Why do some Trads have the Amish spirit?

[dueSicilie]

Ok Greg, in my area we're poor. The best job you can get without a degree is factory work at 20-25k.

We can't all be rolling in dough travelling internationally.

Though as a side note I miss the UK horribly.

[Mithrandylan]

S1776 has an interesting point, though I ultimately disagree.

We don't know why trads who give up conventions do so (generally).  Unless it can be demonstrated clearly that they are Jansenists, it should not be assumed.  And it should be on a case by case situation.  To those that DO have actual Jansenistic tendencies, I would say that the problem falls on a lack of spiritual guidance, or bad spiritual guidance.  Which falls on the clergy, or lack thereof. 

One needs proper formation and guidance to reject 'nice things' in order to mortify themselves.  In our nature, we only tend to reject that which is bad.  It must always be kept in mind that not all things we reject are bad (though some or many may be) and that we are rejecting them for a greater good, not because they're bad on their own.  When someone slips into thinking these things are evil per se, it is because they are not reminded enough of it, or not formed well enough.

Similarly, trads who don't give up 'nice things' shouldn't automatically assume that those who do are Jansenists.  It's possible to enjoy good food and drink on a regular basis and to deny one's self the same and be perfectly Catholic in both scenarios.

[Eliza]

Greg, why is it that you must bring your argument from another forum to this one? Because people here are more apt to agree with you?

None of the people on that thread were idealizing the Amish lifestyle. The gal whom you debated the most with clearly did it out of neccessity, as did the woman in the article. You've got an axe to grind with people who don't agree that your cushy lifestyle is desirable. Would you please knock it off.

[Greg]

Ok Greg, in my area we're poor. The best job you can get without a degree is factory work at 20-25k.

We can't all be rolling in dough travelling internationally.

Though as a side note I miss the UK horribly.

@dueSicilie       Nobody is knocking the individual here, that would be daft and if you cannot see the Wood for your personal Tree'go then ... sorry.  You need to step outside and look at the argument.  I don't even know who the hell you are, why would I care what you as an individual earn or don't earn?  It will make no difference to my life whether you pack dead chickens for a living or are the next Bill Gates.

I am knocking an attitude that says "run away from the world and hide", in cheap areas where there are no jobs or only very low paying ones.  That is an economic sink hole, full of quicksand, from which most will never escape, promoted by idealist priests who don't ever have to worry about economic realities or supporting children and wives.  (Though funding the SSPX-SO society is going to be a challenge I reckon.  They need a large amount of startup funding and I just don't see from whence it will come.)

I am old enough to remember the start of this nonsense when I was a teen.  I saw middle class families driven by a nutty fear of the world running away to remote parts of the UK, France and Australia and America and slowly eating their seed corn over the next 20 years.

Those families I knew who ran off to the boondocks have not, on average, managed to get a higher proportion of their children to keep the faith.  The families who stayed put fared slightly better.  Obviously, this is just my experience.  Nobody has conducted a full survey to the best of my knowledge.  Your mileage may vary, if indeed you are old enough to have any mileage, but I think one would struggle to prove any correlation between what a Trad father earned and his children losing their faith.  In which case, why move?

Do you REALLY think God makes your salvation dependent on your Zip Code?

Realistically, on 20-25k (whether pounds, Euros or Dollars) one is going to find it difficult to marry and raise a family of 6+ children.  That is economic reality.  Basic necessities, like energy, water, food, clothing are going to eat into the larger part of that.  Lots of Trads I know have credit card debt, which frankly means that they are simply not earning enough and saving enough to cope with life's curve balls.  You are competing for the basics of life with mostly dual-income secular families where the wife is contracepted and only loses 5 years of paid work.  Sometimes even these years are covered by here maternity pay.  Trads are at a disadvantage here.  Once your young wife gives up work she is likely to be incomeless, or as near as dam it, for the next 20 years.

I live in the South East of England.  Own a large house.  My life is relatively modest otherwise.  Drive a 7year and a 13 year old car that cost a grand total of $5000 for both.  80% of my clothes from a charity shop (when not on business).  My month to month living costs are at least 3500GBP ($5000) a month.  Utilities are 3000 ($4500) a year for Gas, Electric and Water another 2200 ($3300) for Council Tax (Police, Rubbish collection. local services).  Typical supermarket bill is 150-200 per week at least for myself, two other adults and 5 children.  Another $100 per month on decent meat (call that a luxury if you wish and ignore it).   I work from home so commuting costs are tiny, but for a normal person they can be anything from $1000 per year to $10,000 per year.  Going to Mass, however and general driving around with the children, shopping, outings is about 13000 miles per year, so that is another 2400 ($3900) in Gasoline, (which costs over $10 per gallon here).  Luckily I don't have medical bills apart from dental.  Every year between myself and the wife we spend probably $800 on dental on average, with check ups, the odd route canal, veneer, crown etc.  I have no debts other than a tiny mortgage as it gives me access to funds at 2.5% interest if ever I need them

Every now and then the house needs to be fixed up.  5 kids will wear a house out.  A new Range Cooker costs $2000 at least.  A gas boiler another $1500 at least.  A new front door, $1700.  New Carpets, $2500.

