So this started as a comment on Peter’s great post below but took on a life of its own. Peter humorously accuses Deneen and his fellow travelers of a kind of insincerity since they seem to take great enjoyment in the many advantages afforded us by the modernity they often disdain. I won’t go so far as to call this an hypocrisy because that really is too strong, and I really do think they’re forwarding their position with the best of intentions, and because the two Porchers I’ve met and worked with in some capacity (Deneen and Shiffman) are about as great a pair of guys as you’re ever going to encounter.
That being said, the charge of insincerity has a serious theoretical component to it since it’s related to their selective romanticization of the pre-modern localism they characteristically embrace. Porcher localism lionizes the community but tends to suppress the extent to which these communities grew out of and existed under the specter of real necessity…one lived an agrarian life not primarily because it was the best available option for achieving the Good Life or because one rationally assessed it to be the avenue most consistent with our natural capacity for virtue but rather because no other option presented itself at all.
In the Third Discourse, Descartes playfully and ironically praises the Stoic notion of “making virtue of necessity” which means engendering a salutary sense of resignation in the face of a world that resists our attempts at rational control. The clearest indication that Descartes is insincere is that he uses sickness as an example, precisely one of the conditions we must learn, through the advances of science, to resist, and finally even our very mortality. In this sense Descartes is more Machiavellian than Stoic–virtue is the imposition of one’s own forms on the opportunity provided by fortune.
I bring up Descartes because the Porcher position has an element of Stoicism to it–instead of the destructive modern posture towards nature, that same comportment that eventually corrodes the local ties that bind us together, they recommend that we inculcate a certain measure of resignation in regard to our natural limitations and live more simply. They truly and un-ironically want to make a virtue of necessity. The problem for the Porchers is that their Stoicism doesn’t seem to have a satisfying political program since no one expects the world of modern technology to recede in such a way that it reintroduces the conditions for the kind of community they pine for. They are stuck with a new necessity, the necessity of accomodating themselves to the modern world they have little choice but to inhabit, but they paradoxically confront that new necessity with a conspicuous dearth of Stoic resignation–they want to transform the world they live in, by dint of rational planning and philosophical criticism, into one that powerfully resists the typically modern hubris associated with such planning. They want to manufacture a community that originally arose organically out of the political, cultural, and socioeconomic conditions that both necessitated it and nourished it.
The fact of the matter is that Deneen can partially live the localist ideal and partially experience his cosmopolitan freedom to do quite a bit of traveling around the country and the globe (and yes, so there’s no confusion, I do envy his travel budget). His localism is much more modern than he or the Porchers admit since they have replaced the necessity that typified real, historical, pre-modern communities with a heavy does of choice–instead of making a virtue of necessity they argue for a kind of necessity that no longer tethers them, that they can freely opt of of when it suits their purposes. My tendency is to think they they interpret this localism not through the lens of those who experienced it in its original form, but for those who already live very modern lives-for avowed enemies of modern abstraction their own view of local living is remarkably abstract. My overall point is something like this: we should not confuse the philosophical argument in favor of the local community, or a very reasonable attraction to its many virtues, with either the possibility or desirableness of that arrangement for us today.
July 2nd, 2009 | 5:22 pm
So I agree that the best or least whiny Porchers would be Stoics. A stoa is pretty close to a porch. The best Stoic Porcher ever, arguably the most able and poetic of the selectively nostalgic southern agrarians, took admirable responsibility for his local community of Greenville in the Mississippi delta. He used his incredible erudition and deep imagination to elevate everything, including a great public school system where Walker Percy and Shelby Foote actually did their homework and still got Bs and Cs in English. (Although certainly a racist of sorts himself, Will did what he could–sometimes heroically–to clamp down on racism’s violent side.) He also ennobled his way of life with a beautiful way of remembering it. But he still spent as much time as he could traveling the world–with a special love for Samoa–doing God know what.
