In the first two segments of this essay I will attempt to trace the Christian roots of the Agrarian worldview and the traditional English political philosophy. In the third segment I begin to describe how these roots are connected to the Great Economy. In the last segments I will deal primarily with the history of the Agrarian Movment and it's implications for and influence on political theory and social science.
1. Life is a Miracle
An Agrarian political philosophy or social science must come out of a pivitol aknowledgment that the world is holy. The world is holy because God created it. (John 3:16) The Incarnation was made possible by God's love for the world, not heaven, or even the way the world will be, but for the "life of the world." God loved the world so much he gave his Son for it.
Furthermore, creation is not only holy because God made it in the past and gave his life for it in the present, but also because God fills all things. For God, without before or after, the acts of creation and sustaining are one and the same. Creation is in no way independent of it's Creator even for a moment. Creatures live by sharing or participating in life of God and breathing with his breath. This means there is a sanctity or holiness that is present everywhere in the world.
If it was God's love for the world that made the Son of God become Incarnate for us then it makes no sense to deny that world in order to reach heaven.
For this reason, the uncaring use and destruction of the world is the most horrid blaspheme. This modern heresy treats non-human life as merely biological mechenisms with no value apart from the service to man their destruction can provide. Increasingly, even human life is sometimes destroyed if it is decided that life has no value. This violence denies the reality of spirit and truth present within creation. It denies the truth that God's works embody and reveal his spirit. Ultimately this kind of living will destroy us. If we are going to survive we must come to aknowledge that life is a miracle. In the beginning God created all things and he called them good for the sake of blessing us. All life is ultimately mysterious and beyond our comprehension. Each life is valuble and irreplaceible and should be treated with reverence.
Because life is a miracle, our essential vocation in life, our job, is to be stewards and priests. Those who aknowledge the bottomless complexity and holyness of life know that we are called to care for all creation not abuse and exploit it. Life in all its forms is something to be received from God as a gift. Therefore, man does not own anything in an absolute sense. He only receives it from God and is called to care for it. Created things have a value apart from anything man may atribute to them. Humans have the right to enjoy the fruits of creation. But they must not destroy the source of those fruits.
2. The Sacrament of Life
Whether we like it or not, our lives revolve around what we eat, because without food we die. Yet we don't live to eat, nor do we eat to live. I think that this is a false dilemma. If we eat to live we have replaced God at the center of our lives by making food the source of life. Only God is the Source of Life. If we live to eat then we have replaced God at the center of our lives by making our stomach lord. Only God is Lord. This dichotomy represents the extremes of pagan and atheist thought concerning life and the human person.
As Christians, we must see the world as a gift and see past the gift to the giver.
The atheist does not see through the world to its source. For him the world is dark and opaque. He eats because food is fuel for the body engine. Consequently he thinks of humans as machines or animals. Eating is not something special, but neither is anything else. As Christians we know this debases the dignity of man as the image of God and devalues human life.
In contrast, the Christian receives both his life and food from God as an undivided gift. Consequently he sees through the world, as if it were transparent, to catch a vision of the love of God. In fact the entire world is an expression of the love of God. When seen in this way, even eating can be understood as a sacrament of the presence of God.
Our society today is no less sacrificial than it ever was. To live, man depends on other creatures. Even our day to day survival depends on their deaths. This is a form of sacrifice. It is just that we hide the sacrifices from the people to protect them from the unplesentness of life. As a result people become disconected from the sacrificial gifts that sustain them. So you might say that we daily break the bread and drink the blood of creation. One must receive these sacrificial lives in a properly reverent manner. When we do this reverently, knowingly, and skillfully it may be called a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, and destructively it is a desecration. In so doing we condem our selves to spiritual alienation and others to want and need. In needlessly destroying creation we fail to pass on to those after us what we have received, a happy and whole world to enjoy and in which to receive the life of God. This it the violent blaspheme I spoke of in the first chapter.
When we receive the life of the world from God reverently two things happen. First, a right relationship with God is restored where by we acknowledge God as our Creator, Giver, and Lover. Our relationship to him is also restored as thankful beloved creatures. Second, our original edenic vocation from before the fall as priests is restored or recapitulated in Christ, whose once for all sacrifice on the cross for our salvation enables us to make a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving. When we do this on a cosmic scale, the whole cosmos is being transfigured with us.
COMMUNION WITH DEATH OR LIFE
Whether we like it or not, food is one of the most central elements of our lives as humans. Eating makes up a large part of our personal identity. We wake up and we eat. We eat all day long. Our lives revolve around what we will eat, because without food we die. When we eat without thinking, without mindfulness of our place in the cosmos and before the face of God, our whole person is debased. When we receive food into our cars through a windown in a building and eat it unthinkingly we not only spill the blood of the world ignorantly and clumbsuly, we also reduce our selves to mere biological mechanisms, no better than cows.
