Dominion Family

Several months ago Rick Saenz ran series on agarianism. The very word sent cold shivers down my spine and some of you may remember that I tried to blog about my painful memories of our failed attempt at gentleman farming in NJ. In the meantime, I obtained a copy of I’ll Take My Stand and have now waded through the introduction and the first essay.

I will probably be posting on this subject frequently for a while since it stirs my heart and mind, but today I want to concentrate on the 2 emotions the essay evoked: pain and joy.

My first problem in reading the book is that it is painful. It is painful for me to acknowledge that here in the South we had something precious and for the most part it is lost. Both Tim and I grew up in the South. Tim is a true inbred Southerner and I am from Cincinnati but grew up in cracker country, Florida. That was before cracker was considered a racist word. But having lived in NJ for 13 years, I am well aware that there is still “something” left of the Southern culture that is unique though fading. Here in Limestone County it is amazingly intact but to drive 20 minutes towards Huntsville and Madison, it is a different story. Even in Huntsville there is that “something” that NJ doesn’t have. I would like to expand on this idea in the coming weeks as I continue reading the book but for now let me say, reading I’ll Take My Stand hurts.

As I finished the first essay and began thinking back over our attempts at agarianism in NJ, I suddenly felt joy. What we had attempted and failed in NJ, God had given us as a gift in Alabama. In NJ we bought an old farm. When I say old, I mean as old as possible in America. I mean Gladys Taber/Stillmeadow Farm, old. I mean, George Washington might have slept there when he was a baby, old. We had barns and an orchard and fields and chickens and a horse and cats and a huge garden. Instead of our life being enhanced by all those outward efforts we ended up spending 5 years finding out what we were not made of. Tim and I left the farm broken. We walked away and we didn’t look back. Thankfully, the farm did not break the children. They loved all the hard work and play areas. They loved waking up with snow on their blankets.

Excuse me…I would like to interupt myself:
Waking up with snow on their blankets reminds me that Gary Ezzo could only have a hearing in modern times with modern houses. Trust me when I say that in the olden days mamas kept their babies near and warm.

Now we are in Alabama living on 2 acres in the middle of a little town. Didn’t put a garden in this year, don’t have a chicken (yet), but we are living the ideals that the first essay talks about and we are seeing it lived out around us in our older neighbors. We wave and people wave back. We know the people who own the restaurant and stores in town. We know our policeman. We are only 90 minutes from (the national headquarters) Vanderbilt and the birthplace of Southern agrarianism. We have a porch swing and porch rockers and ferns. We eat BBQ and drink sweet tea. We read and think and talk about classical ideas, just like those 12 guys writing essays in I’ll Take My Stand. Our goals for our children are not carnal but spiritual. And we have hope.

Why? That is what I am asking myself and that is what I am hoping to learn from reading these 12 essays.

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The first essay of I’ll Take My Stand is by John Crowe Ransom and entitled, Reconstructed but Unregenerate

I have already mentioned my emotional state while reading the chapter but now I would like to zero in on one particular passage which I found compelling. It begins on page 9 in my copy and continues on to the top of page 11. Interestingly, it falls nicely into the Titus 2 role of this blog which kinda sounds lame considering the content of the quotes.

It begins with this statement:
Ambitious men are belligerent also in the way they look narrowly and enviously upon each other; and I do not refer to such obvious disasters as wars and the rumors of wars. Ambition of the first form was primary and masculine, but there is a secondary form which is typically feminine, though the distribution between the sexes may not be without the usual exceptions.

Delivering a knock-put punch with this sentence:
If it is Adam’s curse to will perpetually to work his mastery upon nature, it is Eve’s curse to prompt Adam every morning to keep up with the best people in the neighborhood in taking the measure of his success.

Perhaps you aren’t cheering your husband out the door demanding he make more money to keep up with the neighbors in the way described by Ransom. But there are other ways, as SAHMs, that we crack the whip upon our husbands’ backs. When we fail to have simple tastes and simple needs we are hurting our husbands. We may like to think that we are just following some speaker’s advice but in many cases it comes down to feminine ambition. We may kid ourselves into thinking we are enhancing our husbands’ trophy case but, forsooth, we are just making a nuisance of ourselves. Being gracious in the Southern sense does not always mean having the nicest clothes but it does mean carrying yourself with grace no matter what you are wearing, even if it is the same dress you wore the past 3 Sundays.

There are a million other ways that Christian women provoke their husbands to do better wrongly.

Then this paragraph really struck my heart :
“The feminine form is likewise hallowed among us, it seems, under the name of Service. The term has many meanings, but we come eventually to the one which is critical for the moderns: service means the function of Eve, it means the seducing of laggard men into fresh struggle with nature. It has special application to the apparently stagnant sections of mankind, it busies itself with the heathen Chinee, with the Roman Catholic Mexican, with the “lower” classes even of American society. Its motive is missionary, its watchwords are such as Protestantism, Individualism, Democracy, and the point of its appeal is a discontent, generally labelled “divine.”

Ladies, do you see what he is saying? Service can be another word for ambition. History tells us that many of the former feminist advances came on the heels of do-good women’s issues. Abolition was essentially a feminist movement allowing women to leave their own sphere of sovereignty to stick their noses in other peoples’ business. Prohibition comes to mind; Carrie Nation self-righteously destroying bars. When women leave their own dominion and self-righteously begin to serve outside their sphere, bad things happen in society. From current events Mary Landrieu comes to mind. It is just sickening to watch that woman.

And fictional literature has not failed to give us the do-good woman as a caricature of true womanhood. Charles Dickens, himself a reformer, has no end of “missionary” minded silly woman in his tales.

That is why, I think, the patriarchy movement has been so dead set against progams in churches. It isn’t just that our children are getting negatively socialized….because sometimes they are not. It is that so many church programs deteriorate into woman-run do-goodism. A woman should be busy at home not busy at church. This is not to say that works of service are not a part southern womanhood. They are just performed within the proper sphere.

Now a quick reminder that I am a global thinker. I am much better with big ideas than small details.

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The second essay is by Donald Davidson, entitled, A Mirror for Artist, I found several quotes from this piece convicting. He races out of the starting gate with a sadly confimed prediction
of the industrialization of the arts through an “United States Chamber of Art or a National Arts Council, with a distinguished board of directors…”
I had to read that paragraph several times to see if he was decrying the already established “council” or predicting its future birth. He was prophesying.

Mr Davidson then goes on to talk of the true idea of leisure as found among the southern ideal. Not a “muddle of activities,” but a leisure of mind that allows one to think and absorb. He talks about the industrial ideal that separates work and leisure, very much like Christians separate the sacred and secular.

Listen to this:

“The leisure thus offered is really no leisure at all; either it is pure sloth, under which the arts take on the character of mere entertainment, purchased in boredom and enjoyed in utter passivity…”

And to think my next post was to be on the movie Just Like Heaven and my current addiction to 24 (year 3).

Later in the chapter Davidson takes on the public library system. What could possibly be wrong with that institution? In one short paragraph Davidson convinced me.

“Likewise public libraries, which tend ever to become more immense and numerous, pervert public taste as much as they encourage it. For patrons are discourage from getting their own books and keeping them at home. Their notion is that the state …will take care of their taste for them.”

This final quote was the real kicker fo me. I am guilty as charged by Davidson:

“But the works of realists which ought-if science has merit in art- to disclose the beauty that is truth, more often reveal the truth that is ugliness or injured beauty. The realist turns out to be a historian rather than an artist, and, at that, a historian of calamities.”

I am just thinking out loud here, but as we see our nation deteriorate I wonder if the agrarian way would not be to constantly point to the calamities (the Bush administration, the war in Iraq, homosexuality in the church, feminism etc) but instead exalt the truly truthful and worthy ( a mother reading aloud to her children, fixing meals for her husband, creating a beautiful enviroment, graciously living). Right away several names come to mind of people who are/have succeeded with that sort of ideal: Edith Schaeffer, Rick Saenz’s blog, Miz Booshay.

It also comes to my mind that what took place in NOLA was a result of looking for human calamities instead of heroism.

Next essay: The Irrepressible Conflict by Frank Lawrence Owsley

Buy the book

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“But the works of realists which ought-if science has merit in art- to disclose the beauty that is truth, more often reveal the truth that is ugliness or injured beauty. The realist turns out to be a historian rather than an artist, and, at that, a historian of calamities.”

I wanted to amend my last post a bit, especially in regard to the above quote.
I mentioned in the comments that I fear my own reaction to calamities is rolling my eyes and cursing (not literally).
DHM brought up that it really isn’t biblical to only speak of good things and Carmon said her postmillenial views helped her look on the bright side while still reporting calamities.

I thought they both made good points. It made me think of 2 other things.

1. My children love fairytales. We read Andrew Lang’s “color” books frequently and the children read them on their own, even the teenagers. Andrew Lang’s fairytale are not watered down modern versions but direct retellings of the old legends. Sometimes they are quite scary and yet somehow fun. On the Ambleside list, about once a month, a young mother will write about how shocked she is that the advisory has picked these fairytale books. Of course, the books aren’t for everyone but imho fairytales are not only good for children but neccessary. In a way they mix truth and calamity with beauty so that a child can learn some hard lessons in a tender, even lovely, way.

2. Christian suffering is a calamity and yet it is truthful and beautiful and should never be swept under the carpet. We should be directly engaged in the suffering around us. We should not see the suffering Christian as some sort of failure but as someone Christ has set above us. There is a direct clash between materialism and suffering. Most of us want to avoid suffering so terribly we would rather blame someone who is suffering than believe we could suffer also. You will especially see this principle at work when a group begins to turn from orthodoxy to cult status. So if you are in a group that ostracizes calamities and the familes who face them you may want to ask yourself some hard questions about orthodoxy.

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Essay #3 The Irrepressible Conflict by Frank Lawrence Owsley.

Folks, I have been delaying writing this installment because frankly it takes us into deep waters. It has become almost impossible to speak about the Civil War in a non-political way without inflaming fires. I have no desire to stir the pot and I feel dismally inadequate to offer a southern apologetic. All I can do is speak to you from personal experience and hope you understand where I am coming from. I am not a racist or even a kinist, but from a very young age I began to sympathize with the southern view, in spite of the fact that my dear parents did not.

It wasn’t very long ago that people could discuss the Civil War and the southern position was widely understood. That is why for one hundred years the south was allowed her heroes and her flags. Now history is being rewritten and most people interpret the past by the present which is a surefire way to get it all wrong.

I began reading this chapter in the Nashville airport. As our plane took off I looked out over the beautiful, beautiful landscape of Tennessee. Truly God has blessed the South above all places. The landscape has drawn from men those who love hearth and home, who have simple values and desire simple lives. Yes, I am prejudiced, though it has nothing to do with race.

When I was a little girl we moved from Cincinnati to Volusia County, Fl, the heart of cracker country. Those were the days when the words cracker and redneck had nothing to do with racism. My first day of school I was asked a question by almost everyone, black and white. Was I a Yankee or a Rebel? Since I was only 6 years old I didn’t have a clue. I have blogged about this episode before but it has taken me almost my whole life to understand why those children were asking that question 100 + years after the conflict.

My answer: It has very little to do with the actual war. The southern gentlemen marched off to a gentleman’s war and if they lost they could still hold their heads high. But the southern people had nothing in their worldview to reconcile them to US Grant’s total war, Sherman’s march to the sea, burning and pillaging the south, or the terrible, terrible time called reconstruction.

Reconstruction changed the south in a way the war never would have. In Tennessee, the recontruction governor told blacks, scalawags and carpetbaggers that if they killed white southern planters they would be given their land. Things got so bad in Tennessee that the US government had to step in to control their own reconstruction mess. Would it offend you terribly, dear reader, if tomorrow I told the real story of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a man who even the North considered a hero until perhaps the last 10 years?

Mr Owsley does a very good job of explaining why State’s Rights was a legitimate southern issue and how the southern states really viewed slavery. If you would like to understand these things better may I suggest a few books in addition to I’ll Take My Stand?

The Real Lincoln by Thomas Dilorenzo
Cold Sassy Tree by Olive Ann Burns
Penhally by Caroline Gordon
Up From Slavery by Booker T Washington

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it :embarrassed_ee:

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Next we come to John Gould Fletcher’s chapter in I’ll Take My Stand entitled simply : Education, Past and Present.

He begins with a rather long quote by Confucius. I am not one to enjoy plundering Eastern religions but the quote had me squirming in my airplane seat, looking for someone to share it with….Tim was asleep.

That is why the superior man, he who follows the right path, keeps watch in his heart over the priniciples which are not perceived by the many, and he mediates carefully on that which is not openly proclaimed or recognized as doctrine….That is why the superior man pays attention to the secret inspirations of his conscience.

Reminds me of one of the prinicples of the the Principle Approach : “Conscience is the most sacred of all property.” (James Madison)

I also took it to be saying that: ideas have consequences. ( I can find that one under any rock)

As mothers who take responsibility for our children’s education we constantly find ourselves walking the tightrope between striving for righteous children and striving for intelligent, thinking children. If you are one to pooh-pooh this as an unnecessary dichotomy, then my guess is you haven’t met very many homeschooling moms. Yes, it is a false dichotomy but it is a very real part of our daily lives. We are constantly asking ourselves, “Am I doing too much, or is it, perhaps, too little?”

I will stop there for now. I haven’t even got to the actual chapter. I also want to explore a few biblical concepts that come to mind in all of this. This all takes us to the heart of : What is education? When we answer that question we will not have a dichotomy between wisdom, knowledge and understanding. Unfortunately, we have plenty of people trying to answer the question for us and leaving the homeschooling mom perpetually confused.

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I admit last year was not a good reading year although it had its moments. I have just this morning finished 2 more chapters in I’ll Take My Stand. Both chapters were a little over my head but they did get the philosophical wheels turning. The chapters were Lyle H Lanier’s A Critique of the Philosophy of Progress and Allen Tate’s Remarks on the Southern Religion.

One of the questions that arises is why defend the South as a separate entity at all. After all doesn’t the Bible say there is neither Jew nor Greek. Therefore I thought I would try to explain what it means to me to defend the South. Defending anything in these days is really just a blow against egalitarianism. Just try to defend any position at all and you will quickly see how uncomfortable people become. The South truly is one of the last places on earth where people will, rightly or wrongly, defend their opinions.

Even in the arena of sports, southerners will take their stand. When we lived in NJ you would never see anyone supporting a team in the workplace. Supporting your sports team publicly was almost as big a no-no as stating your religion. In Alabama and Texas you won’t find that at all. I mean, our bank decorates itself like the Crimson Tide come time for Alabama to play Auburn; no worry there about offending customers, the bank takes a stand.

I take my stand to defend the South. I am not at all offended that you might take your stand to defend Pennsylvania. I am far more offended when you think it doesn’t matter and why don’t we all just get along.

There is nothing racist about this. The number one thing I like about the South is that you can still have an opinion here. If I have an opinion and you have an opinion we are far healthier than if we both just pour our thinking into a big hole and stir. After all if we all have the same opinion there is nothing to defend when the enemy comes in aroarin’ like a flood, coveting the kingdom and hungering for blood. We can be sure he will know where he stands.

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Having finished The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, my only hope of finishing 2 books this first week of January is to finish I’ll Take My Stand. So last night I plowed through Herman Clarence Nixon’s chapter Whither Southern Economy? and found it to be much clearer than the previous two chapters.

Basically, I came away with the idea that the Civil War took away the best chance America had for building an agrarian society not based on industrialism. This agararian society would have had to come to terms with and abolish slavery. Sadly, in the place of agarianism we have a society based on industrialism which by its nature destroys the soul of the society.

I don’t want to get into deep waters here but I have always firmly believed that we will not be able to retake our culture. We will not return to a soul uplifting society until the decay we are living in takes its full course. Therefore, I also do not believe that sending our children to Harvard is relevant. It is terribly irrelevant.

Reclaiming a culture is sometimes temporarily achieved by a group. I believe in some ways the Reagan years helped delay our cultural slide. But with any honest look at the last 25 years, you have to admit, despite minor victories and massive campaigns, the culture has continued to crash and burn. Hey, I have marched in Washington more than once and even met Randall Terry.

Historically speaking, this crash and burn is the way that good survives and evil is restrained. When a culture crashes only the good and strong rise up out of the ashes. The new society is built upon the better elements of the old.

A couple of days ago someone sent a quote through the Classed group that said homeschooling is the monastery of modern times (perhaps it should be homeschools are the monasteries), or something like that. We are preserving all that is good and right until such a time when those things are needed again. We should not feel that we have failed when our children do not infilterate the society, the arts, or the government. We should patiently remain faithful, doing what God has called us to do, recognizing it is His plan at work not our own.

Psalm 37: 7-11

Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for him: fret not thyself because of him who prospereth in his way, because of the man who bringeth wicked devices to pass.

Cease from anger, and forsake wrath: fret not thyself in any wise to do evil.

For evildoers shall be cut off: but those that wait upon the Lord, they shall inherit the earth.

For yet a little while, and the wicked shall not be: yea, thou shalt diligently consider his place, and it shall not be.

But the meek shall inherit the earth ; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace

Go ahead and read the whole of Psalm 37 if you have time!

I hope you won’t read this as a bury your head in the sand post. It is really a post that says, “Hey, it looks like we are losing, but lift up your head and go forth in hope because we are really winning.”

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Take 2: I just lost my best post ever maybe
For those of you grasping for an understanding of agrarianism, read Andrew Nelson Lytle’s essay The Hind Tit. This essay, though long, paints a beautiful word picture that answers the question: Why agrarianism anyway? ( Try Googling it.)

Having lived in an 18th century (yes, I understand how to count centuries) farmhouse , I consider myself more of a failed agrarian. I have no intention of returning to heating the modern plumbing, chasing critters, cleaning chicken coops, having all the stresses of the modern world and the agrarian world. I am more like one of the people Francis Schaeffer decried, seeking personal peace and affluence. Oh, for a little affluence $

BUT

I do believe it is, oh, so, important to understand from whence we have fallen. And we have fallen. Even in the 25 short years that I have been married our culture has lost its ability to distinguish between needs and luxuries. You have to admit there is a huge gap between what your grandparents, parents, or even yourself as a child deemed neccessary to life and what our society now considers mundane.

I have personally made a salad that came completely from things I grew or found, including flowers. I love putting flowers in salad ! And yet tonight our salad came from a bag and I am happy it was just that easy.

Truthfully, clean sheets and shampoo are luxuries. Everyday more and more “things” move from the luxury column into the need column. You have to be counterculture these days to do the most ordinary things like read a book or say no to your child or get rid of the TV.

If I was one to implore you to exert yourself I would definitely say smash the TV. But I am struggling along just like you wondering, how we got here and where do we get off, and when does the next episode of 24 start.

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John Donald Wade’s The Life and Death of Cousin Lucius is another concrete story of the abstract principles discussed in I’ll Take My Stand. I had lots of random thoughts while reading, many of them not related at all to the aforementioned principles, but nevertheless, I thought I would just spit out a few bullets.

Cousin Lucius was born into a planter’s family right before the Civil War. His life took me back in my mind to other fictional books on the time period, namely Cold Sassy Tree and Penhally.
If you have a true interest in the South and agrarianism I highly recommend Penhally.

The chapter on Cousin Lucius reminded me of the perfect example of the agrarian attitude and vision: Almanzo Wilder, a New Yorker, no less. Almanzo lived an entirely agrarian life scaling things down until he was lord and master of a small holding in Missouri. (or was it Arkansas?)

This chapter reminded me that while our search for agrarianism is most likely a search for community, the agrarian aspect of that search must end in a free and independent community not a communistic-type community.

Unfortunately, almost every time someone sets up a Christian community it turns away from a group of free and independent believers joining for mutual benefit to a hierarchy of control.

25 years ago homeschooling was an agrarian movement; not because some homeschoolers had goats and baked bread but because most of the early homeschoolers had free and independent mindsets, something they have been criticized highly for.

Many of the newer homeschoolers are not of an agrarian mindset; not because they don’t grow their own vegetables and wear prairie skirts but because they are in a sense looking for a handout. They are public schooling at home. Just look at the rise of K-12 type government assisted homeschooling options for proof.

Free and independent thinking based on mutual respect for others is not a bad foundation for a church or a community.

I do not consider myself a prairie muffin, nor do I play one on the internet. For a few sad reasons I am not an agrarian nor a prairiemuffin but I do consider Carmon, the prairiemuffin manifester, to be a woman of wisdom and understanding.

I think I just made up a word, maybe I will grow up to be George Grant!

This is an incredibly overgeneralized post, which means I probably can’t defend myself at all in the comments, but I am sure I will make an utter fool of myself trying :rolleyes_ee:

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