User talk:WHEELER/Country vs City

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Forward: (This is in the preparation for the "pastoralism" section in the Philosophy of mixed government. This was written about 10 months ago for another project. I have not read The Founders and the Classics, Greece, Rome and the American Enlightenment by Carl J. Richard but plan to do so in the future. This book has a chapter called: Mixed Government and Classical Pastoralism". This article hopefully reproduces what is in that book or coorelates closely.)

Country vs City

Thomas Jefferson said, "The Yeomen of America are not the canaille of Paris." Notice the words: Yeomen vs Canaille and America vs Paris. What is he comparing and why?

The first definition of a Yeoman is of a servant or an attendant in a royal and noble house. In the British and American navies, it was a term of an inferior officer but the term Thomas Jefferson is using it as is "A man holding a small landed estate; a freeholder under the rank of a gentleman; hence a commoner or countryman of respectable standing, esp. one who cultivates his own land." ¹

Canaille on the other hand means "a pack of dogs". It is a contemptuous name for the rabble, the mob. Where is this rabble located in?

And in the place names, he is comparing a landmass to a city. This is an important distinction. What is Mr. Jefferson comparing? He is comparing the countryman of the outdoors with the rabble of the city. Is this important?

Thomas Jefferson was also responsible for the Louisiana Purchase. What was his reasoning behind this? Thomas Jefferson wanted every family to grow and live on a farm. Every man to have a mule and forty acres.

Why was this important? He saw a difference in character of people who were rural from those in the city. He himself along with many of his friends was a country people but for a time, he spent several years in France as the American ambassador. He experienced and observed a difference in character and mentality of city people and at that time he saw the unfolding of the French Revolution. There is a big difference between the American Revolution, which should really be called the War of Independence ² and the French Revolution. The French Revolution went about destroying all the cultural institutions of their society. It was about tearing down the old order and laws whereas the American Revolution was about equal representation in government. The French Revolution was a social, philosophical, political, religious and cultural rebellion. The American War of Independence was nothing like the upheavals in France.

What was the difference between America and Paris? What is the difference between a yeoman and the canaille? Is there a difference?

The country is from where? It always has been. It was what man was originally born into.

Where did the city come from? Well, man made the city.

The country, nature, is made by God. The city is made by man.

God created the nature. Man created the city. Because these two phenomena have two different originators, they have two different modalities, aspects, and characters. They are two totally diverse creatures. They are two totally distinct environments and they create two separate and contradicting modalities and paradigms. And they produce two different types of men.

The most basic and fundamental aspect of nature is her laws. Her laws are immutable. When one is cold, one is cold. When one is hot, one is hot. There is no changing the laws. One can not walk up to a tree and turn down the heat. One can not plant in the middle of winter. One can not do what he wants to do in nature. One has to follow HER LAWS and not your own. One has to conform oneself to nature.

On the other hand, the city basically has no laws and what laws there are, are made by men. What is the one fundamental aspect of a man’s law? It can change…and does: forward-backwards; up or down or back again or not. If one is cold, you can turn on the heat. If one is hot, one can turn on the air conditioner. One can change not only his environment but also his laws. If one doesn’t like it, one can change it. Furthermore, the city doesn’t have to obey any of nature’s laws. It is freedom from nature.

The country is a God-created reality whereas the city is a man-made reality.

The God-created reality has laws that are not only immutable but also built according to the highest and perfect knowledge of truth, beauty, and goodness.

The Man-made reality has laws that correspond to whatever his whims and opinions and pleasures are and/or based on an imperfect knowledge and/or wisdom. Man is not perfect and neither is the reality that is based on man. The city environment is a false reality, an impure reality.

This is the essence of the difference between country and city.

Environments teach because laws teach. Law is inherent in both systems. Laws mould human character. People fit the character of the law they grow up in. Culture imprints its character on people and their government.