July 2nd, 2009 | 11:22 pm
The Southern Agrarian in the South Seas isn’t necessarily a refutation of anything the Front Porchers advocate. There’s nothing wrong with travelling, so long as one has a place to travel from. I think Chesterton said something to the effect that true universalism means loving every place as a specific place.
Some of the Porchers seem really to hope to “make a virtue of necessity.” Though they never get as bad as Kunstler does, it takes only a little stretch of the imagination to envision them rubbing their hands with delight as they watch the oil-based growth economy go up in smoke (or no longer give out smoke, or whatever). Maybe they could be faulted for this.
But one can recognize that premodern life emerged from necessity, and recognize (as the Porchers manifestly do) that modernity is not without its advantages, and at the same time maintain that man ought to live a certain way even if necessity no longer forces him to.
“But how can they seriously propose prohibiting abortion? Don’t they realize that the restrictions on abortion emerged in a society where abortion was unsafe and where women were dealt with as property? Though one can conceive of an abstract argument in favor of a more fertile society, we have to admit that modern medicine has made abortion safe, and that legal abortion followed along in the wake of recognitions of the dignity of women. Isn’t it a bit paradoxical to argue against abortion, when one nevertheless visits the doctor and refrains from beating one’s wife?”
July 3rd, 2009 | 12:04 am
There’s necessity and there’s necessity. So I’ll say in Pat’s defense that he does talk about necessity (i.e. oil depletion) that may (if it isn’t doing so already) push us back in a more local-economy direction. Maybe you don’t agree, but there it is.
And as for the observation “one lived an agrarian life not primarily because it was the best available option for achieving the Good Life or because one rationally assessed it to be the avenue most consistent with our natural capacity for virtue,” I guess I can be satisfied to be in the company of Aristotle in at least recommending the virtues and goods sustained by agrarian life and household production over the deformations of the soul that come with the measurement of all value in money. I hear Athens was a pretty lively commercial center, so Aristotle was apparently a romantic rather than a realist. But then Aristotle was a rootless cosmopolitan hypocrite too, I guess.
Oh, and, in the words of the president I am said to adore: “Make no mistake,” I think you’re pretty swell too Ivan.
July 3rd, 2009 | 9:08 am
I doubt the real human choice is farming vs. turning even moment of life over to measurable productivity, Russell Kirk, for example, did neither. Neither did Aristotle or Socrates or Jesus or Walker Percy etc. etc. Neither did the guy from the neighborhood in Pittsburgh who worked in the mill or the southern man who hunts, fights, fishes, and criticizes just as has a mind after working pretty hard at his fairly boring job for something like 40 hours a week. Those guys have more room for leisure and are less tied to drudgery that overwhelming majority of those who actually farmed for a living in the past (And of course Plato and Aristotle were fair and balanced, seeing that Athens was both somewhat hard on virtue and very good for philosophy–that’s one big reason why Socrates was such a stay-at-home in the city and even chose death over exile. That’s one reason why so many bohemians–localist, leftist, and localist/leftist–live in cities and university towns–like the aptly named Athens, GA. There is a Sparta, GA–have any of you been there? It could use a Wal-Mart, among other things.)
Now that technology makes it easy to chose abortion, we need an argument against it. But of course, there is one, and I predict it will eventually carry the day. It’s tough these days to find a moral standard above health and safety, precisely because we’re so healthy and safe. But, as Solzhenitsyn writes, we should stop whining and howling like existentialists and be grateful for this challenge for our free will, as well as for our freedom, prosperity, and all that.
Of course I do worry that our bourgeois bohemians are too bourgeois and not really bohemian, that our professors are too careerist, and all that. But the reasons for their being too bourgeois have little to do with them not farming. I don think that even some of the theoretical localists are too bourgeois in their own way, by looking for too much meaning in the ordinary and surrendering too much spontaneity, by theorizing about being on the Porch rather than just being there.
