I have a love/hate relationship with the modern "homestead" movement, right down to the use of the word "homestead".
Laramie Range ranch house. This is a high altititude setting and this was almost undoubtedly homesteaded late, probably after World War One. Nobody lives there now.
Allow me to explain.
First, I'm an agrarian.
What's that mean?
Well, it can mean of or pertaining to agriculture, but that's not generally what is meant in the American context. Indeed, it's hard to define, even if it's easy to know.
The problematic 1930s agrarian tract, I'll Take My Stand, [1] defined it as thus:
Opposed to the industrial society is the agrarian, which does not stand in particular need of definition. An agrarian society is hardly one that has no use at all for industries, for professional vocations, for scholars and artists, and for the life of cities. Technically, perhaps, an agrarian society is one in which agriculture is the leading vocation, whether for wealth, for pleasure, or for prestige-a form of labor that is pursued with intelligence and leisure, and that becomes the model to which the other forms approach as well as they may. But an agrarian regime will be secured readily enough where the superfluous industries are not allowed to rise against it. The theory of agrarianism is that the culture of the soil is the best and most sensitive of vocations, and that therefore it should have the economic preference and enlist the maximum number of workers.
Well, that sort of gets it, but only partially. At least to Western Agrarians, there's another element, and that is what Aldo Leopold called the "Land Ethic". He wrote a great deal about it, but perhaps defined it most succinctly as follows:
A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.
Leopold bowhunting in Northern Mexico, 1948.
Now, Leopold had a great deal more to say about it than that, but the basic gist of his thought was that man was part of nature and things were ethnical if they served all of nature, including man. Leopold was a hunter and a farmer, so he was not a cubicle dwelling urban vegan or anything of the sort. Indeed, he took his land ethic from being a hunter, as he made plain when he stated:
Perhaps no one but a hunter can understand how intense an affection a boy can feel for a piece of marsh…. I came home one Christmas to find that land promoters, with the help of the Corps of Engineers had dyked and drained my boyhood hunting grounds on the Mississippi river bottoms…. My hometown thought the community enriched by this change. I thought it impoverished.
Indeed, that the hunter's view of the world.
And that's the Western Agrarian's view of the world as well. The two Weltanschauug combined make up the ethic of the Western Agrarian.
But what about the "homesteader"?
Nebraska homesteaderes, 1884.
I don't really think so.
Let's take a look at the work "homestead" for just a second. It originally from Old English but its roots go all the way back to Saxon. It's a German combination word, as so my German words are, combining "home", meaning a dwelling place, with "stead", meaning, basically, a location. Stead is used in at least one other surviving English word, that being "farmstead", although it's not used a great deal.
Where the word really took off in modern American English is with the Homestead Act of 1862, which was a Civil War era radical act which was designed to vest settlers in the West directly with real property, if they worked the land for a time. We note this as a "radical" act, as it could have only came about due to the Civil War, which makes our citation to the Southern Agrarians a bit ironic, as they Southern Agrarians didn't understand the irony of the Southern historical pattern of land ownership.
The South of the 1860s was largely populated by yeomen farmers, i.e., agrarians, but the power in the South was vested in the planter class, which was a class that was making money from production agriculture. The average Southern yeoman of, let's say, 1859, was consuming with his family most of the production from his farm and selling the surplus. That gave him a fair degree of independence, as those who have lauded yeomanry have celebrated, but it also never made him rich. Indeed, that's one of the social benefits of agrarianism, the masses are independent but neither rich nor poor. So agrarianism vests them in decent family lives, but it never allows them to really lord it over their neighbors.
The planter class, however did just that. Planters were engaged in production agriculture as their focus, producing first tobacco and then later cotton. Yeomen also produced cotton as a cash crop, but not really much of it. In comparison, planters produced a lot, and both tobacco and cotton depended upon slave labor, as is very well known. It also depended upon land being continually available further west, as cotton is a soil destroying crop, at least when grown in the 18th and 19th Century manner. Planters had the capital to buy land further west by selling their land that was depleted.
Abandoned post World War One homestead.
If the land, however, was going to be given away to those who worked it, that crated a big problem in that it meant that planters would never be able to buy land economically. Yeoman couldn't afford to buy land from governments like planters could, but planters really couldn't afford to amass land from prior individual occupants either.
Often missed in this story is that yeomen were the dominant class in the north too. Indeed, so much romantic slop has been oozed out about Southern yeomen over the years its been nearly completely missed that in the North most farmers were yeoman as well, and more prosperous ones. This was in part because the planter class had never really grown powerful in the north and, by the time of the Civil War, it had been supplanted. Northern farms, therefore, were bigger, better, and wealthier, while also being agrarian units.
Leading up to the Civil War the US engaged in an enormous struggle on what the country was going to be, and how the West fit into that. The Southern political class simply imagined it going forwards as before, developed by private enterprise, with that private enterprise larger planter driven. In the North, however, there was not only opposition to slavery, which allowed the planter class to exist in the form in which it was found, but also a budding desire to apply the American System to the West. We've dealt with that elsewhere, but the quote from the Congressional website on it remains well worth reading, as does the earlier post:
Henry Clay's "American System," devised in the burst of nationalism that followed the War of 1812, remains one of the most historically significant examples of a government-sponsored program to harmonize and balance the nation's agriculture, commerce, and industry. This "System" consisted of three mutually reinforcing parts: a tariff to protect and promote American industry; a national bank to foster commerce; and federal subsidies for roads, canals, and other "internal improvements" to develop profitable markets for agriculture. Funds for these subsidies would be obtained from tariffs and sales of public lands. Clay argued that a vigorously maintained system of sectional economic interdependence would eliminate the chance of renewed subservience to the free-trade, laissez-faire "British System."
The American System remains very much with us today, and the recent passage of the massive Biden Infrastructure bill gives a good example of it. Its interesting that we understand our own history so poorly that we tend to accuse people of "socialism" while still lauding events and people who directly took advantage of the American System. Homesteaders provide one such example.
