 Agrarianism - dot com! 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 19thcentury, 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 seventy 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: eleven million salaried employees already
do most or all of their work from remote locations, and that number
could grow to fifty 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. | 
