The Crunchy-Con Menace
[Rescuing America from the idiocy of rural life.]
I hardly agree with agrarian poet & essayist Wendell Berry on every question. For example, he espouses pacifism—a creed I regard as indirectly contributing to America's irresponsible imperialism rather than as a potential solution. A somewhat idiosyncratic Protestant, Mr. Berry seems dubious at times of what he calls "organized Christianity", whereas I am a dogmatic if somewhat ecumenical Catholic. Nor do I go so far as Mr. Berry in his skepticism regarding material progress and technological innovation. To my mind the inventive impulse is, like art, an expression of Man's status as an image and likeness of his Creator.
All that said, I find worthwhile food for thought in Berry's writing even on those points where I part company with him. His critiques of our bloated military-industrial apparatus do not in the end rest upon dovish platitudes but upon common sense. His concerns about pious-but-gnosticized Creationists treating Creation with contempt are especially timely, given the rise of "prosperity theology". And his warnings against the thoroughly thoughtless embrace of dehumanizing technologies exposes the folly of the mainstream mantra Technology is morally neutral. (I would go further, and say that in the abstract "technology" is a positive good. Fatuous cliches about "moral neutrality", however, ignore that we never encounter “technology” but only particular technologies—each and every adoption of a particular new technology being an action which gives rise to some cultural, psychological, and spiritual reaction.)
In short, it would be one giant leap for sanity if more Americans picked up Berry's challenging gauntlet: What Are People For?
Unfortunately, considered engagement of Berry's thought does not seem to be on the rise, at least if David Gordon's recent article, "We Will Berry You! The Flaky Socialism of the Crunchy-Cons" is any indication. Given the title, one wonders how Gordon expects anyone to believe he has given Berry anything approaching a respectful hearing.
Gordon's conclusion lives down to his opening headline, taking a jab at the presence of the demon-weed tobacco on Berry’s farm: "In view of Berry’s plangent complaints that market capitalism destroys human beings, it is more than a little ironic that Berry is himself a tobacco farmer."
This would be ironic, that is, if we adhere to hygenic-morality, and if we assume that the self-righteous straw-prig whom Gordon seeks to refute is Wendell Berry. But the central point of Berry's environmental writing is that health issues stemming from pollution and soil erosion are merely symptoms of deeper, more general existential evils—such as the ongoing community-dissolution and rootlessness found in an economic system wherein independent farmers find it increasingly difficult to stay afloat. Of course from the perspective of some this is a win-win situation: Anyone who is too rigidly wholesome in their efforts to hold on to their way of life will sooner or later fail and wind up in the city. Once rescued from "the idiocy of rural life" (as Marx put it) they will no longer annoy us with their agrarian whining. If, on the other hand, they stay afloat, then they will inevitably get their own hands dirty—in which case, per Gordon, they have no business voicing anything except hosannas to the New York Stock Exchange. Since I am a sinner, presumably it is "more than a little ironic" for me to observe that pornography is sinful.
In any event, Berry is less interested in casting stones than some seem to think. For example, while arguing that it might be better for women to seek fulfillment through housewifery than through the workforce, Berry notes that
in many marriages both husband and wife are now finding it necessary to work away from home...it is true that a family living that not so long ago was ordinarily supported by one job now routinely requires two or more.
My interest is not to quarrel with individuals, men or women, who work away from home, but rather to ask why we should consider this general working away from home to be a desirable state of things, either for people or for marriage, for our society or for our country.
There are many possible intelligent answers to this; some of the intelligent answers might challenge Berry. But "Shut up, you tobacco-growing pinko—you have no moral credibility," is not one of them.
This brings up the tactic of hinting slyly that Berry is but a step away from being a Communist. Perhaps I am overreacting to what is merely a jest—but then I don't think one can "merely" imply that a man resembles a Soviet socialist any more than one can "merely" imply a man's resemblance to a white supremacist, a terrorist, or Morris Dees. Does Gordon really think it clever to compare a pacifist farmer who writes poetry to Nikita "We Will Bury You!" Krushchev? To "the Butcher of the Ukraine"? In a situation like this either the comparison is apt and the play-on-words has hit home... or the comparison is a smear—a false, obnoxious, phony, and stupid one—and a sincere apology to the entire Berry family is in order.
In order to discern which is the case, it is worth pointing out that Krushchev pushed land-collectivation, promoted "progressive" industrial agriculture methods, deployed nuclear weapons to Cuba, and approved construction of the Berlin Wall. I can hardly speak for Mr. Berry, but I very strongly suspect he would frown on these things. (Then again, if burley is one of the crops a farmer cultivates on his family farm, perhaps any "plangent complaints" he might make regarding the policies of the Soviet Empire would be hypocritical.)
Also peculiar is Gordon's ultimate dismissal of Berry and his admirers as "statists of a familiar sort". As evidence, he cites Berry's horrifying endorsement of things such as “laws against trusts and monopolies" and "the principle of collective bargaining". Apparently the government's iron hand should provide some select individuals with legal shielding against debt and tort liability which plague personally-owned businesses—while simultaneously policing other individuals to ensure they daren't get uppity by forming one of those corporate bodies known as a union. Statists, indeed.
In any event, we're not just talking about any statists, mind you—but the worst variety, statists "of a familiar sort". One wonders what "familiar sort" are we talking about— perhaps, oh, say, former US Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz? So far as I can tell, Communist functionaries do have a bit in common with Butz, whose policies followed from convictions that "food is a weapon" of the US government, and that American farmers would have to "adapt or die". (Previous USDA Secretary Ezra Benson had more mildly contented himself with directing farmers to "get big or get out.")
But no … it is Berry's enthusiasm for centralized-planning that we have to watch out for. Yes, we freedom-lovers must keep an eye on this dangerous man, who gives away his liberty-stifling agenda with collectivist rhetoric like:
For most of the history of this country our motto, implied or spoken, has been Think Big. I have come to believe that a better motto, and an essential one now, is Think Little. That implies the necessary change of thinking and feeling, and suggests the necessary work.
Thinking Big has led us to the two biggest and cheapest political dodges of our time: plan-making and law-making. The lotus-eaters of this era are in Washington, D.C., Thinking Big. Somebody comes up with a problem, and somebody in the government comes up with a plan or a law. The result, mostly, has been the persistence of the problem, and the enlargement and enrichment of the government.
Holy propagandistic socialist boilerplate. But wait—it gets worse:
While the government is "Studying" and funding and organizing its Big Thought, nothing is being done. But the citizen who is willing to Think Little, and, accepting the discipline of that, to go ahead on his own, is already solving the problem. A man who is trying to live as a neighbor to his neighbors will have a lively and practical understanding of the work of peace and brotherhood, and let there be no mistake about it—he is doing that work.
A couple who make a good marriage, and raise healthy, morally competent children, are serving the world's future more directly and surely than any political leader, though they never utter a public word.
Where's Joe McCarthy when we need him?
Baffling, too, is Gordon's broad-brushing of Berry as the "principal ideologue" of "the crunchy-con movement", accompanied by an effort to debunk Berry through surrogate-target Rod Dreher (author of the neologism "crunchy-con" via his book of that title). Berry has never identified himself with any conservative movement, "crunchy" or otherwise. He has, in fact, written an entire essay entitled, "In Distrust of Movements." It is quite possible Berry would not even recognize the term "crunchy-con", even less likely that he would relish it. Given that he does not own a computer, it is less likely still that he spends any time rallying and catechizing his followers on Dreher's "Crunchy-Cons" blog.
