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John Taylor, President of the
Virginia Institute for Public Policy, which
publishes the Virginia Viewpoint op-ed pieces.
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By Ted J. Smith III, Ph.D
At
this time of year it’s useful to recall what the
Founding Fathers had in mind when they declared
our independence. Almost
all of them were committed to some form of
agrarianism.
Agrarians believe that the best society is one
composed largely of farmers who work their own
land, local tradesmen and independent artisans,
bound together in stable, harmonious communities
in which citizens know one another as persons, not
just roles. Under
a regime of self-government, this arrangement
offers both the greatest possible scope for the
exercise of individual freedom, and the greatest
possible incentive to exercise that freedom
responsibly.
Agrarian ideals were dominant in America through
the end of the 19th century, and in
much of the South, Midwest, and West until well
into the 20th.
But they were gradually forced from the
scene by the inexorable spread of industrialism,
modernism, and the leviathan state.
At each stage of the descent, passionate voices
called for a return to the old ideals.
The most eloquent were the Southern
Agrarians, who mounted a brilliant but futile
defense against the rise of the modern,
commercialized New South in the 1930s and 1940s.
They were followed thirty years later by
the Hippie movement which, despite its infatuation
with sex, drugs, and rock and roll, was partially
motivated by a longing to recreate authentic
communities in response to the crass materialism
of the postwar consumer society.
Today, as we adjust to the post-modern
global economy, new voices -- most recently at a
UVA conference in April -- are again pleading for
a reconsideration of the agrarian alternative.
Critics have long derided such pleas as hopelessly
nostalgic. And
it’s true that never in our history has the
scope of meaningful freedom and self-government
been narrower.
The last 70 years have produced an exponential
expansion of government control.
For example, the Federal
Register, which publishes official notices and
the text of rules and regulations proposed and
enacted by federal executive agencies, routinely
tops 70,000 pages a year; in 2000, it almost
reached 84,000. Given
the demise of most constraints on government
power, we may well be witnessing the formation of
an entirely new kind of society: a totalitarian
democracy in which nearly every aspect of human
existence is subject to government oversight and
control.
This process has been aided greatly by the treason
of the “intellectuals.”
Far more liberal and secular than the rest
of us, and increasingly hostile to traditional
American values and the heritage of the West, they
enjoy near-monolithic control of the major organs
of culture, including education, the news media,
entertainment, and the arts.
From this position of power, they have
worked assiduously to indoctrinate us all in the
necessity of replacing our flawed and oppressive
society with the highly centralized,
rationalistic, therapeutic system they prefer.
Finally, while a quarter of the population is
still classified as “rural,” only a few
million families make their living from the land.
Small towns wither, and commerce is dominated by
huge national and global corporations.
This may seem to present a bleak prospect, but
just the opposite is true.
Agrarianism foundered on the rocks of
economic change: Over the last century it became
impossible for large numbers of people to make a
decent living by farming.
Good jobs – in manufacturing and
associated service industries – were
concentrated in the cities and their anonymous
suburbs, so that’s where people moved.
But globalization and the Internet have
wrought another change.
A great many jobs today consist of processing
information, and the number will increase as
manufacturing moves overseas.
But information does not have to be
processed in an urban office; the work can be done
just as well from home, and home can be anywhere
with reliable Internet access.
The result is the growing phenomenon of
telecommuting: 11 million salaried employees
already do most or all of their work from remote
locations, and that number could grow to 50
million over the next twenty years.
Similarly, e-commerce and the Internet make it
possible to buy and sell in a burgeoning global
market from almost any location in the country
with minimal investment and little overhead.
Internet auction pioneer eBay now has so
many sellers working full-time from their homes
that it has plans to offer them group health
insurance.
For the first time in a century it is possible for
large numbers of people to leave the cities and
suburbs to live and work in the countryside.
Once there, they will have the chance to
rebuild the stable, authentic communities that are
at the heart of the agrarian ideal.
And given enough of those communities, it
might just be possible to wrest control of our
lives from the state.
It is a precious opportunity, and probably
our last.
--
July 22, 2002
Ted
J. Smith, III is an associate professor of mass
communications at Virginia Commonwealth
University, and a member of the Board of Scholars
of the Virginia Institute for Public Policy, an
education and research organization headquartered
in Potomac Falls, Virginia.
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