The Homestead Act of 1862 read:
APPROVED, May 20, 1862.
CHAP. LXXV. —An Act to secure Homesteads to actual Settlers on the Public Domain.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That any person who is the head of a family, or who has arrived at the age of twenty-one years, and is a citizen of the United States, or who shall have filed his declaration of intention to become such, as required by the naturalization laws of the United States, and who has never borne arms against the United States Government or given aid and comfort to its enemies, shall, from and after the first January, eighteen hundred and. sixty-three, be entitled to enter one quarter section or a less quantity of unappropriated public lands, upon which said person may have filed a preemption claim, or which may, at the time the application is made, be subject to preemption at one dollar and twenty-five cents, or less, per acre; or eighty acres or less of such unappropriated lands, at two dollars and fifty cents per acre, to be located in a body, in conformity to the legal subdivisions of the public lands, and after the same shall have been surveyed: Provided, That any person owning and residing on land may, under the provisions of this act, enter other land lying contiguous to his or her said land, which shall not, with the land so already owned and occupied, exceed in the aggregate one hundred and sixty acres.
SEC. 2. And be it further enacted, That the person applying for the benefit of this act shall, upon application to the register of the land office in which he or she is about to make such entry, make affidavit before the said register or receiver that he or she is the head of a family, or is twenty-one years or more of age, or shall have performed service in the army or navy of the United States, and that he has never borne arms against the Government of the United States or given aid and comfort to its enemies, and that such application is made for his or her exclusive use and benefit, and that said entry is made for the purpose of actual settlement and cultivation, and not either directly or indirectly for the use or benefit of any other person or persons whomsoever; and upon filing the said affidavit with the register or receiver, and on payment of ten dollars, he or she shall thereupon be permitted to enter the quantity of land specified: Provided, however, That no certificate shall be given or patent issued therefor until the expiration of five years from the date of such entry ; and if, at the expiration of such time, or at any time within two years thereafter, the person making such entry ; or, if he be dead, his widow; or in case of her death, his heirs or devisee; or in case of a widow making such entry, her heirs or devisee, in case of her death ; shall. prove by two credible witnesses that he, she, or they have resided upon or cultivated the same for the term of five years immediately succeeding the time of filing the affidavit aforesaid, and shall make affidavit that no part of said land has been alienated, and that he has borne rue allegiance to the Government of the United States ; then, in such case, he, she, or they, if at that time a citizen of the United States, shall be entitled to a patent, as in other cases provided for by law: And provided, further, That in case of the death of both father and mother, leaving an Infant child, or children, under twenty-one years of age, the right and fee shall ensure to the benefit of said infant child or children ; and the executor, administrator, or guardian may, at any time within two years after the death of the surviving parent, and in accordance with the laws of the State in which such children for the time being have their domicil, sell said land for the benefit of said infants, but for no other purpose; and the purchaser shall acquire the absolute title by the purchase, and be en- titled to a patent from the United States, on payment of the office fees and sum of money herein specified.
SEC. 3. And be it further enacted, That the register of the land office shall note all such applications on the tract books and plats of, his office, and keep a register of all such entries, and make return thereof to the General Land Office, together with the proof upon which they have been founded.
SEC. 4. And be it further enacted, That no lands acquired under the provisions of this act shall in any event become liable to the satisfaction of any debt or debts contracted prior to the issuing of the patent therefor.
SEC. 5. And be it further enacted, That if, at any time after the filing of the affidavit, as required in the second section of this act, and before the expiration of the five years aforesaid, it shall be proven, after due notice to the settler, to the satisfaction of the register of the land office, that the person having filed such affidavit shall have actually changed his or her residence, or abandoned the said land for more than six months at any time, then and in that event the land so entered shall revert to the government.
SEC. 6. And be it further enacted, That no individual shall be permit- ted to acquire title to more than one quarter section under the provisions of this act; and that the Commissioner of the General Land Office is hereby required to prepare and issue such rules and regulations, consis- tent with this act, as shall be necessary and proper to carry its provisions into effect; and that the registers and receivers of the several land offices shall be entitled to receive the same compensation for any lands entered under the provisions of this act that they are now entitled to receive when the same quantity of land is entered with money, one half to be paid by the person making the application at the time of so doing, and the other half on the issue of the certificate by the person to whom it may be issued; but this shall not be construed to enlarge the maximum of compensation now prescribed by law for any register or receiver: Pro- vided, That nothing contained in this act shall be so construed as to im- pair or interfere in any manner whatever with existing preemption rights : And provided, further, That all persons who may have filed their applications for a preemption right prior to the passage of this act, shall be entitled to all privileges of this act: Provided, further, That no person who has served, or may hereafter serve, for a period of not less than fourteen days in the army or navy of the United States, either regular or volun- teer, under the laws thereof, during the existence of an actual war, do- mestic or foreign, shall be deprived of the benefits of this act on account of not having attained the age of twenty-one years.
SEC. 7. And be it further enacted, That the fifth section of the act en- titled" An act in addition to an act more effectually to provide for the punishment of certain crimes against the United States, and for other purposes," approved the third of March, in the year eighteen hundred and fifty-seven, shall extend to all oaths, affirmations, and affidavits, re- quired or authorized by this act.
SEC. 8. And be it further enacted, That nothing in this act shall be 80 construed as to prevent any person who has availed him or herself of the benefits of the fir8t section of this act, from paying the minimum price, or the price to which the same may have graduated, for the quantity of land so entered at any time before the expiration of the five years, and obtain- ing a patent therefor from the government, as in other cases provided by law, on making proof of settlement and cultivation as provided by exist- ing laws granting preemption rights.
There were later expressions of this act that were somewhat different, such as the Stock Raising Homestead Act of 1916, but they all worked in a similar fashion.
Okay, so what's that have to do with modern homesteading?