People growing up in a rural environment learn the concept of “obedience”; they learn the concept of “obedience to laws”. They learn that there are laws and that one has to be obedient to them. This comes through the subconscious. They learn by habit to be careful. They learn by habit to be prudent. They learn by habit to be righteous (doing things right). They learn the hard way that reality is hard, cruel, and cold. Rural living breeds a sober and humble people.

Socrates discovered a very important principle of learning, (epistemology). He saw that one has to have a concept of a thing before one can learn about that thing. If one does not have a general idea, one cannot learn the particulars of it and therefore cannot really know a thing in and of itself. One cannot come to knowledge.

City people never learn the concepts and importance of obedience, laws, righteousness, prudence etc. They have no clue. They make reality conform to them. Reality is changeable, the laws are changeable and men are changeable. Cities breed a people that are proud, insolent, arrogant, cruel and weird. They learn, “Do what ever you like whenever you like withever you like”. The anarchist character of the city law breeds an anarchist character. Moreover, each generation that comes along, is further removed from the first reality and so it becomes spirally more degenerate and weird.

With Divine Revelation, we have knowledge, episteme, not doxa, opinion. With Divine Revelation, we have a certain and TRUE episteme that we could have never have been known. Without perfect knowledge starting at the very first premise, one can never truly come to other truths and/or learn truths.

What does Divine Revelation teach about the man and his environment?

In Genesis, man was created and put into a what? …a city? No! Man was put into a Garden. Man was not made for a city. Man was made for a Garden. Not only this, but God created the whole universe and everything in it. God did not create cities—He created Nature.

God not only put man in a garden but he also gave them two commands: to cultivate and to keep. In his totality, Man was made to be in agriculture.

But something happened in the original garden. Breaking the commandment to not eat of a certain Tree, Man disobeyed God and for this he was punished.

What did God punish him with? God cursed the ground. He made it hard for man. Now in Nature, man HAS to bend everything under him to his will while being obedient to the laws of Nature above him. He has to bend the horse to his will; he has to bend the cow to his will; he has to tear and mangle the earth to get anything out of it. He learns to be hard because his circumstances are hard.

There is a German peasant saying that sums up the essence of the truth, good, and beauty of the agricultural life. It is “Arbeit macht frei”. Work makes Free. It surely does. Agricultural work works the whole human being. Farm work strengthens the physical body. On the psychological side, it diminishes stress and tears down built up anxiety and on the spiritual side, it teaches virtue: humility, patience, prudence and common sense.

There is another factor also in the rural farm life: it separates people from one another. It puts space in between people that reduces faction, stress, temptation and evil.

Nature is not evil. It has no sin. It is damaged by man’s sin yet it is not sin. Nature is quite purifying because it is directly from God.

Evil on the other hand is based in people. In cities this gets concentrated whereas in the rural milieu it is diluted. Evil has a certain vibration and when this effect gets concentrated, its effects are magnified. Evil feeds on itself. Men grow insolent, arrogant, selfish, lust-driven and covetous.

Horace the Latin Poet extolled the virtues of the country life. He tried his best to stay out of Rome as much as possible.

God ordained the agricultural life: “Hate not laborious work, neither Husbandry, which the Most High hath ordained.” Men were made for Nature and Nature for man. What were the two commands God gave to man? …To cultivate and to Keep. “Keep” is the duty of a soldier. In the Greek of the Septuagint it means to guard. Man was made to be a farmer and a soldier.

Moreover, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle disdained the city life as a purity as well. Aristotle remarks, “When therefore the farmer class and the class possessed of moderate property is sovereign over the government, they govern according to laws; …and hold the minimum of assemblies.” ³

He says again, “The best common people are the agricultural population, to that it is possible to introduce democracry as well as other forms of constitution where the multitude lives by agriculture or by pasturing cattle.” ⁴

As can be seen in history, the greatness of the early Athenian democracy, the Lacedaemonian Commonwealth, the Roman Republic, the Swiss Republic and the American Republic are all due to the Citizen, Soldier, Farmer class.