July 3rd, 2009 | 9:38 am
Mark: I don’t see how this answers Ivan’s point. What was possible for Aristotle and others in his age, I think you’ll agree, is not the same as what’s possible for us. So we’re left with an impressive philosophical argument. And a big question about how we ought to respond.
You joke that Aristotle was a hypocrite, presumably because we’re supposed to reject this as absurd. But Aristotle’s career shows traces of the same tension we’re discussing: theoretical approval for agrarian life and localized politics; practical engagement with City and Empire. So I don’t think its so easy to take comfort in his example. Aristotle was more like Deneen than Wendell Berry.
Finally, you’re right that there’s necessity and necessity. High gas prices are not necessity: and I’ve lived in Europe and paid 4 euro a liter.
July 3rd, 2009 | 10:14 am
Sam, very pithy and on the money comment. I apologize for my typos above. I really can’t read the screen. In response to an inquiring mind: Sparta, GA is the county seat of Hancock County, has about 1200 people, and the nearest Wal-Mart is down the road maybe about 30 miles in Milledgeville (the original capital of Georgia and Flannery O’Connor’s legendary “place”–although she wasn’t born there, moved there out of necessity having to do with the sickness and death of her dad, moved away to the north for artistic reasons and then was stuck with moving back due to her debilitating and eventually fatal illness. She could write about Georgians with the necessary affection and detachment, as she could about the very progressive education she got in high school and college in GA public schools). Sparta, GA is not that far from Athens, GA, and the few with the requisite brains and ambition in Sparta are always anxious to make the move.
July 3rd, 2009 | 10:17 am
[...] Lord, blogging is bad for the soul. That is a confession, not a violation of the Third Commandment, for those of you keeping [...]
July 3rd, 2009 | 6:02 pm
Yes, Aristotle is a bad example since he appreciated both the virtues and very real vices of localism and while he understood it to be the basis of the best political arrangement he didn’t seem to think it was the path to the best life simply. Presumably, this is why he didn’t pursue it himself.
July 3rd, 2009 | 8:45 pm
“Aristotle was more like Deneen than Wendell Berry.”
“Aristotle is a bad example since he appreciated both the virtues and very real vices of localism and while he understood it to be the basis of the best political arrangement he didn’t seem to think it was the path to the best life simply. Presumably, this is why he didn’t pursue it himself.”
These are exactly the reasons why Aristotle is a good example, if you’re criticizing a position that argues that an agrarian life is desirable for social health by charging that the arguers are not living what they advocate.
And while I quite agree with Sam that what was possible for Aristotle is not possible for us, that does not touch the question whether Aristotle was simply right. If my position is that what was possible for Aristotle (or for some cities in Aristotle’s time) is closer to what is good simply, it raises a question about the character of practical reason and the public expression of it that, I think, underlies our disagreements. I contend that practical reason involves recognizing the human good simply, evaluating the possibilities on the ground for us here and now for approximating it, looking at all the tradeoffs, and advocating what is most salutary. Perhaps this is a difference between Aristotelianism and Burkeanism: Burke is so worried about the appeal to nature by a distorted kind of rationalism that he insists on sticking close to where we are and not rocking the boat with “what is good simply.” Curiously, despite Strauss’ criticisms of Burke, his de-natured Aristotelian practical wisdom ends up more Burkean than Aristotelian. So the charge of capitulating to history works both ways in this argument; I’m appealing to nature.
I see myself as trying to work out an articulation of what is good simply and a critique of what stands in the way of recognizing it. I am not too worried about agrarian localism spawning a totalitarian ideological movement in America, but if you want to convince me I should be, I’ll be much more circumspect and esoteric about discussing its merits.
July 4th, 2009 | 10:57 am
Reading the posts between POMO Cons and Front Porchers has reminded me of Dinesh D’Souza’s views on the debate over pre-modern v. modern ways of life; however when he usually discusses pre-modern views, he is looking at Eastern (Middle East and India) and not Western practices.
