We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world…. We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. We must recover the sense of the majesty of the creation and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.

Wendell Berry

The future is agrarian.

Zach Galifianakis

I had a long piece written for this last installment of the “What kind of country?” series, but it kind of meandered around without capturing the essence if what I wanted to convey. So I’ll polish up that post and put it up later on.

But let’s try a different tack for this version. This could be just as meandering, so bear with me.

The United States, because of its youth, its patchwork ethnic character, and its lightning-quick expansion into an enormous continental area, has always struggled to create a unifying identity for itself. As Archibald MacLeish (or maybe Arthur Schlesinger) noted, to be American is to forever argue with other Americans about what America means.

This sounds profound at first, but it’s actually a tip-off to the vacuum that exists at America’s center. Sure, we all give lip service to freedom, equality, democracy, liberty, the American Dream, bootstrap gumption, and other junior high textbook notions, but the reality is that the United States has always been mostly about the mechanisms of power, which have no purpose or telos in and of themselves, aside from expanding that power itself.

After all, what fills up our highest ideals, those textbook values? Freedom to do what? Equality where, and for whom exactly? Liberty from what, and again, to do what? “America is a place where people can come to make a life for themselves!” OK, but what kind of life, and can’t lives be made anywhere?

When a national identity is mostly about power mechanics, the actual purpose for human life gets filled in by anything and everything else, usually parochial: simple geographic identity (which still drives our toxic culture wars), sectarian religious creeds, ethnic heritages, and straight-up individual desires. This might sound like a wonderful basis for national character, an indication of what kind of country we want to be. But it just doesn’t work in the long run. Why? Because the mechanics of power are still dominant, largely invisible, but no less ubiquitous. The smaller purposes that people and communities create for themselves are allowed to exist only insofar as they don’t threaten those power dynamics.

A society based on the contours of power is not necessarily bad, if that power is shared across wide segments of the population. In settings like this, say, Scandinavia or wider Europe in general, power is constrained by robust cultural, philosophical, and political values, largely drawn from centuries of shared history and struggle. But in the US, power itself has been the core of our country from the beginning, with virtually no interruption in the last two and half centuries: power to take land from natives, power to aggressively proselytize at musket-point, power to enslave other humans, power to enclose land, power to restrict political participation, power to define who is considered a person, etc. A quick glance at our current regime is evidence enough that power is still a central animating force, even if dressed up as “strength” or “resolve” or whatever.

The trajectory of modern power mechanics is towards plutocracy, rule by the wealthy. Even those equitable societies of Europe are experiencing the unequal drift of global industrial capitalism, despite their best effort to fight it. And this is not the result of any moral, spiritual, or ethical failure. Rather, it’s just the emergent nature of the blind, relentless algorithms of technology and economics, and the adjoined sociocultural change that comes with those material drivers.

The United States faces a stark choice. Can we overcome the centrality of power to embrace a substantive identity for our nation, something that goes beyond the negatively-formulated civics words and the fantastical delusions of our political parties?

At first glance, the options for our future are myriad and dizzying: a perpetually manly Trump-world, where the laws of ecology are suspended, allowing us to drill and drive as much as we want; an American Theocracy, with (white) babies flowing like the currents of the River Jordan, and all non-Christian heathens expelled, executed, or reeducated; a lily-white nation, with all darker-hued people (paint swatches should work well to determine levels of whiteness) deported or reduced to invisible subservience; an AI-driven utopia, with robots and chatbots delivering endless bounty, again with the suspension of all ecological constraints; a shimmering Green New Deal, with a full-scale transition to the wonderful “jobs of the future,” supporting a virtuous infrastructure of wind turbines and solar skins; a crypto-renaissance, where the taxing tyranny of states is overthrown, allowing all of us to maximize our talents, tax-free. And others, I’m sure.

So many choices, and yet somehow… they all suck. And worse, they’re all pipe-dreams, completely divorced from messy reality. One would figure that imagined futures so untethered from the real world would be more compelling, or even interesting. But alas, maybe because the US has no actual core values of substance (and no, “Western Civilization,” despite the assertions of completely normal guys like VP Mascara Vance and Lord Baldemort Stephen Miller, is not actually a real thing for a population that can’t find Greece on a map or manage to read more than one book a year), we just don’t know how to fill in the blanks on a robust, substantive, positive identity for our future.

If you have a million different ideas, you’ve really got none. America is floundering, searching everywhere for something that will “stick,” as the macro-identities of nation and religion falter in the face of raw plutocracy, and the micro-identities of the individual and the family are battered by that same plutocratic dominance, which has no sentimental cherishing of the lives and destinies of mere mortals. What we desperately need is something in between these failing identities, a new version of the intermediate associations that so impressed Tocqueville a couple centuries ago.

To fill the vacuum of American identity, we must get dirty, literally. The only way to escape the pincer movement of grand delusional ideologies on the one side, and the increasingly impotent condition of our micro-households on the other, is to recreate, concretely, the vital tribal format, that crucial intermediate institution that is mandatory for true human thriving.

A tribal transformation would largely be an urban-to-rural shift in population, with the larger household forms (BHBs) used as vehicles for reinhabiting abandoned rural spaces, enacting a horticultural, self-reliant, ecological rehabilitation mission. As we have discussed many times on this blog, most of our problems are generated by the micro-household format of living. So changing that into a much larger unit would allow us to tackle virtually all of our challenges at the same time, through our daily lifestyle itself, instead of through endless social movements or top-down state fixes.

Can the United States become heavily rural again? If it was a matter of reviving single-family farms, producing agricultural commodities for national and global markets, I would say, “Hell no!” That plow has sailed.

But a neo-rural renaissance, where people live in Bigger Home Bases, pursuing self-reliant horticulture and permaculture, buttressed by Universal Basic Income, with a commitment by those communities to a new national mission to reduce ecological impact and to repair the damage we’ve already done? Hell yes, I think that is doable.

Deep down, I don’t think that most Americans like authoritarianism, fascism, white supremacy, and theocratic control over people’s bodies and minds. I also don’t think that Americans are too enthused about crypto, data centers, AI, or a future where we’re endlessly chasing the “jobs of the future,” which always seem to stay in that future.

To be frank, I think that Americans are the first people to be completely exhausted by, and done with, the whole modern consumer-industrial system (Japan might be close, except that the Japanese have a much longer cultural continuity to make things tolerable and meaningful). Because the core of our nation is power dynamics, and those dynamics have been allowed to run amok, we may be the first people to see the devastating effects of our own power.

So we’re ready for something different, radically different. The rise of Trumpism alone is an indication of just how done Americans are with the current system.

So against all odds, I think we’re ready to be rural again — agrarian, horticultural, permacultural, but not agricultural. That is the country we should, and could, be.