Post by Mya on Feb 17, 2022 8:25:26 GMT
Rural gentrification Part I: Of localists and nationalists
I’ve long been meaning to write a post about rural gentrification and associated issues – localism, globalism, nationalism, migration and so forth. Some recent interactions online have prompted me to do it now. It’s a bit out of sequence in my present blog cycle concerning my book A Small Farm Future, since it’s closer to the material I discuss towards the end of the book in Part IV. But anyway…
The spur to writing this originated from two fascinating pieces by Neal Clark and Anarcho-Contrarian in the Doomer Optimism mini-manifesto series. I found much to agree with in them, but then in subsequent discussions on Twitter got to wrangling a little over the use of the term ‘nationalism’ (partly, it turns out, because I’m just not fluent in Twitter-ese).
I wrote a Twitter thread about it which, by my humble standards, went viral, prompting a mountain (or at least a large molehill) of comments, many of which were directly or implicitly critical of my general argument that nationalism is no friend of localism, whereas homesteading possibly is. I couldn’t keep up with the volume of comments, and in any case I don’t find Twitter great for these kinds of discussions. So I’m going to rake over the embers here instead.
Quite a number of the commenters operated with a stark duality – you’re either a globalist or you’re a localist. They peered warily at my localist claims, suspecting that beneath the homespun mask my true globalist colours would reveal themselves. Well maybe. But to me, as I’ll explain below, the globalist-localist duality doesn’t capture the underlying politics very well. Maybe the duality of Wall Street versus Main Street does a better job. Without a shadow of a doubt I’m against Wall Street and I prefer Main Street. But there are different kinds of Main Streets. Some I like better than others, and some of the people out on Main Street I find easier to get along with than others.
It’s the nature of smalltown life that you run into almost everyone who lives there in the end, and you have to find ways to make that work. So just to say that I honestly want to try and make my localism fit as best it can with other people’s localisms. I really don’t want to be arguing with anyone who’s genuinely for Main Street, and I’d far rather be uniting with them against Wall Street. But if there are things we disagree on it’s no use sweeping them under the carpet. Hence this attempt at clarification.
I begin in this post with some comments about nationalism, where the debate began, and then in the next post move onto a discussion of localism and rural gentrification. That’s followed by a post on migration, then I’m going to close this little blog cycle within a blog cycle with some thoughts on rural gentrification and the internship problem, before returning belatedly to my larger present theme by wrapping up the cycle on property.
I’m aiming to publish these posts in fairly quick succession, probably with a couple of days between each one. I’ll quote occasionally in them from specific comments in the Twitter thread, but I’m not going to name anyone from Twitter individually here, or debate with anyone on Twitter itself – I’m happy of course to debate further in the comments under the posts. I’m the last person to explain to anyone else how to navigate their way around Twitter, but if you have time on your hands, you can probably follow much of the discussion out from here.
So – one commenter wrote: “a nation is precisely that land within its borders AND the people who inhabit it AND their shared history together”. But this is to assume what’s in question – how did the borders get determined, why do the people within them feel a particular allegiance with each other, and how do they come to feel that their history is shared?
For sure, I share some political history with somebody living in, say, Kent, simply because we’re under the same government. But if a few medieval battles had turned out differently, I might be living in Angevinia and zipping across the Channel to visit my compatriots in the continental part of the country to the south, while needing to pack my passport when I head east to Kent. If people just accepted this historical randomness of the polities they live under with a shrug, then I don’t think nationalism would be a topic worthy of attention. But if that were the case, I wouldn’t be engaging with people on Twitter with taglines like “America – love it or leave it”.
www.resilience.org/stories/2022-02-16/rural-gentrification-part-i-of-localists-and-nationalists/
I’ve long been meaning to write a post about rural gentrification and associated issues – localism, globalism, nationalism, migration and so forth. Some recent interactions online have prompted me to do it now. It’s a bit out of sequence in my present blog cycle concerning my book A Small Farm Future, since it’s closer to the material I discuss towards the end of the book in Part IV. But anyway…
The spur to writing this originated from two fascinating pieces by Neal Clark and Anarcho-Contrarian in the Doomer Optimism mini-manifesto series. I found much to agree with in them, but then in subsequent discussions on Twitter got to wrangling a little over the use of the term ‘nationalism’ (partly, it turns out, because I’m just not fluent in Twitter-ese).
I wrote a Twitter thread about it which, by my humble standards, went viral, prompting a mountain (or at least a large molehill) of comments, many of which were directly or implicitly critical of my general argument that nationalism is no friend of localism, whereas homesteading possibly is. I couldn’t keep up with the volume of comments, and in any case I don’t find Twitter great for these kinds of discussions. So I’m going to rake over the embers here instead.
Quite a number of the commenters operated with a stark duality – you’re either a globalist or you’re a localist. They peered warily at my localist claims, suspecting that beneath the homespun mask my true globalist colours would reveal themselves. Well maybe. But to me, as I’ll explain below, the globalist-localist duality doesn’t capture the underlying politics very well. Maybe the duality of Wall Street versus Main Street does a better job. Without a shadow of a doubt I’m against Wall Street and I prefer Main Street. But there are different kinds of Main Streets. Some I like better than others, and some of the people out on Main Street I find easier to get along with than others.
It’s the nature of smalltown life that you run into almost everyone who lives there in the end, and you have to find ways to make that work. So just to say that I honestly want to try and make my localism fit as best it can with other people’s localisms. I really don’t want to be arguing with anyone who’s genuinely for Main Street, and I’d far rather be uniting with them against Wall Street. But if there are things we disagree on it’s no use sweeping them under the carpet. Hence this attempt at clarification.
I begin in this post with some comments about nationalism, where the debate began, and then in the next post move onto a discussion of localism and rural gentrification. That’s followed by a post on migration, then I’m going to close this little blog cycle within a blog cycle with some thoughts on rural gentrification and the internship problem, before returning belatedly to my larger present theme by wrapping up the cycle on property.
I’m aiming to publish these posts in fairly quick succession, probably with a couple of days between each one. I’ll quote occasionally in them from specific comments in the Twitter thread, but I’m not going to name anyone from Twitter individually here, or debate with anyone on Twitter itself – I’m happy of course to debate further in the comments under the posts. I’m the last person to explain to anyone else how to navigate their way around Twitter, but if you have time on your hands, you can probably follow much of the discussion out from here.
So – one commenter wrote: “a nation is precisely that land within its borders AND the people who inhabit it AND their shared history together”. But this is to assume what’s in question – how did the borders get determined, why do the people within them feel a particular allegiance with each other, and how do they come to feel that their history is shared?
For sure, I share some political history with somebody living in, say, Kent, simply because we’re under the same government. But if a few medieval battles had turned out differently, I might be living in Angevinia and zipping across the Channel to visit my compatriots in the continental part of the country to the south, while needing to pack my passport when I head east to Kent. If people just accepted this historical randomness of the polities they live under with a shrug, then I don’t think nationalism would be a topic worthy of attention. But if that were the case, I wouldn’t be engaging with people on Twitter with taglines like “America – love it or leave it”.
www.resilience.org/stories/2022-02-16/rural-gentrification-part-i-of-localists-and-nationalists/