Many people have begun to lament the contemporary extinction of the last natural ritual, the family dinner. Without that ritual to give the eating experience meaning, specialness, and familial communion life ceases to have meaning, specialness, and communion. The family ritual does not make eating less meaningful, it actually fills eating with meaning and puts God back in the middle of our lives. Food comes from God, and our hunger for food is meant to point to a hunger for the one who lovingly provides us with all our needs. When we wake up we aught to pray and thank God for our entire lives and give them to him first, and then eat second. Then our place before the God who gives is restored.
Food eaten for itself without thankfulness is union or communion with that which is dead. As Fr Alexander Schmeman said, the food itself must be kelpt in a refigerator like a corpse. If we would open our eyes and see that all good things come down from our heavenly Father we would be in communion with Life himself. When we lead lives of Eucharistic / Thankful eating, we show that we are truly Christian, because we are willing to put God at the very center of our lives, not serving measured quantities of carbohydrates, calories, and proteins, but being drawn into a loving relationship with Life himself.
DIS-INTEGRATION
For those of us living in the technological consumerist future any awareness of the sacrament of life or of a meaningful connection with the natural world is criticaly missing. As mere interchangable parts of the modern industrial world, people become alienated and detached from the world around them and from themselves. Farming itself has become a technological industry. Thus food becomes merely another product. Quite often modern people are ignorant of where food, water, or clothing comes from. They consider aquiring these things as a primarily monetary or consumer transaction.
Being sheltered from their dependence on sacrifice and hard work people live in self delusion unaware that life is a gift from God by the labor of farmers and from the earth and all creatures. They grow callous, unthankful, and ultimately unable to sustain themselves without an artificial technelogical system caring for them. Their perception of reality becomes distorted and their ability to care for the world sacramentaly is destroyed.
Wendell Berry, an agrarian philosopher and novelist, writes, "I see that the life of this place is always emerging beyond expectation or prediction or typicality, that it is unique, given to the world minute by minute, only once, never to be repeated. And then is when I see that this life is a miracle, absolutely worth having, absolutely worth saving. . ." Reducing all of this mystery to a simplstic theory is a foolish dimunition, an explaining away, not the crowning apotheosis of the human mind.
Any form of participation in the Agrarian experience, however small, especialy in regaurds to food production, helps re-root people in the earthy and quite often brutal reality of how we receive our lives from God.
3. The Great Economy
For Wendell Berry, the sacramental care for the world is an economic matter. Berry's use of the word "economy" makes use of it's entymology, meaning "household managment" not the study of money making, which is itself only a small aspect of the whole field of how the "human household is situated and maintained within the household of nature." This "household of nature" is what Berry calls the Great Economy and identifies with the Kingdom of Heaven or the Dao. The Great Economy encompasses everything, even human economies, in a complex fabric of connections beyond our full comprehension. Consequently, the Great Economy includes not only laws of nature such as gravity, but also absolute "human laws," standards of propriety and right livelihood that can be derived from natural laws.
In his book Standing by Words, Berry writes, "That there might be laws of nature that are absolute and that imply human laws also absolute has not been thought a considerable or a tolerable possibility by the romantic party from Wordsworth to the technological visionaries of our own time. They have disdained the possibility that these laws imply a limiting definition of humanity. That they imply and enforce the practical considerations of propriety and right livelihood, the romantics have apparently never dreamed."
As strange as this idea may seem to us, C.S. Lewis reminds us that our ancestors clearly understood the connection:
Now this Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used to be called the Law of Nature. Nowadays, when we talk of the "laws of nature" we usually mean things like gravitation, or heredity, or the laws of chemistry. But when the older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong "the Law of Nature," they really meant the Law of Human Nature. The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law--with this great difference, that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it.
According to Berry, the main difference between physical laws of nature and the "Law of Human Nature" is "the proximity of cause to effect." When we break moral laws there are effects and consequences. We may not recognize these effects because they may not be immediate. Berry gives the example of industrial farming. The abuse of land may be profitable temporarily, the inevitable results will be low quality food and poor production.
Thus the Great Economy contains absolute laws reflected in moral standards of propriety and rightlivelihood. Such standards define the relationship between the natural environment and human economies and that the neglect of these standards and leads to the breaking of these relationships, and thus ultimately suffering and want. Economies of every scale must be in harmony.
Thus a good human economy must fit harmoniously within the Great Economy. "In certain ways it must be an analogy of the Great Economy."
Because the natural world is organic, an industrial society wars against the Great Economy. An Agrarian economy offers man a more harmonious life integrating a robust family life, civility, heretage, personal responsibility, independence, liberal generocity, pride of place, and liberty. All of these are aspects or analogies of the natural world. For instance, the earth naturaly produces a bountiful harvest and is thus generous. The earth itself is the extention of the liberal generocity of the loving providence of God. Only a local economy that re-presents this aspect of the Great Economy can produce a happy, harmonious, and integrated community. It must be the goal of this local economy to produce these kinds of virtues in its men and women so that they can lead happy lives.
