Educated by Tara Westover
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

That Cool Mountain Air

Tara Westover In Education tells a tale remarkably like that of Jeanette Walls in The Glass Castle (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) - of incompetent parents, child endangerment, and not infrequent life-threatening physical injury. Both women survive and thrive sufficiently to write about their experiences with some considerable elegance and wit. But while the psychological traumas of each woman are similar, the sociological sources of their experiences are radically different. Walls was merely neglected; Westover was actively persecuted. Walls suffered the consequences of random haplessness; Westover was subject to systematic oppression with an historical pedigree. And that history is not irrelevant to understanding her story and her achievement.

After buying the land West of the Mississippi from Napoleon, Thomas Jefferson sent an expedition to find out what was there. What they found was a native culture, in fact many cultures, but all without a civilisation. The aboriginal inhabitants flowed with the seasons up and down the Plains and up and down the mountains. With no fixed place of abode, they were perfectly adapted to their environment.

These native groups were not only independent, they were ungoverned, at least according to European standards - traditions not constitutions ruled; communication was verbal not written; there were few specialised institutions aside from the designation of sexual roles; and, crucially, there were few permanent encampments much less cities. Several members of the expeditionary party, intrigued by this mode of living, decided to stay and became the first legendary mountain men. Of those who returned from this early nineteenth century equivalent of the far side of the moon, at least one committed suicide upon his re-entry to American civilisation, primitive as it was at the time.

About 40 years later, that most American of all American religious groups, the Mormons, wandered across the Mississippi after causing a bit of a ruckus in New York State, Ohio and Illinois (See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). They brought with them some highly innovative home-grown theology which placed the original Garden of Eden square in the middle of Missouri (conveniently right at a crossroads laid out by the Geodetic Survey; it’s easily recognisable because it has churches of various Mormon sects on each corner). Some unsavoury things happened there as well.

Given their domestic habits, particularly polygamy, the Mormons became, at least for a time, a culture without a civilisation, wandering without clear intention further and further West. Eventually they settled by the Great Salt Lake; but the fascination of a culture without a civilisation persisted in many, who until today still seek out such an existence in the remote mountains from Arizona to Idaho.

That these folk who maintain a phobia about civilisation might suffer from a genetic defect, or are bewitched by cultic beliefs, or are undergoing some form of induced mass-hysteria is open to debate. Perhaps they are living examples of the Freudian theory of conflict between the individual and civilisation. What is more certain is that they impose some very strange and often terrifying ways of living on their families, particularly on their children. These people have not merely adopted a ‘life-style’ in the manner of 60’s hippies - like Jeanette Walls’s family - trying merely to ‘drop-out’ of a particular pattern of living. They pray for the destruction of all social institutions and for the coming of divine judgment. And they literally arm themselves and stock their larders for the violent struggle they believe will ensue from that judgment.

Some, like Westover’s parents, reject any form of civil government whatsoever. Their explicit enemy is civilisation itself - its administrative organisation, its legal obligations, its educational systems and, most dramatically, its police powers which they consider satanic. They live in a mythological world of self-sufficiency and imminent apocalypse. Their goal is to remain ‘off grid’ except to the extent that they can undermine existing social structures. So no birth registration, no driver’s license, no insurance, no draft or social security card unless compelled by circumstances, and even then with subversive intent.

Not all Mormons are uncivilised in this sense but some certainly are. In any case, the extreme Gnosticism which they profess is not inconsistent with Mormon doctrine. And their participation, however desultory, in the Mormon Church itself is cultural rather than institutional. That participation is important for sustaining such militant sociopathy. The Church is the only connection to the rest of humanity that is tolerated among them - I suspect because membership in it, a Church many do not recognise as properly Christian, is a subliminal poke at the ‘civilised’ religions in the rest of America. Even then, individual members and the Church as a whole may be considered suspect because of their acquiescence to governmental authority.

Nevertheless, the Church plays a critical role in this strange individualist cult of the American West: keeping this unique culture intact and civilisation at bay. As Westover quotes her father: “God couldn’t abide faithlessness.” Included in this Mormon-inspired anathema is everything from mathematics to health care. Therefore it is not surprising that Westover seems to find the break from her past more difficult than Walls. The fact that either one of them survived is near-miraculous. But that Westover still has the psychic strength to write about it seems a far way beyond the miraculous to me.

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