In the midst of untold luxuries, families tramp out into the woods to live—for a night or two—like nomads of the steppe, outlaws of the Greenwood, bums of the Great Depression. Are they forsaking Egypt to meet God in the desert? Have they been exiled? No—they are camping.
Longing to see the beauty of the stars and the innocence of God’s nature doesn’t describe it by half; doesn’t capture why Mr. Scott has purchased an extra-large bag of beef jerky and a packet of cigarettes (Mr. Scott hasn’t smoked since college—good luck, Mr. Scott!); why his boys are so excited to pee on tree trunks (Good aim, boys!); why Mrs. Scott—beacon of human culture and homemaker, her—permits and even relishes all of this descent to a ruder strata of living.
We all know a few “glampers”: families whose descent to said strata involves a wet bar, a portable shower, and a screen preloaded with rom-coms. Why glamp? Why stake out a plot in bear country only to recreate one’s suburban living room? Why—well, come to think of it, yes, there is something spirited and defiant in annually repeating your bourgeois habits where bears might get at you; something about the TV flickering in ten-thousand acres of pitch-black pine that doth shineth bright. Rightly or wrongly, glamping claims these conveniences; chooses them rather than merely being awash with them. Glamping says (by all the effort of lugging the gear out there) “yes!” to TV; “I will!” to indoor plumbing; “I do!” to air conditioning and the automatic ice dispenser which we all otherwise passively press, another unthought doohickey in an unthought world.
Yes, glampers may yet be saved for their big, fat, “yes” to modern life. But for most of us, camping is a reduction, not a repetition. Its indulgences are Lenten: gather wood, build a fire, erect a lean-to; sausages on sticks, stars in the eye, awake at dawn with dew on the nose and an ache in the back—and happy, happy for all that.
The survivor shows and post-apocalyptic fantasies of our dear and constantly beeping age have made the meaning of camping opaque. We are all stewing with so much dependence (with computer-says’s and it-won’t-let-me’s) that it is difficult to interpret the tent as anything but a “haven in a heartless world” or the campfire as anything but a blaze of resentment. Uncle Scott splits a log with a hatchet: “Man, if life were always so simple.” Mr. Scott pops open a beer, draws on it sagaciously: “Kids were meant to roam free. Explore.” Mrs. Scott—she’s making lanyards with Margaret-Mary, Mary-Margaret, Mary-Elizabeth, and Anna-Marie (who goes by “Spud”)—agrees: “I saw a thing about how the average American child used to have, like, 20 acres to roam. Now it’s down to one!”
I do not doubt the sincerity of the Scotts. Camping is a return to practices of premodernity. Modernity has, as one of its hallmarks, the loss of ownership. The things we do while camping restore ownership for an evening. We burn wood that we get in the woods—warming ourselves instead of paying for the gas companies to warm us. We build our own house (tent) rather than paying the bank or the landlord for permission to occupy one. We make our own entertainment—listen to the Scotts sing “Whiskey in the Jar,” over and over and over—rather than renting it from the usual screen-peddlers. We sometimes even fish. And if I could ever catch a fish, I imagine I would, in the frying of it, feel mysteriously secure: “what do bosses, money, and commodities have to do with me? I who reach into God’s waters and pull out dinner? A guy could get used to this…”
But a guy, in fact, does not. A guy may lament some lost form of living while eating his sixth s’more, but camping ends with a joyful return home (back to civilization!), often an anxious one (“get me out of this woods, Mr. Scott!”)—no foot-dragging sadness back to the grind.
Camping must be something more than a way of resenting our complicated, technocratic world. Why do children want to camp in the backyard, make tents out of blankets in the living room, read books within, and this without any apparent resentment of the blanket-shuttered world without? Why the desert fathers’ night-vigils; the Easter Vigil that takes the Church outdoors, around a fire, before its greatest feast; the Jewish feast of Tabernacles (or Booths, or Sukkot, tents) which God commandeth? Why the Victorian night on an outdoor porch or the medieval St. John’s Eve, in which staring at the campfire was the thing to do? (“In the worship of St John, men waken at even, and maken three manner of fires: one is clean bones and no wood, and is called a bonfire; another is of clean wood and no bones, and is called a wakefire, for men sitteth and wake by it; the third is made of bones and wood, and is called St John's Fire.”[1])
The emperors of the Carolingians camped out. Their people (the Franks) expected them to leave the palace, arm themselves, gather the boys, hunt for supper, roast the meat outside, feast, and sleep by the fire. Their court histographers made a point of listing and celebrating these big nights out. For one thing, “the hunt” proved that the empire was at peace: no one goes camping in a crisis. For another, the campground showed the people that the emperor was one of them. For a weekend the supreme temporal power chased pigs; for a little while, slept rough; for a time, cooked out. For the Frankish people, this was a confirmation that their boy was still their boy; that—despite the palaces, the court, the power, glory, and visitations from the Pope—their man had the foundational manliness they expected from their sons.
