[Bruce Frohnen 03/08 09:47 AM]The skeptical reader deserves a much deeper response than a blog probably can provide. (Such a long way from Homer Simpson and company!) But I want to take a first crack at it, because he gets to a number of important issues in questioning whether we all (or indeed many of us) are called to a truly agrarian lifestyle. I know one thing for certain: I'm not. Perhaps this is very uncrunchy of me, but if you had told me a few months ago that I would be happily referring to crunchycons as "us" on a blog I would have laughed at you.
What Rod has put his finger on, I think, is really a countercultural conservatism, one that rejects the notion that we all have to pretend to be frat boys (including the women) in order to be "cool" and reject personal morals and sympathy for the less fortunate to be good "ideological" conservatives. That has important implications for how we live. But I honestly don't believe it necessarily leads to the farm. In fact, perhaps I can start a useful argument by saying "I am not an agrarian" and, more than that, I do not, in fact, think that agrarianism in its full sense is at the center of the good life, conservatism, or anything other than agrarianism. In fact, in America the desire to move out to the frontier to farm with one's family and be left alone — the frontier experience — has been very, very damaging.
America was not built on the farm, but in the town. The Puritans didn't go out into the wilderness to be alone with their families; they built their houses next to one another and COMMUTED out to the fields because they were afraid of Indians, afraid the Devil (literally) lived in the forest, and wanted to keep an eye on one another. For a good 150 years the pattern remained one of town life. And it was only after Thomas Jefferson's big land grab (Louisiana purchase) and French Revolution-inspired system for laying out land on a grid that left no room for towns that we started losing the habit of living in towns.
Sell back the land? Hardly, but I DO think we should see agrarianism as one choice among several (I don't know about "many") that are moral, and that we should recognize that the separatism that is a part of crunchiness needs to be tempered with community. Home schooling, for example, works (in my limited experience) because most of the people who do it seek out communities of home schoolers to share duties, get together to socialize, etc.
And by the way, Russell Kirk lived in a place with the romantic name "piety hill." But, like most things Kirkian, the reality was less romantic and rural. His house was on the edge of downtown Mecosta.
