Localism Remains Laughable

I could call localism "loco" to take advantage of the alliterative effect, but I think it's more important to highlight the hilarity of its constructs. The latest essay we have from Gracy Olmstead in TAC once again proves the total irrelevance and complete lack of self-awareness of the localist movement.

You have to look at the title first, "Wendell Berry’s cure for partisanship", and ask yourself why we are suddenly hearing about partisanship in a negative way. Is it because a certain party won a bunch of election races? I'm not sure that partisanship is as bad as some people, i.e., the losers, make it out to be. At any rate partisanship is as American as apple pie, and that shouldn't be forgotten.

What is “localism”? It’s a vision of civic involvement and community that, at root, is summed up in one phrase: “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” As Katherine Dalton, a senior editor for the Front Porch Republic (FPR), puts it: “Our love of country is a very little, very local thing. You can’t love something or someone without knowing it well.”

I think we all agree with the second statement. Loving America doesn't mean loving 50 states in equal measure. I know more about Ohio and Pennsylvania than I do about Tennessee, so I love those states more. But her first statement, "Our love of country is a very little, very local thing," is one of those remarks that leaves me scratching my head as to the exact meaning. Certainly one can love America by taking care of the little plot of America which you own and treating with respect the Americans you run into each day. But perhaps more certainly, one can learn to love the Founding Fathers and the nation they framed through reading history and study even if one has never known them personally nor had the opportunity to visit Philadelphia or any one the other great American landmarks. They made your plot possible, after all.

I think these people suffer from a lack of "both/and" thinking, being rather stuck in the world of "either/or". Perhaps they are reacting to elite operatives in Washington who are the other side of that coin and dismiss them as "those people in flyover country." So their brand of politics is an over-reaction based on wounded pride. One gets the feeling that when they see, for example, a picture of an abortion protester holding a sign and shouting in Washington during the January march they cannot imagine that person visiting a sick person or attending a townhall meeting. But in my experience they are the same people more often than not.

“Knowledge of a place is multi-generational, passed down through families and communities,” says Jeff Polet, editor-in-chief of FPR and a professor at Hope College in Michigan. “In destroying regional community, we are asked to love a body”—that is, a country—“that has grown cold.” Simple things like cultivating relationships with local businesses are important politically, Mitchell says: good politics grow out of “civic friendships,” common affections that supersede rancorous partisanship. These foster a “political context” that is healthier and fuller than the “red-meat politics” we see on television.

Here's my main problem with the argument. The "red-meat politics" affects everyone in the country. You aren't going to be able to avoid the effects of Obamacare simply because you prefer local politics to national. Or name any of the other big, hot-button issues in the news: cap and trade, amnesty, how tough the US decides to fight terrorism, what policies the Federal Reserve enacts, etc. All of these things affect everyone in their communities wherever they are across the fruited plain.

Wendell Berry is an example of the way localists defy party structures and schismatic divides: he’s an outspoken environmentalist who often lambasts capitalists for their ruthless treatment of land and resources, yet he also upholds traditional family values and principles of conservation that are decidedly conservative.

Wait... what? Wendell Berry "upholds traditional family values"? I don't think so. Besides, it is pretty ridiculous to suggest that he angers people on the left. I will believe that when I see the evidence.

Rather than dealing in abstractions and global efforts, localism is about concrete realities and particular circumstances. [Wendell] Berry himself rarely leaves Kentucky: he’s grounded himself so fully in his farm and local community he doesn’t like to leave. His example answers the question of just what localism ought to be.

"[H]e’s grounded himself so fully in his farm and local community he doesn't like to leave." But it would be wrong to think that has always been the case. Wendell Berry is 80 years old so, and that enough to explain why he isn't traveling like he used to, except to ironically deliver lectures at prestigious national conferences as Ms. Olmstead mentions. Berry was quite the globe-trotter in his early days before settling down; this has always struck me as funny and ironic as I mention in that post.

