by Robert Hoyle
There will be an apparent paradox in this. You shall applaud and revere your fathers for their determined opposition to forms and principles which you shall receive and even sustain. But the paradox will be only in seeming. Your justification will be found where we find ours: in the fact that the institutions which it was our duty to defend, because they still existed, it will be your duty to surrender, because you have learned by our innocent calamity that they cannot hereafter exist. “A new South” is inevitable and therefore it will be right for you to accept it in the same way that it was our duty to fight to prevent it. It may be the son’s duty tomorrow to “bury the dead mother out of sight,” whom it was the father’s most sacred duty yesterday to endeavor to keep alive.
- Robert Dabney, The New South
Confusing the form of a thing for its substance is an error as old as man himself. Preservation of a way of life or the maintenance of an inheritance can often lead to a reactionary blindness that makes the prized possession more likely to expire or perhaps renders it already null. Twenty-first century America, also known as late stage modernity, is a land rife with ideological commitments. Ideologies underpin policies on everything from trade with China and the price of gasoline, to war in the old Soviet bloc and transgender bathrooms. The great pitfall of the “anti-modern reactionary” is to cast off one reality-denying construction for another; never really getting free of the malaise caused by rationalism’s willful drive to remake reality in man’s image. Unfortunately, the agrarian cause is no exception.
Agrarianism is much more a watchword in the English speaking world today than it was twenty or fifty years ago. The complete triumph of the cash nexus has done much to overthrow traditional loyalties and fuel societal dislocation. In the midst of this disillusion many people are looking to root themselves into something earthier than Milton Friedman or Ben Shapiro. Everyone reading this article will have themselves or known someone who has at least talked about “returning to the land”, giving it a go the way our forefathers supposedly did it. Almost akin to the instinct which drives Salmon to swim upstream, teeming masses are leaving suburbia in search of a place to raise their kids, probably keep some chickens, and start a garden.
Considered at a cursory level, this new interest in traditional ways and means is a major positive. Certainly much of modern life has become extremely artificial, empty, and unfulfilling. Returning to more basic priorities and rejecting much of modernity’s expectations is a good thing. However sometimes a word of caution is in order.
When Robert Dabney addressed the Philanthropic and Union Literary Societies for the commencement of Hampden-Sydney’s class of 1882 he had in mind a phenomenon similar in nature to that outlined above. The ill-fated Confederate States of America was a memory now over fifteen years old. With its demise had perished not just the political aspirations of the states involved but also the way of life known to most of the inhabitants of those states. The end of slavery coupled with the rise of affordable mechanical replacements for human labor meant that the plantation economy was becoming increasingly non-viable. The planters and aristocrats of Charleston, Atlanta, and the Mississippi Delta had not been completely brought down in the twenty years since Shiloh but the writing was on the wall.
Entrusted with the education of the children of these people, Dabney had a difficult task in hand. To be a stick in the mud was certainly popular. Blaming Yankees for the sorry state of affairs was sure to resonate with the hot heads of the affluent youth, but it wasn’t the intellectual equipage that would prepare them for the world as it stood. In his The New South speech Dabney draws attention to the importance of distinguishing between substantial continuity with the past and mere morphological likeness.
Indeed, the South had lost the war (and a generation of young men along the way) and this made the ensuing changes all the more bitter. The world was changing rapidly, however, and both the planter and the aristocrat would have headed the way of the Dodo even if Richmond had never fallen. To preserve the South meant going deeper than the political forms of Jefferson and Calhoun, deeper than the plantation economies which dominated the land. The plantation and the statesman had been the form which the South had adopted for over a century but they weren’t to be confused with the substance of the civilization. The South could change her forms and survive, provided she retained her soul. What was this soul? For Dabney, it was the non-material commitments of a people who retained the Medieval interest in the metaphysical and an unwillingness to reduce everything in life to a cash value and system of utility.
Moving from 1882 into our own day, all of the questions regarding form have changed, but the heart of the matter remains exactly the same as in Dr. Dabney’s day. There was then a very serious temptation for the best and brightest young minds of the South in the post-war era to spend their lives trying to preserve a form of living that was of necessity about to expire. Similarly it is the great error of modern agrarian reformists to miss the substantial elements of the cause while overemphasizing a specific set of external conditions. Modernity assaults its residents with material overabundance, spiritual levity, opulence, decadence, and myopia. All of these are bad, damning even. What pity we feel for the lost souls trapped in this truly awful construction. Even so those who check out on the modern scene often lay upon themselves equally heavy burdens, unable to be borne, while simultaneously missing the fundamentals of the problem.
It is now that the reader rightfully may ask, “what are those fundamentals?” In answer I reply that THE fundamental issue at stake between the modern and traditionalist approaches to life is a spiritual one. Now I am well aware that talk of life as a spiritual struggle is very frequently a cop-out; serving as a cover for a cowardly unwillingness to confront the real matter at hand. Such is not my intention or practice. Yet it does remain to us to recognize and address that the fight at hand is not primarily about corporeal things.