In the Republic and the Laws, Socrates and Plato legislate that the voting class is attached to agriculture. They have a house in the country and the city. They also make sure that the city is small enough that it will ensure a continuing agricultural basis. Plato and Socrates put restrictions on the tradesmen and retailers of their city. They have no political rights.

Aristotle says, “…the citizens must not live a mechanic or a mercantile life (for such life is ignoble and inimical to virtue)”.⁵

Socrates and Plato’s writings are in reaction to the urban society of Athens. What has happened is that there is no more a respect for law, because the people themselves lack virtue. Plato writes:

"It is agreeable enough to have the sea at one's door in daily life, but, for all that, it is, in very truth, a briny and bitter neighbor. It fills a city with wholesale traffic and retail huckstering, breeds shifty and distructful habits of soul, and so makes a society distrustful and unfriendly within itself as well as toward mankind at large." ⁸

Plutarch on recording the "Sayings of the Spartans" records what Athens was like:

"Another (a Spartan), on going to Athens, saw that the Athenians were hawking salt fish and dainties, collecting taxes, keeping public brothels, and following other unseemingly pursuits, and holding none of them to be shameful. When he returned to his own country, his fellow-citizens asked how things were in Athens, and he said, "Everything fair and lovely", speaking sarcastically and conveying the idea that among the Athenians everything is considered fair and lovely, and nothing shameful." ⁹

Athens was slipping in and out of Tyrannies. One of the major factors of this cause is that the citizens of Athens lost their connection to their farms. This period was at the end of the Peloponnesian War. In the second half of this war, the Spartans set up a fort in Attica where they burned and pillaged all the farms and made all the Athenians flee to the city where they lived for 30 years. The Spartans forced the Athenians to give up their farms. The Athenians became purely city-dwellers.

In the history of Rome, Jerusalem, and America, the shift from a Republic to a democracy is always accomplished when the rural class is outnumbered by the city dwellers. Country people have the concept of the rule of law necessary for the operation of a Constitutional Government, a rule of laws. Since they have no concept of the rule of law, city dwellers, as Aristotle and Socrates remarks, soon become sovereign over the laws. They become a law unto themselves. And from democracy does Tyranny arise.

Furthermore, the growth of weirdness becomes apparent. One can see this in the society of Late Republican and Imperial Rome. Even Josephus recounts in Jerusalem before its fall a scene where there was a faction who went around with painted lips and fingernails, women dresses with swords strapped to their sides killing anyone that looked at them funny. Commenting on the Essenes, he writes

"The first thing about these people is that they live in villages and avoid the cities because of the iniquities which have become inveterate among city dwellers, for they know that their company would have a deadly effect upon their souls, like a disease brought by a pestilential atmosphere".⁶

Weirdness and depravity marked the French Revolution in France where prostitutes danced on the altars of the churches and mass orgies were held.

Man separated from nature become canaille.

The backbone of the early Athenian democracy, the Spartan Commonwealth, the Roman Republic, the Swiss Republic and the American Republic has been when the agricultural class is dominant. But now in America, the growth of lawlessness and weirdness can be attributed to the demise of the rural class and country life. There has been a steady program of economics to force people off the farms. In 2003, a business snapshot reported that 328,000 farmers will leave their jobs. The powers that be cannot have people who have contact with nature, it goes against their political aspirations of power. This author figures that for the last 70 years the American government and banking concerns have been steadily trying to diminish the rural class in this country by calculated reason.

Man cannot live outside nature. He was made for nature and nature for him. There is a purpose why that is. In nature, man learns that laws, good laws, ¹¹ are immutable and must be obeyed under penalty of death. Words are immutable. He learns the concept of “The rule of Law”. Nature is beneficial to the whole human being: Arbeit mahct Frei.