This article is mischaracterizes Wendell Berry's true nature as being some sort of enigmatic non-partisan genius when he is actually a left-leaning environmentalist scold who made his money from a tobacco plantation. This article also makes dubious assertions about the political priorities of normal Americans in an attempt to portray one part of national politics as more important than the other parts. The use of the boogieman of partisanship right after the Republican sweep of a nationalized midterm election tips the ideological hand of this particular "Front Porcher", Gracy Olmstead. If this is the best she can do to attract people to the localist cause, I can describe it using the language of my kids: epic fail.

Hey-ey, I, oh, oh I'm still alive...

I'm still alive, just on a new project and up to my neck. Props to Keith and all y'all for keeping stuff going on EQE.

Thought this was an insightful comment from an admitted liberal anonymous commenter (LibAnon) regarding why Rod Dreher rubs him/her the wrong way. The comment continues in the following section here. I'll remark on several excerpts, then I have to bolt.

....I was bullied pretty mercilessly for a while as a kid - in a Catholic school. But I've largely moved on with life. Sure, I despise bullies and authoritarians in general, but I tend to function decently well.

Rod doesn't. Rod's a perpetually aggrieved teenager in a pushing-50-something's body. Rod keeps an enemies' list far longer than Nixon's and nurses his grudges like precious children. The world has failed Rod, and Rod is going to make the world pay. It's all about Rod.

Most people who are bullied do move on with life. That's why I wonder if the new emphasis on bullying isn't caused somewhat by a fixation on it. It might be even more important to get over bullying episodes in the long run than "standing up" to the bully. I always imagine the kids who bullied me in school as working as lackeys in quick oil change garages and as farmhands in the middle of Bum-fudge-egypt. And I'm sure I'm right.

Think about the trajectory of his life since he's been online (which, thanks to his ridiculous personal oversharing, one can get a good sense of). He went to Dallas to do editorial work, but the newspaper industry started to go belly-up. This is the age of his Crunchy Con blog on Beliefnet. Irritating to some, I found it fascinating. Sure, he was a little touchy, but seemed somewhat well-adjusted.

Then he goes to Philadelphia to edit the Templeton Foundation's new online magazine. He immediately runs into trouble because, shockingly, the Templeton people don't seem to appreciate a stream of posts about loose women rather than, you know, WHAT THEY WERE ALL ABOUT. Also, the OCA Orthodox churches (Religion Number 3, for those keeping score) don't fit Rod's standards. So, he passive-aggressively manages to get himself fired from his supposed dream job editing a magazine about the mysteries of the universe because he can't stop being snarky online (this time over some church dispute).

I think the man's peak was the Templeton Foundation gig. The guy had arrived and he didn't realize it. His pessimism got the better of him and all he could see were the things which were wrong with it.

You notice less and less about Rod's blissful family life (which he wrote a lot about in Dallas, which makes its absence all the more noticeable). The good Mrs. Dreher barely appears at all anymore.

Everyone keeps failing Rod. His idol, Wendell Berry, fails him earlier this year, and he turns upon him with a fury that makes me think Rod was looking for an excuse to unburden himself of that old man (who is far more influential than Rod will ever be). He goes the Mel Gibson route and founds the Church of Rod (affiliated with ROCOR, but pretty much Rod's personal kingdom) because the Orthodox churches in Baton Rouge aren't pure enough for him - Religion Number 4. His triumphant return to the town of his birth does not seem to be regarded so triumphantly by those he left behind - they're not lining up to kiss his posterior the way he imagines they should. He gets testier and testier, to the point that commenters on his own blog start posting their concern for Rod's emotional state.

I pointed out at the time that Wendell Berry's attack on Christian morality should not have surprised anyone. But I think Liberal Anonymous is correct to point out that Dreher's response to Berry's betrayal has has a "you-have-failed-me" tinge to it.

