Make yourself comfortable. This will not be quick.

Sometimes you’ll see people wringing their hands about why kids don’t read anymore. This is funny, because, as Leonard Cohen might say, “everybody knows” why kids don’t read anymore. It is because they are watching videos on their phones. Is anyone going to do anything about that? No, of course not! The level of political willpower that would require would make even Thomas Hobbes tremble with fear. So everyone goes on hand-wringing and watching videos on their phones and chaque jour vers l’Enfer nous descendons d’un pas.

But it was not always thus! Once upon a time, children read and delighted in reading. One of the most beloved children’s books of its time was this slender volume, a memoir by Sterling North about his 12th year of life, in 1918, in the state of Wisconsin. One day while playing in the woods, he and his friend startle a nest of raccoons, and recover one of the little masked creatures from their den. Sterling brings the cub home and names him “Rascal.”

What follows is a catalog of Sterling and Rascal’s adventures over the year, from Sterling discovering his little raccoon’s taste for strawberry soda to an amusing incident, unimaginable today, where he brings Rascal to school for show-and-tell.

Interwoven with this are other aspects of a childhood in early 20th-century America, such as Sterling’s ongoing project of building a canoe, town fairs, and similar slices of Americana. If it all sounds idyllic, well, there’s also a dark side which Sterling does not shy away from. Whether from his lingering grief over the death of his mother, which occurred when he was only seven years old, or his fear for his older brother Herschel, who is overseas fighting in World War I, the dangers of the world are in no way sugarcoated.

Yet for all that, it is indeed “a memoir of a better era.” How better of an era was it? The farmers of rural Wisconsin actually ate “second breakfast.” No kidding, down to that detail, it really is like reading an account of some vanished Tolkienesque shire, with the dark threats of mechanical death looming only as vague storm clouds on the horizon. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Now, this is a children’s book, so you can’t expect the prose to be too–

Somewhere it must all be recorded, as insects are captured in amber–that day on the river: transcribed in Brule’s water, written on the autumn air, safe at least in my memory.

Yeah, that’s right. It’s actually gorgeous. They used to write books for kids that didn’t condescend to them.

Also memorable are the other residents of Sterling’s town, like Garth Shadwick, the irascible but good-natured harness maker who makes a leash for Rascal. Mr. Shadwick sees his livelihood threatened by a new technology, which he describes thus:

“It’s these gol-danged automobiles, smelly, noisy, dirty things, scaring horses right off the road… ruin a man’s business.”

We’ve been trained to dismiss the destruction of whole professions by the rise of technology as a normal and even beneficial part of life. Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” at work. And it is that, of course, but well might we ask: “What is being destroyed? And what is being created?”

For example, when Sterling and Rascal listen to a record of “There’s a Long, Long Trail A-winding,” young Sterling asks his father if there are nightingales or other night-birds:

“‘Not nightingales,” he said, “but we do have whippoorwills, of course.”

‘I’ve never heard a whippoorwill.”

“Can that be possible? Why, when I was a boy…” 

And he was off on a pilgrimage into the past when Wisconsin was still half wilderness, when panthers sometimes looked in through the windows , and the whippoorwills called all night long.”

This is where the subtitle of the book really comes into focus. It has a melancholy tone, a wistfulness for an era before the nation was connected by highways and telephones, when it was still wild and natural.

And here is Sterling’s account of armistice day, a week after his 12th birthday:

On the morning of November 11, 1918, the real Armistice was signed in a railroad car in France. Although men were killed up to the final hour, the cease-fire came at last and a sudden silence fell over the batteries and trenches and graveyards of Europe. The world was now ‘safe for Democracy.’ Tyranny had been vanquished forever. ‘The war to end war’ had been won, and there would never be another conflict. Or so we believed in that far-off and innocent time…

During the afternoon, my elation slowly subsided, and I began oiling my muskrat traps for the season ahead. Rascal was always interested in whatever I was doing. But when he came to sniff and feel the traps, a terrible thought slowed my fingers. Putting my traps aside, I opened one of the catalogues sent to trappers by the St. Louis fur buyers. There, in full color, on the very first page was a handsome raccoon, his paw caught in a powerful trap.

How could anyone mutilate the sensitive, questing hands of an animal like Rascal? I picked up my raccoon and hugged him in a passion of remorse. 

I burned my fur catalogues in the furnace and hung my traps in the loft of the barn, never to use them again. 

Men had stopped killing other men in France that day; and on that day I signed a permanent peace treaty with the animals and the birds. It is perhaps the only peace treaty that was ever kept.

And you have to understand; this wasn’t just idle “virtue signaling” by Sterling. He actually made money from his muskrat trapping, so he was truly giving up something for his principles. A lost art, these days.

