Part of the continued introduction to Dorothy Day for supporting subscribers, on Day’s vision for the rural world. For the roots of this, please read this piece, which I wrote on this back in 2019.
The Problem With Agrarianism: People Kind of Like Cities
To begin, no one could mistake Day for being one who naturally fit in country life. She grew up in metropolitan areas: San Francisco, Chicago, New York. She ran with the bohemian crowds of the early 1920s; she lived nearly her entire life in the boroughs of New York, and despite retreats to the country, maintained a consistently urban existence.
Her co-founder of the Catholic Worker house, Peter Maurin, had other ideas.
It was Peter Maurin who tied together the soul-reforming work of the Catholic Worker houses to farming communities and to dwelling more closely to the land. In Maurin’s original vision for the Catholic Worker, there were three points which hung together: clarification of thought, houses of hospitality, and agriculture. John Paul II would much later tie together disparate moral issues like euthanasia, capital punishment, and abortion as a “seamless garment”, of disparate questions under one heading. But Maurin, I think, was on to a different kind of “seamless garment”, tying together cult (religion), culture (education), and cultivation (agriculture) as part of one project.
If a vision for Christian social renewal was what brought Day and Maurin together, it was not without its difficulties, the role of agriculture and the farm being one of those. In Day’s earliest description of their shared project, note that agrarianism takes a very subsidiary role:
“The next step in the program is houses of hospitality. In the Middle Ages it was an obligation of the bishops to provide houses of hospitality or hospices for the wayfarer. They are especially necessary now, and necessary to my program as half-way houses. I am hoping that some one will donate a house, rent free, for six months so that a start may be made. A priest will be at the head of it and men gathered through our round table discussions will be recruited to work in the houses cooperatively and eventually be sent out to farm colonies or agronomic universities. Which comes to the third step in my program. People will have to go back to the land. The machine has displaced labor, the cities are overcrowded. The land will have to take care of them.
It is here, I think, that Day’s Marxist roots begin to show, in that retains a kind of inevitability in this program: what Marx had in the form of the inevitable collapse of the capitalist system due to its internal contradictions, Day seems to adopt for her own thinking here. She envisions agrarian existence as what happens after the inevitable collapse of urban contradictions: once the poverty of urban life is exposed and people begin to be rehabilitated through the houses of hospitality, back to the land they go.
The difficulty that she began to realize, however, is that the cities have an immense capacity to absorb new occupants, and to do so in ways which are slightly less than terrible. As tenement reforms began to happen from the 1930s to the 1950s, movement to the land was slow, and frequently, not what people actually wanted, despite the difficulties and sickening conditions of urban life.
People’s ability to absorb hard things, particularly when dished out in incremental forms, is pretty vast, it seems, and making the leap from an urban situation to a rural one is more difficult than making urban life more amenable. As such, while she envisioned the movement to the land as being the necessary third plank of their work, the reality was far less straightforward.
In our own age, Wendell Berry has dominated the landscape of how to approach the problem of the city. And to be fair, the vision which Day and Maurin cast for the city—that it dehumanizes, that it becomes the place where we lose touch with creation—remains. But what appears, I think, is a workable alternative to the venerable Wendell Berry.
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