The Pillars of American Agrarianism

Any discussion about fly over country (that is Middle America or the American South) must start with a firm foundation in the land. From the agrarian message of John Taylor of Caroline through Thomas Jefferson and on into the 20th Century with the work of Ralph Barsodi, the fiction of William Faulkner, and the philosophy of Wendell Berry, the land remains a central concern.

Nearly all these men see the land and the people’s relationship to it in an almost feudal way. It is as if the people belong to the land instead of our modern capitalist way of seeing the land as something that belongs to the people. The relationship with the people and the land is a much more symbiotic one in rural America. It is because of this that much of what rural people can intuit about the world comes from their agrarian background.

First, one must understand that the cultivation of the soil (the mother of all arts) has what M. Thomas Inge describes as a “positive spiritual good” that instills in the farmer the virtues of “honor, manliness, self-reliance, courage, moral integrity, and hospitality.” Man acquires these virtues through his direct contact with physical nature.

It is through this connection with nature that man experiences the divine. Nature is the medium through which God is directly revealed. Nature serves to remind mankind of the finitude of his nature and his dependence upon Nature’s God. In the Judeo-Christian worldview, farming is an occupation and a calling blessed by God.

According to this cosmology, God was the first farmer having brought order and creation to the universe out of its confusion and chaos. Farming was the first occupation and Adam, the first man, was also the first farmer. Following the example of God and through the direct contact with nature, mankind follows the example set by God and creates order out of chaos. It is through his relationship with nature that mankind develops a closer relationship with God.

In addition, farming is the sole occupation that offers the practitioner total independence and self-sufficiency. Given the state of the economy and the unease in which all of us go into the marketplace to sell our labor, surely, we can appreciate an occupation where there is some independence and shelter from the global marketplace. If the farmer owns the land on which he works (and it is not mortgaged to the bank), he can subsist and perhaps even thrive regardless of the state of the economy and the global marketplace.

Farmers can provide for their basic needs of food and shelter through little more than the farmer’s cooperative relationship with the land. If the property taxes are low (which those living in the suburbs will never know that experience) farmers can produce much of what they need without the marketplace. In this sense, the market, which is pervasive and all-consuming in urban America is little more than something on the periphery of the rural American farmer. In a society where almost all of our interactions with one another are transactional in nature, the absence of the market and the pressures that come with it must seem anachronistic and quaint.

However, economists do not see self-sufficiency as economic activity at all because it is not a commodity that is bought and sold in the marketplace. However, the standard by which an economic system should be judged is not merely the credits and the debits on the balance sheet and the GDP but should also consider how effectively the economy encourages freedom, individuality, and morality.

Farmers, in contrast to those who earn their living in the labor markets of industrial capitalism, have a stable position in an ordered society. The farmer has a “sense of identity” and a “sense of historical and religious tradition.” Because of the emphasis on place and the farmer’s place in that place, the farmer experiences a feeling of belonging to his family, community, and region. This sense of place and this feeling of belonging is psychologically and culturally beneficial for those who live in farm communities. This psychological sense of belonging to a place and to a culture creates a way of live that serves as a check on the fragmented and alienating aspects of modern society.

In contrast to this way of life, urban living and industrial capitalism destroys the independence and the dignity of the individual and fosters vice and weakness in both the individual and in the faux community that exists in that culture. While there may have been micro communities and micro economies within the urban centers, these micro societies were gradually forced out of existence by the spread of industrialism, modernism, and the leviathan state. With the emergence of this leviathan state, most of the constraints on government power have gone unchecked. This might every well lead to a new kind of totalitarian society where nearly every aspect of human existence is subject to government oversight and control.

This is precisely the kind of tyranny that the Founding Fathers opposed. However, we must remember not only what the Founders opposed but also what their commitments were. Almost all of them were committed to some form of agrarianism and a micro economy and society that maximizes freedom and individual liberty. In this sense, the best society is one that is largely composed of farmers, local tradesmen, and independent artisans that are bound together in stable communities in which citizens know one another as people.

It is under this regime of self-government that offers both the greatest possible scope for the exercise of individual freedom and the greatest possible incentive to exercise that freedom responsibly. The agricultural community that exists throughout rural America with its fellowship and cooperation among the individuals within the society provides a potential model for the ideal society — an agrarian utopian vision that challenges the dystopia of urban America.