Show of Hands

Reno's comments are thought-provoking. I am reminded of Wendell Berry's essay on 'The Body and Place' (I think that was the one) in which he writes that the only way we can really love the world is by loving our place in it; just as the only way a husband can show his love for women is by loving the woman that is his. If we tried to equally love all the places of the world, or all women who are attractive, in the end we would love none of them.

It comes down to our comtemporary views of culture. Cultures are idea copy-chains. Under "idea" I include beliefs, behaviors, art, and morals. Over time, ideas are copied, sometimes altered, and then passed down through generations. This is a very different conception of culture from contemporary notions that define a culture as a set of beliefs and customs. In this way it makes sense to speak of "Western culture" despite the fact that what today constitutes Western culture is very different from any other historical period. Western culture is an idea-copy-chain descending from the Greeks, and even though what we call Western culture today is very different from the beliefs, morals, art, and behavior of the Greeks, our ideas originated from them and have been copied and modified through the various historical eras of the Romans, Middle Ages, Renaissance, and the Enlightenment in a chain leading back to them. The chains do branch however (sorry for the mixed metaphor). And although, say, American culture and French culture are very different, they both are branches of the tree that started with the Greeks and are thus both part of the Western heritage. (I am aware that the Greeks also inherited the ideas they revolutionarily altered.) To have a culture is to have your ideas, beliefs, arts, and morals be the latest link in a copy-chain and to acknowledge that your identity is the result of this chain. Because of this, rather than saying that people have a culture, it makes more sense to say that people are part of their culture, or better yet embody their culture.

Our bodies are copy-chains as well, but here it is our genes that are inherited, sometimes altered, and then passed down through generations. Until recently, having a culture was to have your family lineage be part of the biological copy-chain that was the means by which ideas were passed down--the biological copy-chain, and the idea copy-chain followed the same path. Your heritage was your identity as all your beliefs, possessions, values, arts, and religion, even your body, in short, everything about you, was the result of your historical heritage. Thus people valued and honored the customs and heritage as well as the tragedies and triumphs of their ancestors. It made sense to say that "we" suffered the defeats, or that "we" enjoyed the triumphs of our ancestors in the sense that we are a link in the great copy-chain that traces back to our ancestors and defines who we are. For example, in the United States you will hear that "we" defeated the British, the Germans, and the Communists when strictly speaking, very few living people did any of these things.

Today, there is a revolutionary change occurring worldwide where many people do not identify with the culture of their ancestors and do not value the heritage passed down to them. Many cultural traditions are dying out as people willingly abandon their heritage and adopt Western ideas. Even in Western countries, many people, the multiculturalists, those I have called the "Personas," feel no connection to any cultural heritage and feed off the cultural heritage of others who have not yet abandoned their culture. I can't help but feel that a backlash will develop at some point where people look to rediscover their cultural heritage and sense of identity. There will be an envy of those who retain a traditional heritage and cultural identity. Those who abandoned their heritage will feel the emptiness of feeling no emotional connection to their heritage and will look to rediscover what was carelessly thrown away.

Great stuff! Thanks for letting us all know about this.

John E. - Agn Stoic,
WORD!

Practice what you preach, Rod. Your hoe is waiting.

To Laura and John E.:

We need some people to be communicating these ideas! The fact is, most people who do come to the realization that tradition, place and family are vitally important end up: staying home. And there are few Wendell Berrys who can both stay home and capture a national audience. Let's judge Rod's arguments according to their merit, and try to learn from them ourselves, instead of resorting to 'Ad Hominem' attacks.

" . . . so-called progressive politics long ago shifted its focus toward securing lifestyle freedoms for the new-economy winners (gay-pride marches, women's rights marches) . . . "

OUCH. Try telling working class mothers who are struggling to feed their children that they are "new-economy winners". Try telling rape victims, domestic violence victims, and women struggling for health care that the dignity they fight for is a "lifestyle freedoms". Try telling gays and lesbians who have endured violence and discrimination that the justice they seek is a "lifestyle freedom."

This author needs to step outside once in a while!

Angie: "Try telling working class mothers who are struggling to feed their children that they are "new-economy winners". Try telling rape victims, domestic violence victims, and women struggling for health care that the dignity they fight for is a "lifestyle freedoms". Try telling gays and lesbians who have endured violence and discrimination that the justice they seek is a "lifestyle freedom."

You do have a point. However, there was also some truth in the original comment.

Gay rights, although I think it's largely just, is rather an elite movement, and gay culture, although not necessarily individual gays, is appallingly metropolitan, anti-rural and anti-working-class (largely anti-anyone-who-does-anything-useful). In the UK, the movement seems largely to consist of smarmy, affluent London media-types who make a hobby of victimising Presbyterian B&B-owners in dirt-poor villages in northern Scotland.

The feminist movement, has, since the 70s, completely lost interest in working-class women, and despises the earth-mother stereotype with which it was once associated. It's now a sex-and-money movement for female bankers and executives.

