Essays From West of 98: The Hope of Localism
Contrasting hope and optimism in charting a course for rural prosperity
In case you missed last week’s announcement, I now have a West of 98 bookstore! I’m creating book lists for my essential reads and other recommendations and I’ll use it to link the books that I mention in my writings. The good folks at Bookshop.org will pay me a small commission on any books purchased through my links, but most importantly, the profit on each purchase at Bookshop will support independent bookstores. Check it out and let me know what book recommendations you’d like to see in my store!
📷: archives of the Museum of the West Texas Frontier
Last week, I kicked off a series on some ideas that I believe are vital to the future prosperity of rural America. If you have not read that essay (“Subsidiarity, Localism, and You”), I encourage you to read it as a prerequisite to this essay. We will revisit subsidiary in the weeks to come.
A few weeks ago, Adam Smith wrote an important piece at Front Porch Republic titled “Localism without Nostalgia.” Adam is a professor of political philosophy at the University of Dubuque in Iowa. He’s not the 18th century Scottish economist, but that Adam Smith will appear in this location in a few weeks.
“Localism without Nostalgia” sounds like something I would write. Alas, I can only wish I had written this one. Smith points out the perils of nostalgia, something that I have written about on many occasions. He writes that people of the past lived more locally and that we ought to think in detail about the extent to which “local lives” were “better lives.” In that, he quotes Wendell Berry’s insistence on a “full accounting” of history considering the costs as well as the benefits. It’s like I have said before, the “good old days” were not always good for everybody. Smith points out that nostalgia is an accounting trick of sorts: promoting the good things while obscuring the liabilities.
But then, Smith really rocked my world by distinguishing between “optimism” and “hope.” I have often called myself an optimist because I view myself as positive about the future’s possibilities. Smith quotes philosopher and moralist Christopher Lasch describing optimism as “a kind of cheerful fatalism, which assumes that we are carried along on an irresistible flood of innovation. It finds its clearest expression in those conventional images of the future disseminated by the advertising industry, in which everyone owns a private airplane and machines do all the work.”
Nothing describes our current moment’s obsession with “artificial intelligence” and such better than that. It reminds me of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” when he observes that time is neutral and nothing about the passage of time guarantees progress. Optimism is similar. Merely assuming good things will come from innovation is an exercise in folly and a good way to get sucked in to a machine-dependent dystopian world without personal agency or independence.
Smith thusly distinguishes optimism from “hope.” Hope, quoting Lasch, “implies a deep-seated trust in life that appears absurd to those who lack it…[hope] rests on confidence not so much in the future as in the past. It derives from early memories—no doubt distorted, overlaid with later memories, and thus not wholly reliable as a guide to any factual reconstruction of past events—in which the experience of order and contentment was so intense that subsequent disillusionment cannot dislodge it. Such experience leaves as its residue the unshakeable conviction, not that the past was better than the present, but that trust is never completely misplaced…”
That quote is a lot to process. I am still processing it myself. But without a doubt, I will gladly start calling myself a “hopeful” person about rural America, rather than an “optimist.” There is nothing about the passage of time or the flood of innovation that will push our way into a new era of rural prosperity. But hopefulness? A confidence in the good things of the past that we use to shape a better future? A memory of when people lived more locally-centered lives? A full accounting of the past but a realization that we can channel those positive aspects of local life without the accounting trick of nostalgia?
A belief that rural prosperity is possible in the 21st century sounds absurd, like so many other hopeful ideas, but it is only absurd to those who lack the hope and who lack the vision.
Hope in localism is the way. Be hopeful, friends.
James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and the Rural Church and State and West of 98 podcasts. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to him wherever podcasts are found.
Between you and Holden Turner over at Over the Fields, i am also hopeful towards localism. It really is the only way that, not only society but humanity will continue to thrive. I read Small is Beautiful many years ago as a high school student and that hope has grown with me and continues to thrive.