I’m afraid Miss Woodside has profoundly missed the point of these books. They’re part of our origin myth, just like the first Thanksgiving, George Washington and the cherry tree, Lincoln walking miles return some customer’s change, or John Henry and the steam drill.
Origin myths are healthy and necessary parts of any society. The Hungarians believe they were all descended from Megyar tribe. The Russian Orthodox church traces their origins to Prince Vladimir of the Kievan Rus tribe. The Chinese consider themselves descended from the ancient Han. Modern Mexicans increasingly see themselves as Mayan descendants.
None of these are literally true stories (even Laura said “I don’t know I was writing history”), but like any origin myth, they contain important truths about who Americans believe themselves to be. Trying to dissect them and falsify specific pieces is missing the forest for the trees.
These myths allow a people (or peoples) to be bound together where they might otherwise fracture. It’s not accidental that those who hate Western Civilization today seek to undermine its origin myths.
I thought that was the point of the article. Despite these stories being myths and missing large amounts of important information, they seem to have inspired the thoughts and policies of the libertarian wing of government
She’s telling a origin story for the libertarian wing of the Republican Party (a story with is false even under those terms, since the libertarians go all the way back to the anti-federalists in 1787)
My point is that Laura is part of the myths not of a party, but of a nation. The other examples I gave are ethnic because the vast majority of nations in the world are ethnically based. America’s founding myths are even more important though, since we lack a common ethnic tie. Attacking them (by trying to falsify them) is misses their unifying role as myths instead of history.
J.R.R. Tolkien once described the Bible (the ultimate origin myth) as “the myth that really happened” to C.S. Lewis. He didn’t mean he’d investigated the historical location of Eden. He meant that even though it was a myth, it contained Truth universal to all human beings.
That’s what matters in an origin story: that the story has the power to shape and unify the mental architecture of a particular people. ‘Proving” that George never chopped down a cherry tree or that Laura wasn’t completely truthful in her account of prairie life is beside the point.
It is interesting to hear the Bible dismissed as myth by those who have no qualifications for doing so (ask those who’ve spent a lifetime studying it) nor have the experience of some of the Einsteinian dimensions hitherto undetectable to materialists. The Bible records the true history of mankind in astounding detail as – you put it well – the universal Truth.
If you wanted to defend the Bible as almost ur-myth, or as ‘true’ in the sense Jordan Peterson does, I’d go along with you. However so many American Christians are crashingly literal minded! No, the Bible does very much NOT tell an accurate narrative history of mankind, and was undoubtedly written by many authors over hundreds if not thousands of years.
Marcia, I don’t think Tolkien or Lewis are “denigrating” the Bible here, and I’m not either. It’s likely both of those men have forgotten more about the Christian faith than either you or I have ever learned. (Perhaps you’re an Oxford trained, doctoral theologian, but I am not.)
Without being too harsh, let me say that the Christian faith is far larger than the Dwight Moody derived, dispensational, fundamentalist, Protestant view you have articulated. Last year First Things magazine (a conservative, Catholic publication) wrote an article using genetics, archeology, and theology together to hypothesize about who Adam and Eve really were and when and where they likely lived. (https://www.firstthings.com/article/2021/10/the-historical-adam) That’s what I mean when I say “the myth that really happened”, and that’s what I think Lewis and Tolkien meant too.
If you haven’t read Lewis’ Mere Christianity or The Problem of Pain, you really should. The Screwtape Letters is hilarious, until you see echoes of your world in it. Reading things outside of your denominational bubble isn’t a sign of weakness; it’s a sign of strength and a willingness to honestly seek God as He really is.
Mexicans certainly don’t consider themselves full Mayans (it’s more likely to be Aztecs anyway). If they did they would be trying to remove Spanish influence.
Mmm – myths which underly and support modern Hungarian, Russian and Chineses society. Now what do those three societies have in common? I suspect that ‘civilisation’ as defined by the vast majority of people would not be one trait! More likely authoritarianism and the suppression of democracy, surely the very antithesis of ‘Western Civilisation’?
Western civilisation is hardly a synonym for ‘democracy’, and long pre dates it in itsodern form by hundreds of years Most of the time the latter term was used an a completely negative way; it was taken for read that democratic societies would become dominated by the uneducated mob become unstable and lead to tyranny. Athens was seen in this light.