Maybe you think Sterling North is too much of a bleeding-heart environmentalist. Maybe you’d say the same thing about Tolkien. All I know is, the world they inhabited appears to have been full of earnest, hardworking, and resilient people. They were not angels—Sterling records multiple run-ins with bullies of all ages—but for the most part, they were people who appreciated what they had and helped their neighbors.

Reading this book, sharing in Sterling’s triumphs and tragedies, his gentle wit, his love for nature, and above all, his fond memories of his masked friend, makes you nostalgic for a time you never lived in. And more to the point, it makes you look around at the world of today and wonder what happened. True, we are materially vastly richer, our GDP infinitely higher. Quite literally, because GDP did not exist as a metric in 1918.

And yet, are we better off? Sure, you tell me over and over and over again, my friend, that all the statistics say so. Still…

Maybe I am just a cynical misanthrope, constantly longing for a mythical better time that doesn’t exist. Maybe everything is running smoothly. Maybe since at least the Enlightenment, humanity has been steadily progressing, with occasional interruptions but never true retrograde motion, towards a better future. Call this Theory A. “A” can stand for “Accepted by the majority of people,” which probably means it’s true. And again, our standard metrics support this view.

There is, however, another interpretation. Call it Theory Ω.

Theory Ω agrees that technology has certainly been improving over the last 400 years. So when the Theory A’ers make technological progress synonymous with happiness, they are assuredly correct. But if we posit that there is actually an inverse relationship between the quality of human spirit and technology, a different picture emerges. A picture of technology relentlessly eating the world.

Sterling North probably did not know how to build his brand through social media. He was not even proficient with the Microsoft Office suite. But he could make a canoe, scale a cliff, catch a fish, raise a raccoon, ride a bike, write a book, read a book, make a muskrat trap, build a fence, climb a tree, fight a bully, have his heart broken and recover from it. Don’t know if he could conn a ship or plan an invasion, but hey, he was only 11.

Compare this with the 11-year-old nephew of a friend of mine, who, I am told, cries when he receives minor scrapes, can barely read a paragraph, and spends all his free time watching something called skibidi videos.

Theory A has nothing to say about these facts whatsoever. But they are exactly in line with Theory Ω’s predictions.

Under Theory Ω, technology has been steadily improving the ease of life while simultaneously destroying the quality of human capital.

A proponent of Theory Ω might add that material wealth, GDP, ease and comfort are all forms of happiness defined using a Benthamite concept of utility. A certain controversial German philosopher had very unkind things to say about this mode of “English happiness,” believing that only through struggle and hardship could one truly achieve a meaningful form of joy.

In the end, everything has a cost which must be paid in order to get it. Our world of comfort, ease, and plenty must be paid for with a commensurate loss of resilience, nobility of spirit, and strength of character. Let me be quite clear: I am in no way as good a human being as Sterling North was. I am thoroughly a product of the techno-decadent fin de millénaire culture. Even when I went camping, which wasn’t often, I had my Game Boy.

But, to quote Tom Sharpe’s Porterhouse Blue: “A gentleman stood for something. It wasn’t what he was. It was what he knew he ought to be.” All my complaining, grousing, griping and rhetorical fruit-flinging comes to this: that people my age are unhappy because we know we ought to be something better than we are, but we were robbed of that chance. Robbed by the very labor-saving technology that was supposed to make the modern world such a wonderful place.

In this way, Sterling North’s memoir is more than just a picturesque tale of a beloved childhood pet, and more even than a heartwarming story of growing up and the necessary emotional pain that goes along with it. It is both a warning and symbol of hope; a warning of how much we can lose, and a symbol of what essential qualities of humanity we should fight to preserve.

I rant like this because, like Nietzsche, I believe that struggle builds character, and if you have to struggle to read my posts, it’s better for you in the long run. (A.I. assistant’s suggestions be damned.) But even if you think my ideas are misguided and wrong, I hope you will still give Rascal a try. It’s a beautiful story that has touched the hearts of generations and spans national and cultural divides: in the 1970s, it was the basis for a very popular animated series in Japan, the charming opening of which you can see here. (And here is a website dedicated to the history of Rascal in Japanese culture.)

I said at the outset of this post that it would take an unfathomable degree of political will to get people to put down the gol-danged cell phones and live their lives. But in my more optimistic moods, I wonder if all it takes is to recall the advice of the Duke of Urbino, when asked what was the essential quality of a great leader: “Essere umano,” he answered: “To be human.”

If so, it’s worth mentioning that Sterling North wrote another book, Raccoons are the Brightest People, wherein he says the following:

Those who play God in destroying any form of life are tampering with a master plan too intricate for any of us to understand. All that we can do is to aid that great plan and to keep part of our planet habitable.