I don't think very much, really.
Mountain West Farm Bureau, trying to answer the question for its members, has published the question, and tried to answer it thus:
What is Homesteading?
Homesteading is a way of life based on self-sufficiency and the idea of living off the land. It's been around for hundreds, even thousands of years – but most people in the US associate homesteading with Westward Expansion and pioneers. Your mind’s eye might picture something like “Little House on the Prairie” when you think of homesteading, and you aren’t wrong. A homestead is all about people living and working together to do things like grow and preserve food and do other things without being so dependent on modern amenities.
This way of life is fruitful and rewarding, as what you make and what you do directly benefits and impacts you and your family. It can also be incredibly challenging. Thankfully, there are plenty of successful homesteaders out there who have put in the work themselves and are now helping others on their homesteading journeys. More on that later!
Modern Homesteading
Homesteading is becoming increasingly popular; and it's no wonder why! In today's modern world, the idea of getting back to ones' roots and living off the land is attractive to many people. Modern homesteaders tend to be focused on self-sufficiency through growing, raising, and preserving their own food. Many homesteaders today use renewable energy sources, too; like wind or solar. The homesteader lifestyle can be incorporated in small pieces or big chunks, and ranges from getting off the grid entirely to keeping backyard chickens or a rooftop garden. If you or your family is working towards becoming more self-sustained, you just might be modern homesteaders!
Does this define it? Well, maybe. . . but I think while MWFB got the recollection of the 19th Century right, something else is at work here.
Indeed, while modern homesteaders like to call themselves that, and I think are trying to make an intentional association with 19th Century homesteading, they really owe a lot more to the 1960s "back to the land" movement. [2]
"A Member of the Family". English idealized agrarian panting. While highly idealized to be sure, the painting does hit upon actual features of the agricultural and agrarian family. Fresh food, a connection with animals, and a close working family.
And that's what's wrong with it.
Modern homesteaders are highly romantic concerning what they are doing, while also seeming resistant to knowing about the past, although they'll deny that. Now, a person has to be fair about that as there is no central set of tenants that homesteaders subscribe to, so they vary a great deal. But one thing that seems to really be a distinct aspect of it is a rejection of the land ethic, combined with a "me and my own against the world" type of mindset.
These both come through, I think, by the constant posts, if you follow any homesteading thing at all, based upon the concept of "here's where I (or perhaps more often, me and my 'partner') are going to build our homestead!", by which they tend to mean that's where they intend to plop a house and outbuildings, with little foreknowledge on how to do things, in a pristine pasture. That's bad farming, and its contrary to the land ethnic. A yeoman wouldn't do that.
Which gets to the irony that there are some agrarians in towns who exercise the land ethic better than "homesteaders" out in the sticks. [3]
Additionally, and this is really hard to define, there's a rejectionism that seems to infect homesteaders that doesn't agrarians.
Perhaps that's best summarized, in away, by the concepts of G. K. Chesterton, the famous polymath, who was an English advocate of Distributism. All agrarians are distributists, even though not all distributists are agrarians. [4] Chesterton advocated for "three acres and a cow" for English agrarians, which was based upon the high production of English farmland which, at the time he poses this, still featured large-scale aristocratic ownership. His advocacy wouldn't have really changed the viewshed of English agriculture much, but it would have allowed for Jeffersonian yeomanry independence for English yeomen including, in the case of English Catholics, the freedom to practice their religion independently. What it wouldn't have done, however, is to free them from being English. They would have still been participating in village and national life.
Illustration of Chesterton's English Agrarianism of the early 20th Century.
Modern homesteaders, however, heirs to the "turn on, tune in and drop out" culture of the 1960s, don't see things that way. Indeed, they're often trying to create a world of their own, rather than live in tune with the world.
If we take the example of modern agrarians, for example, both great and small, we see how they were still part of their world, at least in a letter to Diognetus fashion. [5]. That is, agrarians are independent and agriculturally focused, but as we've defined it, and indeed as their example shows, cognizant of the land ethic. They're also aware of and part of things outside themselves. In all true Western World Agrarian societies, and we're really only dealing with those here, they've all been deeply religious.
The examples of this abound. Quebec was agrarian and deeply Catholic up until post Second World War economic forces eroded its agrarianism and ultimately the allure of worldly greed intruded, injecting a cancer into its society. Emiliano Zapata's movement in Southern Mexico was also deeply Catholic and marched under the banner of the Virgin Mary in the Mexican Revolution. Post independence Ireland was deeply agrarian and deeply Catholic. Scandinavia up until after World War Two, to include Finland, was deeply Lutheran and deeply agrarian. Southern Agrarianism in the U.S. had a strong Protestant Christian culture to it. Perhaps only in the Western United States, with its remaining What Was Your Name In The States atmosphere to it, was there an exception, but it may also be noted that Western Agrarianism always existed alongside and in competition with a very laissez-faire industrialist view of the world, in spite of the massive influence of the American System in the region.
In contrast, modern homesteaders often reject much of that for a sort of hippy dippy metaphysical view of the world that's remarkably shallow.
They also tend to be ignorant of tradition.
Now, tradition is sometimes called by critics of it "the democracy of the dead", seemingly without those speakers realizing it's a Chesterton quote in its defense. It actually comes from Chesterton’s book, Orthodoxy, and can be found Chapter 4, “The Ethics of Elfland.” The actual quote states:
Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.
What tends to be omitted is what Chesterton went on to say about that democracy:
Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father.
Tradition is true conservatism, we'd note, the conservation of what's worthwhile. Not everything is worth preserving, whether it's a tradition or not, but before tossing any tradition out, it should be given the same test that tools should be given. Does it serve a purpose or not, and what is that purpose?
Now again, this doesn't apply uniformly, and you see varying degrees of this, but the rejection of tradition aspect of things is definitely there in the homestead community. You can see it in some of the links that I link in here on agricultural topics that are homestead oriented, and a tour of Reddit's homestead subs shows it really clearly as well.
