Ted McAllister has posted my favorite porcher comment so far. The true conservative, in our day and age, defends the bohemian against bourgeois careerism and slouching toward a meritocracy based on the productivity that comes from being smart, pretty, pleasing, and industrious–as opposed to being virtuous or just in love with life. So we conservatives unite against the bourgeois bohemian described by David Brooks. In the Bobo’s life, bourgeois trumps bohemian at every turn. And we admire Russell Kirk for having been a bohemian Tory, which means we can’t help but also have some reservations about his competence or prudence. We even admire BEATNIKS–such as Maynard G. Krebs–who graced the fifties and but were commodified by the late sixties. That also means we don’t like Red Tories or anyone who takes the colors red or green too seriously. Ted shows us the real issues that surround being a leftover in a world otherwise so well described by modern science. He could be clearer that our alienation–what ails us as persons–couldn’t be cured by going back to the farm.
Saturday, August 1, 2009, 12:31 PM
August 1st, 2009 | 4:43 pm
“He could be clearer that our alienation–what ails us as persons–couldn’t be cured by going back to the farm.”
Well, I don’t know?
Voegelin argues that ‘alienation’ is a mood of existence that is the result of “…hypostates of the poles of existential tension.” He further argues that the “world” we experience under this condition is “dissociated” under the pressure of alienation into a separation of “this world” and the “other world,” where we exist in the tension between the two, between the world of time and the timeless.
If “alienation” is the result of the breakdown of order in modernity (as in every era) and Voegelin identify’s one element as “the dissolution of traditional economic and social forms through the rise of industrial society, and the global wars (and we might now include globalization and the collapse (in the U.S.A.) of industrial society) then, is it not possible that a return to “the farm” represents our attempt to recover order in our existence?
I think that it is but one problem that rears its ugly head is gnosticism which is, Voegelin claims, strongly “associated” with the symbols of alienation.
However, I now know why I always liked Maynard, but not as much as Thelia Menninger.
August 1st, 2009 | 4:56 pm
Bob, Back to the farm! comes, I think, from a desire to recover order, but some of our alienation is natural. And so any and all “order in history” talk might have the tendency to overrate any and all human order. (When I read summaries of Voegelin likes yours, it occurs to me that Eric ain’t too Christian.) For Walker Percy, being “lost in the cosmos” can’t truthfully be cured by being too at home in history, but by being at home with our [natural] homelessness. I’m not saying, of course, that some times and places aren’t more ordered or homey than others. I really and truly don’t think industrial society is collapsing, as do you very late Marxists. I don’t even think our society is properly described as industrial–as in the industrial vs agrarian dichotomy. Well, it’s still normal and healthy to like both Maynard and Thelia–and to be somewhat repulsed by both Dobie and Zelda, although for different reasons, of course.
August 1st, 2009 | 7:43 pm
It seems to me that Bohemian and Red Tories would be quite inclined to like each other…..or, at the very least, they would share the strong common ground of an imaginative Anglophilia…..
August 1st, 2009 | 8:37 pm
Well there’s a perverse or prideful inclination toward self-sufficiency on and off the farm, isn’t there — and, in the other direction, ditto the bourgeois and the bohemian visions of universality. Half the joy of soil and place is an aristocratic and ultimately ruthless satisfaction — including that of pedigree — of distinguishing, stably AND durably, between MINE and THINE. The other half of course is rather anti-individual and pro-social; we codependent involuntary members of humanity can run from our species being but not hide, so pity — ‘rooted’ in our collective dependence upon not only one another but the good earth — becomes a shining virtue whether arising from the natural world or descending from the supernatural heavens (or both). So much for farm-friendlies. Farm-skeptics lodge complaints on both sides of the ledger: the aristocratic individuality of stoic self-sufficiency (which turns out not to be so self-sufficient after all when it secures the trappings of nobility, as our Fathers of Manumission discovered) is done for, replaced by the great liberated community visible from sea to shining sea in Whitman’s democratic vistas. But on the other hand the communal trudge and drudge and lowering of expectations captured by the view that humans are codependent rational animals is left behind by the possibilities of free thought, free association, and free enterprise — things which are not just for libertarians, and can be trusted to upright people stably AND durably so long as we cultivate a bit of effort and moderation.
