Uneven Ground Read Online Free PDF

Harrington’s arguments led to much of the social engineering associated with the War on Poverty; Murray’s relies more on individualconversion to save the poor. He certainly assumes that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the system; it is the poor and working classes that must change their values and expectations to match those of the more successful.
    But crime, drug abuse, intolerance, laziness, illegitimacy, and family violence are not confined to the poor. If anything, educated elites have a special responsibility for setting cultural norms as a result of their greater access to media, education, the church, and other institutions of social power. If our current system has left us in a social, economic, political, and environmental wasteland, then the crisis is not one of a single class or region but is a problem that cuts across traditional divisions of class, race, and gender. It is culturally systemic. History tells us that transformational change seldom comes from within institutions of power. Real change comes from a broad-based social movement grounded in a shared understanding of the issues and a common vision of the path forward. Populism, the civil rights movement, and the movement for gender equality all began with a common identity and a familiar history, including the telling of cultural stories that differed from the dominant stories being told by the powerful, and with a willingness to act locally before linking with others to effect national political change. Permanent change in the political and economic structures that limit us is contingent on a cultural transformation that begins locally and unites people across class lines through a new consciousness.
    Appalachia has much to contribute to this growing global conversation about a new economy and a new social consciousness. Indeed, the future of the region depends not so much on any short-term fix but on the outcome of that broader conversation. Over a century of experience with unfettered markets, corporate greed, land and labor exploitation, consumerism, and unbalanced growth has left a burned-out shell of a once verdant place and a once proud people. Reempowering Appalachia will require a fundamental change in our deepest assumptions. One of the central themes that emerges from our history, for example, is the fallacy of the prevailing assumption that economic growth equals progress. No economic value is more pervasive in our culture today, but at least since the late nineteenth century it has been an illusion in the mountains that simply expanding markets, building infrastructure, and extracting natural resources produces “development.”In Appalachia economic growth produced material wealth for some (both insiders and outsiders), but it also fueled poverty and inequality within the region and between Appalachia and the rest of the nation. An increasing number of global economists have begun to question the importance of growth to economic security and happiness, and they have started to define wealth as more than just gross domestic product (GDP). If we specify the goals of development more broadly as increasing the well-being, happiness, security, health, and democratic traditions of a place, then certainly the growth-based market economy has failed to bring development to Appalachia. Building a future on the failed assumptions of the past will only perpetuate policies that have failed and that are destructive to the land, to community, and to democratic relationships.
    The history of Appalachia, therefore, informs our emerging national and regional conversations about what Robert Bellah once called our “habits of the heart,” and the lessons of that past provide insight for building a new society and political economy in the mountains. 6 Over the last four decades Appalachian scholars have gathered important lessons from the region’s historic journey that provide a framework for these conversations.
    First,