Matt Hindman
1 year ago
Oh give me a break. I grew up around ranchers who have always worked hard and struggled to get by. Their opinions and what I have learned from them means much more than a glamourized old bit of pop culture and some East Coast university professor. Here is the real lesson I learned from them. Local government can be very effective in addressing the needs of its citizens. The reason is they understand each other and know what they need. On the other hand every government scheme from some young cosmopolitan technocrat who could never be bothered to learn the details and livelihoods of the people they were supposed to be helping turned out poorly. These people are not so much for no government as they are for decentralization. Also FYI, most of those ranchers have gun collections in the double digits and many of those guns have been in their families for over a hundred years.
The illegal guns in the big cities in Blue states, like Chicago, come from straw buyers that buy the guns in Red states, like Kentucky, and illegally sell them in the big cities to criminals.
Stephanie, you are not supposed to talk about the gang shootings in big cities, their predominant victims, and how it’s all deliberately ignored by the mainstream media.
Agreed! The author seems determined to reduce the books (and their appeal?) to raw libertarianism (the paper thin link to Ayn Rand was priceless as it was cheeky). She defines libertarianism thusly:
“ libertarianism: true examples of American self-reliance and independent spirit.”
Libertarianism is about limited government (especially federal), while “self-reliance and independent spirit” is related to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and is (was?) as American as apple pie. The opposite is looking for handouts, like FDR wanted us to. FDR and his policies extended the depression for almost 10 years.
As Milton Friedman famously demonstrated, the Federal Reserve’s policy of deflation was the root cause, FDR just made it worse.
Also, she (clearly left-wing Eastern college professor) had to sneak in an attack on the 2nd Amendment. If you want to undo the Second Amendment, there is a clear procedure in the Constitution- but you won’t get very far.
The left has very little chance of ever changing the U.S. via legal means. That’s why it has to pack the courts with leftist ideologues and steal elections. But it appears that many of the useful idiots are finally waking up.
Brendan O'Leary
1 year ago
Sounds like it’s time to tackle the New Deal myths as well.
Yes, Christene, what a great title for your article. Let’s paint conserving social structures that are not perfect but functional as myths and replace them with todays “progressive” ideology based on eshewing truth for “lived experience” and utopian, authoritarian social controls. Great idea.
The left needs to invade every institution in order to break things completely.
Dustshoe Richinrut
1 year ago
“And why not show some upbeat pluck in a children’s book?”
Said sardonically, of course. Does nothing matter anymore?
The books may well be “imbued” with a political message, and be “pulsing” with “principles rooted in the Declaration of Independence.” Certainly they could be imbued by all manner of things if a scene as plainly run-of-the-mill as the one referred to in The Long Winter is anything to go by. It could have featured in any old Western and looked good. As the decades have rolled by, customers arguing about unregulated markets in shops with shopkeepers has gone out of fashion entirely, surely. Tap and go now. Tap and be gone!
“The stories continue to exert a kind of power on the American psyche.”
Would that strange kind of power have something to do with the mere upbeat pluck that was aforementioned? The hope that can be derived from that? And would it have something to do with the somewhat consolatory aspect of the stories? As well as all these qualities when combined with the entertainment value?
The colour photo at the head of this piece of the family from the 70s tv series of Little House On The Prairie is just like something from the album that you intend to keep. Of good times. Or of good moments, more realistically.
The danger right now in America is that it wants to throw out its by now dusty photo albums because from now on, apparently, as the progressive movement would implore us, America should never be in a state or position from which it can look back fondly on past times and smile. Besides, aren’t there enough clever clogs telling us today that folk back in the 1880s never smiled for their portraits?
A kind of power on the American psyche? Did you ever! (How many countries around the world broadcast Little House back in the 70s and 80s? I suspect a lot. The tv series would have … delighted young and old alike, not indoctrinated them.)
The American psyche? It’s like a strange and awful affliction runs through much of America. Good old TV could be an antidote to that. I wish the young today would just watch plain old TV today. And smile and be proud.
Warren Trees
1 year ago
“Her projection of her radical political views…” Isn’t the entire premise of America a radical idea that the individual is bestowed with unalienable rights? And that our elected leaders are to represent the will of the people? Radical indeed. The left has been trying to reverse this for centuries now.
