A recent post at Front Porch Republic by a former and much-esteemed professor initially prompted in me a series of thoughtful nods, gestures that matched my mind’s own comfortable agreement with much of the substance of the article. Gratitude, localism, liberal education, and stewardship: all are shorthand for positions on which, at least I believed, I could stand with some degree of certitude. As I have thought more on the ideas expressed in this article, I have become wary of tendencies, embodied in either their nature or their associations, toward utopianism, nationalism, and kitschiness. In fact, I would venture to say that such tendencies at their worst expression share in common with the bland inspirations of Soviet propaganda.
Localism, as opposed to the ephemerally appealing cosmopolitanism, is the lodestar of the course set by Mitchell and similar others at Front Porch Republic. In brief, it is the ideology of the small town, the farm, the homestead: deliberately contrary to today’s globalist networking and its ethereal, avatar-inhabited communities. It emphasizes quality over quantity, simple pleasures over gluts of stimuli or information, the small over the bloated. As far as vocabulary goes, this does not offer much of a choice. Be a fat, overloaded, media-pummeled cell phone junkie like some horror formalized from the predictions of a book by Postman, or read a good book with family next to the fire that you started from logs that you split.
I do not believe that there is anything wrong with good books, family, fire, logs, or the splitting thereof. In fact, I believe all these things are good for people and should be better known by Americans. Yet with the dogmatic insistence of localism over cosmopolitanism, and the more foundational insistence on “place” over “placelessness,” I believe Mitchell leaves the way open for – indeed, tilts the ground toward – an idea of ethics that is based on aesthetics instead of, as it ought to be, on choice.
“Place” refers only to where one is. Where one is placed will differ with the contortions of circumstance over time, yet one is always placed somewhere, and that somewhere always offers the opportunity to participate in the most important virtues. Whether repairing a corncrib on one’s family farm in Oklahoma or vegging in front of a rerun of Friends in a New York highrise, one has a place. In fact, wherever one is placed, one has a subjective locality. My locality includes my apartment immediately, and indirectly my apartment complex, my “neck of the woods” of my town, and at the extreme edges of “locality,” my whole town itself. One can escape locality no more than one can escape the Big First of Kant’s categories of understanding.
Of course there are ways of interacting with one’s locality that can be more or less proper. But the proper methods of interaction should not be called “localist” any more than proper methods of approaching one’s time should be called “temporalist.” Unlike relationships with a family, which can indeed be more or less “familial,” one’s relationship to his locality can never be more or less local. Certainly, someone can choose to expend all his time and interest in a virtual community cobbled from IP addresses across the globe, but this does not make him any less local – it just makes him less of a good neighbor. Instead of insisting on a local spirit, which means only a spirit that is somewhere (like Descartes’ res cogitans) we should be insisting on those virtues that are so regardless of placement: friendliness, empathy, compassion.
Aesthetics only indicates or encourages goodness. It can never create it. A locale can be beautiful in itself, but only virtue makes beautiful a community. Localism veers too often into a utopianist understanding of good old country folk in which, by virtue of shoveling manure and squeezing their own cider, such people by default enjoy a cleaner moral atmosphere. Yet I have known people from small towns and loving churches who were cruel and rotten, and people from public schools and cookie-cutter suburbia with hearts of unbound grace. Proper aesthetics ought to be encouraged, not as a substitute for ethics, but as that forum wherein beautiful ethics is best visibly reflected. And if that points to a small town, excellent – but let no one preach that post locum ergo propter locum.
Emphases on moderation, piety, temperance, and justice never grow old. Emphases on locale, hearth, and community, however, are just that – emphases, insistences, elephantiases. Moderation can be emphasized because in itself it contains the antidote for hyperbole. But locale and community can only be emphasized to the danger of individual choice. Nationalism, after all, could grow because people valued their own racially and geographically interconnected homesteads over the common good of all men. The kitschy Victorian model of the home, a not-by-much parody of the Dickensian domestic ideal, could take hold because the appearance of local bliss was more important than the struggles of good things chosen over easy things. And the Socialist Realist vision of happy peasants returning from wheat fields in common triumph differs from certain localist fantasies only in the historical disjunction between the vision presented and the government actually offered to the former serfs.
There is a further danger in the localist movement of elevating the ideas at the expense of putting them into practice. For instance, the more I read Front Porch Republic, the more I wonder, who else reads this? Or rather, who reads this consistently enough that this can afford to be a viable medium for such topics? Is localism so operatively gimpy that it requires the cosmopolitan forum of the internet? And what does that forum do but allow its believers to pat each other on the back and communally denigrate the cell phone, the blog, and the keyboard? I say embrace your media or reject them. Those who champion localism should either provide a cogent defense of internet community or get the Hell off the web. And any defense that incorporates “but everybody else is doing it” is a poor rampart on the battlefield in which virtuous simplicity fights gluttonous comfort.
In closing, I say, God bless the internet. God bless the cell phone, the television, the instant message, the automobile, Facebook, the iPod, and free wireless in coffee shops. And God remove from among us the idiot who isn’t able to use those things with moderation and put them in their, dare I say it, proper place.
