Aspen: Approaches to Fragility: This started as a joke-...

Aspen: Approaches to Fragility: This started as a joke-of-the-moment, in response to talking about "fragile states" in which farmers fight with herders. But it is more. This is Colorado. However, this is the American West. And of the American West we remember that, at least in Broadway's version of Oklahoma, the farmer and the cowman can be friends. But the farmer and the cowman can be friends only when there is a matriarch with a shotgun in the picture.

One reading of world history is that a huge amount of the civilizing process is accomplished when people's mothers and aunts gain social power. The academe that we have has not thought very hard about how it is mothers and aunts gaining social power, or about what we can do to assist this process in the states me regard as fragile...