I might point out that I have never had the urge to read Dreher's book and have no strong feelings about him either way. I am not interested in bashing the original Crunchy-Con; what I would like to make clear is that trying to "get" Berry via a critique of Dreher makes probably less sense than, say, claiming to have discredited Russell Kirk via a scathing deconstruction of William F. Buckley. It is also a bit thick that Gordon—a senior fellow at a think-tank which is devoted to promoting a single, exceedingly specific school of economic thought—has the gall to label a farmer an ideologue.
But Gordon does kindly acknowledge Berry's other achievements, observing that Berry's work "repays careful study" on those rare occasions when Berry "sticks to what he knows," such as "the meaning of death in King Lear." Sighs Gordon: "Regrettably, [Berry] has much to say about economics as well."
This meddling is naturally a grave problem, since Berry is distinguished by his "ignorance of economics," and "shows not the slightest acquaintance" with "the relevant works of Mises and Hayek." The irresistible you-haven't-read-the-appropriate-books argument rears its head again. Clearly Berry has no more competence to note symptomatic problems with the socioeconomic order in which he lives than would an unlettered kulak in objecting to the rather assertive measures of Bolshevism.
True, Mr. Berry has probably never read Hayek's The Road To Serfdom (though perhaps that's not a good example, Serfdom not being a book one can recommend, since it contains blatantly statist shibboleths such as "It is important not to confuse opposition to [socialist] planning with a dogmatic laissez faire attitude.") But I would guess Berry has at least as much practical experience of markets and of how to run a tangible economy as Mr. Gordon does. Then again, by another analogy, whose opinion would we value more regarding the situation in Iraq—a disgruntled Army master-sergeant who has been on the pointy end of American Middle East policy, or armchair-Ares Max Boot? A no-brainer: Has the master-sergeant read "the relevant works" of foreign affairs, military history, and international law? I think not.
Of course such an analogy would be distressing to Mr. Gordon, given that he takes great pains to discredit Berry's comparison of modern capitalism to warfare. Gordon complains that "Berry has confused two very different things," because, as we all know, "in a war, each combatant aims to destroy the other."
Admittedly some readers may have heard an alternative, lunatic-fringe hypothesis about warfare, that its telos is not destruction per se but rather power—power as manifested in material wealth and ideological dominion. Rumors abound among radical-leftist circles, claiming in effect that offensive wars are initiated by aggressors to acquire more power, and that defensive wars are fought by defenders seeking to preserve power and thus retain independence. All such theories are, of course, statist nonsense of a familiar sort.
And they certainly have nothing to do with what Gordon describes as capitalism's wonderful, sublime "form of social cooperation", which exists as an implicit understanding between the victor and the vanquished. Woops—er, I mean between agribusiness, and former-farmers liberated into enjoyment of beef-fed beef at low, low prices. Having plain-old-tomatoes with plain-old-tomato genes become an exotic "organic" luxury item is certainly a price well worth paying in exchange for affordably-cloned uber-produce. Everybody wins.
Of course everybody wins, according to Gordon, since (as we have just seen) "economic competition is not a war", and Berry "hasn’t shown that there are losers in a free market". Had Berry studied economics, you see, he would have realized how dangerous it is to wildly assume, a priori, that the word competition necessarily entails categories like winners and losers. If your business fails you can always win as a janitor.
Returning to things which are "more than a little ironic," it is singularly astonishing that Gordon patronizes Berry's studies of "the meaning of death in King Lear," in light of Berry's explanation for the origins of his book Life Is A Miracle: "Lately my thoughts about the inevitably commercial genetic manipulations already in effect or contemplated have sent me back to King Lear again." A serious penalty flag must be thrown if Gordon is under the impression that Berry's work dealing with Lear is mostly-harmless, with no import on commercial activity.
You see, Berry is of that aggravating (but happily dwindling) group of cranks who regard the study of literature not as a high-culture consumer entertainment but a serious mode of understanding reality, a mode of understanding which conveys insights applicable to community issues. Berry's central interest is not the esoteric meaning of death “in King Lear" but rather in what Shakespeare can tell us about the meaning of life in the real world. Berry seems to think this meaning has implications that go beyond lit-crit conferences:
'Thy life's a miracle. Speak yet again.' This is the line that calls Gloucester back—out of hubris, and out of the damage and despair that inevitably follow—into the properly subordinated human life of grief and joy, where change and redemption are possible.
The power of that line read in the welter of innovation and speculation of bioengineers will no doubt be obvious. One immediately recognizes that suicide is not the only way to give up on life. We know that creatures and kinds of creatures can be killed, deliberately or inadvertently. And most farmers know that any creature that is sold has been in a sense given up on; there is a big difference between selling this year's lamb crop, which is, as such, all that it can be, and selling the breeding flock or the farm, which hold the immanence of a limitless promise.
This preeminent product of Berry's Lear studies is in large part an effort by Berry to refute those scientists who would tolerate the chirping of the occasional theologian or poet, so long as the latter "sticks to what he knows" and does not interfere with technocratic efforts to define the purpose, form, and operation of society. Such condescending tolerance is akin to how we all might feel about an amusing but useless black-sheep relation, who though an irresponsible idiot does at least possess a knack for making the finest origami pterodactyls. He's OK and we're glad to have him around, so long as he sticks to what he knows.
Undoubtedly Mr. Berry knows nothing of formal economic science; yet Mr. Gordon is by his own admission "in no position to judge" Berry's thoughts on Lear. If we must play the credentials game, then perhaps being in a "position to judge" thoughts on Shakespeare should be prerequisite for a man speaking on any important issue dealing with community, economy, society—in short, life—here in what’s left of Shakespeare's civilization. If Shakespeare has anything of any real importance to say then his corpus cannot be segregated from political issues, nor confined to a realm of irrelevant, specialized scholarship.
I do not dismiss Mr. Gordon's own substantive and serious scholarship, nor do I seek to marginalize it; rather I would prefer he take greater care in speaking about people he has never met, whether Berry or family-farmers in general. Cracks such as "farmers are not being forced to leave agriculture at gunpoint," reveal an embarrassing juxtaposition of insensitivity and ignorance. Certainly the former denizens of Kentucky's Land Between the Lakes would find Gordon's pithy quip bitterly amusing, given that Tennessee Valley Authority henchmen spent the 1960’s and 70’s busily evicting some 900 farming families from their private property. (In some cases, yes, at gunpoint.) Not because this now-vanished, self-sufficient and debt-free community couldn't cut it in the marketplace but simply because government functionaries desired their land for a park, in order to create jobs and foster tourism in the surrounding areas.
I am not interested in condemning the principles of libertarianism, many of which I can agree with. Yet laissez-faire libertarians worrying about the potential subversion of our economy by centralized-planners perplex me, given the centralized-state foundation upon which our corporate system has been built. I'm not especially hostile toward libertarians, I like and respect not a few of them. But it is like Ron Paul warning that the Constitution is in peril of being treated like toilet paper, like Chuck Baldwin warning that our culture is in danger of losing touch with its Christian roots, like a monarchist fretting that the influence of the British Crown may be on the wane.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news but I think the frogs in all those particular slow-cooking pots have long since been boiled. Perhaps I am revealing my own "ignorance of economics", but it escapes me how anything remotely resembling our current corporate landscape could survive without massive invasive government measures. Where does the Beltway end and the gargantuan defense and aerospace industries begin? Who says all of those coerced tax-dollars should be spent on an interstate highway system? (They could, for example, just as easily go toward perfecting and streamlining local transportation systems, to favor small farmers vice agribusiness—though I hardly advocate this either.) How many coerced tax-dollars go toward "higher education," a farce mostly designed to turn kids into technician-drones at best or pompous half-wits at worst, a farce which Berry has described as "a subsidy granted to the corporations, which in a system of free enterprise might reasonably be expected to do their own job training"? (Those tax-dollars could, after all, just as easily go toward classical education—though, once again, the federal government getting its tentacles into classical education is about the last thing I would desire.)