The challenge to this last point, I take it, is really NOT that the logic of capitalism drives everyone to insanely abandon moderation, although, as Tocqueville notes, money really does matter more in democratic times (no matter how picturesque). The challenge is that something in the character of life off the farm puts us into a shared frame of being, and then consciousness, in which OUR relationships spiral away from moderation. Not poverty and riches but pride and envy condition the possibilities of happiness and unhappiness in our day and age. Farm life promises to educate both individual and social life; but those skeptical of these claims also promise to do the same only better. The political question pertains to the comprehensiveness of farm life and of the life proposed by its critics. Ultimately what troubles the critics is the creeping comprehensiveness of the farm. The alternative, as we know well from the various totalistic strains of cosmopolitanism floating about, can also slouch toward comprehensiveness and closed finitude; but madness first sets in with the turn to bad infinity. A people obsessed with the fairy kingdom of ‘full individuality’ will fall into the arms of the most all-encompassing of nursery states — ‘good government’, and ‘thuruh’ — faster than a people obsessed with rational control will inspire mass eccentricity and the mania for multiplicity, acting, and appearances. (I wouldn’t want to run in either race, of course.) I think finally the ‘fun’ of conservatism is it never asks to take over the world, just to have its plot in what perpetuity it can win as a more-closed-than-not system. Friends of the farm are under great pressure in democratic times, however, to settle for this without feeling guilty about it; in times like these, the conservative claim has always the whiff of aristocratic aestheticism with a bad conscience, and if there’s one thing the aristocrat lacks it’s a bad conscience about his STYLE — which is even more different from OUR style than Burke’s drapery was from Wilde’s drapes. Of course, a certain variety of farm critic has some sympathy for this very tendency, perhaps most of all: behold the Hamptons. And then there’s another kind of more spiritually snobbish farm critic who fantasizes over a Hamptons without the nouveau riche…and then of a country big and turgid enough to afford any energetic young man with a ‘green breast’ of his own. Fitzgerald, and, following him, Hunter S. Thompson, are models to my mind of the kind of farm-feeling that could, so crazily it just might work, erase some of the more awkward boundaries between the pomocon and the porch.
N.B. Obviously this has been written in one quick stretch with no time to go back and read, so maybe I can find the time to make a proper post of it soon.
August 1st, 2009 | 9:22 pm
Peter and everyone: those that will participate in a church service or Mass tomorrow, if you would remember my wife, Martha (her eyesight) in prayer I’d be truly appreciative.
First Prof. Wilson says I’m a Jacobin (though I did charge him with being a socialist-democrat first, so had it coming!) and now, “late Marxist!” which I ain’t touchin’ with a ten-foot pole!
In reading some things by EV’s students and in the way he wrote of the Christ, I’m almost positive that he died in the bosom of the Lord.
I’m not sure of how the differentiation of “order of history” and “order of man” is done; ain’t smart enough, I need someone to explain it!
All I’m saying is predicated on a post-”fall” condition where Schelling posited that the creation itself represented the “fall” as a centrifugal act, as the Absolute “Idea” becomes differentiated on the level of phenomenon. Also, the return to God is interpreted by Schelling as a “centripetal movement.”
Given the “fall” man is, in this world, naturally alienated-he is seeking, wondering, searching for the pre-fall condition, perfection in God.
“History is an epic,” Herr Schelling wrote, “composed in the mind of God. Its two main parts are: first, that which depicts the departure of humanity from its centre up to its furthest point of alienation from this centre, and, secondly, that which depicts the return.”
Is TECHNOS the devil’s tool; the great distraction that inhibits man from seeking, wondering, searching, for the centripetal return?
The boys at FPR might think it is.
August 2nd, 2009 | 8:20 am
Thanks to James P for waxing way existential on the farm. For myself, I’m not particularly pro- or anti-farm. I just don’t want the farm overrated as a vehicle for personal or political reform. JP is certainly rightly to remind us that our first agrarian–Thomas Jefferson–was actually imagining plantation life. And I’m sure it’s true that Bohemian and Red Tories find much in common in their Anglophile imaginations. But I was thinking about them from a non-Tory perspective. Tories, particularly Canadian Tories, are too anti-American (even anti-Kansan) for me, and I’m too full of imagined memories of my oppressed Irish, Catholic ancestors to be an Anglophile (I do love the partisan of American and Irish liberation Burke.)