All sorts of expressions are there, both great and small. On the large end, homesteaders often seem to have a blistering ignorance of agricultural practices and no concept of learning them from the locals. I've actually seen this in print, and heard it otherwise, from self professed homesteaders who went in to an area convinced that they knew how to grow all organic whatever, often to find that Farmer Bob who lived three miles down, and who is engaged in production agriculture, already knew all about how to grow free-range kale and what the pluses nad minuses are. For this reason, homesteaders often fail, after ruining a pasture and building on it, going back to their former cubicle lives, often with the odd observation that "farming is hard work".
Yes, it really is.
A real ignorance of animals is often part of this.
This is not to say that they lack animals. They don't tend to. Indeed, you'll frequently find sort of an eclectic mix of them, some of which speaks to ignorance on the topic they're engaged in, and some of which does not. Boer goats, Dutch Belted Cattle, Donkeys, and more frequently chickens and rabbits. Indeed on the latter, I'm frequently surprised by how many homesteaders opt for rabbits which, in my part of the country, are so prolific some years that they can genuinely be regarded as a nuisance.
And I'm not criticizing that. Rather, what I'm criticizing is the lack of knowledge that sometimes accompanies the acquisition of the animals, but more than that, the lack of knowledge on the usefulness of large animals.
Indeed, it's that last one that really surprises me.
Lots of homesteaders will acquire a cow, or cows, depending upon what they're intent in regard to the bovine is. The cow may or may not, depending upon the homesteader, then take on sort of a pet characteristic. This isn't universally true, I'd note, as at least one local homesteader is now packaging and selling meat.
That same homesteader, however, who has a popular podcast in that community, recently published something about preparing a pasture.
Frankly, in this country preparing a pasture is pretty rare, as generally grazing is on natural prairie, with some exceptions. A pretty common exception, I'd note, is where the pasture was previously mined or reseeded during a period of time in which that was popular with the government, for reasons of which I'm unaware. Ranchers, however, will very rarely "prepare" a pasture. To the extent I've known any to do so, it consisted of broadcasting seed in a pasture that could use some grass introduction. Also, there will be efforts to eradicate noxious weeds or unwanted grasses, and sometimes the government will seek to knock down the amount of sagebrush in a pasture or even the number of confers in it, up in the mountains.
Now, I'm not criticizing preparing the pasture. That's probably admirable.
What I'm interested in here, however, is a sort of missing the point aspect of this.
First of all, if you really want advice on preparing a pasture, you are probably better off calling the university's agricultural extension officer, not getting it from a "homesteader". Another good option would be just to ask a local rancher.
But what really bothers me here is that the blogger and podcaster in question puts a lot of emphasis on freeing herself from "systems".
Now, by this, she means all sorts of what she deems systems, but maybe is missing an obvious one here.
In her blogging and writing, this homesteader notes she's freed themselves of the pharmaceutical system (more on that in a moment) and the education system (maybe more on that in a moment), the industrial food system, and the consumer debt system. In a recent episode of her podcast, she noted that she'd flown to a homesteader conference back east and when return travel was disrupted, as will occur, she and her husband drove back home, which was presented as being freed from a system.
That may not seem to be related to the pasture preparation, but it seems to be the case that all sorts of homesteaders have an attraction old tractors. I'll confess that I too at one time had a fascination with old tractors, but I like old combustion engine stuff. Old tractors, I'd note, are quite dangerous.
Anyhow, if you own a tractor, you are part of a huge system, that system being, for one thing, the petroleum infrastructure system.
Now, I’m not criticizing the overall goal of being self-reliant. . . as long as it's thought out, not self deluding, and you don't really exhibit a sort of price, if you will, for seemingly thinking you haven't' tacked on to something agrarians have been doing. . . in a thinking manner, for darned near forever.
Indeed, as my views in this direction are pretty far developed, or far gone, depending upon how you look at it, it may seem surprising to readers that I'm levying some criticism here at all, and for good reason. And yet I am.
I'll get back to the petroleum "system" in a moment, but an essential essence of agrarianism is a focus on subsistence on your own. I.e, your vegetables came from your own field, your beef or pig, or whatever, was as well, assuming that you weren't eating a deer or rabbits, etc., that you shot. Self-reliance is an agrarian thing.
And that seemingly is where an agrarian would at least stop to talk about, in this instance, maybe preparing that pasture with a horse-drawn implement.
Indeed, I used to subscribe to Rural Heritage at one itme, and it was packed with agrarians who did just that. And it wasn't all "implements of bygone days" by any means. Looking it up, the current issue features the following:
Features:
Barns on the Move for Horses and Hogs
Pack Saddle Building
Facing Problems with Soil Health in Mind
A Sweeping Success at Horse Progress Days
Cowboys and Indians
2021 Summer Suffolk Gathering
Tales from Carter County - Old Lily
Midwest Ox Drovers Association Gathering
Horse Progress Days Field Equipment
Horse Progress Days Seminar: Horse Health
Horse Progress Days Seminar: Pond Management
Horse Progress Days Seminar: Maple Syruping
Horse Progress Days Seminar: Logging
Horse Progress Days Seminar: Horses and the Amish
Horse Progress Days Seminar: International Meeting
The thing about Rural Heritage was that it was, at least when I last subscribed, a tour de force of modern implements made for or adapted to horsepower, in the original sense.
So I guess my beef here is that, as with so many other homestead type things, modern homesteaders are missing the deep and reinventing the wheel, and just flat out fooling themselves on some things.
I think the freeing ones selves of the pharmaceutical industry is just one such prime example.
I'm pretty back about going to the doctor, I'll note. It's not because I’m an opponent of going to the doctor so much as it's an odd family trait, even though a lot of men in my family have an association with medicine. We just don't.
And I rarely take medications. I'll sit in pain rather than take Tylenol, for example. A lot of medications make me sick, and I'm leery about all of them, not because I don't think they work, they do, it's just me.