I’m sorry but the essay hints at a sad truth that made me laugh:
The Homestead Act gave land to anyone who wanted it and would work the land for 5 years. Despite the revisionism it wasn’t “socialist” as it was the opposite of collectivized farms, effectively giving a loan to each family to make their own fortune good or ill.
Modern progressives still hate this history, noted in the line “it was taken from American Indians.” The very projects the New Dealers used to emphasize to justify their own are now deemed racist and whites supremacist! Along with much of the New Deal itself mind you.
The sad truth was that the Native Americans were a Stone Age civilization defined by constant war and ethnic cleansing (especially on the Buffalo plains of the prairie, where the only way horse tribes could keep populations above replacement level was Mongol-esque kidnapping raids). Ending this bloodshed-as-social-system is today regarded as a cultural genocide, although one thing that set the Americans apart was not completely eradicating the tribes on the prairie that preceded us like the Sioux and Comanches had done.
Last edited 1 year ago by burke schmollinger
Terry M
1 year ago
Little House is a fable, but the self-sufficient, hard-working stoicism of early Americans is as real as the Earth itself. Woolly headed commentary by foolish academicians who never set foot in the wilderness notwithstanding.
Warren Trees
1 year ago
Perhaps the author would like to mandate that every household in America be required to display a minimum of an 8×10 photo of our grand leader instead?
E. L. Herndon
1 year ago
I’ve noticed that when academics don’t have an important thesis of their own, they go on a de-bunking trip. Oh so clever and up-to-date. So sophmoric. Anyway, Woodside started in the middle. I look forward to reading her backstory to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with all its political baggage.
Steve Jolly
1 year ago
I’m a libertarian, and I can honestly say I was never all that influenced by “Little House on the Prairie”. A lot of literature meant for public consumption but allegedly based on true events is highly romanticized or edited for the tastes of particular audiences. TV and movies are even worse. One could fill a small library with examples of historical details in literature and other media fudged for the sake of appealing to readers and selling stuff. Everyone does this and has been for a while. Why is this particular example worthy of such scorn? The answer is that the author doesn’t like the target audience, or at least who she thinks the target audience are. This is clearly an anti-libertarian hit piece, characterizing libertarians as anti-social, bearded, mountain men living off the grid in Wyoming cabins, trying to recreate an era of supposed self-sufficiency. Libertarianism has nothing to do with this and everything to do with returning the levers of power to individuals, towns, neighborhoods, and regions, rather than having everything dictated from a distant imperial capital. That’s inconvenient for a lot of people on both left and right who profit both politically and economically from using government power to ram their own agenda down everyone’s throat, and enforce conformity for the sake of what they claim is the ‘greater good’, so they sick their media dogs on anyone who would dare speak against the One True Faith of corporatized globalist capitalism, and they, in turn, churn out cheap and easy smear articles with barely tangential connections to the thing they’re trying to smear.
Andrew Fisher
1 year ago
This is interesting, but I’d point out that ‘limited government’ isn’t ‘no government’ and that by no stretch of the imagination can it be argued that the United States has limited government today. And, a question really for the whole West, is why far MORE government support and subsidy and bureaucracy is needed in a much richer world, as it now undoubtedly is compared to either the 1880s or the 1930s?
Their answer would be to (i) shut up, (ii) get in the pod, and (iii) eat the bugs.
Mikey Mike
1 year ago
Ms Woodside wrote this article about the disparate impact of climate change on the LGBTQ+ community. I don’t have any specific gripe with the article, its pretty unremarkable as far as progressive pablum goes, but it does make me wonder how committed to objectivity she is on the topic of Libertarians.
Nicky Samengo-Turner
1 year ago
Ahhh… I love the Rev. Lynch Mason- Dixon of the Nascar Free Church of The Holy Bigots, sponsored by Gatorade…
I’m afraid Miss Woodside has profoundly missed the point of these books. They’re part of our origin myth, just like the first Thanksgiving, George Washington and the cherry tree, Lincoln walking miles return some customer’s change, or John Henry and the steam drill.
