Western Civilisation's Pockets of Competence

We at Al Fin blog emphasize the importance of teaching practical competence to children and youth. But adults, too, can acquire competence--if they are disciplined enough.

“The American Dream today is to own your own home,” he said. “It used to be to build your own home.”

He had no practical experience with carpentry, plumbing or electrical work. When he went to the store for supplies, he had to describe what he needed because he’d never learned various fixtures’ proper names.

...But Wernick refused to be swayed. In college, he’d studied math, chemistry and physics and learned theories he was sure he could apply to building. His work followed the pattern of most of history’s great scientists: trial and error.

Eventually, he succeeded. He finished the house and passed inspection. It was invaluable experience for his next dream: building a country home in Northwest Montana.


...In 1980, they decided to take a break from education and focus on building a home in the woods.

They wanted much more than a cabin on their North Fork property. They wanted a real home, a place they could raise their daughter, Rachelle.

They wanted to live off the grid and be completely self-sufficient. The North Fork — with no electricity or other utilities — was just the place.

“It was our dream to have a sustainable country home,” Wernick said.

Source

And so they built their off-the-grid home in western Montana. Then promptly got roped into starting a boarding school on their new homesite.Jerry Wernick demonstrated his personal competence when he buckled down and learned the trade of homebuilding well enough to satisfy fastidious Southern California inspectors. He and his family further demonstrated competence when they successfully built their sustainable off-grid home in Montana.

Having demonstrated their competence twice over, it should be clear that the Wernicks are qualified to teach their boarding students something about competence, at their sustainable home in the Monatana forest. But that was 25 years ago. They have probably learned a great deal since then.

It wasn’t long before other parents heard about the couple tutoring children up the North Fork. Soon the Wernicks had four pupils. By 1982, they realized they had a full-blown school and formally opened Tamarack Springs Academy.

Within a few years, the school was full, and it has remained full ever since. The Wernicks accept just 10 students each year — a small enough number to board the students on their property.

Children have come from all over the country to study at Tamarack Springs.

Most heard about the school from former students or people who’ve met the Wernicks. Horn, from Midland, Mich., first heard about the school from her pastor, Jerry Wernick’s brother-in-law.

Elise Taylor of Calhoun, Ga., is the third member of her family to attend Tamarack Springs. Her older sister, Shannon, attended the school two years ago. Her brother, Michael, is a senior there this year.

For years, Taylor listened to stories about the small school in the woods and its legendary fall and winter campouts. When she was old enough to attend high school, she knew exactly where she wanted to go.

Small pockets of competence flower and grow, sometimes from unlikely seed. While there are few Richard Proennekes in the modern western world, if more persons can learn how to nourish the potential of children and youth in their formative years, sufficient personal competence for meeting the coming challenges might spring up, as if from the void.

Is it really important for adults and youth to learn these basic living skills? Haven't we all grown beyond these primitive ways of thriving? Will it not be a few more years before breakthroughs in biotechnology, nanotechnology, and machine intelligence makes all of this "nonsense" obsolete?

Perhaps, although I seriously doubt it. The forces of Luddist reactionism, political appeasement to Islamic fanaticism, and socialist incompetence are quite strong in the modern world. While western civilisation has acquired a large amount of momentum, it currently rests upon an electronic economic system that is quite vulnerable to disruption. Since modern research labs depend upon a small number of private and government beneficiaries, disrupting the flow of funds to research would not be terribly difficult for a determined and well-funded foe. Particularly in conjunction with other attacks against physical facilities, energy supplies, information infrastructure, etc.

Even under the best circumstances and economies, the technical problems needed to begin to achieve the goals of SENS regenerative medical engineering, ubiquitous molecular manufacturing, better-than-human machine intelligence, and large scale colonisation of space, will take several decades. If political incompetence (appeasement to primitivism) makes the tasks more difficult, it may take centuries.
First published at Al Fin.

Speaking of Iran, How Are Your Nuclear War Survival Skills?

As Iran and North Korea continue to develop and proliferate nuclear weapons technology--with the tacit approval of China and Russia--the probability of a nuclear engagement between the "warlord governments" and the developed western world is increasing.

When the USSR fell of its own centrally-planned ineptitude, most people believed they would never need to worry about nuclear war again. Scholar Francis Fukuyama even went so far as to predict "the end of history." Who can blame all of those naive optimists for believing that it would be downhill coasting from then on?

Well, they were wrong, and history is working overtime to create another world war and perhaps a nuclear world war. So what is a prudent, intelligent, and informed person to do? I barely have the heart to tell you that you need to brush up on your nuclear war survival skills.

I suggest that you begin with Chaper 1, and take your time with it. Most people believe that a nuclear war between the great powers would mean the end of humans on earth--or at least the end of civilisation. On the Beach by Nevil Schute was pivotal in shaping popular beliefs about the consequences of a world nuclear war. Several other post- apocalyptipc novels helped to round out this bleak outlook.

Make no mistake--a large scale nuclear war would the worst event in human history up until now. The huge nuclear arsenals possessed by Russia and the US, and the huge arsenal being rapidly built up by China, would guarantee a human and environmental disaster unprecedented in history.

Still, if you knew that you could survive a nuclear war--given a little luck--would you be willing to take the trouble to learn how? Many people would not. Many people feel that if such a disastrous cataclysm were to occur, with the horrific loss of life, that they themselves would not want to live.

I understand that. Any survivors of a large scale disaster of that magnitude would have to work like hell to have any kind of decent life at all. In other words, any survivor of a large scale disaster has to have personal competence, and hopefully good health and personal integrity. Because who would want to live in a world that was run by Pol Pot characters or Hell's Angels?