But I sure avail myself of medicine where I need to. For example, I'm fully vaccinated for COVID 19 and have the booster.
I downloaded some of this individual's podcasts and in two successive episodes there was dissing on masks. Indeed, one of the same ones in which she decried "systems" where she'd flown out to the East coast and then drove clean across the US.
Now, masks and COVID 19 have been hot topics, to be sure, but being a neo homesteader does not mean that you need to tap into the subtle massive medical conspiracy line of thought. Indeed, trying to find some good agrarian podcast (which I haven't) I downloaded a different person, who had also just been to the same conference, and met with, once again, the medicine is a conspiracy line of thought.
Solzhenitsyn, a sort of agrarian/distributist, Orthodox thinker, may have held that there was no progress, but there sure is in medicine.
The education one baffles me a bit also.
This podcaster lives in Wyoming and Wyoming has excellent schools. I know that this is not true for every location in the US. But it sure is here. That doesn't mean that there aren't good private schools too, there are. Which gets more at homeschooling.
I don't know what the podcaster specifically was concerned about regarding the educational "system". I've known people who lived in other regions of the country who were pretty concerned about the education system in their regions, and for good reason. A friend of mine once lived on one of those "island paradises" in which everyone who could send their kids to private schools, as their schools were a wreck. Another couple I’m friends with sent their youngest child to the big city Catholic school in their city, leading to their return to the church. They did that as the education was better there than in the public schools. Another couple I know sent their kids to the Catholic school locally as otherwise, for some odd reason, they were going to have to send them to two different grade schools.
That all concerns the topic of private schools, of course. But when people say they're opting out of the "education system", what they're usually doing is homeschooling. I really feel leery about that.
Now, I've known one couple who homeschooled all of their kids because the local schools were again, bad. The couple was highly educated themselves and well suited for this task. But I've also known, although not nearly as well, others who homeschooled in grade school, and actually beyond, as they feared what their kids would learn in schools. I.e., it wasn't that they were worried about the schools educating them poorly, or the schools having bad elements in them, it was rather that they feared the schools would teach them something that conflicted with their Weltanschauung.
Now, to some limited, although it is limited, extent, I understand that in some places. For children of orthodox (small "o") Christian families, there's going to be something in regard to moral conduct that's going to come up. This used to be limited to a discussion at some point regarding sex in some expanded form that parents worried about being contrary to their moral values. But in recent years its definitely expanded well beyond that. The entire transgender movement presents, for example, a social view, not a scientific one, that's highly problematic from a Christian moral prospective.
Those would be good arguments, I'd note, for sending children to a Christian school if there was a good one in your neighborhood. But rather in regard to homeschooling, it seems to go a bridge further. In that case, the parents seem to have a secondary concern on actually giving their kids an education at all and worry instead that their kids are going to learn about evolution, or that the United States didn't spring forth fully democratic and flawless in 1776.
And this seems to circle back to what is worrisome about the "homesteading" movement. It seems very self-centered, as in the "me and mine and to heck with the rest of you" view. I.e., I can wreck a pasture, I can live on my own, I can teach my children only what I want them to hear (their later lives in the world be damned), and I can do whatever I want on my little slice of earth.
Which is pretty much the opposite of what agrarians think.
And maybe that's what it gets down to.
Maybe the difference between agrarirans and homesteaders is love.
Agrarians conceive of agrarianism as being ideal for individuals as its natural to the human, and therefore its natural to us all. Agrarians lament to the loss of agrarianism not only for what it means to us today, but for what it means toe everyone.
Homesteaders want an individual homestead. Agrarians want an agrarian society. One is extraordinarily individualistic, the other is the polar opposite.
And hence the concern of the latter over the former. We agrarians will tune into the homesteading podcasts, and read the homesteading blogs, and check out the homesteading subreddits, but they're always baffling to us and frequently disappointing. We love nature, and the farm. We don't invision the world as tiny individualist kingdoms. A lot of us like to be left alone or to our own, but that doesn't mean that we don't know that there are others, and the greater whole. [6]
We're not seeking to drop out. We think that everbody else took a wrong turn, and hope for the turn back, and forward, even though we know it unlikely.
But, that's a philosophy that's pretty deep, and not based on me and mine. No successful philosophy can be.
Footnotes:
1. I'm always leery of quoting I'll Take My Stand as it was by the "Southern Agrarians", written in the 1930s, and it really shows it.
The context of its being written is particularly interesting in comparison to today, as in fact it's a good mirror to modern times. The writers thought, with good reason, that Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal policies were wrecking Southern Agrarianism. They were, accidentally, but in fairness they'd really be polished off by the farm policies of the early Cold War.
Roosevelt had no such intent, of course, and he had a massive economic crisis to deal with and, by definition, dealing with it was going to help some and hurt others, with the thought being that at least you were helping the many and hurting the few. What the Southern Agrarians recognized, however, was that the policies were, no matter how phrased or conceived, industrial capitalist at their heart.
That's significant as many "progressive" policies of today also are. It's a bizarre byproduct of left wing social thought that it tends to reinforce a capitalist economy. By removing hazards, economic, personal and moral, the risks of capitalism are essentially insured against and the need to fully participate in it dramatically increased.
Anyhow, the real problem with the Southern Agrarians is that they were Southern or Southern in sympathies and still living in the Lost Cause era. It's not the main focus of their work, but they tended to be apologists a bit about Southern racism in some instances, although again it wasn't the focus of their writing. There's no excuse for that, but it comes through and taints them, and it continues to taint some of their followers today.