In any event, to reiterate—I am not interested in treating Mr. Gordon in the way he attempts to treat Berry. Mr. Gordon has, in fact, produced serious writing on topics ranging from Murray Rothbard's view of Strauss to Elizabeth Anscombe's masterful condemnation of the atomic bomb—all writing which is of more than mere academic significance, I might add. I only wish Gordon had treated the honorable gentleman from Henry County, Kentucky, with the same diligence he applies to Rothbard, the same fair-mindedness he applies even to Strauss. Had he done so Gordon would probably still disagree with Mr. Berry on a great many important issues. He would, however, recognize that Berry is not a trendy policy-lobbyist trying to get subsidies for organic farmers' markets but a good man who is trying to convince people to give more care to their heritage, to their families, and to the little corner of the Earth upon which they live.
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You might add that in addition to his public commentary, Mr. Berry is a world class novelist, short story writer, and poet.
I think Mr. Salyer has the right emphasis which is 90% of a good writer's task. It requires good judgement even when it does not require scholarship. Having read Mr. Gordon's piece over at Taki Mag I supected he was more of a libertarian scholar than a good judge of other men's character ---which some, if not most, of the crucnhy cons are. Frost once described learning as " the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper." But for most folks the only way they can judge another is how similar their work is to their own as when America's poet described the Lumberjacks thus:
"Out of the wood two hulking tramps
(From sleeping God knows where last night,
But not long since in the lumber camps).
They thought all chopping was theirs of right.
Men of the woods and lumberjacks,
They judged me by their appropriate tool.
Except as a fellow handled an ax
They had no way of knowing a fool."
One has the feeling reading Mr. Gordon's piece that other than how a man views economics, he would have "no way of judging a fool." My complaint against some of the Crunchy cons is not that they are fools but sentimentalists. Heaven is a tough place to find and even a tougher place to hold, so anybody that thinks heaven is in the country (or the city) is going to be disappointed if they are living in the world. Wendell Berry is no sentimentalist, he is a poet. And some of his followers would do well to read some of his novels again and not just his thoughtful critiques of decadence and modern duplicity.
A "crunchy con"?? Ouch, that's quite a charge to make. I'm tempted to say it would be libelous if it were false.
Mr.Salyer, I think you're being hard on Gordan. I do not think he intended to insult Mr. Berry personally. However I do think his critique of Berry is flawed, because I'm not sure he and Dreher have much in common. Dreher is however, a rather valid target for a good critique.
I recall several pieces Dreher did for National Review, among others. He used his Catholic-convert status to essentially trash the Church. Most of them ended with the line, 'Rod Dreher, a Catholic, writes for...'. In fact, he became so critical of the Church on basically everything I found it hard to believe he ever was Catholic.
@4: Dreher's "Crunchy Cons" blog was always an obvious attempt to co-opt the paleoconservatism or conservatives who would be paleoconservatives if they realised there was a section of the movement that actually respected good taste, proper manners and historical legacies. But... "Birkenstocked Burkeans"? I can't figure out how anyone fell for that.
National Review ruins everything it touches and, like Joseph de Maistre noted of the Abbaye de Port-Royal, occupies otherwise decent and talented people in trivial futilities, so who knows about Mr. Dreher?
God Bless this little magazine, I am so very grateful for this article. Thank you to Mr. Salyer, Dr. Fleming, and anyone else who had a hand in bringing this fine piece to us. And could there be a more infelicitously named Chickenhawk than the lying, amoral cold blooded bastard Max Boot?
Indeed, Robert is more right than he or anybody else who will be tried by living through the purgatory about to be unleashed on our propositonal, indispensable Carthsodomalyonia will tragically come to know in the bitterst, hardest of ways. The Unsettling of America diagnosed our moral, environmental, political and economic cancer, but the man who also wrote the Jayber Crow stories offers no organic alternative to chemotherapy nor Steve Mc Queen almond miracle cure to be found in a seedy Tijuana clinic nor anywhere else in The City of Man. Somehow I always have had Berry woven in my consciousness with old Homer Bannon from the movie "Hud"; and thereby with Yeats (whose paganism I know Mr. Berry would rightly abjure) and his gravestone inscription from which Larry McMurtry took the title of his first novel on which "Hud" was based:
Cast a cold eye on life,
On death; Horseman pass bye
Strike my metaphorical remarks on Mr. Mc Queen. Apparently he was a Christian when he died and also did charitable works for orphaned and wayward boys. I cannot fault him for fighting for life.
iirc, Mr. Dreher's criticism was limited to the American bishops, for failing to deal with the priest scandal properly.
Hopefully one day libertarians will be as dedicated to breaking the power of Big Agribusiness and it's hold over the state as they are going after a simple man of the soil like Wendell Berry because of some idiosynchartic views.
Good piece Jerry!
@6 "The Unsettling of America diagnosed our moral, environmental, political and economic cancer, but the man who also wrote the Jayber Crow stories offers no organic alternative ..."
Thanks Virgil for this excellent post. It is exactly what I might have said if I could have said it as well as you. If readers were going to read only one of Wendell Berry's novels, Jayber Crow should be the one. God Bless
Robert:
You said it quite well yourself in your opening comment and I thanks you kindly for your remarks. Peace of Christ be with you and yours.
"Undoubtedly Mr. Berry knows nothing of formal economic science;". If Mr. Berry knew that it is all a lie then he knows all there is to know. It is not known as the dismal science for nothing. Self educated journalists of a century ago (as with historians), like Henry Hazlitt had and presented a far more intelligent economics than the BA or Ph.D propagandized professionals from our Universities.
Berry is absolutely right about Corporate agribusiness. If we don't go back to real farmers farming, as a nation we are going to starve to death. Most people do not realize that our national obesity is a sign of malnutrition -- high fructose corn syrup does not substitute for nutrition dense food.
Thanks, Sean -- and everyone else -- for the various kind words and/or reflective comments.
I believe Mr. Scallon & I are on the same wavelength in observing a point that may not address the deep philosophical divide, but is rather practical and may deserve more attention in order to bridge the gap found in "paleo" vs. libertarian debates: Even granted one rejects the "paleo" idea of community, how much do libertarian principles themselves -- the autonomous sovereign individual, entrepeneurship, free markets, etc. -- really have to do with modern corporations?
If you share the view that these corporations are deliberately engineered mutants of what Dr. Wilson has termed "state-capitalism", that they are Frankenstein's monsters brought to life and sustained by the power of the state (while simultaneously enjoying tremendous leverage over government decisions) then the answer is: Not much.
As to Rod Dreher & the Crunchy-Cons, I didn't address Gordon's critique of them at great length partly because it would have been a sidetrack requiring that an already lengthy piece become even lengthier -- and more importantly because I know very little about them. I haven't followed Dreher's religious life nor his commentary on the Church.
