I believe, and I’m willing to accept any criticism anyone cares to offer, that to incorporate into the FPR or localists environment individuals who are the product of a immanentized existence is to conjoin within the founding movement those elements that will result in the future collapse of the community.

The only people acceptable within a community that seeks to exist as “divinely ordered,” or as God intended, or as Nous requires, should be those who have some understanding of the reality of the existential tension of human existence, e.g. that we experience life in what Plato referred to as the “In-Between,” between time and eternity, immanence and transcendence, the existent and non-existence.

And, while we should be free to refer to the transcendent pole as “God”, Jesus, the Absolute Idea, Infinite Being or whatever, we must focus on the reality of existence that teaches us that man exists both in time and eternity and belongs completely to neither. Specifically what I’m saying is that as a community that exists to live as men where intended, to encourage those that “seek, quest, and search” for the truth of reality, we must reject the modern experiment that has left us as world-immanent beings.

There is no need to recount the litany of gross error, systemic slaughter, deformations, intellectual perversions, that is the result of this condition, and it must be avoided at all cost. If we have learned anything we must know by now, that given free reign, man’s unfettered libido dominandi will not only make opaque the symbols of the truth of reality but he will seek to cast himself as the hero in an act of self-salvation. A being, in the Marxist sense, who becomes God and is capable of self-redemption.
There is always a price for blasphemy.

I have thought for some time that agrarianism remains one of the more potentially fruitful resevoirs of such symbolism. I believe populist movements may also contain the potential for such symbols.

But this is quite a digression and given my previous comment I better shut up before Ryan smacks me again!

Bringing up apparently serious ideas and then ridiculing those who take them seriously seems a bit… unsporting.

absolutely outlandish suggestions

Oh please. I said some of the ideas were hair brained from the get go. Blogging is tiresome enough without all the terminal earnestness.

I recognize that we’re dealing with an immensely complex and interconnected system with extraordinary potential for unintended consequences, and I am resistant to suggestions that it all just needs to be made simpler and smaller. I am thus resistant to a lot of what gets posted at FPR, not because I don’t like the way it sounds or that I disagree with the aesthetic/philosophical/theological commitments of the authors, but because many of the suggestions are enormously impractical and frequently counterproductive.

Caleb, I think you’re being too modest by half, if not actually disingenous. The whole idea of an FPR “project” which consists solely of a group blog**, along with the pea-shooting of commenters like Ryan, strikes me as faintly ludicrous.

Really? You mean to say that there’s no kind of group enterprise at all here? Not even, as you put it, “a fight for what we love?” Even in the post you like you describe FPR as having some kind of “work”. Bagging on me for having the perception that something is going on here, maybe even something significant, seems unfair.

I’m all with you in thinking that a community which loves both each other and the same things is vastly important. But you then go on to make absolutely outlandish suggestions about “what is to be done” politically. Whatever happened to desires of the heart which are politically agnostic, which have no political expression at all? I thought we were supposed to belong to the kingdom built without human hands. “Place?” Whatever happened to being without a home?

My solution? Be the church. When they tell us not to, be the church. When they come to take us away, be the church. And when they kill us, die like the church. Romantic? Maybe. But while I do seem to recall Someone promising that He would bless such activities, I can’t find any equivalent promise about political organization or populism.

The solution is not and has never been federalism, localism, centralization, or any other political dodge. The solution is resurrection.

What I’d highlight here is that this is not a feature of modern, industrial society. It has always been the case. Those who purport to harken back to a time when everyone stayed put are at best fixing on a rather abnormal historical accident, and at worse engaging in an outright fantasy. History is characterized far more by mobility and migration than by of fixity or stability.

I’m not sure there’s anyone here who would disagree with you; I certainly wouldn’t, though I would quibble with what you seem to intend your observation to mean. I fully agree that FPR, at most, must be content to address itself to varying degrees of relative stability and/or locality, not some absolute, ahistorical, probably non-existent standard. But what does that mean for our arguments, though? It reminds me of academic debates between liberals and communitarians back in the 1980s and 90s, where the assumption was that anyone who advocated a communitarian way of thinking about a particular problem must, therefore, have been advocating a return to 17th-century Salem. Which isn’t true, of course, and boxing people into those kind of rhetorical corners isn’t terribly helpful.

Because unless you’ve implicit–and irrational–faith that when left to themselves, local governments will automatically and inevitably produce the kind of vibrant local community that FPR seems to be about, there needs to be some way of making that happen. As one with absolutely no faith in the virtue of the common man–which makes me more than a little un-American, but I’m okay with that–the hand-waving that goes on around here about how awesome things would be if only we could “restore” power to the local level sounds consistently aristocratic.

I think some of those who post at FPR who engage in what you call “hand-waving” probably really do have that kind of implicit/irrational faith in ordinary people governing themselves locally. I confess to having some of it myself; that’s the sneaky, participatory, quasi-Rousseauian/Marxist element to my populism, the belief that many of the choices which drive people to trust to individual rights and opportunities (and the large organizations which vouchsafe such) are a product of those choices having been structured economically and socially beforehand, so that the productive capacities of people to take care of themselves have been stunted. But, you’ll rightly point out, that’s just another form of a “false consciousness” argument, and if you go too far down that route, you’re right back to the vanguard (or the aristocrats) leading the people again, right? So why waste time with people in their local places in the first place?

I don’t have a good answer. Though, I should also add, that I think some of the folks who post here–in fact the large majority of them, I suspect–engage in the aformentioned hand-waving not because they think government and/or community order would improve or be made more virtuous by taking it to the local level, but rather simply because they want less, or at least weaker, government and community order entirely, and they feel that keeping things small will best assure those ends. This is the liberatarian streak in much FPR writing, which I think is pretty prominent, though others assure me it’s not actually here.

I submit that any political or social system which depends upon the virtue of the participants is doomed to fail. I further submit that every political and social system depends upon the virtue of the participants.

So…you’re an anarchist, then? Well, you’ve got good company.

Populism is a response to an elite that governs unconscionably and it is a short term movement. The population makes its voice heard, and when they have reached an acceptable solution, or are defeated, the population will by and large loose interest by and return to the business of living. When change is effected some form of ruling elite will emerge, whether this new or modified elite improves the common good is a separate question.

Timothy Burke dismisses the influence of “the Powers that Be/Consumer Culture/Hegemony/Mainstream Media or whatever…” too easily. The effects are incalculable on something as subjective as taste. I believe it is almost impossible to judge these effects without stepping outside of those influences in some way. Jason Peterson gave us his insight on cell phones, and his refusal of this technology. Some folks run-offt and travel; or give up their cars; or immerse themselves in their faith. Any and all of these things can give you insight into profound depth of these influences.

Which is not at all to suggest that such theorizing is without value or merit.

In the end, it all comes down to love. Which I’ve discussed previously here. And when questions of love are addressed in the context of more than one person, they quickly become questions of power. There is no distinction possible here between “persuasion” and “emancipation”. In fact, those categories really don’t even make sense unless you first grant that we are involved in a pointy-head discussion rather than in a fight for what we love.

As for the question of populism versus elitism, I am of the Bolingbrokian view that rather than being polar opposites, they are of a piece.

The questions clarify themselves and the various power arrangements and lines are crystalized by examining concrete realities of love and interests rather than abstractions like “democractic” or “elitist” etc.

This truth is embodied in many aphorisms of folk wisdom such as “follow the money.”

** Which is not to say that the initial web foray of FPR can’t or won’t (indeed I believe it can and hope it will) mature into something more formidable.