The Conservative party now stands for rich, London businessmen, and the Labour party stands for somewhat less rich, London public-sector managers. Working-class people who don't share the whole bag of past- and place-hating valus tend to be drawn to the BNP (a fascist party), whereas their middle-class equivalents are drawn to the Greens.

Back in 1990 I had the privilege of spending about five weeks in northern Scotland with an old college friend. The process you discussed is also happening there, with the added detriment that by buying up houses out in the quaint country villages, city people drive up the property values to the point that the children of local people cannot afford to buy a home in the village they grew up in, and are usually forced to relocate to the city to find work and affordable housing.

The weekend-home mentality actually causes the forced urbanization of people who would much rather remain rural. I'm sure Dougie McLean has written songs about this. http://www.dougiemaclean.com/

It is really not about country life. For example, say for some reason you have to work several 20 or 36 hour days to get the harvest in. The cows still have to be milked and the chickens need to be fed. Who the heck wants to do that. There ain't person jumping the boarder to come here to be a farmer. They want an easier life.

I think the problem is really the lack of community. A better way of putting it is a lack of common cause. With kids and job there is a great loss of control and time. There are requirements to big city living, same with the country. You would hope even in public schools that your 2nd grader doesn't have to encounter porno or know how to spell every curse word so he can tell you what their friends say at school. Maybe the country isn't so bad at that point.

All of us work hard. It's the lack of choice. For example, a big company like walmart can sweep into a small community and change the micro-culture of that community. Then when the locals complain we hit them with well its a free country, and the market, and you should've thought of walmart first etc. But in the long term it changes the social make-up of the community. Things change families separate etc. Suddenly you find yourself in a band singing about the loss of agrarian culture, while your little kids learn how to spell F*#* or sh%@ so they can tell you it is a bad word, and that billy says it all the time at school. But, if we force that change in another country, PBS has a documentary about how we destroyed the culture of the country we invaded or whatever bad policy thing we did. But if it is our own agrarian communities not much coverage, or not the same sense of wrong. I know they swear worse in the country, but if there were a dozen or so tight families who didn't, and now a lot of them are forced to move. It sucks.

Back to the point, it is not really a city country argument, but a common cause argument. Whom are you going to break bread with in your free time? When you try to live sacramentally it becomes quickly evident that you are out step with the mainstream. When you are not looking to consume, but to create then you are out of step. I think that is the heart of the matter. So people look to the a simple agrarian life surrounded by like minds living in a common cause. Sorry for the long comment doing it between meetings.

R Hamptom
Seriously could one make an argument that American country music is part of the English/Scottish/Irish folk tradition?

I've heard tell things like that?

Englishmen are masters of songs for folks.
My fav. Madness: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aFNvVv-zPk

Another John: "The process you discussed is also happening there, with the added detriment that by buying up houses out in the quaint country villages, city people drive up the property values to the point that the children of local people cannot afford to buy a home in the village they grew up in, and are usually forced to relocate to the city to find work and affordable housing."

This is what has been happening to many rural communities in Alaska. In the mix however I would include well off retirees that have benefited by playing the real estate game in the lower forty-eight. They have come here to invest their capital and eventually flip their acquired properties. Many claim residency but winter out of state. They vote in our elections and register for subsistence hunting and fishing rights. This new population group brings additional strain on our fishing resources; often times exceeding bag limits on their catches.

The utter irreverence for the culture that has been in place for many generations is astounding. I find myself almost reveling at the thought that these capital investors may end up losing their summer homes. Perhaps then our children will be able to afford homes for their young families.

Lord have mercy.

Agrarianism is not so much about "getting back to the land" as it is about re-establishing the proper relationship between town and country. It is not necessary to be a farmer to recognize the value of farms, any more than it is necessary to be a programmer to see the value of computers. Rod doesn't need to get back to the land; but we all need to recognize our dependence on the land, even (or especially) when we do not ourselves work the land.

Empedocles wrote "There will be an envy of those who retain a traditional heritage and cultural identity. Those who abandoned their heritage will feel the emptiness of feeling no emotional connection to their heritage and will look to rediscover what was carelessly thrown away. "

This exactly how a group of students I accompanied to Indonesia put it. They spent a while bemoaning the fact that Indonesians had a common culture while Americans didn't, but then the bus started and they shifted over to singing Girl Scout campfire songs, which occupied the next few hours. They all knew all the lyrics and the accompanying gestures.

BTW, Rod, if you like these songs you would probably like 'Free in the Harbor' and 'The Idiot' by Stan Rogers.

I grew up in a small town in the Midwest, moved to successively larger cities, and now live in New York City.

One of the things I love (and mourn) about this place is precisely the sense of history: when I walk through the Financial District early on a Monday morning I see the old iron sconces on the side of one building, the Art Deco doors on another, and the amazing mosaic at the entrance to the ITT building. It's all still there.