The personal integrity and good health are up to you, as is the general life competence that comes in so handy when the unexpected happens. But specific knowledge and skills that could help you and your family survive a nuclear war, is something that you just have to work at, to learn. Either you want to survive or you don't, should such an unspeakable horror occur.

Los Angeles is Nuked by Arabs on "24"! Will the US Media and Political Establishment Nuke Fox in Retaliation?

It is politically fashionable to pretend that "global warming" is a bigger threat than islamic terrorism. Most elected officials, entertainment celebrities, and news media conglomerates seem to agree that changing the subject and pretending the problem doesn't exist is the only way to deal with the existential threat to western civilisation--the only halfway civilised civilisation the world has ever known.

The television show "24" on the US Fox Network has come out with a powerful first four hours. A large part of Los Angeles has been destroyed by a suitcase nuclear weapon by arab muslim terrorists. This is a major break from an overwhelming denial of the problem among most media powers. I am wondering when the enablers of terrorism will begin to attack Fox for its realism?

Remember when Hollywood made a movie of a Tom Clancy thriller about muslim terrorists setting off a nuclear bomb in Denver? Hollywood changed the muslim terrorists into right-wing domestic terrorists. Realism doesn't sell to the media or political elite. Make believe pretending is more their style.

Muslim terrorists will kill innocent people anywhere in the world they can--until the west can produce an organised force with enough competence and power to put an end to the extremism that has captured the heart, mind, and soul of contemporary Islam.

Today, it is a "24" TV show episode. Tomorrow it will be on 24 hour news coverage of CNN. When it really happens, somehow I think the CNN executives will be smiling.

The Survival of the West Depends Upon the Competence of Its Citizens

Richard Proenneke moved to Alaska when he was 34 years old. He worked hard and after 18 years he retired to a remote wilderness area called Twin Lakes. He made many of his own handtools, and constructed his cabin on the lake himself, with local materials.

Following his discharge from the Navy Proenneke went to school to become a diesel mechanic. The combination of his high intelligence, unique adaptability, and strong work ethic turned him into a very skilled mechanic. Though quite adept at his trade, Proenneke succumbed to the call of nature within him and moved to Oregon to work at a sheep ranch.

Proenneke eventually decided to attempt a start at his own cattle ranch. With an unnamed friend, he moved to Shuyak Island, Alaska in 1950. Proenneke soon discovered that Alaska is not ranch country and he abandoned this venture.

For several years Dick worked as a heavy equipment operator and repairman on the naval base at Kodiak. Proenneke spent the next several years working throughout the state of Alaska as both a salmon fisherman and diesel mechanic. He worked for the Fish and Wildlife Service at King Salmon on the Alaska Peninsula. His skills as a mechanic were well-known and extremely sought after, and he was able to put away a modest nest egg for retirement. Although his living for the most part came from twisting bolts and welding steel, his heart was always in those far away peaks that lost themselves in the clouds.

After some thought on the matter, and a serious accident while working as a diesel mechanic, Proenneke decided he would like to retire in the wilderness of Alaska, specifically at a place called Twin Lakes. In the summer of 1967, Proenneke was dropped off at Twin Lakes for the season so he could fell timber, black spruce logs required for the building of his dream retirement home.

....Proenneke spent May, June, and July of 1968 building his cabin by hand and with nothing but hand tools. The cabin was complete with windows, one of which was designed and built of PET film by Proenneke himself to face the lake and not fog up. He also built furniture including chairs, tables, a desk, and a bunk; a log cache built up on poles to store food and goods that needed to be kept away from wildlife; a stone and mortar fireplace; and many decorations such as a plaster of paris wolf track and moose and caribou antler decorations.

Proenneke's bush pilot friend, Babe Alsworth, returned occasionally to bring food and orders that Proenneke placed through him to Sears. While Proenneke lived largely off the land, he enjoyed things like red beans, bacon, and seasonings, all of which he proclaimed to be life's real luxuries.

Several times during his life at Twin Lakes, Proenneke was attacked by brown bears. He also became quite adept at taming animals, befriending a squirrel, a weasel, many birds, and (almost) a wolverine.

Proenneke remained at Twin Lakes for the next 16 months, when he left to go home for a spell to visit relatives and secure more supplies. He returned to the lakes in the following spring and remained there for most of the next 30 years, coming to the lower 48 only occasionally to be with his family, for whom he cared a great deal.

Source.

Dick Proenneke lived for thirty years away from civilisation, living off the wilderness and surviving by his wits and hard work.

Contrast Proenneke's successful coexistence with a dangerous wilderness, with the sad story of Christopher McCandless, a healthy young man who starved to death after only 112 days living in an abandoned schoolbus, over an Alaska summer. Chris was intelligent--a graduate of Emory University. He managed to kill a moose with his .22 rifle, but did not know how to preserve the meat, so most of it spoiled. He was close to a river full of fish, but apparently didn't know how to catch fish for food.

Proenneke went much farther into the wilderness than McCandless. He made a 30 year retirement out of the wild, and prospered. Proenneke was a much older man, without a college degree. But Proenneke was competent in a way that McCandless--and entire generations of McCandlesses--never could be.

Proenneke was an old school American. McCandless was a product of the new school--the school of neotenous incompetence. Chris wanted adventure, and was both intelligent and resourceful. But he lacked the competence and common sense he needed to survive less than four relatively mild months in Alaska. Chris is representative of what a modern college education can do for a person. He had great self-esteem, and big dreams. He was egalitarian in the best traditions of political correctness. But he was incompetent for the situations he put himself into.

Previously posted at Al Fin under the title "Portrait of Competence: Richard Proenneke."