As we always like to say, read the whole thing. I don't necessarily agree with the characterization 100%; I think everyone tends to feel more like they've been failed by public figures than admitting their folly in trusting them to be their spokespeople. That's why our friend, Tom, is always quoting the Bible with "Put not your trust in Princes." Plus pointing fingers gets easier the more you do it. But it does seem like Dreher may be "failed" more often than most due to the remarkably bad judgment with regard to those with whom he throws in his lot, e.g., Abp. Gandalf, Met. Jonah, Wendell Berry and Wick Allison and his crazy crew at The American Conservative, which LibAnon rightly terms a "sinking ship".

One more insightful observation I will point out that LibAnon makes is the blogging less and less about "blissful family life". It does seem like this feature has fallen off as of late. But this is not necessarily due to a decline in bliss. Maybe the man is just wising up about the dangers of oversharing.

The Unveiling of Wendell Berry

Reactions to Wendell Berry's coming out in support of same-sex marriage have run the gamut on the level of admitted surprise. Rod Dreher is "greatly surprised". Emily Stimpson -- who's piece gets the hat tip from me -- states "[A]t least for me, it’s not entirely shocking."

Having written the following paragraph less than a year ago, my reaction is somewhat lower on the surprise spectrum than either Dreher's or Stimpson's.

The imagined world of Wendell Berry is no less silly than the one "imagined" by John Lennon, it just has more tillable land, furry animals, and maybe a few Indian tribes running around killing each other. Berry is a user of the land and a user of resources just like everybody else he criticizes. The fact that he may use a little bit less than others is ultimately a matter of taste and not morality. I don't care what he does with his life, but he seems to care a lot what others do with theirs and has developed his own Sharia-like law based on his preferences.

I would point everyone toward Timothy Dalrymple's excellent response—as do Dreher and Stimpson—as a sensible, representative Christian response explaining why what he calls Berry's "epic slanderfest" is so preposterous.

My concern here is to merely point out why I am not surprised by this at all, and why no one who believes that ideas have consequences should expect this type of transition from Berry, if it is even indeed a transition at all and not just an unveiling of beliefs he has held for quite some time.

First of all, accusing Christians of being haters of homosexuals is merely the latest in a long line of factual errors based on personal prejudice in the non-fiction writings of Wendell Berry. In his famous Why I am NOT going to buy a computer essay from 1987, Berry refers to a computer as "expensive equipment" which, if he decided to purchase one, would be akin to and attempt to replace his wife who typed his writings for him on an old, manual typewriter. A PC with peripherals marketed to a farmer in that year would probably have cost $800.00 ($1,616.00 in 2013 inflation-adjusted dollars) and I'm guessing wouldn't be extremely unreasonable compared to equipment expenditures for a medium-sized farm. Almost anyone reading the essay would find his insistence that that acquiring a computer would be in effect replacing his wife, rather than replacing the typewriter to which he's become attached, a strange, weak and badly-reasoned argument.

Secondly, Berry has been a dissenter from mainstream Christianity for a long time, and he has been a fierce critic of Christianity for not being more like him. A good example is his Christianity and the Survival of Creation essay. He first calls the condemnation of Christianity by conservationists for its "culpability of Christianity in the destruction of the natural world" a just condemnation. Then he points out that the anti-Christian environmentalist zealots haven't read the Bible, so they don't realize that modern Christianity's supposed disregard for and rape of creation is not rooted in Scripture, or at least not his understanding of Scripture. He calls for a need to "learn to read and understand the Bible in the light of the present fact of Creation." This in turn requires "careful and judicious study, not dismissal." Ironically, he quotes Leviticus to condemn accumulating large amounts of real estate, however he obviously dismisses earlier passages in that particular book condemning homosexual acts. I'm guessing that if I suggested that real estate regulations were ceremonial or cultural my interpretation would be dismissed along with explicit scriptural condemnations of said acts which he personally finds no problem with since, to his mind, these acts do not affect energy consumption, agriculture, or the airy-fairy ideal of "sense of place in community".

