Comments on: The lap of luxury

By: Joshu

Joshu — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 22:42:06 +0000

New to your site, while looking for information on raising ducks (great duck site, by the way!).

The person emailing you about luxuries was silly, and wasn’t understanding your perspective. It’s semantic, really. He should understand your definitions, first.

I may come visit your blog often. Thanks for the work!

By: Benjamin Backus

Benjamin Backus — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 08:14:54 +0000

I don’t mean to besmirch your wise detractor his right to hate, but what is the meaning of life? To till the soil? To live in discomfort? To deprive one’s self of all pleasure? This sounds like a psycological problem. If God has meant life to be hard and tastless, lacking in all pleasure and ease, he would have made this beautiful earth bland and ugly. No beautiful flowers, no salt, no laughter. What of human ingenuity - should we put aside our genius to create tools? Till the ground with bare hands? Cut wood with rocks perhaps? The reason someone commits to a lifestyle is a matter of consciounce, but in my modern Locke liberal beliefs, it is bold to force conviction on others. My Grandfather owned a farm, had electricity, and tractors. By definition, he was agrarian, but he was not subsisting. I like the “New Agrarian” approach in that, it is practical for everyone to enjoy the fruits of hard work and to understand their connection to the earth and each other. To better steward their lives and resources.

By: Eric

Eric — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 16:50:50 +0000

If we’re asking what’s agrarianism, I think asking “how much is too much” is the wrong question. We’re not un-agrarian because we indulge in luxuries; what would make us un-agrarian would be industrial luxuries. If we’re agrarian, we will likely indulge in lots of things that are luxuries from an industrial-conventional persective (things like labor-intensive, organic food; hand-knitted socks; split cedar shingles; etc.) We might also indulge in some things that are luxuries even from an agrarian perspective (prime cuts of meat; a not-so-serious fishing boat; pets; etc.), but so long as those agrarian luxuries can be agrarian-ly financed (i.e. so long as they don’t come at the expense of employing ourselves further and more deeply in the “global economy”), such luxury doesn’t make us un-agrarian either. But to meaningfully call ourselves agrarian, as I see it, I think we have to want to live as much outside the industrial economy as possible. We have to want to contribute to the production of as few things as possible that come at who-knows-what expense to unknown people, communities, and ecosystems. We have to want to take real community ownership of as much of our lives as we can. Such a goal would imply a lifelong mission of reform, of learning to live without the products of the industrial economy and of building an “adversary economy” (to steal a phrase from Wendell Berry.) To define agrarianism as a compromise between merely “living without” and all-out consumerism is to miss the point; agrarianism is a shift from one kind of living to another, not a measure of how much we consume.

By: BJ

BJ — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 12:41:14 +0000

Is he confusing agrarian for Amish

By: Wayne

Wayne — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 15:55:14 +0000

That the complaint came to you in an email, and was not delivered by a mule, bespeaks of luxery, one might say.