Caleb Stegall hasn't left FPR.

He gives a brief explanation at the end of Localism and Globalism Again (and a Note)

In this post, Mr. Stegall links to an essay by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: Seasonal produce: Think local, eat global. In it, she writes:

"The inwardness can develop into serious paranoia and a new form of tribalism."

In a collapsing society, tribalism will develop regardless of whether there is a movement for relocalization or not. What a movement for relocalization can do is to order tribalism towards the proper goods and make it humane. But it would appear that the author may have a vested interest in a liberal multicultural society, as she has benefited from it and is a true believer. Should we then talk about liberal paranoia of ethnic and cultural pride? There may be a right to assimilate, but there is no right to demand that a people change its mores to conform to your liberalism.

Liberalism's war against tradition and culture is sometimes overt, and sometimes it is subtle, but it is there. The discussion of local produce is just the starting-point for one liberal to defend her beliefs against what she thinks are threats to liberalism. (And perhaps rightly so, though she is wrong to claim that these threats are necessarily vicious or linked to evil.)

Caleb Stegall, Searching for a Usable Past

To the extent America has developed an institutional culture, it has done so in keeping with its founding, as a wholly voluntaristic venture premised less on external social bonds than on rational individual choice.

Michael Oakeshott wrote that the man of pure rational choice must have a “deep distrust of time” stemming from “an impatient hunger for eternity.” Likewise, his mind has no home, “no atmosphere, no changes of season and temperature.” According to the dominant American mythos of the fresh start, Oakeshott’s rationalist is the ideal American: a man unbound by time or place, restrained only by the scope of his own imagination and will. “He strives to live each day as if it were his first, and he believes that to form a habit is to fail.”

These ideals of new beginnings and a fresh start have imprinted themselves forcefully on the American soul, giving us everything from the frontier spirit and entrepreneurial innovation to the rugged individual and rags-to-riches fairytales. Americans still view themselves as liberated from Old World limitations: the dead weight of ancient blood-and-soil loyalties; the stultifying expectations of parochial locales; and the suffocating blanket of the-way-it’s-always-been.

Caleb Stegall's advice to college graduates -- Commencement Address (via the Western Confucian)

But for tonight, I’m all you have. So I have distilled a few things that I think are true; things that are true about the human heart; things that I want to share with you tonight.And the most basic truth—most basic for us in this time and place because it is the onemost obscured by the society we inhabit—is the truth articulated most poignantly byBooker T. Washington. Washinton was born into slavery and rose to prominence afterthe Civil War as a leader of Southern blacks. In 1895, speaking to an American Southstill struggling with Reconstruction, Washington wanted to urge blacks to stop looking tothe North for their needs and for their future, so he told this story.

There was a ship lost at sea for many days which suddenly sighted a friendly vessel.From the mast of the stranded ship was seen a signal: “Water, water. We die of thirst.”The answer from the friendly vessel at once came back: “Cast down your bucket whereyou are.” A second time, the signal, “Water, send us water!” went up from the distressedvessel. And was answered: “Cast down your bucket where you are.” A third and fourthsignal for water was answered: “Cast down your bucket where you are.” The captain ofthe distressed vessel, at last heeding the injunction, cast down his bucket and it came upfull of fresh, sparkling water from the mouth of the Amazon River.

Cast down your bucket where you are!

In less poetic language, this is what I have sometimes called practicing the discipline ofplace. To practice this discipline is to believe that to suffer one’s place and one’s peoplein the particularity of its and their needs is the primary basis for finding love, friendship,and an authentic, meaningful life. This is nothing less, I would argue, than the key to thepursuit of Christian holiness, which is the whole of the Christian adventure: to live inlove with the frailty and limits of one’s existence, suffering the places, customs, rites,joys, and sorrows of the people who are in close relation to you by family, friendship, andcommunity—all in service of the truth, goodness, and beauty that is best experienced directly.

Now, what am I saying? Does this mean that I think you should always stay in one place,that you cannot be called elsewhere, or that you ought to forever limit your own horizons.No. I am neither foolish nor naïve enough to think that this is either possible or even agood thing. What it does mean is that the human heart, your heart, will never flourishand blossom if it is forever pining after the next thing, or captured by the false promise ofsomething better just out of grasp, always seeking satisfaction somewhere other thanwhere it is. Rather, it is that marriage between the endless internal horizon of your heartand the limited, restrained, concrete life of geography and community that has borne themost delightful and satisfying fruits of human history.

So cast down your bucket where you are.

This is at once the most radical and the most conservative thing you can do with your life.Yet you are heading out into a very conventional, middling, controlled world. Oh, theywill tell you that their marches for progress and rights are daring, that they are radical.Or they will tell you that their religious revivals are conservative, that they are the moralcenter. You will hear it all, but the truth is that for the most part, people are in the gripsof a boring, lifeless ideology of personal fulfillment, choice, and upward mobility. Welive in a society of tourists—and if tourists have one thing in common it is this—that theyare not at home.

Many if not all of you are off to college somewhere to further your education. This is nota bad thing, and may become a very good thing for you, but I am here tonight with awarning. The world of higher education is a strip mining operation, plain and simple, andyou will become the raw resource being mined. This is the result of a system designed todiscover and refine the most meritorious among you and ship you off to whatever spot inthe world you will be most “productive.”

You will hear over and over and over again, in many different forms, that nothing mustget in the way of making the most of your social and economic opportunities. No ancientbonds of tradition must hold you back (look to the Future, they will say); no loyalties toyour home, to the place of your memory and your belonging must interfere (you can be aJayhawk anywhere, they will say); no sentimental attachment to those who havebefriended and loved you can count (think of all the diverse experiences you will miss,they will say).

I say, resist! Resist the spirit of the age. It does not have your welfare in mind.

Castdown your bucket.

If you do, they will say you are crazy, or foolish, or worse. You will be a heretic in thechurch of convenience and exploitation and false freedom which feeds at a trough ofwaste and ruin.

See also what Sharon Astyk would say to our graduates: As You Go Out Into the World…

Caleb Stegall, Political Friendship in a Facebook World

In a society that has rejected the historical function of meaningful grouping, people begin to confuse the possession of discreet, material objects or opinions (a “book,” a “diploma,” “faith,” or a “political ideology”) with the accomplishment, esteem, and belonging they really desire. As this breakdown occurs it is driven by a resentment that perceives “faith” or “authorship” or “politics” or even “family” as a kind of exclusive club which they either no longer know how to enter or do not have the chops to do so. And they certainly cannot accept that they might not be allowed in under any circumstances.

Trading on this confusion layered over with generalized idiocy and low self-esteem, the credentialing industry–including the massive political credentialing industry (this is what Limbaugh really is)–seeks to remedy existential unrest with a set of opinions or beliefs that require anything but hard work and wisdom. Worse yet, this is how many people view even formerly legitimate communities, faiths, diplomas, citizenships or other indices of human struggle to come to terms with existence. Legitimate and illegitimate accomplishments and identities collapse in on each other. Americans do not now know what the fixed standards are for quality, competency, membership, and real achievement in any area of life (certainly not in the area of faith or politics), except maybe facebook. If you tell them they will deride you as an elitist.

This is now endemic and in fact fundamental to the nation: our citizens habitually dislike and rail against established institutions that are necessarily particularist and exclusive. When these institutions are healthy they don’t care what outsiders think of them. They put big demands on those who want in and they remain unapologetically “elitist.” Well-founded traditional institutions including the Christian church, the family, and the major political parties float in this corrosive ooze which threatens and erodes those institutions bit by bit and has already destroyed many of them.