So, what are we left with? The Gospel According to Wendell Berry in all it's self-righteous condescension and hypocritical inconsistency, whether it's appealing to biblical authority to support pet opinions or stereotyping Americans as conspicuous consumers because they use electricity and buy computers. Berry has always been a self-righteous scold about issues that most Christians from the time of Christ on have considered to be matters of prudence and not absolute morality. The fact that he might go the other way, regarding orthodox Christianity's moral prohibitions as matters of personal choice, should not surprise anyone. This is due to the fact that he is obviously marching to the beat of his own drum. The only question left is this: how does he get away with this inconsistency and bad-reasoning?

My theory is that he is protected by the people who have been deeply moved by his works of fiction or have been swayed by some of his down home wisdom about farming. It is sort of like the protection the media gives Obama on matters like the Benghazi cover-up or the Fast and Furious gun-running operation. Or the kind of pass that's given to film industry pedophilia of the Woody Allen or Roman Polanski variety. The obvious prejudices, logical inconsistencies and factual errors are glossed over because "Well, someone needs to say this stuff and nobody else is doing it." I don't buy either premise. Nobody needs to state inaccuracies about Christians hating gays or destroying the environment. Plus everybody on the left is doing that, non-stop, every day. And there is really no point in trying to deny a simple fact, especially not at this point: Wendell Berry is a man of the left. As such, he warrants the protection of the left and receives it.

One more thing: I commend Rod Dreher for his strong words of condemnation against Wendell Berry for his attacks. For emphasis I link to them again. It's not easy to accuse a favorite author of behavior which is "crude, simplistic, combative, vicious, and altogether deeply disappointing" or calling his words on an issue a "barely-coherent farrago of liberal clichés, ugly insults, and shallow, indignant moralizing". But I applaud and echo all his words which can hardly be called exaggerated if you read Berry's original statements.

Wendell Berry's Imagined World

Here are some of my favorite paragraphs in the very good article by James Schall on Wendell Berry.

The stark localism of Berry is very attractive in many ways. He wants to get us out of the cities and back to the land, to know our neighbor. He wants us to preserve the land and in the process of preserving ourselves and our planet. It is a majestic vision, no doubt. Yet, man is a city living being. The exodus from the land was not merely a plot against mankind but rather a fulfillment of man and the city in which the higher things could take place. It is not that great and human things do not take place in the economic order, but that they are not enough, do not speak what man is. Berry himself, after all, is also a college professor. Scenes of him with his horses and plough are striking, but so are those of his being given a medal by the president. Without the city, he could not speak.

Yes: were the guys who invented your microphone and started your publishing company "boomers" or "stickers"?

The Jefferson lecture has many moving passages. But it somehow struck me as a kind of ecological utopianism. It promotes a world of villages. Berry wants to put us all to work. He seems to reverse Pieper’s notion that we work in order to have leisure. The lives of his characters are honorable and deeply sensitive, no doubt of it. His grandfather, he tells us, took but one trip in his life, to Tennessee, and didn’t see much there that would want to make him leave again. Ever since I read William Cobbett, I have realized that we can achieve our salvation even if we never leave home. If Berry does anything, he makes us nostalgic for our homes. To what extent we are also “restless” at home is not always clear. The Jefferson Lecture re-domesticates us. Still, it does not seem like a lasting city, let alone a lasting farm, even when we live there all our lives and care for the land and animals.

You thought the story of the city mouse and the country mouse was basically a parable about how there is no lasting city on earth, and although where you live may be bad, there are many other worse places. But you have no idea how fascistic a country mouse could be before you listen to Wendell Berry. In Berry's parable, the country mouse returns home, repents of his trip, then scolds the city mouse for preferring his urban residence.

“And so I am nominating economy for an equal sanding among the arts and humanities. I mean, not economics, but economy, the making of the human household upon the earth.” Berry, I am sure, would not disagree with the famous phrase, “We have here no lasting city.” But the Jefferson Lecture does leave me perplexed about the admonition “Increase, multiply, and subdue the earth.” I had always supposed that this passage encouraged us to use our minds and hands so that we could accomplish these purposes. The Jefferson Lecture seems to oppose our minds to our affections, the city to the economy. One suspects that we would be better off if we could harmonize the two instead of pitting them against each other.

