RE: Doing
[Caleb Stegall  03/07 10:30 AM]

Rod asked about the virtues of agrarianism. In response, let me reiterate that this nation was founded and built on a bedrock agrarian class, and the political argument in its favor (I linked to Jeremy Beer’s excellent piece on agrarianism somewhere down there) is that western culture and the democracy it supports cannot long suffer the death of that class. Here again is VDH in a stirring passage we all ought to pay careful attention to:

If just 10 percent of our population lived on farms, did not move, never divorced, did not change jobs, and set the parameters of their day by dawn and dusk, the current madness could be stopped. Yet we lack that prerequisite reservoir of agrarians who might still arrest the itinerary of our present culture, of growing shiftlessness, criminality, and material banality.

Oddly, we sheep who follow only fashion and fad still admire the oddball and nonconformist but with legitimate reservations and precautions. The independent trucker is the stuff of pop ballad, yet we still wince at his oil and grease and the petty criminality of the industry. We are nostalgic over religious dropouts like the Amish but learn their iron-willed agrarianism is powered by the sanction of an authoritarian and unforgiving God. The cowboy on the screen and nineteenth-century military hero lead only to silly buckskin fringe and cowboy hats or peculiar reenactments where grown folk don uniforms and reenact the battle of Gettysburg. We are searching, we Americans of modern material and urban culture, for the epic individual among us who says he has an identity that cannot be bought, rented, or leased, for a man the sociologists label “able to resist being drawn into the orbit of industrial and bureaucratic organization.”

Where, we ask ourselves, will be these counterpoints to a national ethos that has left us parched and wanting? Where will be the often unpleasant individual, the cratered veteran of a continual, a personal struggle with nature, the cultural dissident who will choose still to go it alone in order to protect his old notion of a community, who will have innate distrust for authoritarianism, large bureaucracy, and urban consensus? Where will be the man prerequisite to, the exemplar for, democratic and egalitarian government? The ugly agrarian alone is the now increasingly rare voice that says no to popular tastes, no to the culture of the suburb, no to the gated estate. The noncorporate man can always explain to us of a different brand, an aggressive and materialistic urban stripe, how far adrift we have gone from that ideal. His was the grating voice that might have said finance, insurance, advertising, and law—the great sought-after tetrad of the last decade—were not the real work, the true production, the noble professions of our nation.

What other profession is there now in this country where the individual fights alone against nature, lives where he works, invests hourly for the future, never for the mere present, succeeds or fails on the degree of his own intellect, physical strength, bodily endurance, and sheer nerve? In what other vocation now does an American care so little about his own appearance, about the type of car his is to drive, about the title of the job he is to enjoy, about the status of his associates, but so much more instead about the promptness of his action, the unambiguity of his intent, and the power of his promised word? In what other proffesion is excellence and character certified by the growth and renewal of impartial plants, not concocted by the alphabet soup of B.A.’s, Ed.D.’s, Ph.D.’s, J.D.,’s, A.A.’s, M.A.’s, B.S.’s, M.S.’s, LL.B.’s, D.D.S.’s, M.D.’s, M.S.W.’s, M.F.A.’s, M.T.A.’s, M.P.A.’s, M.P.H.’s, or M.P.T.’s?

Is not the vanishing agrarian the true heir of Western culture?