“That was a long time ago.”
The 1995 film Babe chronicles the story of an ambitious piglet who strives to become a herder of sheep and eventually wins a sheep herding competition. The film, based on the English writer Dick King-Smith’s 1983 book, The Sheep-Pig, is full of cutesy animal chatter, but it is also striking for its depiction of what is supposed to be the English countryside. Like Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, Babe provided the quintessential postmodern pastoralism, mediating the countryside through the comfort of VHS, DVD, and later streaming. One could watch these films in a cozy American basement, visualizing lush and tranquil farms while remaining safe from manure, rain, and hard work.
The desire of modern, postmodern, and now postmillennial men and women to get back to the countryside has often been framed in the United States as the struggle between rural life and “urban sprawl” or “development.” Indeed, American developers have the very bad habit of not only constructing houses or businesses for expanding human communities but of developing land for the sake of attracting more growth. Rather than weaving human development into nature, areas are cleared of animal, plant, and even human life in order to make way for new people and new construction. In his new work, The Incredible Adventure of Passer the Sparrow, VoegelinView editor and author Paul Krause crafts a narrative of the peaceful struggle of little creatures against the rush of modernity.
Passer the Sparrow is a curious and playful post-millennial animal fable. On one level, it is a book about the memories of a lost world. The book begins with the memory of an earlier time of lower technology and more “wide open spaces.” Passer remembers a time of both wild and domesticated animal life woven into rural human life. This is a key point, for, unlike the grotesque anti-humanism of both the radical Left and some elements of the New Right, Krause’s work is not anti-human. Like William Wordsworth and Jacques Maritain, Krause sees the blending of rural human life with nature as something beautiful and precious.
However, after his description of a halcyon agricultural scene, Krause writes this terse and bitter line: “that was a long time ago.” As Frederic Jameson famously diagnosed in his 1991 Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, nostalgia is one of the defining qualities of postmodernity. Looking backward to an earlier time, usually through electronic or digital media, is something that even younger generations of Millennials and Zoomers do. As shocking as it may sound to the ears of Gen Xers and Boomers, young people think nostalgically of the Bush and Obama eras as times of (relative) peace and prosperity, as well as periods in which the digital zombification of life had not had such a strong hold on humans.
In Passer the Sparrow, the only area in Green Valley that has escaped urban sprawl is Mr. Henry’s Farm, at which stands an old oak tree named Birch. Birch is possibly hundreds of years old, and is Passer the Sparrow’s home. Passer himself is also part of a family that is chronicled by memory and stories. This permanence of nature in the face of change is one of the book’s core themes, and one of the strongest arguments for the agrarian life rooted in the ironically changing permanence of nature that Passer the Sparrow celebrates. Even in hyper-technological science fiction, such as Ridley Scott’s The Martian (2015) and Denis Villeneuve’s (rough-hewn) Blade Runner 2049, humans are still farming, and nature is able to assert herself (often in dangerous and catastrophic ways) in the face of the human attempt to denaturalize (and dehumanize) the universe.
Passer the Sparrow is also a book about family. Passer has chicks that he must defend from encroaching development. In the age of many in the New Right championing the bombastic (but necessary) virtues of great men who will lead American and the West into a new age of prosperity and economic and cultural achievement, it is refreshing to read of the little virtues of a father trying to protect his children from the encroachment of modernity. Throughout the world, there are good men who labor and struggle to hold off the deleterious effects of a noxious and debilitating contemporary culture on their families. This is not to engage in curmudgeon grumbling. Rather, it is to note that those on the left and right as well as secular and religious people recognize: technology has reached the point at which we are beginning to serve it more than it serves us.
Passer and his bird family do escape to a new life rooted in new nests in a new area. The book thus ends on a hopeful note. However, there is a bitter irony to this happy ending. There has been much ado about internal migration within the United States. Republicans champion the migration as the victory of Red States (in which many people are moving) over Blue States (out of which many people are moving). However, more than they are moving to be in conservative places that are “open to business,” people are moving to places that are wide open to life.
Montana (your humble author’s home state) is a (increasingly purplish) red state that attracts growing numbers of people enchanted by the Rockies, and, to a lesser extent, the gopher-plagued Northern Plains. However, as more and more people come to Montana, it becomes more and more like the overcrowded and expensive states out of which the newcomers fled. Indeed, some have wondered whether Montana is, in fact, still “The Last Best Place” anymore. Nonetheless, as Passer the Sparrow hints, home is where family and love are, and family is, ultimately, the best place.
Such changes can seem overwhelming to those of us who harbor some desire to live a human-scale life. The challenges might seem insurmountable. As Martin Heidegger (in)famously stated, due to the proliferation of technology, “only a god can save us.” Furthermore, as Richard Wolin has recently documented in his brilliant Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology, Heidegger envisioned some sort of superhuman figure who could transcend the limits of the anti-human enslavement of technology.
But we need not despair. Perhaps the transcendence of what has been called our “technofeudal” age will be achieved not by the great leader, but by the little people, and the little creatures, who build alcoves for nature and life among the dead world of our hyper-technological digital age.
Image Credit: Caspar David Friedrich, “The Lone Tree” (1822)