I do share NGPM's distaste for expressions like "Birkenstocked Burkeans", and find the whole adorable-quirkiness factor of the term "crunchy-con" regrettable. "Quirky" is not a term I think appropriate for approaching either Edmund Burke or the Vanderbilt Agrarians.
But then to be charitable one never knows what good may come. Empirically speaking -- while as a popularizer he may have compromised something, on the other hand I must concede it's fairly certain that Dreher has, if nothing else, introduced more people to the names of serious thinkers than (for example) I have.
According to Gordon, the “Losers” of our economic systyem are not "destroyed but directed to different lines of work... The many farmers no longer able to find jobs in agriculture did not die but found other sorts of work. Berry defines “loser,” so that this cannot happen: if “no one knows what to do” with a loser, he will not be able to find other work. But by this definition, he hasn’t shown that there are losers in a free market." Perhaps the farmers are happier as mechanics and electricians, I really don't know. But a country that has less than 2 percent of its population in the business of growing food is reckless. Moreover, Gordon ignores the cultural dangers of importing the majority of farm labor from the third world. Is a women raped my an illegal alien a "winner" in the free market? If our culture is unrecognizable in 30 years who are the winners and losers? Does the free market have a vision or is it simple determinism that we must accept?
As a poet, Wendell Berry may not have a systematic economic plan, but he does have a vision, rooted in his everyday life and the memory of a past society. As his protagonist Jayber Crow says of of Port William during the Great Depression, "I don't ask you to believe that the place was flourishing. But it was at least thrifty. People didn't waste anything they knew how to save...all the commercial places in town were still occupied and doing business. The people of the town still belonged to it economically as well as in other ways."
Thanks for the excellent deconstruction of a fundamentally flawed article. I read Gordon's piece with a great deal of frustration: I disagree with Berry's views in a lot of ways, but Gordon's caricature was shameful.
The Market is a machine: it is tremendously useful, tremendously powerful, and -- like many other machines -- it is capable of great destruction if we treat it as a compass rather than an engine.
I would have to agree with the comment about Rod Dreher attempting to co-opt the paleocon thunder with his little crunchy con movement. At first I was excited about his book and his efforts until I realized that Rockford and Chronicles had been preaching similar themes for years and Dreher wasn't giving credit where it was due. Then came his diatribes on the Catholic Church and it was around that time that I realized that Dreher was just another National Review flunkie. How disappointing.
This is the first time I've seen this website and I genuinely enjoyed your fine article (I did not really know what a "Crunchy Con" was).
I will certainly bookmark this site.
Dreher, as someone at his site commented, is the Andrew Sullivan of the blogosphere who likes girls, in that he is as flighty as a 16 year old chickie with his whiplash inducing political mancrushes and breakups. Moreover, and more disturbing, he has thrown in presumably for pecuniary reasons with an outfit called Beliefnet.com that host his "Crunchy Con" blog along with Deepak Chopra and recently an ad for the excreable, vicious, anti-Catholic bigot Bill Maher's Christian, Jew and Muslim bashing vehicle, "Religulous".
My encounter with the latter was upon what was to be my final visit to his blog,.; which is too bad because he links to some good stuff from the likes of Sorokin and Alisdair McIntyre. I wish I saw more of that and more energy overall here on the website. But perhaps I'm missing the big picture re: these aforementioned gentleman and the Insitute's mission viv a vis the print publication?
I regret that my article has caused any distress, but one key phrase in your comments shows that you take me to be saying more more than I had in mind. You attribute to me the view that Berry's work repays careful study "on those rare occasions" when he sticks to what he knows. The quoted phrase is something you have added and is not my opinion at all. My objections to Berry's views are entirely confined to those passages in his work where he advocates certain types of economic intervention by the state, e.g., parity pricing and those where he makes various claims about the way a capitalist economy works. I don't think that these passages are central to Berry's thought but they were the ones about which I was writing.
More specifically, I do not claim that Berry's is wrong to think that community dissolution and loss of connection with the land are problems. That is an issue I don't address: His views seem to be thoughtful, but I don't know enough about agriculture to comment on them and it wasn't my purpose to do so. Berry is in my view certainly right to object if the government interferes with efforts by small farmers to survive; my concern, again, was only with proposals to enlist the state to intervene in their behalf.
When I said that farmers haven't been expelled by force, I of course wasn't referring to the government's removing farmers to build the TVA. I meant only that if farmers are producing for a market, then they must secure enough customers to keep them in business. If they cannot do so, and have to go into some other line of work, they haven't in my view been expelled by force.
My complaint about Berry is that he makes claims about economics, e.g., that a free market tends toward monopoly, about which there is a large literature that he doesn't seem to know. He no doubt has practical business experience but, if he wishes to criticize economics , he needs to know the theory also.
I certainly don't regard Berry as a communist and my title wasn't intended to liken him to Khrushchev. My---no doubt bad---pun was rather directed against an attitude in many of his followers, in which his every pronouncement is taken with the utmost seriousness. We must remember, we are told, that he is a "world class" novelist, etc. Well, Tolstoy was also a world class novelist who didn't know much about economics.
I do think that my remarks about his being a tobacco farmer were hitting below the belt and I withdraw them.
The comments are now closed at Gordon's article, so I can't respond directly.
I agree with Gordon that Dreher and Berry display a regrettable ignorance of economics. But the root of that failing is their willingness is to take seriously the very people who toss around "free market" as a god-term: neoliberal politicians and spokesmen for big business. Like Thomas Frank, Dreher and Berry take at face value the corporate "free market" pretensions, instead of seeing their corporatism for the outrage to genuine free market values that it actually is. Were they better informed economically, they would realize that genuine free markets are the worst enemy of corporate agribusiness, and that the latter's misappropriation of the language and symbolism of the "free market" is as illegitimate as Stalin's misappropriation of the language and symbolism of the 19th century socialist and workers' movements. The American corporate economy has about as much to do with "free markets" as Stalin's Russia had to do with anarcho-syndicalism.
Snippets from Gordon and my responses follow. The lesson is that, if Dreher and Berry are economically illiterate, then Gordon is equally liable to being considered historically and politically illiterate. He is, in fact, using "free market" catchphrases to defend the present wealth and power of corporate agribusiness, with no apparent knowledge of the actual role of the state in creating the present balance of power between corporate agribusiness and small-scale farming.
GORDON: "No one, after all, forces those with Dreher’s preferences to purchase food he does not like: why should he be allowed a similar privilege over others?"
"Farmers are not being forced to leave agriculture at gunpoint."
CARSON: As Lionel Hutz might say, this is the best kind of right: technically right. But it's quite disingenuous. The consumer may not be compelled to buy any specific type of produce. But the competitive advantage between small-scale farming and corporate factory farming is most definitely shifted, at gunpoint, by the state. If the Interstate highways were funded by weight-distance fees on heavy trucks proportionate to the actual roadbed damage they cause, and if giant plantation farms in California weren't provided with subsidized irrigation water from the state's dams, people would be buying a lot more of their produce from small farmers in their own communities. The government's subsidies go almost entirely to the largest farms, and almost entirely to the growers cereal grains. And let's not even get into the effects of gov't-mandated RFID chips for livestock, mandated pasteurization of dairy products, and the like, on minimum firm size. Not to mention state subsidies to biotech R&D, the role of patents in promoting GM crops, and the role of food libel laws and FDA labelling restrictions on protecting the marketers of same from a free market in information.