Having grown up in India, D’Souza is well acquainted with Front Porch values like localism and tradition. But he is not sanguine about it:
“If I had remained in India, I would probably have lived my entire existence within a one-mile radius of where I was born. I would undoubtedly have married a woman of my identical religious, socioeconomic, and cultural background. I would almost certainly have become a medical doctor, an engineer, or software programmer….I would have a whole set of opinions that could be predicted in advance; indeed, they would not be very different from what my father believed, or his father before him. In sum, my destiny would to a large degree have been given to me.”
-What’s So Great About America p. 80
It was only in Modern America that D’Souza could have discovered his interest in ideas. And even if Front Porchers disagree with his ideas, surely they can agree the world is a better off with D’Souza as a pundit rather than a programmer.
The downside about all pre-modern living, Eastern or Western, is how stifling they all are. Porches have their place, but they can become prisons.
July 4th, 2009 | 2:46 pm
Porches…can become prisons!
July 4th, 2009 | 11:57 pm
Ivan,
I’m glad you can consider me to be a great guy in spite of my insincerity, if not hypocrisy. That’s really big of you. Thanks.
But, maybe I can allay any residual misgivings you may have about my bad character. While there are some on the Front Porch who can submit the examples of their lives as more closely and personally approximating what a life lived more locally would look like (though I think we all strive to make contributions, as circumstance allows), I think it can be safely said that everyone writing on the Porch does not believe that the force of personal example suffices. If that were so, I seriously doubt anyone would be much bothered to write at all. I dare say, I know more than a few such personal exemplars who have no interest or truck with reading or writing blogs. And, I sincerely respect those men and women.
The decision to write on behalf of a different way involves a different set of commitments. I think we all share the view that any change must involve attention to, and active argument against, greater systemic features that orient much of modern life toward deracination, placelessness, hyper-mobility, and an ethic that sees the world as a thing for our use and pleasure. The several of us came together to help each other understand, and we hoped, to help others see more clearly, some of those systemic features.
Speaking for myself, while I think I advance an argument that is radical (in the original meaning of that term), I don’t propose revolutionary steps to attain that end. Many intermediary steps had to be taken to get us where we are today, and what is needed are a set of incremental changes to move us away from our current trajectory. What should be sought are slight changes in direction that will, over time, lead us to a very different place than the direction of our current trajectory. More important than some quixotic “perfect” and exemplary life, we need to understand how we have gotten here, and explore steps that might move us elsewhere. To do that, yes, I need to think, write and speak with others. I even speak with people who are interested in hearing what I have to say who are in other places, even if that means travelling to meet them. Amazingly, there seem to be more than a few. I can at least allay your covetousness toward my purportedly massive travel budget – I generally only travel to places where I’m invited, which I don’t think officially qualifies as evangelization. But, I do think that the idea that someone who travels to discuss these issues means that they are a “cosmopolitan” is a pretty silly suggestion, kind of below you.
As for your “theoretical point” – I think it’s less me that you accuse of insincerity than Aristotle, along with most other pre-modern thinkers. You’ll notice that most of them – Greek, Christian and otherwise – spoke and wrote often on behalf of virtue. However, you contend that they themselves lived in a time, and wrote for an audience which had “no other option” other than abject poverty and brute necessity. Unlike us, they had no real choices – they were unfree. If that’s the case, then pre-modern arguments on behalf of virtue were actually a kind of rationalization of necessity, window dressing for an optionless world. According to your argument, pre-modern philosophy was a crock, and its thinkers argued in bad faith. Philosophers like Aristotle or Aquinas were dressing up hard necessity by making their readers think they were virtuous, when in fact they were only poor and optionless serfs.
Or is it possible that the force of those arguments were instrumental in fostering an alternative to many of the conditions we term “modernity”? That what you are calling “optionless” pre-modernity might, in fact, have itself been an option?
