On the closing of Spencer Brewery
I was perplexingly saddened by the announcement that Spencer Brewery was closing. Opening at St. Joseph’s Abbey in Massachusetts in 2013, Spencer was notable for being the first Trappist Brewery outside of Europe, a tardy transplant of a historically prominent feature of Old-World beer production. When I lived in London, I got to know the official breweries in this niche institution. I traveled to pubs around England that served some of the rarer vintages (and there are some bottles that are very difficult to track down since some monasteries will only sell in small quantities, in person, in Belgium). But while I liked the beer, why did I really care that its American manifestation was closing?
It cannot be rooted in nostalgia. That would be the feeling I might indulge in when my parents sell our childhood home. My siblings and I will get together and find the weakened spot in the plaster where one of my brothers was thrown through the living room wall. We’ll dig up the time capsule from under the mulberry tree and turn off the lights for the last time, knowing we can always drive by with our kids in ten years and point to the second window on the right above the porch: “That was the boys’ room. Your Uncle Dan used to sneak out onto the roof and lower himself into the bushes to go to parties in high school.” That’s nostalgia, the piquant pleasure elicited when we run our fingers through the tips of dry grass that Cicero calls “…memory and the rich store of blessings laid up earlier in life.”
But my sadness at the passing of Spencer Brewery cannot be nostalgia because I frankly do not have memories of it. Not because of the amnesiac properties of its product, but because it hasn’t been around long enough. There is almost a type of short-circuited anticipatory nostalgia, the hope that the institution would survive dozens of generations as its European counterparts have, like a medieval villager working to lift a stone for a cathedral that he will never see completed, that won’t even be an occupiable building for another hundred years.
Western culture seems to have a unique attachment to its institutions not solely as a link to its ancestors and its past, but because it sees the future potential in the nascent creations of its present. We can trace this phenomenon at least as far back as Virgil’s Aeneid, the epic poem that serves as the foundation myth for the greatness not only of Rome but of the then seminal ascent of the Caesars and, arguably, of the whole post-Hellenic modern West. Aeneas must suffer throughout the poem to establish even a small kingdom amongst the Latins in Italy. He does so not because he will see the full glory of Rome, but because of the greatness that will someday follow him. In Book VI of The Aeneid, after visiting the underworld and being granted a vision of the eventual triumph of his progeny, Aeneas is fired “[with] lust for glory in the future” (emphasis my own). Throughout the poem, his level of suffering is commensurate not with his own triumph, but with a triumph that is centuries in the future.
But if this “anticipatory nostalgia” is solely forward looking, what was it about even a vicarious participation in Spencer Brewery that struck me so peculiarly? America has produced hundreds of microbreweries in recent years (competition with which probably led to the failure of Spencer). Many of these businesses fail – a high school friend of mine even started “an award winning” brewery that couldn’t survive in this hyper-competitive business for more than a couple of years. So I can’t say that I simply have an attachment to any brewery – there was something particular about Spencer.
As someone who grew up as the youngest of eight siblings, I can attest to the allure of tradition. When I was very young, it was almost like growing up in someone else’s house. My older siblings had already established long ranging traditions, many of which had already died away by the time I was born and as the brothers and sisters moved out. In a sense, we are all born into an environment like this, growing up in someone else’s world, hearing about the history and traditions that precede us in human experience and watching the purveyors of those stories eventually “move out” into a “a narrow cell for ever laid.” But these traditions anchor our existence in the present to what has happened before, providing a sense of relative positioning. Perhaps this explains my attachment to a New York City butcher that proudly advertises “Family Owned and Operated Since 1958.” He hasn’t even been around very long, but when I moved to a new neighborhood in the city, that butcher was a symbol that this place had existed before my arrival and that I too could establish myself there in the future.