The primary disservice of the rationalist outlook upon life is that it is unwilling to consider man as a spiritual and eternal being. Reducing man to a clump of cells experiencing “physio-chemical processes” restricts his focus to the immediate environment and the strictly material realm. This cuts man off from finding fulfillment for his immaterial needs. Man is a physical being, true. We all need food, clothing, a house, etc., but this is only a small part of the goes into the created being we call man. We also need truth, beauty, order, and symmetry. Modernity overstimulates the physical senses but starves the soul. Providing ease and allurement for the body, it pretends that the soul does not exist.
Flowing from this dismissal of the ethereal and the eternal is the second great error: the denial of ethical imperative bound up in the nature of the created order. If the only things which truly exist are those things which can be perceived with the five senses then there are no abiding forms or underlying natures and man’s mind is the measure of all things. Freed from a regard for higher things, man is free to impose his own will upon his environment.
A dismissal of the ethereal and a disregard for the higher order are the two chief components which work to make modernity such a hellscape. Malcontents must always chiefly bear in mind that if one is truly to break free from this withering condition, then it will not be a break with the popular forms of the condition, but with modernity in its essence. Trading in one set of material goals for another will not succeed. Giving up on imposing one artificial order only to try and ram-rod another is mere folly.
It is precisely here that any challenge to modernity (including the challenge of agrarianism) must forever bear in mind that the chief principles are spiritual, not material. We are dealing with the nature of things, not the form. Fighting to preserve a form often distracts from the substance. How often do agrarian or traditionalist inspired efforts to “return to the land” create an obsession with a particular form or mode of living that proves just as spiritually withering as modernity’s worst? Far too often I fear. The appeal of the traditionalist life is that it has an interest in man’s non-material needs and a respect for the order which creation reveals to us. But this pursuit can easily be converted into another materialistic pursuit and another opportunity to project an artificial construct over reality.
Many a young man has burnt himself out, ignoring his mental development, spiritual well-being, or even filial obligations, in the pursuit of the supposed trappings of the “non-modern” life. Many a woman has proven to be a downright insufferable wife for trying to be the instagrammable traditionalist. Families hurriedly fleeing suburbia for dreams of a homestead often make foolish financial decisions that set themselves back decades. Young couples in tenuous circumstances have large numbers of children and then raise them without direction. Rule-manufacturing puritans whimsically alter the qualifications for being sufficiently “traditionalist” or “agrarian” or whatever, in order to make themselves and their followers feel sufficiently superior to the common and unfortunate masses.
It is not my intention to portray the anti-modernist factions (they exist on the both the political right and left) as something akin to a “Handmaid’s Tale” type of scourge. On the contrary, I have invested my entire life into combatting the spiritual emptiness, societal dislocation, and personal disintegration so rampant in the world I inhabit. Particularly as a Southerner, I interpret the maintenance of a spiritual outlook on life—pursuing the symmetry of the soul through a life lived in harmony with the created order—to be an act of devotion to my fathers. I live the dream life of any agrarian theorist. From personal experience I can say that many a theorist gets it wrong. My contentment does not rest in how many of my meals were produced here on the family farm, or from the amount of cows in the barn at night, or from how many children sit between my wife and I at church on Sunday morning. Joy in my life comes from the spiritual quietude and peace of conscience found only in the Christian life. It is rooted in an inner ordering of the soul that only be found in reflection, prayer, and rest. I lead an agrarian lifestyle, true, but that is only the form. The substance is in the ethereal things. And without a constant refocusing on these eternal priorities the style of life which I lead could quickly become just as withering and just as deadly as anything modernity has to offer.
This brings me around to my original point. I am actively trying to preserve something. People drawn to agrarian and traditionalist challenges of the current status quo all feel this. But don’t get hung up in the forms. Continuity with our forefathers is more about virtue and the state of our soul than about our physical possessions (or lack thereof) and the location of our bodies. Are you a suburban factory worker? Don’t let anybody shame you. Three kids got you wondering how you could ever handle more? Don’t let yourself be manipulated into having more by someone who won’t be paying the bills. Do not fall into the modernist trap of thinking that the good life is all about things or that your ideological zeal for a cause gives you a get out of jail free card from wisely considering your circumstances in life.
What has been said here should not be taken as an encouragement towards complacency or indolence, but rather a reminder of what is truly important. A “New South” is just as inevitable in our day, looking forward, as it was one hundred and forty years ago. We must become a people who seek, not merely status symbols, but true order in our souls. We must cultivate respect for God’s order in the created world, pursuing that which is good, true, and beautiful, and thinking on that which is noble, pure, and lovely. Only then we will bring forth a form of living that is worthy of our fathers. The forms may differ; that is the way of things, but the substance will endure.
In short, don’t be distracted by forms. Yes, the cash nexus will eventually burn itself out. Yes, the elongated supply lines and removal of the common person from the production of their own daily essentials will eventually cause catastrophe. Yes, the modern world is a mess. But to ruin yourself in an overeager “last stand” form of combat will only accomplish the extinguishing of your won soul. Flee from bitterness. Cultivate the courage to walk against the grain. Do not neglect a balanced diet and a good night’s rest. Arm the children you do have with skill. Be shrewd as a serpent. Never ever forget that the spiritual inheritance of our fathers burns within our souls. We must face the grim truth that the world we had isn’t coming back. All our efforts will never turn the time back. However if we hold our heart’s in readiness we may set it right.
The author is a research associate with the Pactum Institute.