I don’t think there’s anything in what’s been argued by me and my colleagues that suggests “resignation” to necessity. Rather, what I think is being advanced is the active and engaged effort to judge what comports best with human nature and the natural world. This is not a matter of resignation, but a supreme kind of engagement – one that is difficult, not automatic or instinctive, but requiring great stores of experience, prudence and practical wisdom. We have largely lost that capacity largely by dint of ignoring both the guidance of the natural world and of our own human nature – rather than engaging in a conversation, our relationship to nature is totalitarian.
I would submit that if there is Stoicism to be found anywhere, it is exhibited on this side of the blogosphere (it would explain why it’s an attractive course offering for some), particularly manifested in the view that we’re stuck with the world as it is, shaped by forces that are outside any human control, and so we’re going to have to make the best of it through a kind of ironic detachment from the world – even as we submit to what we regard as its ultimate technocratic, globalist trajectory, all the while content that some residual evidence of our humanity will kick in eventually. We’ll weather this primarily through an individual attitude of detachment and breezy nonchalance, convinced of being untouched by its corruptions by dint of our hyper-consciousness. That’s pretty resigned, if you ask me. Which is fine. But there is real work to be done, and it’s time to move on.
July 5th, 2009 | 12:25 pm
Pat,
Well, I gotta say, that is a pretty unfriendly and ungenerous moment in an otherwise light hearted exhange. So for example, I thought the “cosmopolitan” remark that is “below me” was pretty obviously done tongue in cheek.Maybe I should point out that I grew up in NYC, never owned land or worked on it, never actually mowed a lawn, am writing this entire comment on a blackberry poolside witn a pretty pricey imported beer next to me.In other words, that’s a charge I always throw about playfully when ad hominem..I have a less playful critique of theoretical cosmopolitanism in the new Perspectives, within a discussion of Delsol, if anyone is interested.
In fact, I think I went out of my way to draw a theoretical critique out of Peter’s obviously humorous charges of insincerity. My point is that I think the Porcher crowd misunderstands something about their own position not that they’re hypocrites. Of course, I could be wrong about this, and Lord knows it wouldn’t be the first time, but its still, behind the jokes, a theoretical criticism which is what I think we do for a living. So why the hasty indignation, which I know for sure is below you? If I offended you I sure didn’t mean to and feel bad about doing it.
That all being said, I still think that what counts as localism today would have to be something very different, maybe decisively so, from what it used to mean-technology, the gift and curse of superabundant leisure, and a broadening of our perspectives not to mention the fact of great advances in transportation technology, make recapturing those conditions problematic. But there’s plenty of room for disagreement here not to mention agreement. If I see you at APSA I’ll buy you a beer and we can hash it out more-you can even pick a domestic one.
July 5th, 2009 | 12:41 pm
If Pat picks a domestic beer, it’ll have to be Canadian (I won’t start in on the bit of Canada envy displayed on the Porcher site and nicely dealt with by Sam above). I know Pat was for keeping in the APSA in the real America. For the record, I never meant insincere–but (as a good social scientist) unempirical. A lot of Porcherism is literary politics, with the typical poet’s shaky grasp of the real. Not all of it, of course–and I certainly want to exempt Caleb (who actually is from and still lives in the middle of nowhere in Kansas). I recently saw the musical JERSEY BOYS–which featured, for once, Broadway music I could stand [nothing is more misery producing than Les Mis]. The narrator says that the music of Frankie Valli was for the real America in real jobs and doing their real duties to God (well, maybe pushing it there) and country. Can the localists muster a literary defense of Frankie Valli and THE FOUR SEASONS–or is that too good to be true?
July 5th, 2009 | 2:11 pm
And me thinking the contretemps had all died away. Well, no actually, and it seems with a little more fire than smoke this time.
