Here’s Mr. Carter. I really do have a real job, and so I have only time to quote Joe on the pretentiousness of the Porchers through his reporting on what he learned at their recent conference:
For example, one professor (they were almost all professors) presented his localist bona fides by explaining how he bought his vegetables from a local food co-op. He was very proud of the fact that he paid a higher price to support a local farmer—despite the fact that the same vegetables from the same local farmer could be bought at Whole Foods. For most agrarians throughout history, food was considered fuel for survival and cheap food has made it possible for populations to grow and thrive. For the tenured agrarians, though, food is a totem, a symbol of how they are not only making the “right” consumption choices but how they are supporting the environment and the community in the process (a debatable assumption). The professor’s underlying message—though admittedly presented rather winsomely—was that if you bought bananas at Wegmans rather than whatever was in season from your local farmer, you were part of the problem.
During the question and answer session that followed, an earnest student stood up and asked how people like him—poor kids on the college’s meal plan—were expected to partake in the “luxury of buying local.” The professor’s rather dismissive and surprisingly smug answer was that the student should buy what he could afford and make his meals in his dorm room. And if the student couldn’t afford the higher prices charged by local farmers, then the right thing to do, said the professor, was to eat less food. Hunger was the price one pays for philosophic consistency. Can’t afford organic arugula? Let them eat leeks.
Other presenters denounced the current American trend (that has been going on for over 200 years) of people choosing careers that take them away from the local communities. The irony was that the laments were almost exclusively being made by college professors who had left their own local communities to take jobs in schools far away from their hometowns. (Of course they bought their veggies from a co-op so they could still consider themselves to be good “localists.”)
In America we all get to choose our traditions, so I can’t really fault folks for choosing to be traditionalists. They may be a bit preachy and lacking in self-awareness, but these types of Porchers mean well and are trying to do the right thing. They also tend to be pro-liberty. They may want you to buy your raw milk from a local farmer but they aren’t going to advocate laws to stop you from buying some pasteurized two-percent at the Wal-Mart Supercenter. They respect freedom—they just want you to use it to make the right choices. I’m fully in agreement with them on that point.
There is another brand of Porcher, though, that is less enthusiastic about giving people the freedom to make choices for themselves. They believe the flaws of democracy and capitalism are so great—individuals continuously make the wrong choices—that we need to abandon (or at least seriously curtail) both.
There is no reason that I know of, of course, that struggling college students should be made to feel guilty for eating their cheap cafeteria meals by professors bragging about their lifestyle choices. It’s not so different from Marxist professor-workers making such students feel guilty for being bourgeois exploiters. There is no reason I know available to a non-Marxist, non-materialist for attaching virtue and dignity so tightly to the mode of production. And even Dr. Pat Deneen gets nervous when those Porchers start talking present-tense monarchs and peasants and such.
In my Al Gore mode, of course, I’m offended that no one remembers my invention of “Porcher,” which in a semi-affectionate mode was an attempt to expose their ideological nerve. But I also invented “postmodern conservative.”
I agree with Joe and am not opposed to living traditional or buying local or talking distributism, it’s just that…
January 6th, 2012 | 11:20 am
I too was at the conference. While I agree that mr. Carter is being snarky, his characterization of Cloutier’s talk is justified. In fact, the weirdest thing Cloutier said was that if one were to buy socks at Walmart one would be “involved in vice.” see the video from about 9:30 to 10:30 mark. Carter is also right that there is a serious split among so called “porchers”. See for example Stegall’s talk at the same conference. I seriously doubt he and Cloutier have much if anything in common. While he also talks about sticking at home he does so from the view of hardship and manly self sufficiency, not preening moralism. He is representative of legitimate small government porcherism, but i understand from google searching he left the website in protest over the movement Carter is describing towards kookiness. Stegall also talks about the problem of mobility in much more compassionate and practical/reasonable terms. See minute mark 19:00. Also good talks at the conference from Deneen, Carlson, Kauffman, etc. Kudos to Mr. Carter for pointing some of this out.
