Cultivating Culture
Cultivating Culture
There are many cultures to which we can look to find something approximating the ideal. Of course such a concept as the ideal culture is a no-no according to the anthropologists and the PC police, but I promised to be nice this issue. We may be tempted, due to our impoverished view of history, to look to the 1950's. Some that are wiser might look all the way back to the gentlemanly culture of the antebellum south. Some still might cast their lot with the Yankees, the Puritan variety circa 1650. Some of us who live on the extreme may want to go back to the light of the Dark Ages, a time of feudal clans. Some to my right would suggest that Old Testament Israel, at least during its better moments, represents the ideal. But I'll go one further. The ideal culture, with no qualifiers to account for sin, is the garden of Eden.
Three things stand out from this brief list. The first is that the first on the list, the culture of the 1950's, has n o business being there. This is the evangelical ideal. It is also the culture which brought you the moribund culture in which we now live. The second is that things seem to be getting progressively worse. That's a little embarrassing to a post-millennialist like me. We're supposed to see things getting better, not worse. But that's OK. I'm a patient, catastrophic post-millennialist, which means, in short, my conviction cannot be swayed by the mere reality of history.
The third key to this list is that all of these cultures (save the 1950's) were agrarian. They were cultures in which life centered around and was governed by the land. That, I believe, is the key. Andrew Lytle, in his essay The Hind Tit, which appears in the book of essays he edited, I'll Take My Stand, argues, "It is in fact impossible for any culture to be sound and healthy without a proper respect and proper regard for the soil, no matter how many urban dwellers think that their victuals come from groceries and delicatessens and their milk from tin cans."
What is it about the land that serves to idealize a culture? We have to go back to the garden to understand. First man was made for dominion. To be sure there is an element of dominion in working at the widget factory, or in writing and teaching, but there is too great a distance between one's labor and its fruit. There is a peace which comes from living more directly on the fruit of one's labor.
A part of that peace is the knowledge of one's dependence on God. In Genesis we move from God's garden to Cain's city, Enoch. One was a monument to God's beauty and grace, the other a monument to man. One cannot sweat and toil in one's fields and come away believing that the sweat is what makes e food grow. We plant, we weed. God sends the rain, and brings the harvest. The farmer stays close to God's gracious miracle of life.
But not all men are farmers in an agrarian culture. Just as Abel herded while Cain farmed the dirt, there is a division of labor. That division, however is not such that the community is fragmented. Gigantism is absent, meaning with one's neighbors. No matter how folksy and charming Dave of Wendy's fame may be, it isn't the same as knowing the person who makes my burger. What is lost in economies of scale is more than returned in personal relationships.
The agrarian culture is a free culture. True it won't produce oodles of doo-dads, bells and whistles. Neither will it create slaves of men. Men are not slaves to fashion, the bank, the state, or their bosses. Women are not sent out to work for others to raise the cash to pay the state to keep the machine running.
In an agrarian culture one cannot e-mail one's friends. All one can do is visit with them on the front porch, or enjoy some homemade ice cream together. I have much to learn from the land, much to learn about what makes the ideal culture. But I believe cultivating is the key.