August 3rd, 2009 | 2:08 am
Thanks to Mr Lawler for pointing out this wonderful essay by Mr McCallister (who is no slouch in deep writing on American politics).
That being said, I must demur in this. Mr McAllister’s version of the non-abstract is as abstract as the abstract. It is all fine to speak in Burkean and more honestly Kirkean fashion of the dangers of abstraction, but one never looks at the ways in which abstraction has “colonized” (to use a trope from the Frankfurt School of all places) ordinary day to day life. His version of the particular is almost as abstract as Robespierre. Okay I too exaggererate, but like Rod Dreher, this particularity that Mr. McAllister speaks of only relates to a particular few when it comes to the life that any one of us lives. It is fine to speak of the local traditions in American politics, but there is no particular in the particular. It’s all abstract. Is McAllister willing to write off the rest of humanity as beasts unless they adhere to his version of humanity? Of course not, but then is Rod Dreher’s version of life the only life to be led in an ordinary way? Peter Lawler tries to defend the other side of ordinary, as it were.
Unlike the Frankfurt School I’m here to defend the ordinary life. It is not a life of false consciousness–with its racism, bigotry, and stupidity. The ordinary life is as rich as Kirk says it is–and as bohemian–but it is also as addled with drugs and violence and for lack of a better word “bigotry” as Kirk would want to avoid and as its most adamant critics would want to emphasize. In order to not be abstract, I would say that one must admit that cocaine and murder (while rarer) should be spoken of in the same breath as piety and loyalty. And yes, sometimes the “people” say things about “jewing you down.” I hate all this.
But I refuse to lie about all this. Nonetheless, the bigger lie is the lie that belies all this. The technocratic future that says we can overcome all differences in the interface of an Ipod. This is a bigger lie–especially when it is applied to politics and assumes that techno-language in its pragmatic necessity will overcome stupid prejudice. I don’t believe it.
But I do believe that humans are better that they appear, and that they can be turned–whatever that means.
I want to overcome stupid prejudice–that is part of my mission in teaching–but I definitely don’t think that everyone having internet access will solve this. It requires good old fashioned education. Not teaching of values, but teaching of character.
August 3rd, 2009 | 12:34 pm
I for one very much appreciate Peter’s occasional doses of reality re farming et al. in these discussions. Anti-capitalism/collusion arguments re farming, for example, are often spouted off without much in the way of practical, factual opposition. I have rarely heard both sides on such issues speaking together in a frank, goodhearted manner, which is just part of the reason this blog is wonderful. Anyhow, on the topic of farming, I’d like to hear more answers to objections raised by articles like this one:
http://www.american.com/archive/2009/july/the-omnivore2019s-delusion-against-the-agri-intellectuals
Which contains snippets like this:
Farming has always been messy and painful, and bloody and dirty. It still is. This is something the critics of industrial farming never seem to understand.
Critics of “industrial farming” spend most of their time concerned with the processes by which food is raised. This is because the results of organic production are so, well, troublesome. With the subtraction of every “unnatural” additive, molds, fungus, and bugs increase. Since it is difficult to sell a religion with so many readily quantifiable bad results, the trusty family farmer has to be thrown into the breach, saving the whole organic movement by his saintly presence, chewing on his straw, plodding along, at one with his environment, his community, his neighborhood. Except that some of the largest farms in the country are organic—and are giant organizations dependent upon lots of hired stoop labor doing the most backbreaking of tasks in order to save the sensitive conscience of my fellow passenger the merest whiff of pesticide contamination. They do not spend much time talking about that at the Whole Foods store.
August 3rd, 2009 | 1:21 pm
And lest I be accused of taking the thread off course, the idea that what alienates us can be taken care of by becoming farmers, etc., suggests that what ails us is less in the realm of ideas and more in the realm of lifestyle or material setting and our instinctive reaction to it. This begs the question. If a part of the problem is endemic to human nature, as Peter preaches, and this alienation is exacerbated by ideas/error-ridden philosophies, then it is clear that going to the farm isn’t going to completely address the core issues. Do the corrupt portions of modern ways of life cause corrupt ideas or do corrupt ideas cause the corrupt portions of the modern way of life? Generally speaking, and assuming one isn’t romanticizing a way of life that one doesn’t know from actual experience, I think it is true that farming puts one in touch with nature in a realistic way (see the article above-heh), and modern society could use a dose of this, but this is a long way from the extremes to which some people go.
