(This article courtesy of the Arlington Catholic Herald.)
At the end of the trial period judges evaluated the experiment, in effect awarding points to these modern pioneers on the basis of how well they managed to cope. All of the participants flunked one crucial test – none had chopped nearly enough wood to see them through the winter.
Perhaps few of us would have the fortitude to do even that well. But the organizers of the experiment also did a kind of post-mortem, visiting the families after they had returned to “civilization,” and it struck me that the experiment told us less about coping with physical privation than it did about the people's spiritual state. Being put into an extreme situation ought to have a transforming affect on people, but it does not always do so.
People who experience great tragedy in their lives sometimes seem to continue living on a rather shallow plane, their sufferings providing them with no deeper wisdom. This seemed to me the case with the “survivors” of “The Frontier House.”
One teenage girl was shown helping to drag in hay from the fields and to feed the cattle during the winter. Bubblingly, she told the camera that she enjoyed the job but “when it stops being fun, I quit.” Another pioneer, a successful executive in real life, manifested an obsessive competitiveness towards his neighbors, feeling cheated when he did not win.
The experiment's organizers missed no opportunity to contrast the conditions of the frontier with the actual lives of the participants. Thus, rather cruelly, the girl who “sort of” liked haying was later shown with her friends in her family jacuzzi, next to a large swimming pool. What had she learned from the experiment? For one thing, real life can be boring – “you get tired of just going to the mall every day.” Another lesson was, “I'm not going to let people boss me around at school. I'm going to be my own person.”
Only one of the pioneer couples were shown to be regular church-members, and their marriage broke up soon after they returned home. The wife told the camera that her church meant a great deal to her, because “the church is a warm environment where people support you.” One might think that being thrown entirely onto one's own resources, forced into a situation where one's very survival is in question, where nothing is given and everything has to be gotten by effort, would forge different attitudes in people.
The teenage girl wants to be treated as a self-sufficient person, yet by her own admission did not actually practice self-sufficiency while on the frontier and joined in the experiment only to the degree that it was “fun.” The hyper-competitive father might have recognized that the spirit of cooperation sometimes serves better than relentless competition. The church-going mother, instead of looking for her religion to “affirm” her, might have become aware of mankind's radical dependence on God, the fact that the church is important not because it affirms us but because it teaches us to live with a sense of that radical dependence.
In their various ways each of the participants emerged from the experiment merely prepared to express, in sightly new ways, their continued membership in the “me generation.” The real pioneers must often have been dreadfully conscious of how insignificant they themselves were in the face of an implacable nature. Our television pioneers continue to assume that the universe really does revolve around them.
In the end “The Frontier House” merely seemed to show that you can take the middle class out of suburbia but you can't take suburbia out of the middle class.