As such, we are never removed from the past. Faulkner says, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Returning to The Aeneid, Aeneas is not engaged in the “creative destruction” of Schumpeter’s Gale or a dialectical imperialism in which the past must be destroyed to make way for a more perfect future, as though he were some type of unmoored revolutionary Hegelian. When Aeneas is fleeing Troy, he literally carries his aged father (along with The Penates, their traditional household gods) while leading his son Ascanius by the hand. Aeneas’ future is anchored in the past even as that past burns with the walls of Troy. And even though his father will die before they reach Italy, their establishment of new traditions along the way and the continued presence of the Penates forms the basis of the new society that Edmund Burke says links “those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”
This extension of memory into the future is almost a form of terrestrial immortality. We might have faith in the immortality of the soul, but our hope in the perpetuity of institutions is a reverse Pascalian Wager. But this not a form of personal refraction through future history (a seeming contradiction, but Aeneas is gifted a vision of “future history” when he sees Virgil’s presentation of the past). It is not personal because Rome will be named for Aeneas’ descendant, Romulus, not for Aeneas himself. Even the name of the Trojan’s will be erased from Rome’s history by Jupiter. Instead, like the villager working anonymously on the medieval cathedral, the heavy burden of institutional construction is borne by the individual to the benefit of the future collective. In his Confessions, St. Augustine claims that all the divisions of time exist in the mind: “The present of things past is memory, the present of things present is sight, the present of things future is expectation.” And time does not measure the thing itself, but the impression that it makes in memory, “the interval between some starting point and some conclusion.” It is this conception of time in memory that creates the impression that “a long future is merely a long expectation of the future… a long past is merely a long memory of the past.” By extending our memory into a participation in embodied institutions, it is as though we can extend the length of our own lives, reaching them far before our birth and long after our inevitable deaths. A failure to participate in this collective dynamic can lead to the despair of a Dostoevskian suicide or a life spent en attendant Godot.
Yet, as we age, many of the institutions that surrounded us in the first half of life seem to come to a jarring conclusion. I’m not saying I poured one out when General Electric was pulled from the Dow Jones, but I did leave Toys R Us for the last time with just a smidge of regret – tinctured with the satisfaction at carrying a dozen boxes of discounted Legos that will be stored away as Christmas presents for years to come. But it was a bit like the satisfaction I imagine comes with an unexpected bequest upon the death of a distant relative. We encounter – and expect to encounter – death in our pets and aging entertainers and unfortunately even our family and friends. But the institutions that have existed since our childhood feel like they should continue in perpetuity, even if in reality they are not even all that old.
As such, it seems to me like we are searching for an institution that we can see existing far into the future, one that carries the thread of Theseus through the labyrinthian turns of history. We look for something that expands on an old tradition, an increasingly rare example of the seemingly ancient planting a new seed in a new setting. Which raises a particularly obvious critique of my sadness: a brewery is such an insignificant institution.
It could certainly be in part my own short-comings. Perhaps I’m just not perceptive enough to see nascent glory rooted in our past. But I think many others have been noting this problem, particularly after the First World War. Already in the early 1930s, Christopher Dawson writes about “the vast movement of changes… tearing the old civilizations away from their traditional moorings and threatening to wreck society both spiritually and materially.” Stefan Zweig writes in 1942 in The World of Yesterday how “the past was over, all achievements were as nothing… the destruction would last long after our own lives.” Zweig killed himself shortly after he submitted the manuscript to his publisher. More recently, writers such as Alasdair MacIntyre have noted the death of a teleological understanding of a human life and that “the individualism of modernity could of course find no use for the notion of tradition within its own conceptual scheme except as an adversary.” Even the forward looking liberal of today tends to deny the positive contributions of nations and culture, to throw cans of tomato soup at its art, or to use the negative aspects of the past as an excuse for the destruction of the existing world order. It is not as though anyone is really thinking anymore that Facebook or Google – arguably the most impactful creations of my generation – are going to form the basis for a positive cultural revolution.
Of course, perhaps the longest-lived institution with a still prominent international presence in the world is the Catholic Church. It feels blithe to say, though, that therefore this is the only institution in which we can place trust. The recent cultural and moral failings amongst the leaders of the Church, particularly in the United States and in Europe, has led many individuals along the whole political spectrum to fear for its continued ability to serve as a meaningful institution of cultural continuity in the West. And yet Robert Royal, in his work A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition of the Twentieth Century, makes a convincing case that, despite the more “radical” (and maybe worse “flat and uninspiring”) changes in the Church after the mid-point of last century, that the intellectual life of the church continued with “considerable theological ferment.”
It is on that note of “fermentation” that I return to my original question: Why do we have an attachment to earthly institutions that we hope will continue after our deaths? Even for those who live in the hope of eternal life, it is impossible to exist without a community. The most ascetic of the Desert Fathers recognized that Christ was among them when they gathered as a pair in His name. In our era, with its seemingly shrinking collection of institutions that connect humanity’s past and future beyond a digital age, we find that we need to act as a new Aeneas ourselves, anchoring our creation of new cultural and intellectual traditions in the “theological ferment” of the last century. The struggle of what we write and produce might never reach the heights for our own glory but, though we might not be granted a vision of the future as Aeneas was, we can see the many generations ahead that will grow from the lives we live and the work we do today.
But I will also keep a case of Spencer Beer aging in my cellar.