The full introduction to the work states:
INTRODUCTION: A STATEMENT OF PRINCIPLES
THE authors contributing to this book are Southerners, well acquainted with one another and of similar tastes, though not necessarily living in the same physical community, and perhaps only at this moment aware of themselves as a single group of men. By conversation and exchange of letters over a number of years it had developed that they entertained many convictions in common, and it was decided to make a volume in which each one should furnish his views upon a chosen topic. This was the general background. But background and consultation as to the various topics were enough; there was to be no further collaboration. And so no single author is responsible for any view outside his own article. It was through the good fortune of some deeper agreement that the book was expected to achieve its unity. All the articles bear in the same sense upon the book's title-subject: all tend to support a Southern way of life against what may be called the American or prevailing way; and all as much as agree that the best terms in which to represent the distinction are contained in the phrase, Agrarian versus Industrial.
But after the book was under way it seemed a pity if the contributors, limited as they were within their special subjects, should stop short of showing how close their agreements really were. On the contrary, it seemed that they ought to go on and make themselves known as a group already consolidated by a set of principles which could be stated with a good deal of particularity. This might prove useful for the sake of future reference, if they should undertake any further joint publication. It was then decided to prepare a general introduction for the book which would state briefly the common convictions of the group. This is the statement. To it every one of the contributors in this book has subscribed.
Nobody now proposes for the South, or far any other community in this country, an independent political destiny. That idea is thought to have been finished in 1805. But how far shall the South surrender its moral, social, and economic autonomy to the victorious principle of Union? That question remains open. The South is a minority section that has hitherto been jealous of its minority right to live its own kind of life. The South scarcely hopes to determine the other sections, but it does propose to determine itself, within the utmost limits of legal action. Of late, however, there is the melancholy fact that the South itself has wavered a little and shown signs of wanting to join up behind the common or American industrial ideal. It is against that tendency that this book is written. The younger Southerners, who are being converted frequently to the industrial gospel, must come back to the support of the Southern tradition. They must be persuaded to look very critically at the advantages of becoming a "new South" which will be only an undistinguished replica of the usual industrial community.
But there are many other minority communities opposed to industrialism, and wanting a much simpler economy to live by. The communities and private persons sharing the agrarian tastes are to be found widely within the Union. Proper living is a matter of the intelligence and the will, does not depend on the local climate or geography, and is capable of a definition which is general and not Southern at all. Southerners have a filial duty to discharge to their own section. But their cause is precarious and they must seek alliances with sympathetic communities everywhere. The members of the present group would be happy to be counted as members of a national agrarian movement.
Industrialism is the economic organization of the collective American society. It means the decision of society to invest its economic resources in the applied sciences. But the word science has acquired a certain sanctitude. It is out of order to quarrel with science in the abstract, or even with the applied sciences when their applications are made subject to criticism and intelligence. The capitalization of the applied sciences has now become extravagant and uncritical; it has enslaved our human energies to a degree now clearly felt to be burdensome. The apologists of industrialism do not like to meet this charge directly; so they often take refuge in saying that they are devoted simply to science! They are really devoted to the applied sciences and to practical production. Therefore it is necessary to employ a certain skepticism even at the expense of the Cult of Science, and to say, It is an Americanism, which looks innocent and disinterested, but really is not either.
The contribution that science can make to a labor is to render it easier by the help of a tool or a process, and to assure the laborer of his perfect economic security while he is engaged upon it. Then it can be performed with leisure and enjoyment. But the modern laborer has not exactly received this benefit under the industrial regime. His labor is hard, its tempo is fierce, and his employment is insecure. The first principle of a good labor is that it must be effective, but the second principle is that it must be enjoyed. Labor is one of the largest items in the human career; it is a modest demand to ask that it may partake of happiness.
The regular act of applied science is to introduce into labor a labor-saving device or a machine. Whether this is a benefit depends on how far it is advisable to save the labor The philosophy of applied science is generally quite sure that the saving of labor is a pure gain, and that the more of it the better. This is to assume that labor is an evil, that only the end of labor or the material product is good. On this assumption labor becomes mercenary and servile, and it is no wonder if many forms of modern labor are accepted without resentment though they are evidently brutalizing. The act of labor as one of the happy functions of human life has been in effect abandoned, and is practiced solely for its rewards.
Even the apologists of industrialism have been obliged to admit that some economic evils follow in the wake of the machines. These are such as overproduction, unemployment, and a growing inequality in the distribution of wealth. But the remedies proposed by the apologists are always homeopathic. They expect the evils to disappear when we have bigger and better machines, and more of them. Their remedial programs, therefore, look forward to more industrialism. Sometimes they see the system righting itself spontaneously and without direction: they are Optimists. Sometimes they rely on the benevolence of capital, or the militancy of labor, to bring about a fairer division of the spoils: they are Cooperationists or Socialists. And sometimes they expect to find super-engineers, in the shape of Boards of Control, who will adapt production to consumption and regulate prices and guarantee business against fluctuations: they are Sovietists. With respect to these last it must be insisted that the true Sovietists or Communists-if the term may be used here in the European sense-are the Industrialists themselves. They would have the government set up an economic super-organization, which in turn would become the government. We therefore look upon the Communist menace as a menace indeed, but not as a Red one; because it is simply according to the blind drift of our industrial development to expect in America at last much the same economic system as that imposed by violence upon Russia in 1917.
Turning to consumption, as the grand end which justifies the evil of modern labor, we find that we have been deceived. We have more time in which to consume, and many more products to be consumed. But the tempo of our labors communicates itself to our satisfactions, and these also become brutal and hurried. The constitution of the natural man probably does not permit him to shorten his labor-time and enlarge his consuming-time indefinitely. He has to pay the penalty in satiety and aimlessness. The modern man has lost his sense of vocation.
Religion can hardly expect to flourish in an industrial society. Religion is our submission to the general intention of a nature that is fairly inscrutable; it is the sense of our role as creatures within it. But nature industrialized, transformed into cities and artificial habitations, manufactured into commodities, is no longer nature but a highly simplified picture of nature. We receive the illusion of having power over nature, and lose the sense of nature as something mysterious and contingent. The God of nature under these conditions is merely an amiable expression, a superfluity, and the philosophical understanding ordinarily carried in the religious experience is not there for us to have.
