Liberalism and the Land

As a minor contribution to First Things’  ongoing efforts to define liberalism (along with its “pre-,” “non-,” and “post-” varieties), it may be worth examining a passage from Spengler (the original, not the once-anonymous but also mighty David P. Goldman). Whatever one thinks of the man’s broader project—and there is plenty to object to—it is difficult to deny that he lands quite a number of poetic blows on modernity and liberalism’s weakest spots. In one particularly striking passage, he defines liberalism as: “freedom from the restrictions of the soil-bound life, be these privileges, forms, or feelings — freedom of the intellect for every kind of criticism, freedom of money for every kind of business. But both, too, unhesitatingly aim at . . . domination.”

To be sure, this is a polemical assertion—a catchphrase, really—and it’s woefully inadequate as far as precise definitions go. Its major fault is that it ignores the fact that liberalism arose in a specific historical framework, in response to both political and cultural shifts in Europe (the Reformation, the Wars of Religion, and the late-Medieval world order in general). Most crucially, it neglects to mention the Christian presuppositions that undergird liberalism, especially its notions of universal moral imperatives and the essential equality of all human beings simply by virtue of their existence. Liberalism may have secularized these assumptions or taken them far from their original purpose in making them political weapons, but their framework is ultimately inconceivable without the Gospel message. Though it is certainly possible to speak of democratic arrangements in Athens or the rise of a middle class in ancient Egypt, it does not make sense to employ the term “ancient Greek liberalism” or “Egyptian liberalism.” The fullness of this term generally applies to cultures with Judeo-Christian, or post-Christian, assumptions.

Still, this maxim offers something critical, something often ignored by defenders of liberalism and conservative ‘purifiers’ of it alike. It suggests that a living connection to the land—and, by extension, to nature—is more than a (pardon the terrible pun) ‘grounding element’ for a civilization. A connection to the land is, to some extent, not merely an anchoring but an unravelling element; a force which reins in some of liberalism’s tendencies by jettisoning them. And it implies that, whenever political or cultural life moves into a cosmopolitan theater, it enters fundamentally different circumstances under which it cannot but mutate.

Concerns in this vein have of course appeared many times in our own nation’s history, from Jefferson’s idealized republic of yeoman farmers to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ southern agrarian tradition. Today, though, it is ironic that most of the concern for not only natural preservation but related (and arguably more relevant) issues like sustainable farming or small-scale economics are dismissed as the province of Vermont vegans. And right-wingers today are mostly inevitably ‘urban conservatives,’ despite their frequent soliloquies for small-town America. But if Spengler’s quip has at least a kernal of truth to it, it suggests that reconsidering this relationship will be vital to any post-liberal political theory, especially ones interested in resisting late-liberal urges to globalize ever-larger swaths of society as a way of covering up for centralization’s previous disappointments.

Calling for ‘a return to foundations’ can be immensely helpful in pointing out and even reigning in the worst aspects of liberalism, but these solutions can also slip into abstraction, becoming frustrated gestures at a hazy and diffuse dilemma. A more physical, sacramental approach—and one that would specifically begin with rethinking our relationship to nature and the ground we tread upon—should be considered. This is hardly to suggest that everyone must open a farm (although perhaps there’s something to be said for the ever-more-visible urban gardening movement), or that our society had better embrace radical policy shifts  all at once or else!  But it does seem to imply, at the very least, that a serious exploration of postliberal possibilities means a reopening of life outside the theater of the gigantic and a recovery of the (metaphorical but also literal) soil in which our civilization germinated.