So forget international travel.  Just do the math on the above.  And that is only the start of it.

Short of abstaining from sex, (which is one 'solution' for low income Trad couples) there is nothing a devout Catholic can do to limit the number of children nature sends along.  Even NFP is not fool proof, it's reasonably likely you will have an extra baby.  You can get 3 kids to a room, but 5?  There are natural limits.  Let's have a bit of realism here.  If you play the game according to the rules the most likely outcome is that you will have 5 or 6 children.  Marry in your 20s to a woman in her 20s (which is surely desirable) and you could very well have 10 children.  You cannot have hand me down clothes for 10 children because after 3 or 4 they have holes in them.  10 children WILL cost more than 2.

If all you can manage is factory work, then you are really going to struggle to raise a Trad family.  God bless you for trying but your life is going to be a battle with some horrible financial cliffs.

Sure you CAN economize, but you cannot get discounted Gas or Energy or Gasoline, or Bacon or Beef or toilet paper or diapers.  You will pay just as much for those as a thrifty middle class person. In fact, you might pay more as they will have the cash or credit to buy them in bulk or when they are on special offer.  You might not, because on 20-25 per year you are unlikely to have a high FICO score.  When I go to a CostCo I will spend $600.  How are you going to do that on a gross salary of 20-25k????

There was a guy at Fisheaters who worked on Wall Street, but he never mentioned it in the forums because he didn't want to be accused of supporting usury by the Amish brigade.  That means you and others can't ask him for help, introductions, assistance, pointers, guidance to help you with making career decisions because you don't know who he is.

Finally, forget the idea that you NEED a degree to be successful.  It helps, sure.  In a few areas of work it is vital.  But determination, drive, a work ethic, a logical mind, honesty, trustworthiness and integrity are a lot more useful.  Business is intrinsically very simple.  Your sales exceed your input costs.  Nothing they teach you are university is particularly useful for most businesses most of the time.  What businesses want is hard working people, with humility, realism, and self-learning.  They also need people who can deal with the everyday world, obviously.

I have hired Traditionalist Catholics before, not to help me but rather to help them and 90% of the time it has been a bad move.  Admittedly, I was helping the ones who had hang ups about how they could work in the real world and be insulated from all of its ills at the same time.  Candylanders make really bad employees.  I would not touch another with a 10 foot pole.

A generation of Trads has now been homeschooled and attended Trad private schools.  These were supposed to be so much better than secular education.  How is that working out?  I don't know the answer, though I see a much greater prevalence of unemployed Trad men with ideas about distributism and the evil of central banking than I do doctors, lawyers, community bankers, research scientists.  Though maybe it is just that they are hanging around on the Trad forums.

As you say, no high paying jobs out there in the boonies.  So what to do?

[Greg]

Greg, why is it that you must bring your argument from another forum to this one? Because people here are more apt to agree with you?

None of the people on that thread were idealizing the Amish lifestyle. The gal whom you debated the most with clearly did it out of neccessity, as did the woman in the article. You've got an axe to grind with people who don't agree that your cushy lifestyle is desirable. Would you please knock it off.

How about "No"

[stitchmom]

He encourages rural living because it can be more natural to family life and it keeps people grounded in reality. It's easier in some ways to parent, especially if you have boys. Kids can go out to play on your own land weather permitting. There is room for hobbies, animals, herb gardens, food gardens, plenty of space for children to be outside and be kids. It's a trade off for travel time for men who have to travel for work usually or when kids are older for homeschool activities. We live in a tiny apartment, I work, eat, homeschool, sew, on the same utility table. I'd do just about anything to move 20 minutes to a rural place. If God wants to provide that he will, for now he hasn't.

[Greg]

Post a story about a married couple of University educated Trads who start a software company selling derivatives software to pension funds and earn $2m a year in cash and stock options while simultaneously having 10 kids and funding their FSSP Church.

Post it on all Trad boards and see whether they find that couple's get-up-and-go as desirable as the other couple's thrift.

I bet you before the first page is filled in someone on one of those boards is bitching about 'women going to university', 'banking is evil' and 'they are obviously liberals because they go to FSSP masses'.

Have I got an axe to grind with nutters with no sense of reality, who are racists, and tell the rest of Traditionalists they are not Catholic enough?  Too right.  I have.  A great big axe.

[tmw89]

''A wild ACCUSATION OF RACISM has appeared!''

[Greg]

He encourages rural living because it can be more natural to family life and it keeps people grounded in reality. It's easier in some ways to parent, especially if you have boys. Kids can go out to play on your own land weather permitting. There is room for hobbies, animals, herb gardens, food gardens, plenty of space for children to be outside and be kids. It's a trade off for travel time for men who have to travel for work usually or when kids are older for homeschool activities. We live in a tiny apartment, I work, eat, homeschool, sew, on the same utility table. I'd do just about anything to move 20 minutes to a rural place. If God wants to provide that he will, for now he hasn't.