GORDON: "If people need to cooperate in this way in order to survive, how can the their activities be coordinated? The price system of the free market offers the only satisfactory answer."
"[Farmers] have chosen to grow crops for a market, or to seek employment with other market-seeking farmers. If they cannot make it in this activity, this means that consumers prefer to spend their money on other things."
"Berry could have discovered these elementary facts had he read the relevant works of Mises and Hayek, but he shows not the slightest acquaintance with them, or for that matter with the writings of any other economist."
CARSON: Reading this, you'd get the idea the present system of domination by corporate agribusiness was actually a free market, or a fair approximation of one. In fact, it is a poster child for state capitalism. Is Gordon defending the principles of the free market as such--which I fully agree with--or is he defending corporate agribusiness and factory farming with the misappropriated language of the free market?
GORDON: "Civilization rests on the widespread division of labor: not even Berry imagines that everyone could live in the small self-subsistent agricultural communities he thinks ideal."
Actually, division of labor is promoted under the present state capitalist system considerably beyond the levels that would prevail in a genuinely free market. As Adam Smith observed, the extent of division of labor is limited by the size of the market. Both market areas and dominant firm size have been grossly expanded by government-subsidized, centralized infrastructure for long-distance transportation: the land-grant railroads, the various national highway systems culminating in the Interstate, the civil aviation infrastructure (which was built pretty much from scratch with taxpayer money), and the jumbo jet industry (which was able to operate profitably only because government heavy bomber contracts enabled the aircraft industry to use the expensive dies to full capacity). Excessive firm size and division of labor are also promoted by cartelizing activites of the state like "intellectual property" laws, and tax policies that promote capital- and tech-intensive forms of production.
The productivity benefits of division of labor and economy of scale are real, but they level off pretty quickly compared to the actual size of existing firms.
Gordon also hints, in the quote above, at the standard talking point of the USDA-agribusiness complex, that without chemical agribusiness "the world would starve." This poison meme is trotted out by those, including Norman Borlaug, who are utterly ignorant as to the actual methods used in modern organic farming. Small-scale, soil-intensive farming is in fact *more* productive per acre than mechanized agribusiness.
In my opinion, in a free market the economy would look a lot less like something out of Alfred Chandler, and a lot more like something out of Ralph Borsodi or Lewis Mumford.
Their inability to distinguish between Wendell Berry and Ron Dreher is a pretty good indication of the limitations of libertarian thinkers, and of the difference between Southern culture and "America."
A technical correction. Various claims have been advanced here and on the discussion thread at the Taki site about state interventions that benefit large agricultural producers at the expense of small farmers. While it is certainly true that the Monsantos, Cargills, and ADMs of the world are extremely powerful, politically, there is little doubt among serious students of agriculture that the net effect of US and European agricultural policy has been to subsidize small producers. The food-processing and retail sectors are increasingly concentrated but the agricultural production sector (i.e., farming) is the least concentrated, least corporatized, most family-firm-oriented of any mature industry in the world. In the US, corporate farms in 1997 held only 1.2% of total farm acreage and generated only 5.6% of total sales receipts. In France, 75% of farms are family owned with no employees. Farms are getting larger, to be sure (US average of 487 acres per farm in 1997, compared with 149 in 1920), but are still remarkably small considering the potential scale and scope economies in food production. Virtually everyone agrees that this is the result of government policies (in the US, not just price supports but Agricultural Extension services, the Farm Credit System, the Capper-Volstead Act, etc.) designed to “preserve the family farm.”
In short, in a truly free market for food production the number of Wendell Berry-like independent, small farmers would be about the same as the number of independent, small steel producers or auto manufacturers.
Ha! So, according to Kevin Carson, it is Gordon who is actually quite ignorant of the free market. Interesting.
Dreher is a product of his culture urban androgynous metrosexual, go from there when you deduce meanings from his writings. I'm a little disapointed in the responses, but I guess to be a "respectable" or semi-respectable conservative writer you must first take seriously the current priests of the conventional wisdom. Here is the situation, at the very top of the priesthood lie the media personalities of the political and academic priesthood, psychopathic to the core who rule by fear and paranoid hatemongering, Jim Joneses with a satellite feed. So it is ironic that beneath this group of true liberal believers are the types who want to retreat to the country and raise goats amongst the very people the psychopaths continually rant against. The problem with you respectable conservatives is that you conflate the small cadre of television psyschopaths with the scared childlike followers who attend an Obama rally and then think today's current political liberalism is more than it really is.
@ Dr. Wilson:
Mr. Dreher professes to be an admirer of Wendell Berry. And indeed his past association with serious thinkers who somewhat walk the agrarian walk such as Caleb Steagall and links to such blogs as Prof. Patrick Deneen's (the closest thing to a traditional Catholic at Georgetown University not in the Diocese of Arlington, Va. magisterium), in some ways bear this out.
On the other hand, he paid the rent by suckling at the corporate teat of Rupert Murdoch's "New York Post" and the Moonie's "Washington Times". Not to mention his bizarre fawning over Tina Fey of Saturday Night Live Agitprop-Ready for Prime Time Cultural Marxist Commisariat, the AMC network series "Madmen", and other weaknesses for pop culture befitting a 38 year old going on 17 at an Obama rally.
Despite the downside, his blog was still worth reading in my view until I encountered the ad for Bill Maher's new hate film on the website hosting it. Five days later, not one click, and with God's help never another.
I guess Dreher is another byproduct of the post WWII final destruction of Southern folkways and values through indoctrination/cowing of the post Civil Rights generation. What Dreher is blind to, is that one can't spit on one's ancestors or patriots such as Robert E. Lee, Robert Penn Warren and the Vanderbilt Fugitives, while simultaneously holding onto the best of the old ways in how one scratches out a living from God's creation.
Or put another way, with admittedly a little help from popular culture by way of Marvell, Arkansas and the great Levon Helm whose once haunting tenor still vividly animates my nom de blog :
"You can't raise the cane back up when it's in the field"
I want to thank Mr. Salyer for drawing attention to some of the shortcomings in the analysis provided by my good friend David Gordon. David is the most intelligent and best-read libertarian alive today, but the wicked streak in his well-known (infamous?) sense of humor got the better of him. Part of the wickedness lay in conflating Rod Dreher, a columnist who might well be a nice man but only a columnist nonetheless, with a man who has distinguished himself as a poet, novelist, and essayist. Mr. Berry has never represented himself as a conservative--quite the contrary--and if he suffers from residual New Dealism (like a recurrent case of malaria), it hardly affects any of his important work. To blame him for a lack of economic understanding would be like blaming David Gordon for the quality of the poetry I feel quite sure he has stuffed somewhere in his desk.
Setting aside the trivial details of this disagreement, one might look more closely at the fundamental questions. Dr. Gordon's argument represents not only the libertarian mainstream but also the conservative mainstream, and to combat it, one would have to repudiate certain basic principles held dear by many old-fashioned conservatives. These ideas form the core of the classical-liberal individualism that taken over lock, stock, and barrel by the editors of National Review, who confused matters by putting on a gentile overlay of literature and tradition. When classical liberals insist that we should be "free to chose," a Christian reactionary always wants to know, "choose what?"
