—but not like friendly Ticos. Like Hollywood. And all kept looking for something to make them really happy but nothing really did.

On the first sunny morning of the new millennium, New Year’s Day, 2000, I walked up the hill from our house in Chile with my two little boys to get some sheep manure from our neighbour, Ignacio Kahler. More than a century earlier Ignacio’s family came from Germany, sailing around Cape Horn, to settle on this beautiful farm, high above Lake Llanquihue. Here, where one looks across the water to Chile’s “Mount Fuji,” the Osorno Volcano, they built their rambling wooden farmhouse with its veranda and the barns, Württemberger style, around a protected Hof. This morning we stood at the gate, watching the hired man carve an ox yoke out of a piece of new timber, long slow curves of his knife adding new curls of shavings to his growing pile, while bees buzzed about their hives under the apple trees, birds twittered loudly in the still morning air, and a flock of sheep shuffled down to the paddock, hanging steep and green to the village and the lake, far below. 

A new ox yoke for the year 2000. Will anyone be farming with oxen a hundred years from now? Or fifty years? Or ten?

On the Caribbean island of Trinidad, in remote settlements on the Pomeroon River in Guyana, on little farms high above the wild west coast of Norway—everywhere I go I find the same things happening. And they are happening fast. But the more things change, the more they all—suspiciously—look and sound the same. Everywhere I go, in every country, the last islands of distinctive culture crumble and sink beneath the waves of one great sea of uniformity rolling around the face of the whole earth in our time.

Millions and billions of young people around the world listen to the same music and watch the same DVDs. All cut their hair by the same styles and wear the same brands of jeans and get into the same trouble with the same type of boys and girls in cities that are all the same. They all grow up wanting few children, but access to lots of partners of the opposite (or of the same) sex. The same “body cult” has taken them all, and whether they get educated or not, their values (shaped, largely, by what they see on television) are the same.

The author, Peter Hoover sent this essay to us from his home in Detention River, Tasmania, Australia. Peter is a member of the Rocky Cape Christian Community. Visit their website, "The Common Life". Peter's recently published book, The Mystery of the Mark can be downloaded and read on line.

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