Nor do the arts have a proper life under industrialism, with the general decay of sensibility which attends it. Art depends, in general, like religion, on a right attitude to nature; and in particular on a free and disinterested observation of nature that occurs only in leisure. Neither the creation nor the understanding of works of art is possible in an industrial age except by some local and unlikely suspension of the industrial drive.
The amenities of life also suffer under the curse of a strictly-business or industrial civilization. They consist in such practices as manners, conversation, hospitality, sympathy, family life, romantic love-in the social exchanges which reveal and develop sensibility in human affairs. If religion and the arts are founded on right relations of man- to-nature, these are founded on right relations of man-to- man.
Apologists of industrialism are even inclined to admit that its actual processes may have upon its victims the spiritual effects just described. But they think that all can be made right by extraordinary educational efforts, by all sorts of cultural institutions and endowments. They would cure the poverty of the contemporary spirit by hiring experts to instruct it in spite of itself in the historic culture. But salvation is hardly to be encountered on that road. The trouble with the life-pattern is to be located at its economic base, and we cannot rebuild it by pouring in soft materials from the top. The young men and women in colleges, for example, if they are already placed in a false way of life, cannot make more than an inconsequential acquaintance with the arts and humanities transmitted to them. Or else the understanding of these arts and humanities will but make them the more wretched in their own destitution.
The "Humanists" are too abstract. Humanism, properly speaking, is not an abstract system, but a culture, the whole way in which we live, act, think, and feel. It is a kind of imaginatively balanced life lived out in a definite social tradition. And, in the concrete, we believe that this, the genuine humanism, was rooted in the agrarian life of the older South and of other parts of the country that shared in such a tradition. It was not an abstract moral "check" derived from the classics-it was not soft material poured in from the top. It was deeply founded in the way of life itself-in its tables, chairs, portraits, festivals, laws, marriage customs. We cannot recover our native humanism by adopting some standard of taste that is critical enough to question the contemporary arts but not critical enough to question the social and economic life which is their ground.
The tempo of the industrial life is fast, but that is not the worst of it; it is accelerating. The ideal is not merely some set form of industrialism, with so many stable industries, but industrial progress, or an incessant extension of industrialization. It never proposes a specific goal; it initiates the infinite series. We have not merely capitalized certain industries; we have capitalized the laboratories and inventors, and undertaken to employ all the labor-saving devices that come out of them. But a fresh labor-saving device introduced into an industry does not emancipate the laborers in that industry so much as it evicts them. Applied at the expense of agriculture, for example, the new processes have reduced the part of the population supporting itself upon the soil to a smaller and smaller fraction. Of course no single labor-saving process is fatal; it brings on a period of unemployed labor and unemployed capital, but soon a new industry is devised which will put them both to work again, and a new commodity is thrown upon the market. The laborers were sufficiently embarrassed in the meantime, but, according to the theory, they will eventually be taken care of. It is now the public which is embarrassed; it feels obligated to purchase a commodity for which it had expressed no desire, but it is invited to make its budget equal to the strain. All might yet be well, and stability and comfort might again obtain, but for this: partly because of industrial ambitions and partly because the repressed creative impulse must break out somewhere, there will be a stream of further labor-saving devices in all industries, and the cycle will have to be repeated over and over. The result is an increasing disadjustment and instability.
It is an inevitable consequence of industrial progress that production greatly outruns the rate of natural consumption. To overcome the disparity, the producers, disguised as the pure idealists of progress, must coerce and wheedle the public into being loyal and steady consumers, in order to keep the machines running. So the rise of modern advertising-along with its twin, personal salesmanship-is the most significant development of our industrialism. Advertising means to persuade the consumers to want exactly what the applied sciences are able to furnish them. It consults the happiness of the consumer no more than it consulted the happiness of the laborer. It is the great effort of a false economy of life to approve itself. But its task grows more difficult even day.
It is strange, of course, that a majority of men anywhere could ever as with one mind become enamored of industrialism: a system that has so little regard for individual wants. There is evidently a kind of thinking that rejoices in setting up a social objective which has no relation to the individual. Men are prepared to sacrifice their private dignity and happiness to an abstract social ideal, and without asking whether the social ideal produces the welfare of any individual man whatsoever. But this is absurd. The responsibility of men is for their own welfare and that of their neighbors; not for the hypothetical welfare of some fabulous creature called society.
Opposed to the industrial society is the agrarian, which does not stand in particular need of definition. An agrarian society is hardly one that has no use at all for industries, for professional vocations, for scholars and artists, and for the life of cities. Technically, perhaps, an agrarian society is one in which agriculture is the leading vocation, whether for wealth, for pleasure, or for prestige-a form of labor that is pursued with intelligence and leisure, and that becomes the model to which the other forms approach as well as they may. But an agrarian regime will be secured readily enough where the superfluous industries are not allowed to rise against it. The theory of agrarianism is that the culture of the soil is the best and most sensitive of vocations, and that therefore it should have the economic preference and enlist the maximum number of workers.
These principles do not intend to be very specific in proposing any practical measures. How may the little agrarian community resist the Chamber of Commerce of its county seat, which is always trying to import some foreign industry that cannot be assimilated to the life-pattern of the community? Just what must the Southern leaders do to defend the traditional Southern life ? How may the Southern and the Western agrarians unite for effective action? Should the agrarian forces try to capture the Democratic party, which historically is so closely affiliated with the defense of individualism, the small community, the state, the South ? Or must the agrarians-even the Southern ones-abandon the Democratic party to its fate and try a new one? What legislation could most profitably be championed by the powerful agrarians in the Senate of the United States? What anti-industrial measures might promise to stop the advances of industrialism, or even undo some of them, with the least harm to those concerned? What policy should be pursued by the educators who have a tradition at heart? These and many other questions are of the greatest importance, but they cannot be answered here.