Every skill has its campgrounds. The Franks had hunting; I have handwriting. It is how I began writing—stubborn cursive classes in Catholic school, a thousand epics begun and lost in a hundred composition books. It is a form that I always have with me, at the little cost of a No. 2 pencil, a sharpener or knife, and some scrap paper. It would be wrong to describe the art as something “pre-technological”—the pencil is as industrial a product as the best of them. It would be misleading to call handwriting “natural”—it was a hard-won habit, achieved in me by all the disciplining and punishing that Mom and the Texas parochial school system had to bear circa 2000. And yet I do “return” to handwriting. And in returning, I do something more than a chronological shuffle to an earlier mode. I return to a moment of power. I return to a feeling (the blank page, the pencil brooding over it, the children, impossibly, still asleep) of being stripped down, not to a shivering nakedness, but to a foundational competence.
To camp is not to grasp at a pretechnological Genesis. If it was, I’d have no reason to find the return to handwriting so satisfying. I could always push further back, before the strictures of graphite and nubby erasers, back to a period in which I dwelt in orality and the art of composition relied on nothing other than existence, consciousness, and a tongue still attached. (Bards—that’s the real thing.) And Mr. Scott could always ditch the cooler and the hatchet and the polyester tent and seek an ever-purer mode of being in the woods: laying under a bush with a cloak over his face (the real thing). Camping could be judged as some idiots do judge it: with all the puritanical snobbishness of the naturalist. “Oh, you brought a cooler, did you? Utilizing capital-intensive petroleum byproducts like your forefathers, hmmmm?”
No, to camp is not to re-enact, but to utilize a skill in such a manner as to realize that you have it—that it proceeds from you and in such a manner that no one could take it away from you by cutting off this or that source of aid and assistance. The Emperor—who can use the whole mechanism of royal power to order a deer roasted by the lord of the town he visits—can, in fact, snag a deer himself. “He’s still got it!”
Every human art—from software engineering to the art of rule—has its rudiments. In actual camping, the art is that of living, homemaking, subsisting. The fun of it is in making a dwelling. The satisfaction of it is in that—suprisingly—it works. (You did it, Scott family, made warmth, made shelter, made food, and lived on for a weekend—and it all proceeded from you!) But there is “camping” in remembering “long division” on a yellow notepad; in unplugging the guitar from the pedal-board and going acoustic; in turning off the background music and making a mood with a game; in writing your own code; in hand-drawing the plans for the addition to your house; in chanting when you could use the organ.
There is something undemocratic in a society of machines—as anyone with a brain cell has noticed. Men receive more or less power, honor, and esteem because of their (somewhat arbitrary) capacity to purchase the use of certain devices—not because of who they are. The relative sex appeal of the guy who can afford a nice car is a case in point. The boneheadness of our tech lords—who own most of the nation’s wealth and yet seem utterly without character—is another. The capacity to “go camping” proves to a man and his fellows that his access to this or that machine is not a cheat or a fraud, but an aid and assistance to an underlying skill that he really does have. I don’t think it was by accident that modern, American camping was popularized by Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone and John Burroughs, industrialists (besides the naturalist Burroughs) who wanted to live rough for a weekend. Every year these self-styled “Vagabonds” would take (highly publicized) camping trips—chop wood, pitch tents, and see the stars. We can scoff at them for wanting to appear as “common men” capable of the arts of subsistence—but not too loudly. It’s a good impulse. They wanted to show to themselves and others that, despite the power of the machines they had invented and the money they could bring to bear on any particular problem, they still “had it”—the art of living.
We’re entering a New Age, kids. It’s a weird one. It’s one in which a great number of the skills and trades and talents of humanity can be “accessed” in their results by people who do not have the chops to produce those results themselves. This will result in a lot of errors (and praise God that we get to enjoy stories of lawyers getting busted for using ChatGPT-generated legal cases; architectural students generating floor plans that advise parking a car in the kitchen, and so on.) Real foundational competence—in writing, architecture, homemaking, whatever—is what enables us to “know what good looks like,” as my friend Joshua Griffith put it. But I am less worried about all these silly mistakes, and more worried about what happens to the human heart when it loses its campgrounds. The ability to return to some foundational competence is more than a practical means of assuring good work. It is also the assurance that the man is good, that he has virtue, that he has been shaped into a particular and meritorious character—in short, that he has something within him that makes him worthy of praise. The AI world is one in which less people are praiseworthy for their actions. And a world of fewer praiseworthy people seems like a sadder world in which to live.
This essay was cut from my “Overture” in New Polity’s current magazine issue: the one devoted to AI. The thing was getting too damn long. Purchase the magazine for the full effect—especially to see how much this modest thought owes to Andrew Willard Jones’s grand contribution: “The Humane and the Technocratic.”
Notes
Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 312–313.
The self-styled “Vagabonds,” Thomas Edison (napping), Henry Ford (reading the news) and Harvey Firestone enjoy the outdoors (1923).