Of Small Places And Agrarianism

Friend to this blog Leigh Tate made a comment in the post Of Small Towns and Small Cities that made me think a great deal more than perhaps is wise in the early morning upon reading it: 

"It was the connectedness of today's reading list post that reminded me to comment. I sometimes mention agrarianism as a lifestyle, and it is interesting to me that the response is usually a variation of "yes but, not everybody wants to be a farmer." This post reminds me of what I am consistently unsuccessful at explaining, i.e. that agrarianism isn't farming, rather, it's a social and economic structure based on community and the land. The small town is the heart of such a structure because it's there that the community has the potential to to meet its needs. I would like to say that it has the potential to be self-reliant, but I get scolded for that term too, because it tends to be interpreted as isolationist.

Instead, I think I'll say, an agrarian community is more resilient, and able to weather whatever ups and downs happen in life. Of course, this will never happen because human nature strives against it. But I sincerely think it's the way things were designed to be.”

Well, that is a lot for 0500 wake call and cup of coffee, to be sure.

I believe I was originally introduced to the term of Agrarianism by Herrick Kimball (Formerly of The Deliberate Agrarian, now of HeavenStretch), although I really believe I came tor understand it earlier through the writing of the sadly now departed Gene Logsdon in The Contrary Farmer.  Logsdon's book was in principle about farming and self-sufficiency, but really what it was about was way of life that both valued the land that enabled it and the small environments that it created and thrived in - the social and economic structure based on community and land that Leigh refers to.  In a way, it was a call back to the small place that I had grown up - but really a call back to the small environment that I had grown up in, the place where I felt (and continue to feel) most connected to.

Small communities can be (but are not always) interdependent and resilient.  It is not just in the sort of Hallmark-ish concept of "taking care of each other"; it is in the real human connections that come from living and doing business with people that live in the same community that you do.  One comes to value that community because in a way, through its success comes one's own success - not measured necessarily in the wealth one possesses, but in the way one feels when one is finished with the day.  One has done business - be it a retail enterprise, a farm, or some other interactive contribution - instead of just "commuting to a job".

Interdependence.  Resilience.  These are phrases we - or at least I - have heard a great deal in recent years.  The surprising thing - or perhaps not so surprising - is what this terms have come to mean.

"Interdependence", in the modern parlance, has come to mean relying on the largest administrative body possible. Communities should not be interdependent, states should be.  Interdependence is always facing up and outward, not down and inward.  Not needing "The System" is seen as rebellious and a bit;ignorant:  States need each other because that is the best and highest use of the individual, communities should not to the exclusion of the state but subservient to it.

Resilience is the same.  States should be resilient, but not communities.  Communities need to look to the state for their resilience and show there dependency on those outside, not generate their resilience internally.

Why is the concept of agrarianism - interdependent, strong communities generally (but not exclusively) practicing agriculture and the basics of living not embraced by those that mouth such words?  Because such places are not reliant on the the state that exists above them, are not "plugged in" to the much larger urban units that they are expected somehow to support and defer to.   Small communities in the modern world - agrarian communities - are places that should be dying or kitschy places where large urban entity dwellers can go to shop and stay and eat and be catered to, not communities which are not reliant on the larger whole for survival.

I perhaps sound a bit out of sorts by this disconnect between what the modern world says it wants - for example, interdependence and resilience - and what the modern world is willing to accept.  My thought is that it is - again - based on the concept that there can be only one "right" answer, the one that is authorized by Our Political And Social Betters (OPASB).  Interdependence and resilience must be exercised in the approved fashion, as specified by the experts and accepted by the social masses, not run willy-nilly by people who think they know what is best for themselves.

There is one thing I will say for state-sanctioned or state enforced interdependence and resilience:  it is a fragile thing, a tropical flower sustained in an arctic environment only by the greenhouse of the state.  Remove that greenhouse - remove the official requirement to make people be interdependent and resilient via laws - and much of those things, I posited, would blow away with the wind of reality.  These sorts of things, to last, must come to fruition organically, not enforced.

We live today in a bifurcated world:  those that are interdependent and resilient (and this is not always in the "classic" way) and those that believe they are because the state says they are. Let the requirements fall away, and I suspect that true agrarians among us will shine like stars in the sky.