Origin myths are healthy and necessary parts of any society. The Hungarians believe they were all descended from Megyar tribe. The Russian Orthodox church traces their origins to Prince Vladimir of the Kievan Rus tribe. The Chinese consider themselves descended from the ancient Han. Modern Mexicans increasingly see themselves as Mayan descendants.
None of these are literally true stories (even Laura said “I don’t know I was writing history”), but like any origin myth, they contain important truths about who Americans believe themselves to be. Trying to dissect them and falsify specific pieces is missing the forest for the trees.
These myths allow a people (or peoples) to be bound together where they might otherwise fracture. It’s not accidental that those who hate Western Civilization today seek to undermine its origin myths.
I thought that was the point of the article. Despite these stories being myths and missing large amounts of important information, they seem to have inspired the thoughts and policies of the libertarian wing of government
She’s telling a origin story for the libertarian wing of the Republican Party (a story with is false even under those terms, since the libertarians go all the way back to the anti-federalists in 1787)
My point is that Laura is part of the myths not of a party, but of a nation. The other examples I gave are ethnic because the vast majority of nations in the world are ethnically based. America’s founding myths are even more important though, since we lack a common ethnic tie. Attacking them (by trying to falsify them) is misses their unifying role as myths instead of history.
J.R.R. Tolkien once described the Bible (the ultimate origin myth) as “the myth that really happened” to C.S. Lewis. He didn’t mean he’d investigated the historical location of Eden. He meant that even though it was a myth, it contained Truth universal to all human beings.
That’s what matters in an origin story: that the story has the power to shape and unify the mental architecture of a particular people. ‘Proving” that George never chopped down a cherry tree or that Laura wasn’t completely truthful in her account of prairie life is beside the point.
It is interesting to hear the Bible dismissed as myth by those who have no qualifications for doing so (ask those who’ve spent a lifetime studying it) nor have the experience of some of the Einsteinian dimensions hitherto undetectable to materialists. The Bible records the true history of mankind in astounding detail as – you put it well – the universal Truth.
If you wanted to defend the Bible as almost ur-myth, or as ‘true’ in the sense Jordan Peterson does, I’d go along with you. However so many American Christians are crashingly literal minded! No, the Bible does very much NOT tell an accurate narrative history of mankind, and was undoubtedly written by many authors over hundreds if not thousands of years.
Marcia, I don’t think Tolkien or Lewis are “denigrating” the Bible here, and I’m not either. It’s likely both of those men have forgotten more about the Christian faith than either you or I have ever learned. (Perhaps you’re an Oxford trained, doctoral theologian, but I am not.)
Without being too harsh, let me say that the Christian faith is far larger than the Dwight Moody derived, dispensational, fundamentalist, Protestant view you have articulated. Last year First Things magazine (a conservative, Catholic publication) wrote an article using genetics, archeology, and theology together to hypothesize about who Adam and Eve really were and when and where they likely lived. (https://www.firstthings.com/article/2021/10/the-historical-adam) That’s what I mean when I say “the myth that really happened”, and that’s what I think Lewis and Tolkien meant too.
If you haven’t read Lewis’ Mere Christianity or The Problem of Pain, you really should. The Screwtape Letters is hilarious, until you see echoes of your world in it. Reading things outside of your denominational bubble isn’t a sign of weakness; it’s a sign of strength and a willingness to honestly seek God as He really is.
Libertarians are “inspired” by the works of people like Friedrich Hayek, Adam Smith and Frederic Bastiat, not children’s stories.
Mexicans certainly don’t consider themselves full Mayans (it’s more likely to be Aztecs anyway). If they did they would be trying to remove Spanish influence.
The Aztecs, though, were latecomers, brutal conquerors, somewhat analogous to the Zulu coming into South Africa.
The term ‘Aztec’ is now considered problematic. It was the ‘Triple Alliance’; of whom the Mexica were the dominant people (Tenochtitlan etc).
Mmm – myths which underly and support modern Hungarian, Russian and Chineses society. Now what do those three societies have in common? I suspect that ‘civilisation’ as defined by the vast majority of people would not be one trait! More likely authoritarianism and the suppression of democracy, surely the very antithesis of ‘Western Civilisation’?