Except, of course, it's not. The old tenants have moved out and a pharmacy or bank or Starbucks has snuck in, and where o where is the idiosyncratic New York I moved here to find?

It's there and it's gone. New Yorkers are constantly bemoaning the loss of the 'real' city, the one which existed when they were teenagers or first moved here or yesterday, the city which justified the high prices and the crowds and standing-room only train cars. But this is the real city, today, and while I wish there were still Italians in Little Italy and working-class Jews on the Lower East Side, there are Poles in Greenpoint and Russians in Brighton Beach, hasidim in Williamsburg and Crown Heights and mosques in Bed Stuy. The Hare Krishnas and Scientologists lurk in the Union Square train station, and I even saw one brave soul setting up a McCain/Palin table not too far from the saxophonist. There's the Stonewall Bar and the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine (finally fully open this Sunday) and the wrecked earth from the Sept. 11 attacks posed in Battery Park.

This city erects and erases and absorbs its histories and cultures, mystifying and horrifying and, finally, gratifying those of us who are still learning when to hustle and when to pause.

It's there and it's gone, wherever you are. Pay attention, wherever you are.

Having got round to listening to the music at last, I have decided that I like it. However, Hampton is right that it is not all that English. Even the accents sound slightly mid-Atlantic - there is certainly nothing of the ooh-arrish edge that you would expect from rural southern England. The music is in the Irish-American mould that has become the standard of folk-influenced music throughout the Anglophone world. Proper English folk music, the finger-in-the-ear stuff, is completely different, not well-known elsewhere, and is closer to Dutch or Danish trad music, if ever you hear any of that. This could be part of the point, though - the music they play is more Celtic than Anglo??

Politically, the message is left-conservative, which has a long tradition, exemplified by writers like William Cobbett and John Clare, and now by the nature-writer Richard Mabey. However, one strain that you might not have caught is English Nationalism, ie. the idea that England should declare independence from the UK.

I suppose rootless, world religion is either Evangelicalism or some sort of Westernised Buddhism/Hinduism

Another great SoH song is 'Cousin Jack' (eminently YouTubable), song from the point of view of a Cornish tin miner who has to emigrate because there's no work for him in the county, but still takes pride in his trade and in his origins. ("I see the English living in our houses/The Spanish fishing in our seas ...")

(FWIW, I interviewed them for the Financial Times [probably the polar opposite of their philosophy] here: http://us.ft.com/ftgateway/superpage.ft?news_id=fto082920081715527742)

It's worth adding that Knightley's songs are short stories rather than straight autobiography: he gets fed up with people asking if his brother is okay after the chainsaw accident. 'Raining Again', a song on his solo album, Cruel River, takes a look at city people moving to the country from the opposite point of view to Country Life and is an interesting counterpoint.

interesting article from Rusty Reno. He has, however made a startling and crucial error in one of his 'Roots' lyrics quotes. The singer says quite clearly "I've lost in St George IN the Union Jack" and not "AND the Union Jack" as Rusty quotes. The point being that the English cross of St George has subsumed itself in the broader flag of Great Britain with all of it's imperial implications and that the English flag now has to be reclaimed from the extreme right. He does the band a disservice and opens them up to being claimed by the very Nationalists they seek to attack!

Dyland freak: Yes, but "nationalist" has different meanings in the British context.

It can mean the far-right (eg. British Nationalist Party), who tend to be racist, and are close to being classically fascist. Clearly SoH are not that type of nationalist.

On the other hand, "nationalist" can refer to the movements for independence or greater autonomy for the constituent parts of the UK / British Isles (ie. Scotland, Wales, Ireland and/or Northern Ireland, and sometimes Cornwall). The point is that #English# nationalism has recently appeared in response to these, being a movement, not necessarily right-wing, for the secession of England from the UK. Judging by the lyrics about losing St. George in the Union Jack, that seems very much a part of the SoH perspective.

I don't know how many Americans will be interested in the intricacies of this debate, but Britain was really an invented country, with little historical depth. I hardly know anyone who describes him/herself as "British" - it makes one sound like some sort of weird imperialist throwback. Almost everyone describes themselves as English, Scottish, etc., or as UK citizens when being pedantic (strictly speaking the UK and Britain are not the same, as the former, the current nation-state, includes Northern Ireland).

BTW: If you like SoH, you might like Blyth Power, if you don't know them already.

"He does the band a disservice and opens them up to being claimed by the very Nationalists they seek to attack!"

They do themselves a disservice by not using the proper terms. It's only the Union JACK when it's flown on a ship (traditionally from the jack spirit, hence the name). In all other circumstances, it is the Union FLAG.

Dear Rod,

Thanks for the music recommendation - I picked up the album and really enjoy it (reminds me of the Levellers, though without their regrettable atheism). I also loved your post on choosing community over career. Good stuff.

God bless and keep the witness strong,

Fr. Anthony
St. Michael UOC, Woonsocket, RI
www.orthoanalytika.org