FROM THE ARCHIVES
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Front porch anarchists and obedience to the unenforceable
[Caleb Stegall 02/24 11:32 AM]Lots of good stuff this morning. And thanks, Jeremy, for the kind words. I’m with you on the use of soft social policy changes to mitigate against the destructive aspects of hyper-mobility, not on any statist principle, but as a concession to the reality Bruce and Mitch touched on earlier: that the state is never neutral and its policies for a long time have been actively hostile to local communities and families. Nanny-state leftists and corporate-state rightists have long been in bed together promoting the wage-entitlement economy and 100% out-of-the-home servitude. Didn’t I see Victor David Hanson making just that argument in NRO a while back?
Jeremy, your emailer also hits on an excellent point about Americans understanding the individual and the state, but not society. The kind of “libertarian/communitarianism” I would advocate for is premised almost entirely on his mode #2 with a dash of #1 thrown in. What it requires is a renewed appreciation for society; for what Wendell Berry calls “membership”—a network of social interconnectedness and shared obligation. It’s what the old English jurist Fletcher Moulton called “obedience to the unenforceable.” It is tradition in this sense, in the societal sense, that is required for order. Social context and membership within it is not something which can be simply valued or appropriated. Tradition must be inheritable, or always-already inherited, to be wholly itself. It is a gift of givenness, given to the point of being so formative of the order of man’s soul that it is ineradicable even from those who turn against it. So, yes, the individual remains free to choose, but in the choosing he is always choosing against an important part of himself. Or, as Voegelin put it: “One can throw out a tradition only by throwing oneself out of it.”
There is a political, not just social, point to be made in all this regarding the health of the republic. That point is made excellently by Jeremy in his article on agrarianism where, following Cato, Vergil, Jefferson, and John Taylor, among others, he says that “the practices associated with the agricultural life are particularly—and in some cases uniquely—well-suited to yield important personal, social, and political goods.” Among them, “the personal and civic virtues associated with farming—economic independence, willingness to engage in hard work, rural sturdiness, hatred of tyranny.”
Along those lines, I am headed outside to my woodlot from my home office with my boys, my chainsaw, and my axe, to chop some wood for the woodstove. We have a warm spell here just now, but being Kansas, it’s sure to turn cold again before spring. There are many virtues in this, I think, and among them is a political virtue, one I do not practice enough.
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