Dreams Without Fields
About 3 years ago, I read Victor Davis Hanson’s Fields Without Dreams. It is a melancholy book– a requiem for the death of the American family farm, and a dire warning of what this means for our Democracy. The small farm, Hanson argues, functions as a critical component in society, anchoring it and foisting upon it a kind of pragmatic realism that can only spring from experience working the land, toiling in desperate obscurity, and wrestling with the capricious whim of nature. As goes agrarianism, Hanson argues, so goes Democracy.
It might seem that this is a strange message to hear from Hanson, who is otherwise known for his critiques of modern liberalism. These days, he writes for Pajamas Media, doling out harsh words for our current Democratic regime, defending the resurgent Republican party, and supporting free market economics. He is in many ways the poster child for modern neoconservatism, a firebrand who isn’t afraid to attack the slow advance of socialism through our society or to oppose the softening of our foreign policy.
It is perhaps ironic, then, that this article, written as a scathing attack on free-market meritocracy and discussing the decline of Middle America seems to resonate with Hanson’s writing in Fields, even as it directly contradicts his neoconservative views:
>It is no surprise, then, that what Lasch calls the “new aristocracy of brains,” more mobile than ever and indeed committed to a “migratory way of life” as “the price of getting ahead,” has little use for Middle America, which they imagine to be “technologically backward, politically reactionary, repressive in its sexual morality, middlebrow in its tastes, smug and complacent, dull and dowdy.” America’s meritocratic elites, Lasch claims, “are at home only in transit, en route to a high-level conference, to the grand opening of a new franchise, to an international film festival, or to an undiscovered resort. Theirs is essentially a tourist’s view of the world-not a perspective likely to encourage a passionate devotion to democracy”.
Witness Hanson’s similar disdain for our intellectual elite:
>A pampered lot they were, terrified of the ghetto across the freeway, struck dumb by a hammer and nails, left pale and stammering before the formidable blue-collar white repair man. They preached an awfully stern Darwinism. But even those tanned and fit on their Nautilises would be the first to go in any jungle their own models might create.
It is a fascinating study to compare Hanson’s book with Beer’s article, to witness and experience the vast and thundering cognitive dissonance of two pundits, who seem to fall on opposite ends of many spectrums, be they political, social, or otherwise, nevertheless coming to agreement on a central problem that has arisen in American society. Their solutions are different– Hanson argues for limited government protection and financial encouragement for small agrarian communities, whereas Beer seems to advocate equality of outcome through a scathing critique of meritocracy– they describe the problem using almost the same words.
Reading both Hanson’s book and Beer’s article, it is difficult to argue with their assertions about how our society’s increasingly rootless nature is fracturing the democracy upon which it is founded. At the same time, a solution appears impossible. We cannot destroy meritocracy, as Beer argues. Hanson’s notions about the protection of small farms likewise do not address the root problem. (After all, if there is no one who wants to participate in the agrarian sector of our society, government incentives, protections, and subsidies will do little to change that). This is as much a problem of perception as it is political policy.
Perhaps I am sympathetic to its effects because my expertise is, I feel, highly devalued by the free market system. I hold a degree in music theory and composition. I would like to believe that I am pretty good at using it to produce quality music. At the same time, I recognize that, given how little practical value such a skill inherently carries, finding employment in my field is difficult at best, and impossible at worst. (Which is why my current job has nothing to do with it). Right now, I have a degree in my hobby.
Just as it is interesting to see the anti-meritocracy arguments of Beer weirdly line up with the “conservative” arguments of Hanson, perhaps it is even stranger that my own feelings on the matter also align with theirs, if somewhat obliquely. As a musician, I would certainly fall within the ranks of those who Hanson and Beer continually scorn as “the elite”. I grew up in a materially wealthy environment, attended two expensive private schools, and now participate in the arts. I wouldn’t last an hour working in Hanson’s vineyard.
But my career choice is in many ways as doomed as Hanson’s farm. The world has decided that, with hundreds of years of Western music to play and enjoy, it has very little need for new music. My own scribblings and scratchings compete with masterworks of Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach, all of which I gladly admit carry far more merit than my own. Even I would rather listen to Beethoven’s 9th Symphony than California by Curtis Schweitzer.
Yet, once again, I’m faced with a dilemma, because I do believe that new music is important. And I can do little else. Aaron Copland writes in his book What to Listen for in Music that “to a composer, writing music is a natural as eating or sleeping”. He might have added, “is as essential” to a composer, because it is. I am deeply unhappy when I do not create music. But I also understand and believe in the free market, and I am fully aware of how little practical value the creation of music is.
Some people argue with me when I talk to them about this. “The music industry is enormous” they say. They point to my endless rants about the low quality of much of today’s music. “You say yours is better, so why is there a problem?” The problem is, although in a perfect world better=more economically valuable, in our current culture, that isn’t true. In fact, in many cases, the exact opposite is true.
I don’t mean to be a snob here either. I enjoy a lot of today’s “commercial” music. I’ll listen to a Coldplay song, and probably enjoy it. But I do recognize that the music of John Adams– say, “On the Transmigration of Souls”– is infinitely more valuable as a cultural artifact than “Baby got Back”. I don’t have to add it up to tell you whether Sir Mixalot or Adams made more money, even considering that Adams won a Pulitzer.
It might seem that I’m being a bit petulant here, but I genuinely don’t mean to. Quite some time ago, I was willing to accept the situation in which I find myself, and these days I don’t waste energy getting all that frustrated about it. I could have chosen to enter the academic elite that Hanson scorns. For awhile, I even went to grad school.
Perhaps my own scorn for the prison of humanities education stopped me, or perhaps it was the smell of cows in Greeley. I don’t really know. I do know how ironic it is that I was once too disgusted by the perpetuation of an unfair and undemocratic system of intellectual elites and by the unpleasant nature of rural life to continue. I am both unwilling to accept the romanticized agrarian existence that Hanson promotes and sympathetic to his melancholy laments for it. I despise the rootless and feudalistic nature of our ivory towers while at once unable to accept the hard facts of life outside of our comfortable modern society.
All of which is to say: I think there must be some kind of middle ground. Some societal and cultural structure that at once realizes, and therefore protects our, agrarian roots while at once preserving the real values of our meritocracy. Governmental solutions are kludgy at best, and tyrannical at worst, and so I don’t see those as an option.
Hanson and Beer lament our detachment from the past. Both, I think, don’t give enough credit to progress and innovation. Given that we are not in any danger of marveling too little at our own advancement, however, I think that such a mistake is understandable and certainly forgivable. We’ve tipped the balance so far in favor of the future that we don’t even remember how to protect the past. We have decided, together, democratically, that the roots of our democracy aren’t worth preserving.
Like Hanson and Beer, I am fearful of what that means.
