keeping the trains on time

"the real expression of the spirit of a united people." - Peter Maurin

When the bank account
is the standard of values
the class on the top
sets the standard.
When the class on the top
cares only for money
it does not care
for culture.
When the class on the top
does not care
for culture,
nobody cares
for culture.
And when nobody cares
for culture
civilization decays.

— Peter Maurin, “When Civilization Decays,” The Catholic Worker, September 1933

July, 2024

The other day, I went to meet James at the Harrisburg train station. The sign on the station door advertised that the station was open until 1 AM.

But a police officer closed the station at 10 PM, demanding all present leave because “the station is closed.” I do not know why. I should have asked why. I should have asked: “Why isn’t the station open until 1 AM, as advertised?” But the police officer seemed like he wanted to go home and not deal with the many homeless people sitting at the station. And he did not understand why I was there, a housed-presenting person, waiting in the station, without a car to sit and wait in.

I was, I must admit, annoyed. This is the problem with this country, I said to James, when he finally arrived: the fundamental problem with America is that we make public spaces: trains, buses, and their stations so inhospitable they have grown basically dysfunctional.

They are inhospitable to ludicrous degrees (see, lack of benches in Penn Station’s fancy new terminal) because of this fundamental desire to keep them from becoming de facto shelters for homeless folks. They are spaces originally designed for hospitality, but because there is such a disgust for the poor, and a lack of willingness to engage with the discomfort of seeing our suffering neighbor—whose suffering questions our own comfort—that we cannot even share space with them. We cannot share space with anyone poorer than ourselves, we do not want to be in solidarity with them, even for the few hours we are all just humans waiting for a train or all just humans riding a bus. We are like little children in a tantrum on the playground, determined to ruin the toy rather than be asked to share it: we have made public transit so punitive for the poor (who we cannot bear to give one free pass! No, they must be punished for their immoral lives of not pulling themselves up by their bootstraps—they deserve misery and nothing nice or good that we have earned with our respectable money) that no one who isn’t forced to wants to take it.

Because these public spaces are inhospitable, they incentivize Americans to take privatized and wasteful forms of transit (i.e.: cars) that pollute the atmosphere and directly contribute to the heat waves we’re all suffering from—but our homeless neighbors most of all.

Public spaces like train and bus stations become more and more harsh, Soviet, and inhospitable as more and more middle-class and wealthy Americans opt for private transportation and leave the Amtraks and intercity buses to the poor and working classes.

Alden Global Capital—the corporation that buys up and shuts down local newspapers, the organs of democracy, for its own profit —is now buying up and shutting down Greyhound Stations. Greyhound Stations make it possible for Americans without cars—roughly 10% of U.S. households [there are dozens of us! dozens!]—to travel between cities.

In 1960, about 20% of American households did not own a car. At the end of World War II, less than half of inter-city travel was done by car.

Intercity buses—even for car owners—alleviate traffic: they are the “secret weapon” for solving climate change, and they lower traffic accidents and fatalities.

Now, I enjoy a car as much as the next person. I owned my grandmother’s old 1997 Toyota Camry for two years, and I am grateful that I now (as I did not when I wrote this in July) have the use of a community car at the Catholic Worker.

But the problem is not individual cars so much as a world where we are forced into a car monopoly. We want to believe we have individual freedom, but, despite the American cries of “Freedom” we don’t really have much feedom. We are only as free as our communities are free. Plane crashes remind us of this—to travel is to take a risk that is mostly made of other people and a lot of collective choices far outside of our control.

Car infrastructure has taken over the nation to such a degree that walking (a much more natural and dependable and less dangerous mode of transportation) is often impossible, that biking becomes more dangerous, or that public options, like trains or buses, are unavailable because they have become unprofitable. Or, because there are so many cars on the road that the far more efficient and ecologically-friendly buses become torturously slow in clogged traffic. One of the benefits of congestion pricing in New York City is that it clears traffic so that the city buses can run more efficiently.

Cars, as individual phenomena—of one mode among many modes of transportation—cars, as they appear in a Richard Scary book—they do not pose the same problems. But we live in a world where our choices have gotten worse—so much so that they are becoming almost no choice at all.

A car monopoly is dangerous, not only because it excludes other forms of transportation, but because of the human formation that a car instills and the human society it fosters.

Our friend Colin Miller writes at Church Life Journal on how cars de-form our own humane pace of life with their speed; autobesity—the phenomenon of cars being made bigger and bigger so that drivers cannot see a child in front of your hood—is contributing to increased pollution, traffic accidents, taxing the limits of our infrastructure, and causing the death of children. There are a lot of sad reasons children die: many of them are tragic and unpreventable. That a child dies because your car (that is only ferrying you from a cubicle to the grocery store to the gym, not traversing rivers and mountains!) has to be larger than the Joneses is a very bad reason.

With the increasing privatization of our public life, is it any surprise that the United States has become an increasingly unequal nation? Wealth inequality has risen over the past six decades—now 10% of the population holds more than 60% of the nation’s wealth—as we have slowly chipped away at investing in public infrastructure, moving out of communal cities into more privatized suburbs.

As Nathan Schneider wrote recently in America:

More and more of society’s basic functions have come to depend on the accumulation of private wealth, while instilling fear that a good life is otherwise impossible.

Schneider counters that a “good society” should not aim simple to alleviate or “end” poverty, but making life without great wealth dignified. “Dignity begins with sharing wealth in common” Schneider writes, indicating the Apostles in Acts and the medieval common lands for hunting and gathering. Trains are shared wealth—we all benefit from them. Americans could take the extra 0.83 car in their household and pool it together as subways, buses, and trains—now that is sharing things in common.

