There’s always been something unrealistically romantic about too much emphasis on place and memory in America. Not so far from where I live there was a town -- Cassville, GA -- that, by 1860, was extremely well settled, had several serious institutions of learning, and certain sorts of aristocratic traditions that are still remembered by those who care about that stuff. It wasn’t even there until 1840 -- it was founded in the wake of the pretty anti-communitarian Cherokee removal that’s part of our wonderful southern heritage -- and it was devastated by the Civil War. Community came and went with almost blinding speed, as it has done often in our country’s history. (Consider also, if you want, how quickly the Cherokees transformed themselves into good [slaveholding sometimes], agrarian Americans, with their really deep traditions both adapting and sometimes disappearing.)This is not to say that I completely object to the agrarian ideals of place, belonging, connection, but it is a telling fact that most of the famous agrarians did not choose this life, even when they could have done so--Wendell Berry, for instance, is a farmer and lives off the land, but he does not have to depend on the land for his sustenance. (And neither did his father, from whom he inherited the land.) But Wendell Berry is the closest that individuals come to living up to their ideals. Many other agrarian idealists are professors, writers, doctors, etc. Men who farm as a hobby. Or not at all.
Peter Lawler, Postmodern Conservative
I would say it is inappropriate to be unfairly judgmental. After all, men like these are necessary for the message of agrarianism to reach the people. But most farmers I have met are hardly distinguishable from the rest of us, once they cross the city's boarders, and it is moments when I meet the real farmer they I begin to suspect that agrarianism is a romantic notion which distracts us from the crooked timber of . . . reality.
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