So far in this series of posts this month, I've discussed 12 essays and opening manifesto of the 1930 book, I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. The book consisted of essays by 12 different Southern writers arguing in various ways for the virtues of Southern agricultural societies. The writers became known as the Southern Agrarians.
We can always wring the turnip for blood and find seemingly contradictory tendencies in pretty much any thinker's work. Theodore Adorno could find in some of Søren Kierkegaard's hyper-individualist theology some perceptive criticisms of the emerging mass society of the 19th century.
Such turnip-wringing can be done in a serious way or in a hack way. In Kierkegaard’s case, we’re dealing with a brilliant theologian who was wrestling seriously with Hegel and other cutting-edge thinkers of his time. And in his analysis of mass society he was actually making perceptive observations about real phenomena, however deficient his overall perspective may have been.
Looking for such useful pieces of analysis in the Southern Agrarians confronts us with a much less promising field of investigation. They are primarily significant for being highbrow representatives of a reactionary defense of the ugliest and most undemocratic aspects of the South in the middle years of the segregation system. There’s nothing especially creative about their diagnosis of social conditions in the South or in the US as a whole. Their agrarianism is little more than a pretty mask for a defense of white racism and the semi-authoritarian form of government in the segregated South of which the Jim Crow system was an integral part.
We could look at John Crowe Ransom’s praise for “so simple a thing as respect of the physical earth and its teeming life” out of which “comes a primary joy, which is an inexhaustible source of arts and religions and philosophies.” We could look at his praise of “graceful bounty of nature” and his criticism of the American economy as promoting “the strange idea that the human destiny is not to secure an honorable peace with nature, but to wage an unrelenting war on nature.” And we could then christen him as a prophet of the environmental movement.
But as we saw in the post on him in this series, Ransom’s praise for Nature had more to do with maintaining poor Southern whites in their poverty and African-Americans in a condition of racial segregation and poverty. Ransom’s supposed reverence for the sanctity of Nature has more to do with Social Darwinism, an agrarian-reactionary version of it, than with concern for environmental pollution.
We could take some isolated statements completely out of their context and make them sound more enlightened. In one of the paragraphs I quoted in my post on Donald Davidson, we could say that he argued that the artist should “do [his] best to flee the infection of our times” and thereby “to resist with every atom of his strength the false gospels of art as a luxury which can be sold in commercial quantities or which can be hallowed by segregation in discreet shrines.” We could say that here he was addressing a problem of the degradation of art by increasingly superficial commercialization.
We could quote the same paragraph in which Davidson warns that the artist “cannot wage this fight by remaining on his perch as artist. ... He must enter the common arena and become a citizen.” We could take this as an argument art must address the lives of ordinary people and that the artist much be passionately involved in the real issues affecting her or her community in order to properly formulate such artistic productions.
We could do that. But Davidson’s argument was a more specific plea, for Southern writers to ideologically defend the white racism and racial segregation of their section and support Southern whites who wanted to resist national efforts to have the US Constitution applied to the South in matters of rights for African-American men and women. Framing that in the way that I suggested in the previous two paragraphs would be little more than a scam. A scam either to paper over the ugly side of the actual Southern Agrarian argument or to deliberately twist their words into arguing something like the opposite of what they actually advocated. His concern in that essay was far more the Jim Crow system of segregation than the "segregation [of art] in discreet shrines"
This is a consideration that very much applies to neo-Confederate/Lost Cause nostalgia. The neo-Confederates claim, in their more clean-shaven mode, that they only wish to honor the abstract heritage of their Confederate forebears, who displayed Honor and Courage and Love of Home and Family and Jesus in their fight against the Union in the Civil War. But it's one thing to honor qualities so abstract that they can be found in some form or another all over the world in thousands of different historical situations. It's another to pretend to honor those qualities in the specific setting of the Confederate States of America and to evade or lie about the actual cause in whose service they exercised those abstract virtues. This is an essential element of the scam in which present-day ideological priorities dress themselves up as historical commemoration in the "Confederate Heritage" celebrations, observances and pseudoscholarship.
Tags: confederate heritage month 2011, slavery, southern agrarians, us south
No comments:
Post a Comment