4. I'll Take My Stand
Agrarianism is a social and political philosophy which stresses the viewpoint that a rural or semi-rural lifestyle, most especially agricultural pursuits such as farming or ranching, leads to a fuller, happier, cleaner, and more sustainable way of life for both individuals and society as a whole. In the introduction to his 1969 book "Agrarianism in American Literature," M. Thomas Inge defines agrarianism by the following basic tenets:
- Cultivation of the soil provides direct contact with nature; through the contact with nature the agrarian is blessed with a closer relationship to God. Farming has within it a positive spiritual good; the farmer acquires the virtues of "honor, manliness, self-reliance, courage, moral integrity, and hospitality" and follows the example of God when creating order out of chaos.
- The farmer "has a sense of identity, a sense of historical and religious tradition, a feeling of belonging to a concrete family, place, and region, which are psychologically and culturally beneficial." The harmony of this life checks the encroachments of a fragmented, alienated modern society which has grown to inhuman scale.
- In contrast, farming offers total independence and self-sufficiency. It has a solid, stable position in the world order. But urban life, capitalism, and technology destroy our independence and dignity while fostering vice and weakness within us. The agricultural community can provide checks and balances against the imbalances of modern society by its fellowship of labor and cooperation with other agrarians, while obeying the rhythms of nature.
In the 1910s and 1920s, agrarianism garnered significant popular attention, but was eclipsed in the postwar period. It has been revived somewhat in conjunction with the environmental movement, and has been drawing an increasing number of adherents. In 1930 the Southern Agrarians wrote in the "Introduction: A Statement of Principles" to their book I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition:
All the articles bear in the same sense upon the book's title-subject: all tend to support a Southern way of life against what may be called the American or prevailing way; and all as much as agree that the best terms in which to represent the distinction are contained in the phrase, Agrarian versus Industrial. ... Opposed to the industrial society is the agrarian, which does not stand in particular need of definition. An agrarian society is hardly one that has no use at all for industries, for professional vocations, for scholars and artists, and for the life of cities. Technically, perhaps, an agrarian society is one in which agriculture is the leading vocation, whether for wealth, for pleasure, or for prestige-a form of labor that is pursued with intelligence and leisure, and that becomes the model to which the other forms approach as well as they may. But an agrarian regime will be secured readily enough where the superfluous industries are not allowed to rise against it. The theory of agrarianism is that the culture of the soil is the best and most sensitive of vocations, and that therefore it should have the economic preference and enlist the maximum number of workers. [http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA01/White/anthology/agrarian.html]
Chilton Williamson, Jr. described the political philosophy I identify with Agrarianism when he wrote, "the expression of rootedness: a sense of place and of history, a sense of self derived from forebears, kin, and culture — an identity that is both collective and personal.” [What Is Paleoconservatism?]
Jefferson's vision of an agrarian civilization was based on his own "desperate yearning for settledness." The absence of large-scale commercial interests, industrialization, and over seas commerce was exactly what guaranteed the stability of American liberty, a nation without creditors, fear of debt, or taxes. For Jefferson, the opposite of stability was instability, not opportunity, because these "opportunities" were more likely to enslave a man than set him free. Rather he wanted a nation of individuals laboring under the sun on their own land for their own families without interference from government institutions and refusing all temptations to profit from someone else's expense.
Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he had made his peculiar deposit of substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth. Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example.
