Rural morality and the left

Western Norway

Source: Wikimedia Commons (2016)

Internationalism, the idea that people and states should organize across borders, is a popular organizing principle on the political left. It takes two related forms. Liberal internationalism promotes democracy and free trade as a path to peace through multilateral governance. Socialist internationalism emphasizes solidarity among workers across nations, rather than competition between them. Both tend to replace an emphasis on local community with an abstract political identity that isn’t rooted anywhere in particular.

International governance creates a layer of authority that communities cannot meaningfully influence. The resulting cosmopolitan governing class (sometimes pejoratively referred to as “globalists”) are socially and geographically distant from communities affected by their policy. Meanwhile, international economic integration guts local economic prospects so that multinational firms can thrive.

This process spreads similar models of education and culture, eroding distinct regional identities and traditions. In the name of internationalism, many have advocated for cultivating cosmopolitan “citizens of the world.” Within this frame, local or regional culture is something to be overcome, not preserved. Is rural culture something that needs to be overcome in pursuit of a more equal society? 

French philosopher Jean-Claude Michèa offers a critique of liberalism that bears directly on this question. Until recently his work was unavailable in English. Michael Behrent, a History Professor at Appalachian State University, recently published a collection of his works titled Toward a Conservative Left. Don’t let the title put you off. What the title evokes is the way in which Michèa combines a critique of capitalism with a suspicion of progress. Michèa says little about American politics in his work, but his analysis maps uncomfortably well onto the contemporary Democratic Party, which has become a party of urban educated professionals. 

Michèa’s personal background is relevant too. He was born in 1950 in Paris, France, to parents who were members of the French communist Party, and grew up in public housing. The Party was central to his childhood. His parents were employed by the Party, with his dad working as sports reporter for the Party newspaper. It was a community of working-class people who looked out for one another. 

At the center of Michèa’s work is Orwell’s concept of “common decency,” developed in The Road to Wigan Pier.  For Orwell, common decency is the moral intuition observable in tight-knit communities built around face-to-face interaction. It is the instinct “that makes a jury award excessive damages when a rich man’s car runs over a poor man.” Michèa takes this concept further,  giving it anthropological character. Working people, because of their way of earning a living and social status, tend to exhibit a form of solidarity and spontaneous ethics. Working people rely on one another out of necessity. It is a set of habits that arise through family life, neighborhood association, and shared work. Common decency requires social relations through which people experience themselves as dependent on and responsible for one another. This social fabric, Michèa argues, is breaking down.

This maps directly with the concept of high density of acquaintanceship that is found in the rural American context. In a small agricultural community, a neighbor’s failed harvest is visible. Decency is not an abstract value, but a material reality that rural people navigate on a daily basis.  Michèa argues that modern society has removed people from the social relations that foster this common decency. 

Here is where Michèa’s argument becomes uncomfortable. He contends that economic liberalism, meaning the spreading of free markets, free trade, and global integration of markets, and cultural liberalism are not in tension at all. He believes these two liberalisms actually operate in concert. He writes, “a right-wing economy cannot function in a lasting way without a left-wing culture.” It is well documented that economic liberalism has devastated rural communities by financializing land, offshoring manufacturing, and consolidating agricultural markets. 

Cultural liberalism, for Michèa, works in parallel. It elevates individual autonomy and the right to choose one’s lifestyle over inherited social norms or traditions. Institutions that once anchored rural life: stable family, religious practice, the local community, have all been delegitimized over time in the name of individual emancipation. Rural communities are left with a social and moral vacuum at a time when economic liberalism has taken away their material foundations. For Michèa this is not a coincidence, capitalism prefers autonomous individuals without a sense of rootedness to a place and an inherited way of life. The tech worker who relocates for opportunity is a more compatible economic subject than the farmer who will not leave because his family has worked the same land for three generations. 

While Michèa’s argument is not without its blind spots, he invites the left to take working class culture seriously. To be clear, I don’t believe the left should abandon a commitment to individual freedom. However, a politics aimed toward a more just society cannot organize against rural morality. To me, this is what is intended by the provocative title. The social fabric that allows for the cultivation of common decency is worth conserving.