In many long conversations over the years--conversations I value as highly as any I have had with anyone--DG has suggested that just as libertarians have the free individual as the answer to every question, I would propose the community. But that is not even close to the argument I have been trying to make. (Incidentally, I should disclose that the arguments of The Morality of Everyday Life were sharpened by debating with DG on the telephone, and the bibliography was considerably lengthened!) I or we look at man as an historical and natural being (quite apart from the supranatural dimension), while liberals start with a priori assumptions. Like Hume, we begin with the fact that human beings are born to mothers to whom they are indissolubly attached and have their characters formed first within the family and then within a community of kinfolks and friends. Thus, we find it an absurdity to speak of human beings as free-floating individualists because such people happen along less frequently than unicorns.
To make a long story very short, David Gordon begins with the economic and ethical principles of his tradition, and we begin with ours. His, I believe, can be shown to be false on biological and historical terms and not only false but perverse. Nonetheless, the liberal individual is an almost godlike ideal attained to by certain members of wholesome societies. Where classical liberals and Christian reactionaries can work together and have fruitful debate is to discuss the conditions propitious to instilling the good qualities of moral rectitude, self-discipline, honesty, and courage that individualism requires. I would say more but I am working on a book on this very subject. I can only wish that David Gordon will consent to read a few chapters and use them as whipping boys.
@26
The probelem with all popularizations from Dreher and his crunchy cons to Hitchcock and his reform of reform, reformers is not earnestness, sincerity, or malicious deception but depth of understanding. They are not serious men in the classical sense of that word. Piety is something along the lines of being grave towards ones duty, towards the truth, towards what is good and necessary: men like professor Wilson or Tom Fleming. It is not difficult to understand the real difference between a Southern Agrarian writer or a Crunchy Con like Mr. Dreher; simply read the ancients and then read the immitators. The difference discovered is what once upon a time was the difference between the best that has been thought and said and all the rest. We have lost the measure and therefore end up talking about sillys as though they were serious writers and thinkers.
I submitted my post above (Oct 6, 9:10am) before Kevin Carson's appeared, and I'd like to offer a few additional remarks. Kevin and I have sparred on this question before, and agreed to disagree, so I won't bore anybody with a long comment.
Briefly, my view is that Kevin does an able job presenting exactly half the story. He lists a number of government policies, both general (e.g., transportation) and specific to agriculture, that benefit large agricultural producers over small ones. Fine. But there is an equally large number -- actually, in my judgment, a much larger number -- of government policies that benefit small producers over large ones. A short list would include price supports, production controls, marketing orders, policies that subsidize cooperatives, subsidized crop insurance and farm credit, and agricultural research and extension serrives. The net effect, in the view of most analysts, is to keep farm size much smaller than it would be in the absence of restrictions on either side.
Incidentally, Kevin refers to large growers of cereal grains who benefit from price controls, "giant plantation farms" that benefit from water subsidies, and the like. But even "large" farms are remarkably small, compared to their counterparts in other industries, both at present and over time. There is no General Motors or Exxon or Microsoft of production agriculture. According to the 2002 US Census of Agriculture, there were 2,128,982 farms. The largest size category tracked by the census, farms with 2,000 or more acres, represents less than 4 percent of that total. Farms of 500 acres or less account for 84 percent. Perhaps a 500-acre farm is too large for Wendell Berry's tastes, but it hardly represents a capitalist agribusiness behemoth.
I don't quite understand what is meant by suggesting Wendell Berry's work reflects New Deal principles. Agriculture is a unique animal, it doesn't fit the standard paradigm of supply and demand. Aside from desiring a stable agrarian society, food supply is too critical to be left to such a blind system. It would seem logical that the government should have something to do with ensuring a reserve food supply, stable food prices, and sustainable land use. I realize that sounds somewhat Marxist but that is not my intention. I value private property rights, self-sufficiency, and the stability and diversity that a republic of yeoman farmers would yield. I think the New Deal programs did admirably well in preserving the ability of small farms to stay in business through price supports, and by keeping surplus food off the market. Recent U.S. farm policy appears to have replaced the New Deal ethos with a ruthless survival of the fittest mentality. As former Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz said, "Get big or get out!" I have no idea what kind of economy is needed today to reinvigorate small and medium sized farms, but I'm fairly certain that Libertarians fail to understand that farming cannot be treated uniformly with the classical economic model.
"As former Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz said, “Get big or get out!” I have no idea what kind of economy is needed today to reinvigorate small and medium sized farms, but I’m fairly certain that Libertarians fail to understand that farming cannot be treated uniformly with the classical economic model."
Josh,
I have no idea where you are located but if Diogenes was still walking the streets and carrying his lantern in search of one honest soul, I would refer him to you. Thank you for your stunning honesty in this bizarro world of electronic group think.
I'm grateful to Tom Fleming for his kind remarks. I also learned much from our conversations. I'd be glad to comment on the new book.
@29 Josh
Both liberals and conservatives need to eat and as such there is an encouraging movement to eat local. In my region North Virginia, the slogan is "support your local farmer or watch the houses grow." Many local restaurants pay a premium for organic vegetables grown by erstwhile tobacco farmers, who saw their market dry up and did not want to sell out to developers. I think there are encouraging trends afoot which transcend political lines. Vinyards are popping up like mushrooms after a rainstorm, some of the product is disgusting and should be cooked into brandy, while other local pinot grigios and viogniers are not too shabby.
In addition, catfish is replacing cotton in Alabama and is packaged as seafood and marketed to New Yorkers. The high price of fuel is causing people to re-think the cost of transporting food a thousand miles, and in the future I expect local canneries will make a comeback. A small nation like Italy boasts of its regional cuisine, and I would like to see more than Virginia hams and Maryland crabcakes as proof in this country. Perhaps Northern Neck tomatoes and sweet corn, along with Shenandoah Valley cheeses will grace the tables of Fredericksburg and Richmond. From there anything can happen.
I have noticed many German themed restaurants in Michigan, and they're not simply flogging franks and hamburgers and pilsener lager. In the Southland Charleston and New Orleans both have distinctive cuisine, so why not other cities?
Imagine Chicago being famous for more than pizza, and Philadelphia for more than big, greasy sub sandwiches.
@32
"Both liberals and conservatives need to eat and as such there is an encouraging movement to eat local."
I agree. This may be the most promising sign of renewal in a long time. I live in upstate New York where CSA's, farmers' markets, roadside produce stands, and other "buy local" movements are thriving.
Robert,
Re "I suspected [Gordon] was more of a libertarian scholar than a good judge of other men’s character —which some, if not most, of the crunchy cons are."
According to my dictionary, "libertarian scholar" is defined as, "a bad judge of other men’s character".
#29, Mr. Cooney. Berry and New Deal principles? I agree. Mr. Berry is not criticising free markets---he is criticising state capitalism.
Mr. Berry's continuing attachment to the milk-and-water Marxism of the Democratic Party is not, I should think, a point to be debated. It does not make him a Marxist or a socialist, and it is a trivial aspect of his mentality. Unfortunately, government intervention to save the family farm has been as effective as government intervention to save the family itself. The results in both cases have been disastrous, enriching and enabling vast concentrations of wealth and power (agribusiness, welfare agencies) at the expense of the little communities that are the foundation of our social life. Simply because Mr. Berry is largely right about the more important things--though not including the Christian religion--does not mean he is right about everything.