In that case along with the Conversion of Russia will have to go the 100 Trillion dollar rebuilding of Russia.  97% of Russia and the iron curtain countries live in apartments.  Many Europeans live in apartments.  To live in a house in Moscow you have to be a multi-millionaire.  Are Russians less grounded in reality than westerners?

We are not taking about the burbs of major cities here.  We are talking about small towns 100 to 150 miles away from a city of more than 1 million people

[Greg]

''A wild ACCUSATION OF RACISM has appeared!''

Go and check it out.  It is 106 pages last time I looked.

[tmw89]

Greg, only responding to what's been posted here on SD thus far... the racism bit seemed to crop up out of nowhere.  But if you're referring to something that happened in another corner of the web... ok, understood.


Not going to investigate the 106 pages of shenanigans over there myself, though.  I'm perfectly content here!

[Greg]

Probably a good idea.  It is a pretty ugly reality.

[Kaesekopf]

Post a story about a married couple of University educated Trads who start a software company selling derivatives software to pension funds and earn $2m a year in cash and stock options while simultaneously having 10 kids and funding their FSSP Church.

Post it on all Trad boards and see whether they find that couple's get-up-and-go as desirable as the other couple's thrift.

I bet you before the first page is filled in someone on one of those boards is bitching about 'women going to university', 'banking is evil' and 'they are obviously liberals because they go to FSSP masses'.

Have I got an axe to grind with nutters with no sense of reality, who are racists, and tell the rest of Traditionalists they are not Catholic enough?  Too right.  I have.  A great big axe.

Clearly, that couple would be two liberals infected by modern errors and completely undeserving of praise.

[Someone1776]

Perhaps more people should read Saint Thomas More's Utopia.

Trads often fantasize about what a wonderful thing it would have been to live in the middle ages, but the middles ages were just as plagued with immorality as our day. Prostitution was so rampant and engrained in society that Saint Thomas Aquinas thought it would cause revolution to outlaw it. Bastards abounded. And most couples engaged in pre-marital sex (we know this because most women gave birth within 6 months of their marriage).  Venereal diseases were rampant. Priests, bishops, and Popes were notorious for leading debauched lives. And, the Church turned a blind eye to heretical ideas circulating among priests teaching at the universities (Martin Luther didn't come out of a vacuum).

And Saint Thomas More didn't think much of pre-reformation Europe either. His first book of Utopia is a pretty savage critique of the Medieval society which he saw as plagued by warfare, bad kings, corruption, an unfair legal system, poverty, starvation, and an elite class that was self-indulgent and didn't care about the poor. (This shouldn't surprise us...I am unaware of any medieval saint that thought the medieval Europe was an incredibly godly place).

And so in Book II Saint Thomas More writes of the wonderful island of Utopia which has solved all these problems and where everything is rather perfect. The only problem More notes is that Utopia is a place you can't get to (the coordinates to the island have been lost)! And even the word "Utopia" means "place that doesn't exist." Thus, utopias are places that don't exist and that you can't get to if you wanted to.

And, thus Saint Thomas More's argument in Utopia is that trying to fantasize about the perfect society is a fantasy that gets you no where and the only way to bring change is to work within corrupt or even evil societies to bring change or at least good acts. Saint Thomas More compares this to working as a spy in an enemy territory. 

And that's the life Saint Thomas More led. He was very much a man that lived in the world but was not of it. Up until his martyrdom, he had lived in society as a Catholic as best he could, but without bringing much attention to it or seeking to escape the world.

And, I think Saint Thomas More is a better model for us than most saints. Most of us are are not called to become priests, hermits, or cloistered nuns and should not be expected to live as such.  I can't think of any saint or any church leader to have encouraged family men to deprive their families of the comforts of life in the name of God.

No saint tried harder to avoid his martyrdom than Saint Thomas More. Saint Thomas More didn't run into the streets to proclaim that the King was a heretic. He simply resigned his position when he felt he could no longer serve the king in good conscience and kept his opinions about the King's divorce to himself.  Other saints (such as Saint John the Baptist) did run into the streets to decry the immorality of their kings, but Saint Thomas More had a family to support and he would have been serving his family poorly if he had done that. I think a lot people who try to model their lives on uncompromising in-your-face martyrs fail to realize that most of them were religious and didn't have a family to support.   

The problem with Bishop Williamson's thesis "to take back the land" is that it robs the world of people like Saint Thomas More. Our faith isn't a secret to be held onto, but a gift to be shared with others, especially through our example.

And, dreaming about that island you will never reach doesn't accomplish anything.

[erin is nice]

I know a bunch of families who are living this way (not all trad, I'd say half go to the NO) and to be fair, none of them have stopped having children, and they all have 6 or more. I don't know how they manage. Greg is absolutely right about how expensive kids are-- you can cut a lot of costs when they are babies/toddlers, but big kids cost a small fortune to raise. And I'm not talking about extra activities or anything, just the basics.
I guess for some people being away from society is worth the hardship. I used to think it would be nice, until I visited some friends who live this way-- things that would be easy near a city become an ordeal. For example, packing up a bunch of kids and driving an hour each way to Mass every week. Or being stuck in bad weather because rural roads don't get plowed. No thanks.