"Real England" and reactionary radicals

I find myself in the same predicament as many crunchy liberals. I'm a romantic. In fact, an ex-Southerner who simply adored Gone With the Wind. I love quaint local everything. But quaint local customs in my part of the country included, for 400 years or so, treating a significant part of the local work force as chattel. Moving to New England merely changed the nature of the old quaint local customs to include hanging witches. While I'm not enchanted by Big Government, or Big much of anything else, we do seem better as working out the immoral wrinkles of local custom on the national scale. I haven't shopped at Wal-Mart in years, and I love farmers' markets, but I'm really glad the USDA is supposed to be protecting my food from e coli and I wish the current administration would let it do a better job.

If the proponents of "the Real England" appeared more comfortable with its current non-white and non-Christian population, I might be more comfortable with them.

I think the Spiked review, though harsh, makes good points and echoes many of my concerns over the whole concept of crunchy conservatism:

1. Crunchy conservatism, as Rod has often pointed out, is really not a "movement" in any sense of the word. It's a sensibility; crunchy conservatism, with its endless exceptions, exit ramps and loopholes, is really whatever you want it to be. If you define yourself as a good, old-fashioned conservative, you may differ with the movement in some ways (you may be more concerned with government regulation and taxes, for example, than abortion or gay marraige), but you certainly have to subscribe to conservatism's foundational elements in order to be labeled as such. With crunchy conservatism, you don't really have to do anything. You can go to local farmers for produce/meat...unless it's too expensive or too troublesome, then feel free to hit up Wal-Mart (but at least feel a little bad about it).

2. While I applaud the general notion of smaller-is-better, my problem with so-called crunchy conservatism is that it seems to ignore or downplay the ramafications of this "sensibility." Just one example: Could our local environments support a collective population of 330 million? (And keep in mind, Rod has posted on a number of occasions that we need even more people [of certain types, he might add]). I have a garden in my backyard. It's about 20x20. On an average non-winter week, I work it for about 20-30 hours. This includes, seeding, transplanting, watering, fertilizing, composting (which I make myself out of lawn clippings and fall leaves), weeding, mulching, pest control, bed maintenance, pruning, etc. This does not even factor in harvesting and storing, which you could add another 10-15 hours a week, considering the size of my harvest. This, on top of a full-time job. After all of this, we still rely heavily on grocery stores to feed ourselves. But I do this because I like it. I like the taste of freshly picked fruits and veggies; I like the excercise; I like playing in the dirt. Most of my friends do not have the time or desire to tend to a project of this size. I imagine that when I have kids, it will be diffcult to maintain this garden. And this is what bugs me about a lot of crunchies: they're tourists. They don't understand that this lifestyle is damn hard work.

Marian: "Moving to New England merely changed the nature of the old quaint local customs to include hanging witches."

The politics of which injustices are remembered and which forgotten is really interesting. What the Irish and other Catholics went through in New England, for example, pales in comparison to what happened in Salem. My father says he did not even feel as though he was truly accepted as an American until the 1960s, and his family has been here since the 1840s. My father is not one of those ethnic grievance types, so his statement (almost as an aside) really shocked me! It also made sense of all of that the Ancient Order of Hibernian stuff that my forebears were involved in (they basically provided protection to Catholic churches and Catholics).

The thing is these grievances have not been nurtured or cultivated (either by my family or the culture), and so I didn't grow up knowing any of this. Never once have I felt as though I was a second class citizen. The Irish, newly christened as "white" in the 1960s, are not a protected ethnic group. It sounds so absurd to even contemplate it! Yet the stories my Dad tells me about growing up in the 1950s, while not dramatic, show how strong and real that prejudice was just five decades ago.

I digress ...

oops pardonez moi! Fergus's quote ends thus:

‘Traditions come from places – from the land, from our relationship to it ... it’s not even about food, really – it’s kind of about belonging. I feel such a part of it through this that I could never leave. I suppose it ties me to England. This is my place.’

and my palaver proceeds thusly:

- its not about preserving inanimate things, its about animating places in honor of the people who are alive (and grateful for the gift of those who went before who made it possible?)

