We are all well aware of the no-man’s land of cultural difference between farmers and non-farmers...But there is another cultural divide coming to the fore in our society, this one between farmer and farmer.
(original)
Catholic and Protestant cities, though different in many respects, both became economically dynamic over the centuries – thanks, mostly, to the benefits associated with the emergence of the modern nation state, something that post-Counter Reformation Catholic rulers nurtured alongside their Protestant opposite numbers.
The recently published and expanded fourth edition of The Transition Document: Toward a Biological Resilient Agriculture by Harry MacCormack is arguably his most important work in a long and winding career of poetry, politics, farming, writing, and spiritual discovery.
Faux Friendship By William Deresiewicz (via the Western Confucian)
It's an ok piece, and gets better when dealing with social networking sites like Facebook. But its caricature of medieval (Catholic) attitudes towards friendship is ignorant:
The rise of Christianity put the classical ideal in eclipse. Christian thought discouraged intense personal bonds, for the heart should be turned to God. Within monastic communities, particular attachments were seen as threats to group cohesion. In medieval society, friendship entailed specific expectations and obligations, often formalized in oaths. Lords and vassals employed the language of friendship. "Standing surety"—guaranteeing a loan, as in The Merchant of Venice—was a chief institution of early modern friendship. Godparenthood functioned in Roman Catholic society (and, in many places, still functions) as a form of alliance between families, a relationship not between godparent and godchild, but godparent and parent. In medieval England, godparents were "godsibs"; in Latin America, they are "compadres," co-fathers, a word we have taken as synonymous with friendship itself.What of the writings of St. Augustine, St. Aelred of Rievaulx, or St. Thomas Aquinas, just to mention a few? Yes, rules of religious life discourage particular friendships/attachments, but this is not the same as denigrating friendship in itself. (And there are apparently good reasons for this, since particular friendships may become hindrances to the exercise of charity towards all in the community, or the occasion for something worse.) Nor was this the ideal for lay people. Rather than doing away with friendship, the Christian tradition has held that the love of God and the supernatural life elevate and perfect it.
It is true that “Jacksonians” on the right lose patience with nation-building, but they also have nationalist convictions that our interventions abroad are always benevolent and initially they are very keen to repeat the propaganda that we are fighting wars of liberation or wars against tyranny (or evil or some new form of fascism). They might support military interventions without the trappings of democratist rhetoric, but they readily re-use this rhetoric whenever they are confronted with arguments that the war in question is unjust or illegal or unnecessary. In other words, they will insist on having national security reasons for going to war, but they will embrace every argument that makes the war appear to be an expression of charity and goodwill. Where they will draw the line is when they conclude that the benevolent, “humanitarian” justifications get in the way of achieving whatever amorphous concept of “victory” they hold.
What makes “Jacksonians” weary of nation-building is not the goal of establishing new political institutions in another country. It is instead the time that it takes to do this and the “ingratitude” of the alleged beneficiaries of our interventions that tend to turn them against prolonged deployments. The charge of “ingratitude,” of course, is inevitable if you believe that you have been doing another nation a favor by invading and wrecking their country. Jacksonians’ instinctive deference to the executive and their belief that criticizing a President in wartime is a kind of disloyalty force them to focus on nation-building and “political correctness” (i.e., refraining from bombing civilians) (as Rep. Chaffetz did) in order to criticize a President and his conduct of a war without suggesting that they lack in support for the military and military interventions in general. This is why “Jacksonians” may be critical of certain details in how a war is conducted, or they might, like Chaffetz, even favor starting a new war that cannot easily be started until the current war ends, but they could never seriously be described as antiwar.
This is how you get critics of the Afghan war plan from the right who want to be more pro-military than the military, and who believe that the rules of engagement that the theater commanders insist on imposing are driven not by military necessity but by “political correctness.” It may be that they cannot imagine why a military commander would want this kind of discipline, which just drives home how instinctive and visceral their “pro-military” views are and how unrelated these views are to actual military needs. This is an echo of that Vietnam revisionist sentiment that insists that the military should have the fewest possible constraints on what they do. Strategy and geopolitical considerations never enter into any of this. Hence you have someone like Chaffetz who says that Iran’s nuclear program should just be “taken out,” as if he thinks this is simply a matter of will and as if there are no costs or consequences to doing this. Even pragmatic considerations that less restrictive rules of engagement could prove to be extremely counterproductive in a counterinsurgency seem to be irrelevant to such “Jacksonians.”
The family is the one institution of primitive participatory community that still survives. It involves the equal sharing of goods. Authority within the family is not necessarily patriarchal and aims self-denyingly at reciprocity. In these ways the family offers uniquely a training in mutual nurture. Of course it is the worst source of pathologies, but only because it is the strongest source of psychic health.
Of course also, there can be "unconventional" families which should not be penalised. But all families aim for fidelity and stability, and this very aim favours a social and political bias towards marriage rather than cohabitation. For commitment in time requires more than an endless reserve as to what one may think tomorrow, which causes "partners" to face an intolerable continuously renewed judgement from each other. Marriage suspends sexual competition and distributes sexual partners equally. It still today usually protects women physically and compensates for their lesser muscular strength.
In the case of liberal feminism, the left has shied away from the fact that its success has coincided with a regressive era that has involved an increase in economic inequality and a decline of civil liberties while covertly compensating sexual liberties. The archetypal female subject today is in one way a male capitalist subject writ large, as it is seen as autonomous in relation to biological reproduction as well as economic production. At the same time it remains a traditional "female" subject defined by private concerns now become consumeristic.
The downside of this hybrid female subjectivity is the continued enslavement of women in both workplace and home and the loss of a male code of honour as to the assistance of women and children, which has had devastating consequences for the working class. All this combines with an increased state and market control of reproduction which amounts to a new general rule of men over women.
Instead of this we need a true radical feminism more focused on the question of what constitutes good relations between women and men. This needs to include mutual equity concerning procreation and above all equal rights to the combining of work and child nurture without economic loss. In cultural terms we need women to play a public role neither as subordinate, nor as men writ large.
Such a feminism would promote the family as the first school of association and of resistance to the depravations of both market and state.
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