One of the many limitations on American political discourse is the tendency to take sides. If socialism is bad, then we become free-market radical individualists; if free-market individualism destroys society, then we become socialists. I know many socially conservative Catholics who fall into this latter category, forever damning Michael Novak and all his works--as if Novak were really an advocate of democracy and free markets as opposed to state capitalism and rigged elections. One simply suggestion I usually make is to point out that by and large liberal economists know how markets work and, within limits, can predict the general effects of rigging or constraining those markets. What they cannot tell is is how to live or what to live for. It is possible, therefore, to separate Liberal market analysis from Liberal philosophy, just as we can separate Darwinist science from Darwinist ideology. Put simply, the Liberal economist can tell us the consequences of imposing a tariff, but he cannot tell us whether or not it is a good idea, because to do so entails a moral judgment. Now, the Liberal will often tell us that he is neutral, as we should be, about the ends of human life as pursued by this or that person, but that, alas, is what we cannot agree on. If we were arguing with, say, Walter Block, he would tell us that all sorts of pornography should be freely sold and that the market would determine if people wanted or did not want it. Walter would also probably stipulate that no coercion be used and that the subjects had to have reached some particular age. A Christian would say, in response, that there are some things he does not want his neighbors poring over in the dead of night, because it poisons their minds and their characters. A Puritan would then take steps to eliminate all depictions of semi-clad women including the Sears Roebuck catalogue, while a more reasonable Christian would not wish to increase the power of government. He would be content to eliminate the viler stuff and prohibit the display of nude people on news stands and book stores and would probably cut back the porn industry to something like what it was in the 1950's. Similarly, a wise Christian would not try to eliminate red light districts, nightclubs, and other dens of iniquity, understanding that men are weak. The point, as St. Thomas says, is not to coerce people into virtue but to establish conditions propitious to a virtuous life. This requires the virtue of prudent and in exercising prudence in framing public policy, a wise man will take account of free market economics.
As Murray Rothbard and I once agreed, we were opposed to about 90% of what government does and could work jointly in debunking these activities. In the highly unlikely event that we succeeded, we could then fall to blows over the last 10%. That is why I believe that one can make tactical deals with Liberals-Libertarians--as one can make such deals even with Marxists--but one should never confuse them with a genuine alliance.
PS Anyone who would accept the label crunch con is either a complete idiot or too childish to have anything to do with. It is another, sillier way of saying communitarian, and I have never met a self-described communitarian that did not make me long for the company of Walter Block.
Dr. Wilson,
Yes, "state capitalism" is an excellent phrase. Mr. Berry wrote an essay in 1965 titled "The Tyranny of Charity" in which he is very critical of federal welfare programs and their pernicious effect on his native Kentucky. Perhaps Mr. Gordon and others might understand Mr. Berry's anger towards this kind of capitalism if they remember the context of his work. Mr. Berry is from East Kentucky, a region that has been ravaged by coal companies. In a free market the wealth generated from this natural resource would be kept within the region. So why then are these areas notoriously poor? And why are they dependant on the "charity" of the state, and at the mercy of the coal companies who exploit them? Dr. Wilson's "state capitalism" looks very similar to Belloc's Servile State.
"Mr. Berry’s continuing attachment to the milk-and-water Marxism of the Democratic Party is not, I should think, a point to be debated."
Fair enough. After reading Dr. Fleming's post I realize it's a dead end issue.
The libertarian inclination to talk abstractly about "government" must be resisted. Federal government, in a country as large as ours, should not micromanage cities and townships—that is out of scale. But a Lutheran city council should not feel burdened by the reasonable Thomas Aquinas. Luther: "[I]t is frivolous to say that [if brothels existed] less seduction and adultery would occur. For a youth who has been intimate with whores and has first overcome his shame will not keep away from married women or virgins if he gets the opportunity."
@ Etienne:
Catfish farmers in Alabama are rapidly going the way of small town independent druggists and grocers in the era of Wal Mart. They need corn to feed the fish, the current price of which busts their bottom line through the floor thanks to Big Ethanol. Then again, maybe catfish isn't something to be farmed to begin with; but it's sure a nice eating fish especially when thin cut and expertly fried as at Middendorf's in Pass Manchac, Louisiana. (Mark Twain thought it the best) It's even better when eaten by the young without lead, cadmium and mercury in dangerous quantities the wild appaloosas and channel cats are laced with due to the state of our rivers in the ear of universal electricity and industrial progress.
@ Josh Cooney: I second Robert's comments on your honesty. Also, I think Mr. Berry 's family has deep roots in the Buffalo Trace area of Northern Kentucky where Port Royal is located. He didn't grow up in "America's spoil bank" as did Harry Caudill who spoke up for those ravaged Harlan County communities in "My LAnd is Dying" and "Night Comes to the Cumberlands." At any rate, Mr. Berry probably could sense, and perhaps see after a rainy spring, the "externalities", to get Blockian, of modern industrial capitalism Mountain people knew up close and personal from diaper to shroud.
Mr. Wolf (#43), I agree in principle. The problem I see, however, is that so much of local government mimics the Federal monstrosity. "Growth," i.e. corporate welfare, is the mantra. Here in the Piedmont of NC, our infrastructure is literally falling apart thanks to overdevelopment and tax subsidies to developers. In areas of morality we find the same thing -- a progressive loosening of ordinances against lewdness and pornography.
Elected government on this continent is a failure. Religion aside, I think the ancient Cherokees had it right: a permanent council of elders in each town that ruled by influence (rather than coercion). Of course, that has something to do with culture, identity, and respect.....
The question should not be whether or not to license brothels, as they do in Nevada and parts of Europe, but how to treat this problem. Luther was more than a little correct in his assessment--the same pro-vice argument has been made repeatedly in the Netherlands and Belgium with disastrous social and moral results. On the other hand, Puritanism is the other equally wrong-headed approach. Tacitus sums up the model ruler as someone who can "know all but not follow up on everything." Once again, this requires prudence. Sometimes the problems of prostitution--and homosexuality--have to be understood in a broader context. Where average men are too poor to think of undertaking the burdens of marriage of family until they reach their 30's or, what is worse, when the standards of consumerism and greed make them believe they cannot afford a family (as is the case in the USA), they will turn inevitably to whores, paid or unpaid, or even to other men. The spiritual emptiness that separates sex from procreation, exacerbated by economic pressures against early marriage is the cause of the disease. Brothels are merely a symptom. In the absence of a strong faith, there is hardly any reason for a young unmarried man not to go to a brothel, especially if the girls are regularly checked by a physician. A married man, even a pagan, who pledges fidelity, is another matter. Where Berry's agrarian vision is more relevant than Misesian economics is precisely in the recognition that socio-economic pressures on fathers and farmers wreaks great havoc in society. What to do about it is another question. My own answer that any measure that increases the power of any secular form of government is worse, far worse than the libertarian approach.
@22:
I appreciate Mr. Gordon's temperate response to my admittedly blunt commentary.
It is of course possible that I interpreted Mr. Gordon's essay as saying something more or other than what he actually had in mind; but then that is how language works. I certainly do not subscribe to the current trend in literary theory, that a piece of text can be twisted into whatever a fashionably-insane deconstructionist wants it to mean. But I do firmly believe that the primary burden lies on the wordsmith to exhibit as much clarity as possible.
In light of this I was of the opinion (which I still hold) that Mr. Gordon's piece would leave an unfortunate and grossly inaccurate impression on those unfamiliar with Berry's work, should they accept Mr. Gordon's article at face value without bothering to make further inquiry.