For, in conclusion, this much is clear: If a community, or a section, or a race, or an age, is groaning under industrialism, and well aware that it is an evil dispensation, it must find the way to throw it off. To think that this cannot be done is pusillanimous. And if the whole community, section, race, or age thinks it cannot be done, then it has simply lost its political genius and doomed itself to impotence.
2. It's rarely noticed that the peak year for homestead entries was actually 1919 and the various homestead acts were not repealed, and even then not fully, until 1932. There was more 20th Century homesteading than 19th Century homesteading.
The back to the land movement was a pretty big part of the hippie movement, although it doesn't seem to be all that well recalled in the history of the 60s generally. The degree to which it shares similarities with the current homesteader movement, as will be noted, is pretty pronounced.
3. American farmsteads usually feature dwellings on the farm, but this isn't the case everywhere and indeed it isn't the case everywhere in the United States.
Irish farms, for example, often have traditionally featured a house in town, although not always Many Irish farmers walked to their fields daily, and they did not want to ruin valuable farm land by building an unnecessary house on it if they could avoid it. In some regions of the US where farming and ranching was initiated by Irish immigrants, that pattern remained. Indeed, in central Wyoming there were quite a few ranchers of Irish descent who always lived in town, not on their ranches, with some traveling considerable distances to their outfits daily. I still know of one descendant of an Irish rancher who still does so.
While this no doubt is inconvenient in all sorts of ways, it did and does offer some advantages as well. For one thing, such ranchers were part of their communities. It's notable that Irish American ranchers in Wyoming tended to be quite active in their local communities and retained their Faith, while out in the hinterlands both is much less true of the ranching demographic. Town headquarted Irish American ranchers also placed a high value on education, with many of their children ending up in the professions.
4. As a Distributist as well as an Agrarian, I'd note that the modern Distributist community is flat out weird, or perhaps contains a fair amount of weirdness. Having said that, everything in current American economics and politics is pretty weird right now.
Anyhow, while all agrarains are distributists, some distributists pride themselves on not claiming to be agrarians, in large part because they don't grasp what agrarianism is. That's understandable enough, as distributism also tends to attract a lot of romantics who envision returning the economy of the globe or perhaps their region of it to Medieval monarchies, something that at least G. K. Chesteron would have laughed at.
5. The letter:
Christians are indistinguishable from other men either by nationality, language or customs. They do not inhabit separate cities of their own, or speak a strange dialect, or follow some outlandish way of life. Their teaching is not based upon reveries inspired by the curiosity of men. Unlike some other people, they champion no purely human doctrine. With regard to dress, food and manner of life in general, they follow the customs of whatever city they happen to be living in, whether it is Greek or foreign.
And yet there is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country. Like others, they marry and have children, but they do not expose them. They share their meals, but not their wives.
They live in the flesh, but they are not governed by the desires of the flesh. They pass their days upon earth, but they are citizens of heaven. Obedient to the laws, they yet live on a level that transcends the law. Christians love all men, but all men persecute them. Condemned because they are not understood, they are put to death, but raised to life again. They live in poverty, but enrich many; they are totally destitute, but possess an abundance of everything. They suffer dishonor, but that is their glory. They are defamed, but vindicated. A blessing is their answer to abuse, deference their response to insult. For the good they do they receive the punishment of malefactors, but even then they, rejoice, as though receiving the gift of life. They are attacked by the Jews as aliens, they are persecuted by the Greeks, yet no one can explain the reason for this hatred.
To speak in general terms, we may say that the Christian is to the world what the soul is to the body. As the soul is present in every part of the body, while remaining distinct from it, so Christians are found in all the cities of the world, but cannot be identified with the world. As the visible body contains the invisible soul, so Christians are seen living in the world, but their religious life remains unseen. The body hates the soul and wars against it, not because of any injury the soul has done it, but because of the restriction the soul places on its pleasures. Similarly, the world hates the Christians, not because they have done it any wrong, but because they are opposed to its enjoyments.
Christians love those who hate them just as the soul loves the body and all its members despite the body's hatred. It is by the soul, enclosed within the body, that the body is held together, and similarly, it is by the Christians, detained in the world as in a prison, that the world is held together. The soul, though immortal, has a mortal dwelling place; and Christians also live for a time amidst perishable things, while awaiting the freedom from change and decay that will be theirs in heaven. As the soul benefits from the deprivation of food and drink, so Christians flourish under persecution. Such is the Christian’s lofty and divinely appointed function, from which he is not permitted to excuse himself
6. Not worth putting up in the main text, but as a minor irritating aspect of this, one of the aggravating, at least to me, aspects of this is the weird, weird, rejection of time proven clothing.
Mormon farmers, Oneida County Idaho. The Salt Lake Valley was the center of outward colonization from there, which is fairly unique compared to the settlement of the rest of the West.
It used to be said that all men's clothing came from one of two fields, the plowed field or the battlefield. That was pretty much true, up until recently.
More recently, a lot of men's clothing comes from the nursery or from test tube, including the clothing of "homesteaders".
Again, like everything else associated with homesteading, in the modern context, there is no one universal rule here. You'll find "homesteaders" wearing broad brimmed hats and Levis, or the like, showing an adoption of time tested agricultural clothes. But you'll also see smiling faces of young homesteaders wearing wool pull on hats and baggy sweaters with shorts in the middle of the summer, showing that they adopted their sartorial approach to rural work more from the dorm room than the field.
While the feedstore truckers cap has tragically, and even somewhat lethally, become an agricultural clothing staple, almost all clothing actually worn by rural people in rural activities reflects a process of evolution. Cowboys don't wear fur felt broad brimmed hats as an affectation. That hat keeps the cancer causing rays of the sun off your head, and it sheds rain. Levis and boots protect the rider. And so on.
I know that its a minor matter, but coming in rejecting thousands of years of evolved agricultural dress sends a sort of statement about a person, and not a sensible one.
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