As we are seeing—very dramatically demonstrated over the past month—you cannot have a democracy made up of individuals. Atomized individuals, sealed off into our own homes with our own yards, our own cars where we never greet another person on an interstate, who meet all our basic needs in our own private unit of existence— housing, transportation, food, clothing— cannot be a public together.

People who built the Cathedral
of Chartres
knew how to combine
cult, that is to say liturgy,
with culture, that is to say philosophy,
and cultivation, that is to say agriculture.

The Cathedral of Chartres is
a real work of art
because it is the real expression
of the spirit of a united people.
Churches that are built today
do not express the spirit of the people.
“When a church is built,”
a Catholic editor said to me,
“the only thing that has news value is:
How much did it cost?”
The Cathedral of Chartres was not built
to increase the value of real estate.
The Cathedral of Chartres was not built
with money borrowed from money lenders.

The Cathedral of Chartres was not built
by workers working for wages.

— Peter Maurin “Building Churches,” The Catholic Worker, February 1934

An individualized existence ignores the basic fact that our well-being—our very existence—is bound up in one another’s. If we are not meeting our basic needs in some sort of communal fashion, in exchanges that take place on the axes of relationships, then those needs are most likely being met by corporations, on the axes of exploitation.

Our lives have been built around corporations rather than community. To be in a corporate, rather than a communal, country means our lives are no longer in our control. Ownership has been outsourced. There’s no reason that all the employees at Target, Guardian Glass, or U.S. Steel can not all be owners of the factories or stores where they work. But that model—which is quite democratic—is not common because it is not profitable for the owners and shareholders of said stores to share ownership.

Corporations are not democratic. Positions are eliminated in a race for quarterly profits, changes in ownership dictate changes in leadership, and corporate downsizing and restructuring make any sort of community built in the workplace contingent and fragile. Beyond your wages, the company owes you nothing, even if you are a company man. You are owned more than you are owed.

If you do not have ownership of the corporation, you are at the whims of the owners. This means the organizing principle of your life—your work, which determines where you live and what you do with your daily life—is something determined not by the common good of your community but by what will make the shareholders profits.

We used to organize our lives around communities—around our towns or villages, our meeting halls, or our churches.

A parish, I think, is a design for this old culture, where they were hubs of the community rather than one of its many spokes. They are an old design—they are not the only design for where to have liturgies, many houses once were homes for that—but the parish design no longer functions in car culture. In car culture, there is no centralized hub, no reason to drive 15 minutes there or 15 minutes here other than our own preferences. In many cities, the parish community is an homage or memorial to the building, but the community that built this building in and around which to live their communal lives has passed on.

What are our communities organized around now?

We are currently watching a man who runs a corporation treat the government like a corporation: with no concern for any of the many priorities a government is supposed to have.

A corporation has one telos: the profits of the shareholders. Taking the individualistic logic of a corporation to this absurd limit, we see that it is no model for democracy. Cooperatives propose instead a “triple bottom line” — people, profit, and planet. These principles indicate that a company is for something else—for something greater—than just to line their own profits. This isn’t just morality, it’s good business sense: if you burn up the planet or kill all the people, well, what does it profit a man to gain the whole world as his net worth and then blow it up?

“An infinitely greedy sovereign is afoot in the universe, staking its claim,” wrote Wendell Berry in 1977, regarding the rapacious appetite Americans had for wandering, sandals strapped firmly onto feet, into a Creation aflame with the holy and tearing it to heedless pieces.

If we cannot be a public together, we cannot be a democracy. We have lost that muscle of organizing with one another. We have become quite disorganized, and corporations (like perhaps one that bought a little blue bird website) benefit from our disorganization.

The Atlantic recently noted that the constitutional crisis unfolding has received a lackluster response, because many Americans have lost trust in the institutions that are being attacked. As Peter Maurin said:

Man is partly good
and partly bad,
but corporations,
not institutions,
make him worse.
“An institution,” says Emerson,
“is the extension
of the soul of a man.”
Institutions are founded
to foster the welfare
of the masses.
Corporations are organized
to promote wealth
for the few.
So let us found
smaller and better
institutions
and not promote
bigger and better
corporations.

To Peter Maurin, institutions are the public organ the organized make together, and American society—in the crises of the 1930s and the 20202s—needed to “bring back to institutions the technique of institutions,” to make better institutions to serve the common good rather than build corporations.

Peter Maurin created the program of the Catholic Worker, known as the “three C’s”: cult, culture, and cultivation. These “three C’s” are the basis, Peter Maurin asserts, of the “common unity of community.” The three C’s, Peter Maurin believed, were how the Irish monks of the seventh century evangelized Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire.

Maurin wrote his Easy Essays in a world that was going mad—going mad for fascism, cratering toward war, destroying itself. His ideas were written expressly for such a moment, and they contain the gentle wisdom of the common good in a world of cutthroat individualism. And they offer a way for us to begin to organize ourselves, so that we can “bring order out of chaos.” But perhaps an order more attuned to the good of each person and the good of a community, the good of an earth, and honor rather than disdain the old, the slow, and the communal.

The bourgeois capitalist

believes in power,

and that money

is the way to power.

He believes that money

can buy everything,

whether it be labor or brains.

But as the poet Emerson says,

“People have only

the power we give them.”

When people will cease

selling their labor power

or their brain power

to the bourgeois capitalist,

the bourgeois capitalist

will cease being

a gentleman of leisure

and begin being

a cultured gentleman.

— Peter Maurin, “The Bourgeois Capitalist,” The Catholic Worker, August 1936