Saturday, October 2, 2004
Loss of Soul. I wanted to expand still a little more on what I was saying earlier in the week about how Traditional America has died and how its corpse has been taken over by the demon spirit of consumer capitalism. The real heart of traditional America is Jeffersonian. It lies in an imagination of the American citizen as an independent, self-sufficient landowner who sustained himself on his farm. This imagination of the American ideal was carried forward by Andrew Jackson and later by the rural populists toward the end of the 19th Century. They always saw themselves as opposed to the Big Money interests of the Northeast and later the railroad magnates and other industrialists whose growth and influence were making it increasingly difficult for the these yeoman farmers to thrive, and in the end even to survive.
There have been some attempts to keep the Jeffersonian American ideal alive. In the 1920s the Fugitive Poets, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, and others, made a futile effort to defend the agrarian Jeffersonian ideal against the encroachments of industrialization, and the contemporary poet and essayist Wendell Berry is an eloquent heir to that legacy. But the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal was doomed to extinction in America, and if it lingers now in the American imagination, it is wraithlike and insubstantial. It might remain in some people's minds as memories do, but it does not live in concrete human institutions that transmit it as a living tradition. The gradual destruction of the family farm as a foundational American institution and its replacement by the new capital intensive agribusiness system killed whatever vitality this genuine American traditionalism once had.
This was the major conflict in American history until World War II. Whose side were you on--those who thought that America should be run according to the logic of capital--the Hamiltonian school? Or those who thought that America should be ruled by the logic of the land--the Jeffersonian school? The second lost, and with it came the loss of the traditional American soul because the traditional soul of a nation is nourished by its longstanding relationship to the land. The last vestiges of a living connection to the land linger in the environmental movement and in the longing many Americans still have to get out into the wilderness. But the spirit of capital is toxic to the soul of the land. There are pockets here and there where the authentic traditional American soul hasn't been completely extinguished, but it's just a matter of time before they, too, will disappear.
Did it have to happen this way? I don't know for sure. In France, for instance, they've made it a priority to support their rural culture and uncompetitive small-scale family farms with enormous subsidies. That kind of thing seems completely irrational to the American free-market mentality. But the French, at least, know what's at stake--their national soul. Nevertheless I doubt in the long run they will be able to hold onto it. The new global system is driven by the logic of capital, and sooner or later everyone succumbs--even the French.
So this is my point. The traditional American soul died and it was replaced by the spirit of capital. The victors, however, coopted much of the language of the vanquished. But it was false, and it developed a foul smell for anyone who has a nose for what's fresh and alive and what's rotten. Wal-Mart culture is prime example. It presents itself as this bastion of traditional American values, but it is driven relentlessly by the logic of capital. When push comes to shove capital cares not a whit about the tradition and has no need of it except for public relations purposes.
If you can't smell the stink that Wal-Mart exudes, and if you think that it's an example of American free enterprise at its best, there's probably nothing I can say to convince you otherwise. But if the thought of Wal-Mart makes your nose crinkle even a little, stay tuned. This warrants further discussion because I think it cuts to the heart of our present confusion about what are the real American values for our time.