Western civilisation is hardly a synonym for ‘democracy’, and long pre dates it in itsodern form by hundreds of years Most of the time the latter term was used an a completely negative way; it was taken for read that democratic societies would become dominated by the uneducated mob become unstable and lead to tyranny. Athens was seen in this light.
Oh give me a break. I grew up around ranchers who have always worked hard and struggled to get by. Their opinions and what I have learned from them means much more than a glamourized old bit of pop culture and some East Coast university professor. Here is the real lesson I learned from them. Local government can be very effective in addressing the needs of its citizens. The reason is they understand each other and know what they need. On the other hand every government scheme from some young cosmopolitan technocrat who could never be bothered to learn the details and livelihoods of the people they were supposed to be helping turned out poorly. These people are not so much for no government as they are for decentralization. Also FYI, most of those ranchers have gun collections in the double digits and many of those guns have been in their families for over a hundred years.
I suspect that the gun collections of ranchers are not the main contributor to the 45,000+ gunshot deaths p.a. in the USA today.
Most of the gunshot deaths are suicides. The next big category is gang shootings in big cities…
Yes, gang shootings in big cities with very illegal guns. And very strict gun laws.
The illegal guns in the big cities in Blue states, like Chicago, come from straw buyers that buy the guns in Red states, like Kentucky, and illegally sell them in the big cities to criminals.
FBI statistics say otherwise.
Stephanie, you are not supposed to talk about the gang shootings in big cities, their predominant victims, and how it’s all deliberately ignored by the mainstream media.
Mention BLM to them and they will talk for hours about the Bureau of Land Management.
Agreed! The author seems determined to reduce the books (and their appeal?) to raw libertarianism (the paper thin link to Ayn Rand was priceless as it was cheeky). She defines libertarianism thusly:
“ libertarianism: true examples of American self-reliance and independent spirit.”
Libertarianism is about limited government (especially federal), while “self-reliance and independent spirit” is related to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and is (was?) as American as apple pie. The opposite is looking for handouts, like FDR wanted us to. FDR and his policies extended the depression for almost 10 years.
As Milton Friedman famously demonstrated, the Federal Reserve’s policy of deflation was the root cause, FDR just made it worse.
Also, she (clearly left-wing Eastern college professor) had to sneak in an attack on the 2nd Amendment. If you want to undo the Second Amendment, there is a clear procedure in the Constitution- but you won’t get very far.
The left has very little chance of ever changing the U.S. via legal means. That’s why it has to pack the courts with leftist ideologues and steal elections. But it appears that many of the useful idiots are finally waking up.
Sounds like it’s time to tackle the New Deal myths as well.
Utterly on target comment. Let’s start with the idea that keeping generations of poor people enslaved with welfare is in their best interest.
And next should be the myth that the New Deal ended the Depression.
Lol yep
“…and now do the New Deal.”
Yes, Christene, what a great title for your article. Let’s paint conserving social structures that are not perfect but functional as myths and replace them with todays “progressive” ideology based on eshewing truth for “lived experience” and utopian, authoritarian social controls. Great idea.
The left needs to invade every institution in order to break things completely.
“And why not show some upbeat pluck in a children’s book?”
Said sardonically, of course. Does nothing matter anymore?
The books may well be “imbued” with a political message, and be “pulsing” with “principles rooted in the Declaration of Independence.” Certainly they could be imbued by all manner of things if a scene as plainly run-of-the-mill as the one referred to in The Long Winter is anything to go by. It could have featured in any old Western and looked good. As the decades have rolled by, customers arguing about unregulated markets in shops with shopkeepers has gone out of fashion entirely, surely. Tap and go now. Tap and be gone!
“The stories continue to exert a kind of power on the American psyche.”
Would that strange kind of power have something to do with the mere upbeat pluck that was aforementioned? The hope that can be derived from that? And would it have something to do with the somewhat consolatory aspect of the stories? As well as all these qualities when combined with the entertainment value?
The colour photo at the head of this piece of the family from the 70s tv series of Little House On The Prairie is just like something from the album that you intend to keep. Of good times. Or of good moments, more realistically.
The danger right now in America is that it wants to throw out its by now dusty photo albums because from now on, apparently, as the progressive movement would implore us, America should never be in a state or position from which it can look back fondly on past times and smile. Besides, aren’t there enough clever clogs telling us today that folk back in the 1880s never smiled for their portraits?
