The 'replace not repair' style of American life
Plus: a new book on evangelical politics, our sense of agency, and more
Good morning! It’s Thursday, and this post is a day late because I’ve been under the weather this week.
Update 10:36 a.m.: Well, perhaps because I’m still under the weather, I consistently mixed up “replace” and “repair” in all three uses of the headline phrase. It’s fixed now—hopefully you’d already figured out what I meant.
1. A take I haven’t written elsewhere
The replace not repair style of American life
I’ve mentioned here before my fascination with watching people do traditional handicrafts, arts, and building techniques on Instagram, including but not limited to hedge laying, stonemasonry, woodcarving, hand-painted decor, thatching, and watercolors.
I like watching this stuff partly because it seems so doable. In a sense it is: All of these crafts are longstanding practices that employ pretty basic tools and could be learned by almost anyone, with enough practice. Of course, that’s a huge caveat, and I will never be a stonemason. (I am toying with buying a little woodcarving set, though.)
Another reason I like it is that it’s all so durable. It’s repairable. In fact, a lot of what the thatcher and the mason do are repairs, fixing up buildings (many of them cathedrals, in the mason’s case) that have stood for centuries. This stands in glaring contrast to the modern American reliance on disposable dreck, especially plastic dreck.
There is so much plastic dreck around. It really becomes inescapable when you have kids, but it’s constant in our society, regardless of class, job, family, housing, etc. Two things made the sheer extent of our dreck really hit me in the last few years.
One was that we started to recycle our plastic films (bread bags, the sheer bit on the top of the cherry tomato container, the netting around the oranges, all that stuff). There is so much of it. Every few months we take it to the drop-off at a nearby grocery store, and by then the collection often fills the whole trunk of our SUV. I don’t even think we’re super high-consumption! Nevertheless, there is so much plastic film. (There’s likely a similar drop-off near you. Try it for yourself and be horrified.)
The other is that I live in an old neighborhood, built when modern garbage collection was still in relative infancy, not so long after it was totally normal to burn or bury your garbage in your yard. I think about how this neighborhood functioned back then, particularly when I consider whether it’s wise to garden in our long-settled dirt. If we tried to bury our garbage in our yard, the lawn would rise higher than the house in a few years’ time.
Similarly, we recently read through the Little House series with our twins, and the Ingalls family has basically no waste. Laura delicately does not mention the bathroom arrangements—can you imagine the smell when the whole town’s chamber pot dumping sites melted at the end of the long winter?—but she doesn’t need to shy away from the question of trash, because there typically is none. They have a few food scraps, maybe, and some dirty bathwater and dishwater. Everything that can be reused is reused. Everything that can be repaired is repaired.
Now we have plastic dreck, and we increasingly do not repair. And I have been thinking lately about how that replace not repair style is creeping well beyond our baser consumption choices. It’s a sort of escapism—perhaps also the next step after the brokenness diagnosis memorably described by Alana Newhouse at Tablet—and I see it popping up in technological and political spaces, too.
It’s there in our fascination with AI imagery, which is now all over hobbyist and design spaces online: Don’t learn to fix up your house; instead spend another two hours scrolling through pics of fantastically gorgeous AI-generated kitchens with soaring windows somehow on four walls.
It’s there in the still-stupid concept of the metaverse: Don’t figure out how to build relationships and institutions in real life; instead hang out with other avatars in our imaginary club.
It’s inherent to the very notion of space settlement, an idea I still can’t believe otherwise serious people actually contemplate: Don’t bother with the one life-sustaining planet in the universe; instead go muck about in a shiny, new, airless wasteland.
And it’s all over our politics, in the larping and accelerationism and catastrophizing and the last few years’ increasingly popular nonsense about finding some system better than liberalism: Don’t bother doing endless, incremental, compromised, boring work on the Constitution and governance we have, which is amply flawed but also incredibly free and stable by world-historic standards; instead imagine a fresh start, an easy moral clarity of friend and enemy and good and bad, a slate wiped clean—perhaps with blood.
2. What I'm reading this week
The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism, by Tim Alberta. Prompted by my former colleague from The Week,
, I picked up a copy and sped through it in a few days.It’s a highlight of the genre, significantly because—as Joel observes in a longer review than I’ll give here—Alberta writes as a practicing Christian. This is not a myopic diatribe of angry deconversion or disillusionment, and that brings a nuance many works on the subject lack.
That said, the excerpt at The Atlantic, adapted mostly from the first chapter, is the best part of the book, and much of the rest will already be familiar if you’ve tracked the Trump-evangelicals conversation closely over the past eight years.
3. A recommendation
Hot phone habits tip which has really been working for me the past couple weeks: When you’re at home or work, treat your cell phone like a landline which needs to stay attached to its charger, preferably out of your sightline. I don’t mean to brag or anything, but my daily screen time average has dropped around two hours since I started doing this (counting some Google Maps usage, even!), which is still deeply pathetic not bad.
4. Recent work
Answering Kim Jong-un | Defense Priorities (newsletter)
5. Miscellaneous
Whatcha think?
I agree with a whole lot of what you're saying about the whole "replace not repair" thing - in terms of more complex tools, like cars and computers, it's a combination of the fact that repair requires a dedicated toolset that isn't always available, plus the ways that corporate producers of these tools try to actively make them difficult to repair as part of the "planned obsolescence" model of development. For simpler stuff, though (say, shoes or clothes), I think it relates to the way that life has, generally, grown more complex over the past century or so, to the point that skills of repair and maintenance are less available for people to learn or practice. The easy availability of replacements is also a noteworthy factor, of course, since that removes the pressure that would previously have made those skills essential for life.
All that said - holy shit that take on space settlement couldn't be more wrong. The thing that makes such settlements hard to do is the absolute need to repair or recycle every component of the lived environment, often in shorter, tighter loops than the natural processes of the Earth. I mean, you've got a couple paragraphs in here about Laura Ingalls Wilder's stories of being a family that was part of a newly established community with intermittent, expensive contact back to what might have been external suppliers of goods. How can you possibly miss that any sort of space-based community would necessarily be like that but more so?