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Due to time zones, I’m reading this post the day before you posted it. I feel like I’m Marty McFly. But I digress…
I’m going to have to read Dr. Mitchell’s article to really understand your post, but I do like what you say about the neutrality of things like the internet, cell phones, and whatnot, but the goodness of things that do not depend on place and time, like kindness, compassion, and temperance. I wonder if some of those in the ideal setting of a local culture wondered what it would be like if they could have just lived in a blessed era before the God-blasted automobile, motion-picture, and radio. Times change, but values and virtue don’t.
[...] Another recent post on another “blawg” (my, how they proliferate) lays down a more skeptical challenge to the likes of FPR (it would seem it was written by a former student of our own Professor Mark Mitchell), accusing its authors of a form of romantic “aestheticism” rather than anything that could be seen as offering any real assistance to denizens of the age. Of course, I think the more conservative disposition of many here inclines toward a deep suspicion of anything “programmatic,” informed as so many are here by a Burkean or Oakeshottian suspicion toward top-down impositions upon the messy reality of life. But, does such a disposition fate one to an essentially romantic or “aesthetic” form of opposition to the dominant ethos – one that allows you the liberty to say “I told you so” even as it relieves one of the necessity of the “hard boring of boards,” in Weber’s famous formulation of “Politics as a Vocation”? I will admit that I struggle with these questions, and think that – in addition to doing what we are doing in these many, many fine, stirring, and accumulating posts, that there needs to be an effort to articulate “what is to be done.” I’ll continue to try to do so, but admit that the question is difficult, perhaps unanswerable. But still it must be answered. Stay tuned – more to come. [...]
One of my favorite places in the world is the small town 90 minutes from Chicago where my parents were raised. My father has roots there going back 100 years, and the town, surrounded by family farms, orchards, and vineyards, seems to encourage a yearning in my soul for simplicity, beauty, and goodness. But the factory on the edge of town that sustained this lifestyle pulled out in the late 1970s. The community has been experiencing a slow decay ever since.
The last year in DC I was working at a trendy, upscale, “Green” restaurant full of mid-to-far left liberals who championed sustainability, localism, the family farm, etc. and spent their spare time on drugs, promiscuity, theft, and drunkenness.
The local community cannot long survive without interaction between it and the industry of the surrounding world community, and such aesthetic emphases certainly can exist absent of virtue.
david:
a couple things:
1. i think that your picture of localism mistakes the effects for the cause, and is a bit two-dimensional. sure it’s frustrating to hear overzealous rants against cell phones and facebook, but the impulse of localism (at least in a thoughtful person–a phrase that categorizes most of the writers at front porch, i think) goes deeper than antagonism toward wal-mart. a true localist doesn’t hate wal-mart cause it put his friends out of business, but because it represents a level of scale that puts the just and modern life at odds.
forgive me if i go back to wendell berry here (http://www.fs.fed.us/eco/eco-watch/ew910219): “Abstraction is the enemy wherever it is found. The abstractions of sustainability can ruin the world just as surely as the abstractions of industrial economics. Local life may be as much endangered by “saving the planet” as by “conquering the world.” Such a project calls for abstract purposes and central powers that cannot know, and so will destroy, the integrity of local nature and local community.”
the idea of loving your neighbor is one that berry takes literally. he recognizes he is incapable of loving the person (as a neighbor) who made the shirt he’d buy from wal-mart, despite the fact that the terms of that relationship (financial) are invariably moral. a localist favors the local by default because the scale does not turn relationships into number based abstractions.
2. i do not think that mitchell’s idea believes that we should preserve western culture through liberal education because it pleases him aesthetically. he believes in preserving it because it represents the cumulative and rigorously refined understanding of the world that the last three or four thousand years of western history have produced. it has nothing to do with a preference of bach over ravi shankar any more than a belief in localism would think that pressing your own cider somehow makes you magically superior from the new yorker who buys it from the corner shop.
i believe i was that principles of biblical foundations class with you long ago, in which we read c.s. lewis’s “men without chests.” surely you remember his argument? the western tradition has little to do with the sublime as aesthetic twitterpation, but rather a recognition of what is good, it is the fulfillment of an educated soul.