January 6th, 2012 | 1:38 pm
What an enjoyable thread!
I do hope our friends at FPR take up the cudgel/pen and respond.
Sadly, had the intellectuals at FPR eschewed their statist-leftist-distributist-monarchial inclinations and instead moved toward a certan fundamental republicanism it is possible they would have established a national movement (Randolphian Tea Partiers?).
The problem, of course, is that any effort to construct a highly centralized general gummint quickly derails into, yet, another example of a gnostic, dreamworld, albeit a higher sort.
While Hobbes abandoned both the anthropological and soteriological to achieve his political order, FPR has ‘simplified the structure of politcs’ by obviating the experience of philosophy, the Nous, and reducing man to less than the whole in which God has made him.
Actually, FPR has done the great service of introducing a debate re: their efforts to establish ‘a civil theology beyond debate’, in their articulate defense of a Catholic/Orthodx Christianity.
January 6th, 2012 | 2:13 pm
Good comments–I agree about the manliness of Stegall and the excellence of Carlson and Deneen, whatever their limitations.
January 6th, 2012 | 3:00 pm
As Carter’s comments illustrate, enough with the food stuff already. Do buy local as it becomes passing practical for your money and time budgets, because it is a directly community-changing moral-gesture habit, much more so than the (largely Potemkin) moral-gesture habit of recycling plastics and cans. People who are ever so serious about food all the time cannot be taken seriously. They are epicureans or cranks. FPR should be wary of sponsoring such lectures, and do more to get real farmers, alternative or regular, to come talk about the practical issues they’re facing.
The real issues, going forward into serious Porcher-dom, is more resident-favoring state college policies, local taxation policies that favor long-term or meeting-attending residents, Porch-friendly (think community planning, a la Leon Krier) zoning laws that will anger libertarian types, vigorous attacks on State pre-emption of local statutory authority(the Dillon rule), extra business taxes for Walmarts, etc. It’s issues like those, where the rubber meets the road. Can’t say I’d be w/ serious Porchers on all of these issues, but they would be real issues. But let’s see them some win local offices, see them form some old-fashioned membership chapters. Or let’s at least see movement towards such goals. Put the foodie issues on the back burners.
And, stop voting Dem and continually whining about conservatives in a way that defacto encourages this. And ditch the dim not-a-dime’s-worth-of-difference talk that accompanies it.
There you have it–my quarterly love/hate effusion for and against the Porchers.
January 6th, 2012 | 3:10 pm
I characterize many of the Porchers the same way I do many of the young Evangelicals who voted for Obama in 2008 because they don’t want to be Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.
If you think that Evangelicals and traditionalist conservatives have been at times “useful idiots” for the Republican Party you may have a point. However, the way to prove that point isn’t to become “useful idiots” for the Democratic Party.
January 6th, 2012 | 3:11 pm
Well, maybe we should raise Carl’s excellent “The real issues” par. up to a separate post. Can’t do it right now, though.
January 7th, 2012 | 11:37 am
There’s another reason the Porcher foodie stuff is so annoying. Anyone who actually wants FPR-style agrarianism to politically WIN (that is, win without some Utter Collapse of Modern Liberal Civilization scenario), even at the local level, knows that it would have to do so in some POPULIST manner. Yes, a Porcher party would have in its pocket the profs, the alternative farmers, and the sundry church radicals, but it would have to also have a good deal of “red-state” (of the “you might be a red-neck” sort) appeal culturally. It would need country songs sung in its favor, and not just by beard-sportin’ bluegrass bands. It would need Williams Jennings Bryan flavor, but the present FPRers would rather tout professors who rail against cheap groceries at Wal-mart, and guilt folks into thinking they’re an intractable part of the problem, and less Christian too, if they don’t pretty radically alter their food budgets and intakes. Bryan’s cross of gold stuff was a bit much, economics-wise and acceptable-Christian-rhetoric-wise, but it did work, whereas all that foodie Porcher-ism can really offer the public is Do not nail us to a cross of inexpensive groceries!
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