Country and City in a Democracy

Some traditionalist types have, over the decades, blamed democracy and the free market for alienating man by uprooting him from hearth and home. The best writers in that tradition are thoughtful enough to avoid the reactionary seduction and to help us remain grounded -- to avoid the intoxication of self-worship. All of them, however, must grapple with the simple fact of their existence in the world as it is. Critiquing it thoughtfully is a high art that requires intellectual honesty and an ironic touch.

Writing for the Independent, Adam Nicolson reviews Roger Scruton's latest book, News from Somewhere: On Settling. The book is a paen to the rural life that Scruton, an accomplished philosopher and cultural critic, has adopted. Nicolson appreciates Scruton's well crafted prose and genuine love of family and place, as should we all. The book's cover features Brueghel's famous painting of Icarus falling into the sea as a plowman goes about his work in the foreground, utterly unaware of the fatal plunge occurring in the distance. Scruton, who calls himself a "meta-farmer," wishes to be the plowman. Nicolson hits on the soft underbelly of much wistful, anti-modern literature when he discusses the necessary dissonance of Scruton's attempt to escape the world while yet encumbered by the urbane intellectual's baggage.

Scruton says that the rural folk in his area eat their lunches in total silence, only "grunting and nodding when the pudding appears." But that places him in an impossible quandary. As Nicolson writes:

"Whether or not that grunting and nodding is only a meta-farmer's signal for innocence, the overwhelming rural silence is a disaster for the man who wants to settle there. Scruton, whose entire mode of being is voluble, vocal and argumentative, cannot slump into the quiet. He has got to meta-farm for all he is worth, writing and lecturing on all his multifarious interests, not in wordless authenticity but in the endless, paying word- stream of which this book is a part. News from Somewhere is not even a dialogue between the settled and unsettled. It is a struggle between them and describes not a solution but a predicament: once you have left the silence of Eden, there is no going back."

"'You are reminded of the fundamental truth about travel,' he writes at one point, 'that it is a mistake. Don't leave but stay - and make where you stay a home.' But even to say that is a symptom of having left. Icarus envies the ploughman. The ploughman doesn't even know that Icarus exists."

More on this topic -- the problem of living as free men and women in a technologically driven society -- in the near future.