Deneen’s First Corps steals a march and strikes Kenneally’s flank; Lawler come up in support. Oh yes I would really like to be a fly on the wall during the APSA meeting this year!
“Can the localists muster a literary defense of Frankie Valli and THE FOUR SEASONS–or is that too good to be true?”
I don’t know, but I know they can for the immortal Les Cooper, the Harlem recording artist who wrote of the greatest R&B instrumental of all time, Wiggle Wobble! God bless you Les!
July 6th, 2009 | 4:08 pm
Bob, sounds like you have good taste in music!
Pat, you are (again!) unnecessarily thin-skinned, as I’m sure you realize…but I think your response to Ivan, along w/ Mark’s, is pretty much right. (And to all and sundry, I really don’t think “lifestyle hypocrisy” charges, humorous or not, amount to much, or at least advance our discussions very much. And likewise, I think too much has been made of personal aesthetic choices. I mean, who can really give a shit about how the Jersey Boys fits or doesn’t with the FPR ethos?) You’re right that the FPR project, whatever it is, has to be about long-term goals, and about moving forward from where we are. Realism about one’s interconnection to the global market economy in the meantime is necessary, but so is continual opposition to resigned acceptance of market “imperatives.” For that reason I thought Ivan’s final sentence highly questionable, and fatal for any Pomocon/FPR dialogue: “we should not confuse the philosophical argument in favor of the local community, or a very reasonable attraction to its many virtues, with either the possibility or desirableness of that arrangement for us today.” Bah. It depends on how Ivan is defining “local community,” but against this resignation I join Mr. T. (Tocqueville) and the A-Team (Aristotelians) in insisting upon the greater naturality and liberty of township/polis life, and thus upon our unavoidable duty to cultivate whatever qualities and institutional features of that life that we can in our circumstances.
Where do the Porchers want to go? Or where should they? Well, it would seem to me the most important sentences in Wendell Berry are the following: 1) “The destruction of the community begins when its economy is made–not DEPENDENT(for no community has ever been entirely independent)–but SUBJECT to a larger external economy.” 2) “…if you are dependent on people who do not know you, who control the value of your necessities, you are not free, and you are not safe.” (Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, pp. 126-128; yeah, I notice the difficulty with “dependence” therein) Hence, the Porchers should want to move from the current system to one in which a) the HABITS and BELIEFS of certain Porcher-influenced or protected communities, and b) hard-fought-for LEGISLATIVE prerogatives/jurisdictions of these same communities, vis-a-vis national(esp. judicial) and state authority allow first, a much larger degree of economic self-regulation than is now possible, and second, a much larger degree of community-adopted morals legislation than is now possible. This goal assumes that the larger tech-fueled market system, so curtailed and hopefully subjected to greater national environmental regulation, nonetheless chugs along. It does not assume “post-capitalism.” Since the ability of these Porcher-quality communities to even be able to legally act upon their Porcher beliefs demands that big govt. advocates, big corporate-freedom advocates, and big-on-autonomy civil liberty advocates be forced to accept a much more variegated legal and institutional environment, this would require that the Porchers’ promotion of greater federalism (at all levels), and simpler living had won certain nation-wide political victories.
Well, all the various difficulties in even getting to such a political place and then maintaining it would have to be thought through. And perhaps the difficulties do amount to sheer impossibility, or to chances pretty near impossibility. But the menu of “in-between” modernity-mitigating possibilites that might be there if genuinely pursued politically and legally ought not to be sniffed at, least of all by real conservatives.
So Ivan is right to point out that the agricultural nature of the older localities was to a large extent forced upon them by necessity, but wrong to say that settles the question of the Porcher desire to re-empower community-friendly aspects of our politics and political economy.
That said, I’ve made clear elsewhere, I agree with Peter that “literary politics,” (and its Christianity-influenced little-brother of too much faith in “inner-change” via “restorative ethical habits” adopted person-by-person) is a serious temptation for the Porchers.
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