A kind of power on the American psyche? Did you ever! (How many countries around the world broadcast Little House back in the 70s and 80s? I suspect a lot. The tv series would have … delighted young and old alike, not indoctrinated them.)
The American psyche? It’s like a strange and awful affliction runs through much of America. Good old TV could be an antidote to that. I wish the young today would just watch plain old TV today. And smile and be proud.
“Her projection of her radical political views…”
Isn’t the entire premise of America a radical idea that the individual is bestowed with unalienable rights? And that our elected leaders are to represent the will of the people? Radical indeed. The left has been trying to reverse this for centuries now.
Exactly. 100 upvotes!
I’m sorry but the essay hints at a sad truth that made me laugh:
The Homestead Act gave land to anyone who wanted it and would work the land for 5 years. Despite the revisionism it wasn’t “socialist” as it was the opposite of collectivized farms, effectively giving a loan to each family to make their own fortune good or ill.
Modern progressives still hate this history, noted in the line “it was taken from American Indians.” The very projects the New Dealers used to emphasize to justify their own are now deemed racist and whites supremacist! Along with much of the New Deal itself mind you.
The sad truth was that the Native Americans were a Stone Age civilization defined by constant war and ethnic cleansing (especially on the Buffalo plains of the prairie, where the only way horse tribes could keep populations above replacement level was Mongol-esque kidnapping raids). Ending this bloodshed-as-social-system is today regarded as a cultural genocide, although one thing that set the Americans apart was not completely eradicating the tribes on the prairie that preceded us like the Sioux and Comanches had done.
Little House is a fable, but the self-sufficient, hard-working stoicism of early Americans is as real as the Earth itself. Woolly headed commentary by foolish academicians who never set foot in the wilderness notwithstanding.
Perhaps the author would like to mandate that every household in America be required to display a minimum of an 8×10 photo of our grand leader instead?
I’ve noticed that when academics don’t have an important thesis of their own, they go on a de-bunking trip. Oh so clever and up-to-date. So sophmoric. Anyway, Woodside started in the middle. I look forward to reading her backstory to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with all its political baggage.
I’m a libertarian, and I can honestly say I was never all that influenced by “Little House on the Prairie”. A lot of literature meant for public consumption but allegedly based on true events is highly romanticized or edited for the tastes of particular audiences. TV and movies are even worse. One could fill a small library with examples of historical details in literature and other media fudged for the sake of appealing to readers and selling stuff. Everyone does this and has been for a while. Why is this particular example worthy of such scorn? The answer is that the author doesn’t like the target audience, or at least who she thinks the target audience are. This is clearly an anti-libertarian hit piece, characterizing libertarians as anti-social, bearded, mountain men living off the grid in Wyoming cabins, trying to recreate an era of supposed self-sufficiency. Libertarianism has nothing to do with this and everything to do with returning the levers of power to individuals, towns, neighborhoods, and regions, rather than having everything dictated from a distant imperial capital. That’s inconvenient for a lot of people on both left and right who profit both politically and economically from using government power to ram their own agenda down everyone’s throat, and enforce conformity for the sake of what they claim is the ‘greater good’, so they sick their media dogs on anyone who would dare speak against the One True Faith of corporatized globalist capitalism, and they, in turn, churn out cheap and easy smear articles with barely tangential connections to the thing they’re trying to smear.
This is interesting, but I’d point out that ‘limited government’ isn’t ‘no government’ and that by no stretch of the imagination can it be argued that the United States has limited government today. And, a question really for the whole West, is why far MORE government support and subsidy and bureaucracy is needed in a much richer world, as it now undoubtedly is compared to either the 1880s or the 1930s?
Their answer would be to (i) shut up, (ii) get in the pod, and (iii) eat the bugs.
Ms Woodside wrote this article about the disparate impact of climate change on the LGBTQ+ community. I don’t have any specific gripe with the article, its pretty unremarkable as far as progressive pablum goes, but it does make me wonder how committed to objectivity she is on the topic of Libertarians.
Ahhh… I love the Rev. Lynch Mason- Dixon of the Nascar Free Church of The Holy Bigots, sponsored by Gatorade…
Abracadabra, Holmes.