Emphasis mine. The imagined world of Wendell Berry is no less silly than the one "imagined" by John Lennon, it just has more tillable land, furry animals, and maybe a few Indian tribes running around killing each other. Berry is a user of the land and a user of resources just like everybody else he criticizes. The fact that he may use a little bit less than others is ultimately a matter of taste and not morality. I don't care what he does with his life, but he seems to care a lot what others do with theirs and has developed his own Sharia-like law based on his preferences. Continuing to pay serious attention to him as a thinker because a few of his quips are quotable and insightful is a dubious practice which can be applied to moral idiots such as Mao Tse-Tung, Muhammad Ali and the aforementioned Mr. Lennon, although I am reminded that the line "I believe in yesterday" was penned solely by Mr. McCartney.

"You can't figure out the bag l'm in"

Rod Dreher and I had a rare exchange in the combox over here. I commented on someone else's reporting that Wendell Berry was kind of a globetrotter before he became a staunch localista. My original comment was this:

It's funny that Wendell Berry lived all over the world and writes romantically about people who live in one place their whole life. Not right, not wrong, not good, not evil, not "hypocritical" -- whatever that means... just FUNNY. I hope he makes millions of dollars selling his books and farm produce and has a very happy life. To me he's a very funny guy.

To which Rod responded:

Pauli, I don't think that's fair to Berry. He did live elsewhere as a young man, but chose to move back to his family home in rural Kentucky and take up farming and writing. He could have had a great career had he chosen to stay in New York or in some academic center -- but he had the conviction that he should return home. Why is that wrong? It's an overblown analogy, I concede, but isn't this the same logic that would damn the repentant sinner for urging people to choose to follow Christ, on the grounds that he had his fun, and has no grounds on which to deny the same experience to others?

Anyway, I'd be real surprised if Berry was getting rich off his books, or doing much more than breaking even, if that. The overwhelming majority of books published today lose money.

For what it's worth, Rod Dreher is a much better writer than Wendell Berry. But this was my response to his comment in multi-part format with his remarks in Italics:

Pauli, I don't think that's fair to Berry. He did live elsewhere as a young man, but chose to move back to his family home in rural Kentucky and take up farming and writing.

And there was nothing wrong with what he chose to do.

He could have had a great career had he chosen to stay in New York or in some academic center -- but he had the conviction that he should return home.

Well, it sounds to me like does have a great career. And insofar as he followed his own personal conviction, great.

Why is that wrong?

Re-read my post. I specifically stated that it's not wrong, whatever he did or does.

It's an overblown analogy, I concede, but isn't this the same logic that would damn the repentant sinner for urging people to choose to follow Christ, on the grounds that he had his fun, and has no grounds on which to deny the same experience to others?

It's an overblown analogy because living a bunch of places and then moving back home isn't repenting simply because you haven't sinned to begin with.

Anyway, I'd be real surprised if Berry was getting rich off his books, or doing much more than breaking even, if that. The overwhelming majority of books published today lose money.

OK — my overblown remark was talking about making millions of dollars. My bad. What I mean is that Wendell Berry should live and be well and ride horses and roll his own smokes and have a kick-ass farm. That is his choice.

Judging from what I've read, his material is chock full of over-the-top condemnation of people's lifestyle choices and a tendency to manufacture pharisaical moral dilemmas in a kind of pre-Christian cult of blood and soil. So my main point is still that it is funny to me that he went Bilbo-like off on adventures elsewhere and returned home enlightened. He should certainly suffer all others to choose the same path, or those equally licit.

I then apologized for saying "cult of blood and soil" because of the connotations. But if you want to talk about overblown analogies, the "bloom where you're planted" is a good place to start. Everyone know what it means generally, but the fact remains that people aren't plants. We are made to move around. Some people don't have a family farm to move back to and others are called to serve their fellowman elsewhere.

Well, anyway, this explains it all: