Like most important things in life, there’s a relevant Warren Zevon song for this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUyNBEzJTNE

Sorry for my lack of manners. I was more affected by Jeffrey’s hyperbole. Your terminology just got me to thinking.

Though I’m not a Catholic I must say that I greatly appreciate those words of St. Jean. Thanks for sharing them.

As part of my government school education I was required to learn the definition of “culture” in my 9th grade social studies class. The teacher told us that learning this definition was the single most important thing we were to learn in his class that year….

== Culture is the total way of life of a given people at a given time, as passed down from generation to generation.

But I like your definition and analogy better.

I do, however, think that there is an agrarian sub-culture remnant that functions in loose community in many areas of the country. Even here where I live in central New York state (of all places!) there are a lot of like-minded rural folks and families who delight in working to raise much of their own food, providing for their basic needs with their own hands as much as they can, and living very simply. Some do this out of economic necessity. Others do it because they see the wisdom of it.

By the way, I am impressed with your web site and guild. Very nice.

One does not have to chose between city and country, they are part of a continuum that cannot fully exist without both within a productive human ecology. Suburbs , the mirage….the compromise…they have done a lot to spark the false provincial wars between the city and country. Perhaps it has done so due to its creeping realization that far from gaining the best of both worlds, it has created the worst of both worlds and done so in the longest running misallocation of resources in human history. Needless to say, the suburbs are the main event of the vicarious agora.

I don’t know which I like better, standing in the middle of Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue during the Atlantic Antic and hearing a call to prayer to the mosque while a Mexican vendor feeds me roasted corn in front of a Belarusian church or swatting flies as I buy raw milk from a farm with mud on my pants from playing in the country dirt in the foothills of the Berkshires.

We were once a Republic with an agrarian and independent sensibility that aptly informed a messy community. Like others say, urbanity is never exclusive of the agrarian nor vice versa. It is not required that we choose. However, if we do choose, this too can be realized ….but a full stomach can only long be preserved in country. But if you think only a full stomach will keep you sated and that you can live without the dynamic possibilities of the city, this too can be achieved but it comes at a cost.

We must love where we live for it to hold its meaning and a healthy social construct. Unfortunately, since the 1960’s the perceived reality of the country has been overtaken by an essentially shoddy construction of caricatured houses, Within vast tracts of the country, one cannot detect either regional identity…or historical presence….a feeling of connection to past…and therefore future. In much of suburbia, its built expression, not its people …there is little to love. The problem that confronts us is the people are beginning to believe their built environment.

Regarding any one person’s Agrarian state of grace, I can only poorly echo St. Jean: If you are not an agrarian I pray the Lord make you one, and if you are an agrarian I pray the Lord keep you one.

As to whether a good agrarian can consider himself part of an agrarian culture, I feel I am on stronger ground to declare that no, one agrarian does not a culture make. (must be my day to abuse the words of others).

I’m certain we can’t adequately plumb the depths of what constitutes culture in com-boxes, but I doubt I’m far off if I suggest that culture is like good soil. Dirt is everywhere and even a good plant may flourish in dirt, but good Soil is rare and when it is abused and gone, impossible to create in less than a lifetime. So judging by your excellent blog, it would seem you are a fine (heroic?) plant but you are growing in dirt.

I hope (and occasionally search) for an agrarian culture in America; but until I see some sort of Pilgrimage of Grace emanating from Atchison, KS (and we all know how well that went) I’ll stand by my original hyperbole.

Finally, two thoughts about the Amish
1. They may indeed be MacIntyre’s St. Benedict… if only for the fact that they may save humanity solely by teaching us how to use horses in agriculture again.
2. I hope I may coin a new internet law: “As an Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving the Amish approaches 1.

Your statement that there is no authentic agrarian culture left in America intrigues me. Surely the industrial revolution has reshaped Western culture in its own image, destroying traditional agri-culture. But what of the Amish? Is their culture authentic agrarian culture? Or is it perhaps just the closest thing still remaining?

I’m left wondering what authentic agrarian culture really is. I suppose it means different things to different people. Personally, I’m an agrarian-minded person and my life revolves around agrarian activities (though I am not a farmer). I take my agrarianism seriously. I am a “deliberate” agrarian. To the extent that I live out my agrarian ideals, I think my life is authentically agrarian. It’s not old fashioned agrarian culture but it is agrarian culture nonetheless. No?

