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Agrarianism’s natural home is the field, the garden, the stable, the prairie, the forest, the tribe, or the village . . . and the cottage rather than the castle. So it is little wonder that most contemporary Americans are strangers to the term, the concept, and the geography.
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One reason, I believe, for its being ignored is that agrarianism isn’t just about money. It might get a more respectful hearing if it were. But it is about culture, just as agriculture was about culture. Before it got run into the ditch by agribusiness.
A funny thing about cultures is that they produce people who understand more than they know. Sort of like osmosis. So the old agrarians, to get back to our subject, knew a lot about local soil, local weather, local crops, animal behavior, and each other. They depended on each other. It almost defines that much abused word, provincial. It was very provincial and no doubt carried a load of both inertia and foolishness, along with wisdom.
But whatever the mix, it was rooted in places, communities, continuity, and people whose names and faces you knew. As a matrix, it worked reasonably well. Which is different from claiming that it was idyllic and completely satisfactory.
Introduction
I
This book, like several others I have written, is intended as a part of a public conversation about the relationship of our lives, and of our communal and economic life, to the lands we live from. That no such public conversation exists presently, or has existed for the last sixty or seventy years, has never been, and is not now, an obstacle to my “contribution.”
Tanya Berry, my wife, says that my principal asset as a writer has been my knack for repeating myself. That insight has instructed and amused me very much, because she is right and so forthrightly right. It is true that my writings have often repeated certain movements of thought, which, as I must hope, have been made clearer by being repeated in changes of perception and context.
So far as I am able to name them, those habitual movements of thought, at least some of them, are as follows:
From protest or public advocacy to work and to good work. This is akin to, sometimes the same as, the movement from universal to particular. Obviously, then, this is a movement from the public languages of commerce, politics, the media, and the news to a local, neighborly language, accurately referring to particular persons, places, and things, and to the acts by which they relate to one another.
From the future, now for bad reasons the most fashionable of all times, to the present.
From “job,” the manna of the economists and the politicians, to “vocation,” which is the authentic calling to the work that is properly one’s own.
From anywhere or everywhere to home, which is not a house for sale or a site for “development,” but the place by which one is owned, year after year loved and known.
From the global economy—which for five hundred years has plundered the land and exploited, enslaved, or murdered the people of the “foreign” or “rural” world—to a local economy that would care for and conserve all the goods of a place, including the membership of its living creatures.
From my own depleted, disintegrated, and thus somewhat representative rural homeland to instances or thoughts by which its decline may be measured and understood.
From reality as understood by materialism and industrialism to reality understood as divine creation, holy, whole, and beautiful.
As I look back over my work of several decades, I can see that the back-and-forth of my thoughts has hardly been graceful, as it is hardly graceful in these present pages. It will probably have to be seen as a struggle to find or recover the language necessary to speak, in the same breath, of work and love.
II
From my college years, when I first encountered the word, I have understood myself and my native culture as “agrarian.” In my writing and conversation I have often used that word, assuming, no doubt too confidently, that others understood it more or less as I did. But political circumstances, a number of “opinion pieces” in newspapers and magazines, and my own recent work as represented here have put me under pressure to define “agrarianism” as fully and exactly as I can.
I was first alerted to the need for this by a young professor’s article in a magazine of “ecocriticism,” in which he questioned the “acceptability” of my writing in view of my avowed indebtedness to I’ll Take My Stand, a collection of essays by “Twelve Southerners,” sometimes known as “southern agrarians,” which was published in 1930. My “ecocritic” assumed that any book published in 1930 by southerners would be necessarily a racist book, and that I and my writings, because of my acknowledgement of my debt, were necessarily racist as well. Those assumptions are fairly explicit. Others are implied: that agrarianism and racism are only southern; that only southerners were racists in 1930; that if a racist espouses agrarianism, then agrarianism is racist; that my own agrarianism could have come only from the “southern agrarians” and I’ll Take My Stand.
The “ecocritical” charge of racism, though I would discount it as trivial, cannot be discounted as harmless. The problem with several of the isms now prominently condemned is what we might call flypaper justice: the impossibility, once accused of a categorical offense such as racism or sexism, of establishing one’s categorical innocence. The Accuser, in these instances, is a subtler serpent than the Tempter. I am sure that some at least of the Twelve Southerners were born, as in fact I was, into a circumstance of racism that they merely accepted until the time when they were obliged consciously to deal with it. For example: Robert Penn Warren, one of the Twelve Southerners, later wrote two books conscientiously intended to be against racism. Not all the others were so penitent. Though the Accuser typically is self-exempted, an actual critic is obliged to take up the work of a particularizing judgment: Is there in the life and work of the person categorically condemned anything of positive worth that can be respected and salvaged? In the absence of the morally discriminating work of actual criticism, the Accuser sets a trap that finally catches us all. This is a variety of “liberal” zeal that falls exactly into the pattern of “conservative” zeal, condemning with ferocious righteousness the sins of other people.
In fact, I got my agrarianism by being born into an agrarian family in an agrarian community. And so I have naturally recognized it and been grateful for it wherever I have found it. I found it in I’ll Take My Stand, which certainly can be associated with racism and contains some evidence of it, but it would be substantially the same book if those contaminants were removed. Its “Statement of Principles,” to which I have given most praise, contains nothing of racism. Moreover, my closest agrarian friends and allies, beyond my family and neighbors here at home, have belonged to the Midwest, not the South.
I have found agrarianism in the conversation of living farmers, and as far back in the written record as Homer and the Bible. I am sure that it is about as old as farming, far older than writing. It would be reasonable to suppose that all professors of literature would know that Homer and the Bible cannot be competently read without granting a fundamental respect to swineherds and shepherds, planters of trees and sowers of seed. But it has been the business of both the liberals and the conservatives of our time to withhold that respect, as they have withheld it also from the lands of farming and grazing.
And so in defense of myself and of my own “side,” I offer the following definition or characterization of agrarianism as I understand it:
1 An elated, loving interest in the use and care of the land, and in all the details of the good husbandry of plants and animals.
2 An informed and conscientious submission