BRIEF EXPLICATION

In my Credo, the Lone Rider and the Barn-Raising Community are intended somewhat as what Max Weber calls Ideal Types.  They are meant to capture in simple images two fundamentally different ways of viewing the world.  Obviously, it would take hundreds of pages to spell them out.

Here is an exercise I have sometimes wanted to build a course around.  Take a simple tool -- let us say a hatchet.  Now start tracing back every single thing that some previous persons did in order to make that hatchet possible.  Imagine tracing back the discovery of iron ore, the processes of smelting and forging, the elaborate and ever expanding network of practical and theoretical knowledge presupposed by the production of that hatchet.  Include the language used by the people involved to communicate with one another, to pass on the knowledge.  Think of the tools used to produce the hatchet, and the tools used to produce those tools, and so on and on.  No one ever does anything all by him or herself [never mind the social construction of reality involved in defining the gender roles invoked by the phrase "his or herself."]