In 1800 only 36 percent of the English population was engaged in agriculture, whereas between 75 and 90 percent of Americans were engaged in it. This is particularly indicative of a move away from the countryside and toward the city, a rejection of rural settledness and the embracing of industrialization and urban opportunities that Jefferson despised. The liberal or politically progressive thinkers of the day wanted to see America "mature" or "develop" into an industrial urban-based nation with over seas trade just like the European nations. To Jefferson this was exactly the "opportunity," so essential in to today's global capitalism, which represented instability and indebtedness. Judging from where we are today, running head long after the bankrupt manegerial state of the European model, perhaps he was right. Hamilton, the first Secretary of Treasury, produced an economic plan which called for a the establishment of a national bank for funding development projects, financing War debt, and subsidizing manufacturing interests. This benefited Hamilton’s financiers but was bad news for the landowners who would have to pay the taxes. To Jefferson, this seemed like selling the states back to the British. (6-10)
5. Human nature, tradition and reason
Since human nature is limited and finite, any attempt to create a man-made utopia is headed for disaster and potential carnage. They also see social democracy, ideology, and managerial society as malevolent attempts to remake humanity. Instead, they lean toward tradition, family, customs, religious institutions and classical learning to provide wisdom and guidance. [40]
Thomas Fleming stated this opposition to abstract ideals in a way that critic David Brooks called a "startling crescendo":
Among the most dangerous of our theoretical illusions are the political fantasies that can be summed up in words like democracy; equality, and natural rights; the principle of one man, one vote and the American tradition of self-government. No one who lives in the world with his eyes open can actually believe in any of this.[41]
Historian W. Wesley McDonald explains the opposition to ideology this way:
In a humane social order, a community of spirit is fostered in which generations are bound together. According to [Russell] Kirk, this link is achieved through moral and social norms that transcend the particularities of time and place and, because they form the basis of genuine civilized existence, can only be neglected at great peril. These norms, reflected in religious dogmas, traditions, humane letters, social habit and custom, and prescriptive institutions, create the sources of the true community that is the final end of politics.[42]
Along these lines, Joseph Sobran, in his "Pensees", argues that Western civilization relies on civility at the center of the society:
Civility is the relationship among citizens in a republic. It corresponds to the condition we call "freedom", which is not just an absence of restraint or coercion, but the security of living under commonly recognized rules of conduct. Not all these rules are enforced by the state; legal institutions of civility depend on the ethical substratum and collapse when it is absent. And in fact the colloquial sense of civility as good manners is relevant to its political meaning: citizens typically deal with each other by consent, and they have to say "please" and "thank you" to each other.[43]
Certain paleoconservatives say that tradition is a better guide than reason. For example, Mel Bradford wrote that certain questions are settled before any serious deliberation concerning a preferred course of conduct may begin. This ethic is based in a "culture of families, linked by friendship, common enemies, and common projects." So a good conservative keeps "a clear sense of what Southern grandmothers have always meant in admonishing children, we don't do that."[44]
Thomas Fleming calls tradition "a body of wisdom and truth and a set of attitudes and behavior handed down from one generation to another. It is our parents' respect for their grandfathers that we reflect when we refuse to think ourselves wiser than our ancestors and do not presume to condemn their shortcomings." By following tradition, Joseph Sobran said that society can maintain continuity with the past, through words, rituals, records, commemorations, and laws:
There is no question of "resisting change." The only question is what can and should be salvaged from "devouring time." Conservation is a labor, not indolence, and it takes discrimination to identify and save a few strands of tradition in the incessant flow of mutability. In fact conservation is so hard that it could never be achieved by sheer conscious effort. Most of it has to be done by habit, as when we speak in such a way as to make ourselves understood by others without their having to consult a dictionary, and thereby give a little permanence to the kind of tradition that is a language.[43]
Furthermore, James Kalb argues that tradition succeeds where ideology fails because it includes habits and attitudes about things that are hard to articulate rationally. Many aspects of social life resist clear definition, so technocratic approaches to social policy deserve suspicion:
Our knowledge is partial and attained with difficulty. The effects of political proposals are difficult to predict and as the proposals become more ambitious their effects become incalculable. We can't evaluate political ideas without accepting far more beliefs, presumptions and attitudes than we could possibly judge critically.[45]
Paleoconservatives in the 21st century often focus on their points of disagreement with neoconservatives, especially on issues like immigration, affirmative action, U.S. funding of its allies abroad, foreign wars, and welfare. They also criticize social democracy, which some refer to as the therapeutic managerial state, the welfare-warfare state [The Welfare-Warfare State, Old West Edition] or polite totalitarianism.[The Last Ditch: Who We Are]
are not conservatives in the sense that they necessarily wish to preserve existing institutions or seek merely to slow the growth of Modern Big government liberalism.[American Conservative Union Foundation] They do not wish to be closely identified with the U.S. Republican Party.[The Myth of GOP Conservatism: The Ugly Truth about the Republican Party, by Kevin Tuma] Rather, they seek the renewal of "small 'r'" republican society in the context of the Western heritage, customs and civilization.[American Conservative Union Foundation] Joseph Scotchie wrote.
Republics mind their own business. Their governments have very limited powers, and their people are too busy practicing self-government to worry about problems in other countries. Empires not only bully smaller, defenseless nations, they also can’t leave their own, hapless subjects alone.... Empires and small government aren’t compatible, either.[29]
By contrast, paleocons see neoconservatives as empire-builders and themselves as defenders of the republic, pointing to Rome as an example of how an ongoing campaign of military expansionism can destroy a republic.[30]
On some issues, many paleocons are hard to distinguish from others on the conservative spectrum. For example, they tend to oppose abortion on demand[31] and gay marriage,[32][33] while supporting capital punishment,[34] handgun ownership[35] and an original intent reading of the U.S. Constitution.[36] On the other hand, paleocons are often more sympathetic to environmental protection,[37] animal welfare,[38] and anti-consumerism[39] than others on the American Right.