Can't recall Rod's recent post where you linked to Pomo's
http://pomoco.typepad.com/postmodern_conservative/2007/09/to-alasdair-mac.html
analysis of the role of "time" in MacIntyres theorizing on culture, but his POV was

      ".. MacIntyre is very firm that a tradition, and thus authority, begins to die when it stops changing, and that Burkean conservatives do woeful harm to the theory of tradition by arguing that we must not get too conscious of our traditions. For MacIntyre, unconscious heirs to a tradition help kill it off by not re-performing it constantly, and indeed re-performance requires in MacIntyre's estimation a healthy exercise of critical reason. I think this is a little overdrawn, and that the survival of traditions and authorities is not hostage to their moment-to-moment performance by human agents; following Geertz and Freud (and Rieff, I think) I judge that authoritative shared truths, and shared convictions in the verity of traditions, virtues, and so on, can .f.l.u.c.t.u.a.t.e. in their .•:*¨¨*:•.degrees.•:*¨¨*:•.of.•:*¨¨*:•.presence.•:*¨¨*:•. in the world."

Now there's the crux - what do we mean by "fluctuate" as opposed to "re-perform"? Would you pay to attend a performance of a work of Shakespeare when you knew the directors and actors were "fluctuating" because they think it "overdrawn" to let their human agency "be held hostage" from "moment-to-moment"? Not likely - it wouldn't be Shakespeare, it would be Ionescu.

Ludicrous right? But that's the problem, we laugh because we're afraid of being uncovered as dupes who got taken for a ride, not because we're confident we can relax in the company of equals. And yet what if the theatre company weren't so fraudulent and had performed Ionescu "true-to-form" those who enjoy Beckett et al would have been happy to fork over their hard earned pennies, right? Its about "relationship" - are we being tyrannized by those who interact with us as "objects" or are we creating common ground with fellow "subjects"? Are we in a "managed democracy" (and if so who are the "managed," who the "managers"?) or is "freedom ever new" and we bear responsibility "moment-to-moment" ?

I've seen a lot of this going on, with our high streets and town centres becoming more and more identical and boring. Big chain stores dominate, part of the cultural problem with the coming recession is that it makes it harder for smaller stores to survive, big stores will glide through it of course.

A note about the politics, localism is always talked about by the opposition and forgotten when they get into government. It's worth remembering that the conservative goddess Thatcher removed lots of power from the local governments and abolished the GLC, so i'm sceptical about what Cameron will actually do in government.

I'm with English Voice on this one. Generalisations are always difficult, but, in the UK, on the whole, the Right has tended to be more hostile to localism than the Left. There are also the Greens, of course, but they put a lot of people off with their hippie-drippie-ness.

Of course, I wouldn't want to buy wholeheartedly into this myth of Merrie England - dancing on the village green, men in smocks, etc. It's easy to make it all look a bit silly.

M. Neudel: "If the proponents of "the Real England" appeared more comfortable with its current non-white and non-Christian population, I might be more comfortable with them."

Ah, I see, you're using "non-white and non-Christian" as code for "Muslim".

1. "Non-white": Race, in itself, is probably less of an issue here than in the USA - the white-black intermarriage rate, for example, is much higher. Most blacks are of Caribbean origin, and they cease to exist as a distinct community within a couple of generations.

2. "Non-Christian": Well, as only a smallish minority of people in the UK go to church, most people are non-Christian. Even if you meant people who practise religions other than Christianity, I don't think Hinduism and Sikhism (the 3rd and 4th religions) are seen as problematic. There are hostilities to Catholicism (disliked by cultural liberals, and old-school Empire Tories), Judaism (disliked by Muslims, the far right, and the anti-Zionist left) and US-type Evangelicalism (disliked by cultural liberals, and seen as tacky and stupid). However, overwhelmingly, the Religion Question is dominated by Islam.

Rod: I think the under-the-radar movement you & Kingnorth describe is a huge movement that is barely noticed by the mass culture/mass media...yet.

Please consider picking up a book called "Blessed Unrest", by Paul Hawken. It relates a similar notion regarding a grassroots reaction to the loss of place, a loss of culture, and a loss of nature, as well as the global, under-the-radar movement to reclaim what has been bulldozed over.

He also demonstrated how a loss of environment is very much akin to a loss of human and civil rights. In a real sense, they are seamless issues.

It's a complicated subject, and there are not many real villians in the over-all scheme of it (ergo, we can find common ground), but it is an important movement, and Hawken makes the case that it will be THE movement of the 21st century.