Seriously, I rather enjoyed the essay for its lucid outline of the first onset of a vague uneasiness that long vanquished agrarianism presents to the victorious suburbanite; though you yield no ground, it is a good sign (to us agrarians)that you feel the urge to push back.

Berry is, per force, a harsh tonic to modern sensibilities; he must be, for there is no authentic agrarian culture in America any more. It has been completely and utterly destroyed by… well, let us not cast stones.

Berry may be some sort of modern Roland; what is unclear to me is whether the Suburbanites are the Saracen or whether your essay signals the faint stirrings of change responding to Berry’s horn – however reluctant.

But here is the real question: at what cost to cities has been the destruction of the villages?

As John notes above, the Cities are dependent upon the proper functioning of the countryside; it sustains them physically, spiritually and artistically; it has ever been thus.

York was great in so far as it was the epitome of Yorkshire; New York has not a shire to sustain it; it is a thing cut off – in more ways than one.

Although I know I’d enjoy rural, small-town life, I couldn’t see myself as a farmer. I don’t think I’m disciplined enough. Yet I consider myself an agrarian because I’m convinced that as the farms go, so goes the country.

Your flippant anti-agrarian rant is prompting me to make my first comment here at FPR….

After reading the first part of this essay and your bio, it occurs to me that you epitomize modern industrialized man: You have utter disdain for manual labor and those people who “labor in the earth.” You are addicted to vacuous modern amusements (i.e., organized sports). And you are completely dependent on the Industrial Providers for all your needs in life. In short, you are what I would call a typical helpless modern. And, amazingly (to me), you are content with this artificial way of life.

As one who loves the soil (“dirt” to you), working with my hands, and the thrill of living an agrarian-based, subsistence lifestyle, the industrially-subservient views you express here strike me as terribly boring.

(no offense intended)

David and I were never particularly close, though I have a lot of fondness for him. Steve was my advisor; I owe much of what was good about my CUA years to him. We’ve remained friends since those days. Supposedly we’re working on a book on Fred Dallmayr together, though there hasn’t been much movement on that front for a while. Steve occasionally blogs at the Catholics in Alliance website; here’s a post he wrote just last week on subsidiarity and health care. Good stuff.

I consider it an honor to be bathed in such acid, and I can appreciate a really well-wrought and passionate insult. Besides, you aren’t responsible; I did it to myself.

The idea for this essay began in a conversation I had with Mark Mitchell down in NM this past summer. It’s all very rough, sort of an exercise in thinking something through.

We’ll have to compare our CUA notes some day. I did work quite a bit with Walsh and Schneck. David and I have remained good friends to this day. You quoted a dissertation on Gadamer? What sins did you commit that made this relevant to your work?

First, this is a fine essay; thanks very much for sharing it. I have some comments, but I think I may wait until you have posted the other parts, so I can better appreciate the ideas you’re developing.

Second, embarrassing as it may be, I think I’ve only just placed you: you graduated from Catholic U. a few years before I arrived there, and wrote a dissertation that I liberally quoted from in several papers I wrote for David Walsh and Steve Schneck. It has the distinction of being the longest dissertation I’ve ever seen (two whole volumes, right?).

Third, I believe I have unintentionally brought you under Caleb Stegall’s condemnation. My apologies.

And yet I am an agrarian.

How do I reconcile my attitude and Jeffrey’s? I believe that agrarianism, properly understood, is not about getting everybody “back” to the farm, but about re-establishing the proper relationship between town and country. It is also about re-localizing the economy to its most local unit, the home. In order to have strong cities, you must have strong farms, and the proper relationship between them. The townies must eat the bread of the country people, so that those who love their city will love the country that supports it. And those who love their farm will love the town that provides the farmer with a ready market.

As for technology and modernism, note that the so-called “industrial revolution” is really the resumption of a revolution that had been suspended by the Reformation and the resulting disorder in Europe. Indeed, medieval man believed that he lived in a marvelous age of machinery and invention, which in fact he did. In the Doomsday book (1086), there were recorded 5,600 mills in Norman England, which was not yet the whole of England. And the uses of the mills were expanding at a rapid rate. Technology was advancing in every field. I advise reading Jean Gimpel’s The Medieval Machine on this topic.