3. place (the local) is not simply, as you say, just where you are (that’s locale!), but rather shorthand for the complex web of relationships that you engage in every day. yes, choice is important, and so is recognizing the significance of place as a factor in that choice. part of the localist beef (so to speak) is that the abstractions of modern living make it impossible to have a real choice anymore.
the abstractions of modern living also tend to train us to favor abstract solutions that make sense only in a skewed cost-benefit analysis. for example, i recently moved to a suburb of vancouver. in vancouver, they have a sort of hampsterdam (to borrow from the wire) thing going. all the vagrants and junkies are pushed to one small area where they are collectively ignored. the streets of vancouver are pretty clean, and my understanding is that, occasional gang violence aside, the place is a pretty peaceful city. yet i have a problem with a city that can make a decision to let a whole class (not sure if that’s the best word) of people go to hell. one of the benefits are the various needle exchanges that help keep AIDS and other diseases at bay. they can also target drug programs to that area in hopes of reaching some people. yet, when i travel around the rest of vancouver, it seems as if the rest of the city forgets they exist. they might donate money, or sometimes venture in with a church group to minister, but ironically, they sound a little bit like old scrooge to me: don’t i pay taxes that go to support the poor houses? how else can i be held responsible? you can actually love your neighbor. at least the poor guy on the corner you see every day is a reminder that you’re not loving your neighbor.
micah
Micah,
1. It is fair to question David’s criticisms of localism, and it is probably reasonable to bring up Berry’s concept of the “agrarian mind” which can exist in any place–rural or urban. There is, of course, the danger of turning “limits” and “place” into a totalizing ideology itself where even government subsidies are endorsed.
Perhaps Wendell’s problem is in fact taking “Love Thy Neighbor” literally, since that is precisely not what Jesus did. Samaritans were not ethnically, linguistically, or religiously the same as Jews. This is a cosmopolitan love, but grounded in one’s location, just like a more accurate translation of the Great Commission which says not “Go” but “As you are going.”
The danger I see that FPR may soon fall victim to is not precisely “abstraction” but rather a closed language. As can be seen already, most comments from FPR authors are congratulatory, even if they do add caveats of disagreement. The problem of a group of excessively like-minded authors is creating a hermetically sealed conversation. If one reads newcomer comments, they ask about the terms because they are used frequently and casually but FPR’s vocabulary is largely inaccessible to the potential convert.
2. As for the Abolition of Man reference, I think you’re right to question David’s use of the word “aesthetic” here, but if he is right, it places FPR’s project in terms of pleasure rather than “honor.” Of course, honor (the “chest”) requires something to honor which is perhaps all of what we’re talking about here–the need for a definite, limited territory to defend, preserve and keep.
The assertion is often made that the pleasant image of working the land is “good for the soul.” Honestly, that may be right and I’m all about the small farmer, but I do not find a rigorous analysis of the habits of farmers and the products of their actions… right here, I have to say David may be onto something. The image is attractive, and our propositions follow the localist aesthetic rather than critically engaging the practices themselves.
3. Place, hopefully, is a convergence of three things: tradition, culture, and nature. The body occupies a liminal position which helps keep abstractions from occurring. In fact, it is precisely why perhaps farming would keep one “grounded” (literally and figuratively!). The “local” versus “locale” distinction may be helpful, but perhaps what David is saying is that localism can become “locale-ism” though to be fair, I don’t see any significant difference other than local being an adjective and locale being a noun.
let’s be honest, hermetic conversation is a danger on any blog. i do remember asking the same question david did about fpr when it launched: who will read this? i still don’t know if i can say they’ve answered it (or perhaps they did and i did not see it). nonetheless, i do value fpr as a valuable platform for ideas and criticisms that have not quite broached the mainstream. and until they do, i think i will continue to value fpr.
regarding berry, i should have distinguished that he takes “love” literally. he doesn’t think of love as an abstraction, and that to understand love you have to actually know the person. also, i don’t think that the whole parable of the samaritan is a particularly cosmopolitan one. though to be fair, i don’t think fpr is entirely against cosmopolitanism defined as the real interactions that happen in a diverse city, either. mithcell’s takedown of “cosmopolitanism” is more directed at the whole “i’m going to the city that’s the center of everything” mindset. an endorsement of the local is not an endorsement of close-minded people having the same discussions over and over. it’s just a recognition that people matter, and it’s an awareness that the way human relationships are arranged figures highly into how we treat them.
as for local vs. locale distinction, i wouldn’t die on that beach. but, i was thinking of the way that fpr tends to use local as a noun (“the local”). locale being more a word used to signify the layout of a particular place (“scoping out the locale”), a literal setting. my intention was to associate the one word with the way david talked about local with the way fpr talks about it. maybe not that helpful in the end.
My (disjointed) thoughts: (I always was more of a “chest” than a “head” person, David ;-P)
Perhaps the problem is neither “localism” nor “cosmopolitanism,” but simply the “us vs. them” provincialism which can be found both in city-dwellers and farm-folk. My Locale is, at the moment, Suburbia, and I can testify that my neighbors have just as much suspicion and prejudice towards non-city-dwellers as country people might have towards them. It comes to almost hilarious extremes in my professors, who regard, say, a miner from West Virginia as almost a seperate (sub)species to their superior, New York-bred “citizen of the world” selves.
In my “chest,” to borrow Lewis’ term, I prefer agrarianism because I remember being happier and more fulfilled while living in a tight-knit quasi-rural community than I am now, even though my present location is one which should (according to a certain interpretation of Berry) hold my loyalty because it’s Where I’m From.
My imperative, as I see it, is to Love my Neighbor where I am, trust God to keep me where I should be, and draw comfort from the idea that someone, somewhere, can count more than 20 stars in their sky