A sort of Agrarian Manifesto. What's wrong with the world (and how to fix it). Part 7. What would that look like, and why would it fix anything, other than limiting my choices and lightening my wallet? Wouldn't every one be just bored and poor?

 

His life will grow out of the ground like the other lives of the place, and take its place among them. He will be with them - neither ignorant of them, nor indifferent to them, nor against them - and so at last he will grow to be native-born. That is, he must reenter the silence and the darkness, and be born again.

Wendell Berry, A Native Hill.

So we've gone through this and lamented on the state of the world.

We looked at how working for largely local businesses, in an economy in which most were local, would work, in terms of economics.

In other words, if you needed an appliance, and went to Wally's Appliance Store, owned and operated by Wally, rather than Walmart, owned and operated by anonymous corporate shareholders, how would that look?

And we looked at something more radical yet, Agrarianism.

So how does this all tie together, and what difference would it really make?

Let's revisit the definition of Agrarianism.

Given the above, isn't Agrarianism simply agricultural distributism?

Well, no.

Agrarianism is an ethical perspective that privileges an agriculturally oriented political economy. At its most concise, agrarianism is “the idea that agriculture and those whose occupation involves agriculture are especially important and valuable elements of society

Bradley M. Jones, American Agrarianism.

Agrarianism is agriculture oriented on an up close and personal basis, and as such, it's family oriented, and land ethic oriented.

We also noted that agrarianism as we define it incorporates The Land Ethic, which holds:

All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants and animals, or collectively the land.

The Land Ethic, A Sand County Almanac.  Aldo Leopold.

So what would this mean to society at large, and a distributist society at that?

To start with, it would mean a lot more family farm operations, and no remotely owned and operated ones where the land was held by Bill Gates or the Chinese Communist Party. Combined with Distributism, it would also mean a lot more local processing of agricultural products.  Local packing houses, local flour mills, local bakeries.

It would also mean a society that was focused on local ownership of homes with residents who lived a more local, land ethic focused, lives.

Indeed, the local would matter much more in general.

And with it, humanity.

There would still be the rich and the poor, but not the remote rich and the ignorable poor.

Most people would be in the middle, and most of them, owning their own. They'd be more independent in that sense, and therefore less subject to the whims of remote employers, economic interests, and politicians.

All three major aspects of Catholic Social Teaching, humanity, subsidiarity, and solidarity, coming together.

An agrarian society would be much less focused on "growth", if focused on it at all.  Preservation of agricultural and wild lands would be paramount.  People would derive their social values in part from that, rather than the host of panem et circenses distractions they now do, or at least they could. 

They'd derive their leisure from it as well, and therefore appreciate it more.  If hiking in a local park, or going fishing, or being outdoors in general is what we would do, and we very much would as the big mega entertainment sources of all types are largely corporate in nature, preservation of the wild would be important.  

And this too, combined with what we've noted before, a distributist society and a society that was well-educated, would amount to a radical, and beneficial, reorientation of society.

We won't pretend that such a society would be prefect.  That would be absurd.  Human nature would remain that. All the vices that presently exist, still would, but with no corporate sources to feed them, they'd not grow as prominent.

And we will state that it would cure many of the ills that now confront us.

Such a society would force us to confront our nature and nature itself.  And to do so as a party of a greater community, for our common good.

Which, if we do not end up doing, will destroy us in the end.

Last prior:

A sort of Agrarian Manifesto. What's wrong with the world (and how to fix it). Part 6. Politics

Directly related:

What's wrong with the world (and how to fix it). Part 3. Agrarianism.

Finis