My conviction is that one impression a disinterested reader would draw from Mr. Gordon's article is: Berry's intellectual merit, though great, is confined to technical, specialized fields such as literary criticism and the conduct of agriculture... unless you are specifically interested in analyzing the formal symbolism of Dante's Inferno, or want to bone up on the best way to go about raising sheep, then Berry's work is not for you.
Again, I will concede that this may not have been Mr. Gordon's intention, but I stand by my assertion that that is pretty much what came out. I will not beat a dead horse by trying to demonstrate my assertion, as my point here is to emphasize to Mr. Gordon why I felt obligated to respond as forcefully as I did. Not because I hold a deep animus against either himself or libertarians in general, but because the federally-colonized Kentucky Commonwealth is in rough shape and I cannot afford the luxury of being diplomatic when it comes to one of our greatest living thinkers being marginalized, unintentionally or no.
It might be worth adding that had Mr. Gordon's article been confined to critiquing the "crunchy-cons", it would have been no skin off my teeth and I would not have responded at all. As I wrote earlier, while Dreher may have achieved some measure of good in drawing popular attention to the dangers of materialistic consumerism, I do not identify with nor spend much thought upon the "crunchy-con" movement.
On a purely positive note -- while my very first, initial reaction to Mr. Gordon's article was considerably angrier than what actually came out in my response, calmer reflection brought me back once again to what I consider the silver-lining of living in a civilization (I use the term loosely) dominated intellectually (even more loosely) by characters such as Boot, Christopher Hitchens, Madeleine Albright, etc: It makes it that much easier to find the good in anybody, anybody at all, who is not a bloodthirstily malevolent idiot. (Always look on the bright side, is my motto.)
This is quite aside from any deference I might feel toward a friend of the good Dr. Fleming, in whose judgment of character I would put considerable trust.
For example, I can honestly say, independently, that if even a small fraction of American Catholics possessed even a small fraction of Mr. Gordon's knowledge and seriousness vis-a-vis Just War doctrine, then (to make an understatement) the world would be a vastly improved place.
Heh-heh: "St. Thomas, almost as important an authority as Fagothey, long ago noted..." A wicked sense of humor, indeed.
What a great web-site!! Where else in this tired old world of ours can folks of good will discuss, poetry, journalism, economics, southern agrarians, religion and the real significance and dangers of whores, popularizations, and agri-business in a decadent age. Let every man decide for himself where he shall stand in the days and years ahead, but of those happy few in Rockford, they will someday say," They were the best and brightest during the dark days of neocondom.
Dr. Fleming, as always, helps to clarify the basic situation for dense people like myself. Writers like Wendell Berry, Russell Kirk, and my fellow Batavian, Bill Kauffman, have inspired me to "stay home" and center my life on the particular: my home, my parish, and my local community. If Libertarian economics can help my community survive, then I am open to learning from them.
Josh,
You have the right idea in my opinion. I am not an economist but find economic man and explanations of his behavior rather venal and imprecise to say the least. If I were King for a year I would impose a system of taxation in which small businesses would pay no taxes, expanding businesses would pay some taxes, the franchise type would be cost prohibitive and Wal-Mart would be confiscated. There is not a dimes worth of difference between being owned by Enron or being owned by the Government. It is like trying to decide between McCain or Obama or between raising chickens or guineas.
Once upon a time all politics was local as was the economy --- then communications changed, the Big Whopper became popular to tell with a straight face over and over again, Lincoln became President, a remaining remnant of western civilization was destroyed, the vultures and blow flies moved in and picked the carcass down to bones and teeth -- now even the teeth are going bad. Soon we will all being spending more time at home” and centering our life on the particular: our home, our parish, local community -- and the local cemetery. Hopefully some old degenerate will remember to pray for the dead and the whole thing will begin again.
@ 25 & 31
Dr. Klein,
One of the criteria for making a strong inductive argument -- such as a prediction -- is taking into account all the relevant factors.
In predicting what the economy would look like sans big-government tendrils, you might consider the myriad ramifications of US taxpayers keeping ~ $600 billion a year, vice injecting that sum into a global military-network.
Another possibility -- implausible, I know, but worth considering for the sake of argument -- is that of a large percentage of parents, elders, & influential thinkers in America's communities suddenly deciding to take their obligations seriously for a change, by throwing their moral authority and decision-making power behind local businesses and concerns.
Short of one of the psychic pre-cogs from the sci-fi film *Minority Report*, I can't think of anybody who could reasonably claim to know, with certainty, what the American economy would look like if our socialism evaporated overnight -- regardless of how much statistics or US Agricultural Census reports we have at our disposal.
As a general objection to objections against Berry-type positions, why can't a Misesian cite Mises' own anti-inflationist arguments? Modified by a concretization of value, that is, but a simple argument might run like this:
The key error of Keynsian inflationism is, on Mises' own view, that inflationism inserts non-value into the calculus of value-exchange.
The Austrian position on individualized valuation is liberal only insofar as it doesn't answer the question, 'choose what?'; strictly speaking the marginal theory of value is indifferent to scientific judgments on 'what exactly the subjective utility of some exchangeable is'. The relevant domain of the Christianized Aristotelian includes both nature and supernature; patristic polemics took nature-regarding subjective-utility valuations as evident and dialectically given, with only supernature needing to be justified against pagan attacks.
But what is really subjectively useful? Austrian-type valuations that are not nature-regarding don't (except incidentally) even maximize mutual benefit within nature; so mutual benefit maximization in exchange is properly possible only when the individual valuators actually pay attention to human physis. The general Austrian position is that markets are in principle better valuators than anyone else, because of the nature of valuation; the metaphysical realist at this point will have to insist that the physical determinacy of bodies has something to do the real subjective utility of anything.
Aristotle, the first serious theoretical economist (whose reputation among twentieth-century economic theorists was most damagingly assaulted by Schumpeter, by the way), observed that exchanges not responsive to (relative) need (khreia) take money, the medium of exchange, as a per-se object -- as something sought for its own sake, rather than as something sought for the sake of things an individual human being needs (with relevant subject-proper variation). This 'denaturing' of money, which is really a confusion of the material and formal aspects of exchange, introduces theoretical limitlessness to the non-khreia-type exchanger's intention, and this kind of limitlessness (which as such is essentially not nature-regarding) is really just the same thing as greed (pleonexia). So for Aristotle valuing things not on nature-determined subjective utility misunderstands money and harms moral character. (A Christian Aristotelian might add that the per-se valuation of money is thoroughly gnostic.)
Schumpeter's criticism was directed mostly against this kind of reasoning: that Aristotle here is a moral philosopher, not an economist. Fine -- the relevant passages appear in Aristotle's ethical works anyway. But I think it would be silly to dispute that the whole motivation for the study of economics as a *practical* science is 'to maximize benefit in exchange', i.e., to maximize economic value, and if Aristotle is right about physis and khreia (and if you think he's not, then you need to engage him philosophically, as Schumpeter noted), then non-nature-regarding exchanges are not mutual benefit maximizers at all.
@44 Virgil
It's been a long while since I toured the Heart Of Dixie, I'm sorry to hear that has happened to the catfish enterprise. I hope the famers hang in there rather than sell to developers. I'd rather see golf courses, or perhaps vinyards. I have drank some Alabama wines though, hoo eee!
And of course they can plant pine or poplar, trees only need to be harvested every 15 years.