If you want to start a new tradition, and rely on tradition over “abstractions”, you can’t jolly well get out of arguing rationally with abstract ideas about why your suggested tradition ought to become such. As Aristotle is said to have asserted, either way one must philosophize. So let the philosophizing continue!
I write as one who is good friends with many folks of Front Porcher spirit, and husband of one who tends an organic garden. I am amazed at how the mere mention of the fact we made our own Maple syrup last year from the Maple trees in our yard starts so many souls all atwitter these days. “So authentic!” Well, I guess so. I would love to write (or read someone better at it than me) an essay on human nature and the authenticity of the un-authentic and unauthentic authenticity.
August 4th, 2009 | 8:54 am
John and Matthew–Eloquent and detailed arguments for the reality of ordinary life and against the delusions of agri-intellectuals. What could be better? Thanks a lot. Let the philosophizing continue!
August 4th, 2009 | 10:04 am
Peter, you are like a Socrates to a gaggle of Platos and Aristotles….them Greeks! And, BTW I own a copy of the original Whole Earth Catalogue and the first copy of Mr. Schuttlesworth’s Morther Earth News…so there!
“don’t it always seem to go
that you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone
take paradise, put up a parking lot!”
August 4th, 2009 | 11:17 am
There you porches go again, Bob: Thinking the fundamental human alternatives are paradise and parking lot. But who can’t love Joni Mitchell? And of course that catchy tune had an excellent country cover, which caused its message to resonate with me again more deeply. And you do know I’m for ordinary environmentalism, just not the pretentious kind?
August 4th, 2009 | 12:32 pm
Yes, yes, always liked Joni but it was socialist Joan that flipped my switch. What a voice, the visage of an angel, and just an absolute commie!
I’m comentin’ PoMoCon over at FPR…see if I can rile up a few fellows.
I had a feeling you were enviro-country. Next thing you know you’ll be interviewed on Hannity!
I do miss you on the Bio-ethics comittee!
August 4th, 2009 | 6:03 pm
I just reread my essay to find out what people were talking about. I finally deduced that this conversation about agriculture, life on the farm, and so forth, has nothing to do with my essay but with some longstanding debate between different intellectual clans. My essay was about the way our language had become too abstract and simplified and that we were losing our capacity to deliberate together or even to see things that a more differentiated language might expose.
I explored the alienation that is part of the human condition (on this I’ve long been influenced by Peter) and I never even hinted that going to the farm was the answer to this problem, so called. I employed a quotation from Lippmann that invoked the life of the village rather than the life of the modern cosmopolitan, but that was brief and not meant to provide a foundation for a neo-agrarianism. Peter, I guess, wanted me to more expressly claim that going back to the farm was not the proper response, but since I never considered that as a possibility, I didn’t get the point. At any rate, however fascinating the debate between different camps on the virtue of life on the farm, it is not my debate. I will address related themes next month, but not as part of this debate primarily.
August 5th, 2009 | 8:47 am
Ted’s confusion–expressed by the question “What does the bleepin’ farm have to do with it?”–shows that we’re in deep agreement and that he’s a card-carrying postmodern conservative. I will say something about the techno-language issue, which is a lot more real–as soon as I can. My apologies for using his post to make a point that’s not his own.
August 5th, 2009 | 11:41 am
I am a conservative, which means that I carry no card. I do, however, have drinks with agreeably disagreeable friends.
August 5th, 2009 | 2:27 pm
[...] you really should read the comments to the article as well as reading the article. Peter Lawler pops up and directs us to his post at PomoCon: The true conservative, in our day and age, defends [...]
July 11th, 2011 | 12:36 pm
J5KhYm lykcxozphbry, [url=http://lebbbgokdaqc.com/]lebbbgokdaqc[/url], [link=http://dntuvdcuglvg.com/]dntuvdcuglvg[/link], http://thcjkpqwcsck.com/
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact