The Urban/Rural Divide

/rant on

Continuing from my review of Brian Miller’s Kayaking with Lambs, I want to comment on the town-and-country or urban/rural divide, which gets paid lots of lip service by writers, politicians, and commentators who give no suggestion of their ever having set foot on a small farm or family farm. Grade school visits don’t count. As a result, their complete lack of knowledge or insight informing their opinions rankles me. In contrast, a couple brief visits such as I’ve had only reinforces my awareness that I know so very little about what it takes to farm. (Industrialized Big Ag is an entirely different beast I won’t discuss.)

Aside: I don’t usually think, write, or speak in absolutes, which I regard as sloppy and lazy. However, once in a while, something offensively stupid shoves me in the red zone. In addition, I don’t believe that in writing this rant I’m rising to the defense of those living in rural locations, who can defend themselves. Rather, I want to add some context and color without the usual ameliorating discounts forced on writers by editors who fear offending readers. Offense is already given, so why hold back now?

Miller often cites Wendell Berry at his blog, the latter of whom wrote a recent letter to the editor at the NY Review of Books entitled “What Liberal Elites Don’t Know About Rural Americans Can Hurt Us.” Oddly, it was refused publication by the addressee but published instead by a website called Barn Raiser. Berry accuses liberal elites of rank cluelessness regarding what rural communities represent or need. Yet the patronizing tone of the chattering class, dismissing flyover states and presuming the political allegiances of their inhabitants (outside the cities, anyway), is a ubiquitous feature of those overconfident enough in their untutored opinions to essentially talk outta their asses, blithely offending anyone who might actually know better. Berry states the essential conflict here:

Because I have watched for half a century and more the decline of my own community and others like it everywhere in rural America, along with the increasing ecological and cultural damages of industrial agriculture, I have made a practice of reading newspaper and magazine articles by Democratic or leftward experts of politics and economics, hoping that I would see an acknowledgement, first of the economic importance of the natural world, and then of the importance of the land-use economies of agriculture, forestry, and mining, by which the goods of the natural world are made available for human use. I have not made a “survey,” but I have read enough to know that Alexander Burns’s article is conventional. Like his fellow experts, he appears to assume the inexhaustibility of the non-human world, and likewise the forever availability of the rural and working-class humans who do, well or poorly, the fundamental work of every economy. Like most of his fellow experts, he consents to and takes for granted the corporate destruction of the land and the human communities of rural America.

Like most urban Americans, I can’t opine knowledgeably because I’m just as fundamentally alienated from rural life and economies as the next (and thus, the source of my food, except that I don’t believe meat appears magically packaged under cellophane at the neighborhood grocery). Of course, food is only one commodity originating in the hinterlands, later harvested (also mined and extracted), processed, and transported to cities. Very few natural resources needed to sustain the industrial economy are urban. It’s not merely natural resources at issue, however. Cultures and lifeways situated in rural communities are being lost and eclipsed as cities expand ever further into neighboring agricultural land to accommodate growing population (soon to reverse into population collapse here as elsewhere). America’s economic and social history as primarily agricultural is not far in the past, and if one is paying attention, its present character as a hegemonic cultural, technological, and military force is unlikely to last much longer, at which point return to the land with agriculture as the central organizing feature will be impossible.

Berry and Miller both point repeatedly and effectively to the urban/rural disconnect, only rarely devolving into screed at the inanities of folks who might think better wading into unfamiliar territory with unearned authority. To orient the debate around racehorse politics, as though problems can be identified and solutions found in whomever Americans elect to high office, is just plain stupid. Loose talk and inane commentary in the comments section at Barn Raiser repeat the mistaken idea that voting solves anything. Perhaps I should focus instead on those commentators who signal support for Berry’s perspective, but the offensiveness of so many comments that miss the point, shift blame, and reveal their authors as the very same rubes they pretend not to look down upon just sticks in my craw. Caitlin Johnstone wrote quite recently that she is criticized for being, well, critical of dominant forms of social organization:

I write a lot more about the problems our society faces than I do about solutions. I do this because we are so far from being able to implement real solutions that most people don’t even really know the problems exist yet.

For her, it’s about consciousness raising, which from the perspective of this blog (having written quite a lot about consciousness) is a poor term I nonetheless use. My guess is that complainers complaining about other complainers not offering solutions (idiotic demand for the happy chapter) want to skip the really difficult work of developing circumspection, introspection, and basic humanity enabling identification of deeply embedded dynamics that produce the problems humanity as a whole faces and go straight to the part that allows business as usual with all the comforts and security to which American are temporarily conditioned. Berry’s letter to the editor points directly at one of those dynamics — the urban/rural divide — yet a good portion of the commentators are simply too stunted and/or self-involved to grok it.

/rant off