Further, "One swallow does not a summer make." Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are concerned with virtue. Can boys be trained to virtue? What they said, for a society of Freemen, is that education must be geared toward the training of liberty and that requires virtue. Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem, sank into the abyss of democratic nihilism which ends up as Tyranny because of this loss of contact with true reality. That true reality is Nature. The city is a false reality and it breeds a false and childish man. Education must consist, if there is not possibility of rural life, of exposure at great lengths to Nature. Men have to got to have a relationship with Nature and learn her lessons. A Liberal education is not complete without this training. It is a major fallacy of modern American culture and educational philosophy that men are encouraged to go straight from high school into college. This breeds nothing but idiots with a degree. In the Republic, Socrates, in the training of the philosophers, requires a twenty year break between lower and higher education. Jacques Maritain in his Intro. to Philosophy writes on the importance and necessity of commonsense for philosophy. ¹⁰ J.S. Mills was well educated, well read in the Classics and fluent in Latin and Greek but sadly not in nature or commonsense.

God-created reality of Nature breeds a man for liberty by teaching him the rule of law and virtue. The man-made reality of the City breeds a man for slavery and puerility.

[edit] Miscellania

• "The soldier was the citizen, and most citizens were farmers". on the early polis of Greece. ⁷

• In the Septuagint, the word is "φυλασσειν" at Gen. 31.15. Socrates uses the same term for his guardian class ""φυλακη", in the ideal society of the Republic.

• In point Nine of the Communist Manifesto, Erik von Kuehnelt writes, "Point Nine has to be understood in the light of the Marxist notion of the "idiocy of rural life". The farmer was and remains the stumbling block to socialist experiments everywhere. Since he raises his own food and tends to live in his own house, he is less 'controllable' than, say, the urban dweller." (Leftism Revisited, pg 117.)

[edit] In Addendum

Another purpose of the Baden-Powell’s Boy Scout Program was to take the city boy out of the city and put him in Nature; have him learn the ways and laws of Nature. The Boy Scout program is the best modern system designed for this course of action. (Even though now, through liberal attacks and criticism, it has softened its core strategies and principles. It is also due to the lack of understanding in modern times; i.e. the loss of classical learning among its leaders. Furthermore, it is due to moles and sappers; people with contrary designs working to undermine and convert it to other uses.)

[edit] References

1. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Ed., Clarendon Press, Oxford, Vol XX.
2. Liberty or Equality, Kurt von Kuenhelt-Leddhin,
3. Politics, Aristotle, Loeb Classical Edition, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1990. IV. v. 3; 1292b 25f; pg 307.
4. Ibid, VI. ii. 1; 1818b 10; pg 497
5. Ibid, VII, viii, 2-3; 1328b 40-1329a 5; pg 575. He continues, “nor yet must those who are to be citizens in the best state tillers of the soil (for leisure is needed both for the development of virtue and for active participation in politics)”. The problem here is Too much work but not the benefits of living in nature.
6. Hellenistic Commentary to the New Testament, ed. by M Eugene Boring, Klaus Berger, Carsten Colpe, Abingdon Press, Nashville, 1995. see Gospel of Mathew #30, Mat 5-7; pg 30
7. The Greeks, Kitto, pg 162-163.
8. Collected Dialogues of Plato, Edith Hamilton, The Laws, §705a; pg 1297.
   1. "...with the tricks of town dwellers for overreaching and outdistancing one another and the rest of their devices for mutual infliction of mischief." The Laws, §677b; pg 1272
   2. "...and again within the city, under the names of litigation and party faction, with their manifold artful contrivances for the infliction of mutual injury and wrong by word and by deed; (the men before the Deluge) they were simpler and manlier, and by consequence more self-controlled and more righteous generally." The Laws, §679d-e; pg 1274.
9. Hellenistic Commentary to the New Testament, see The letters of Paul #644, I Cor 6.12; pg 403.
10. "Memory and experience and acuteness are each of them either a consequence or a concomitant of wisdom", On Virtue and Vice, attributed to Aristotle, Loeb Classical Library, pg 493.
11. In the Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by Edith Hamilton, the first dialogue is the The Apology, Socrates defense of himself. It asks, "What makes the young good"? The answer is "The laws". (24d; pg 10) The Dialogues end with The Laws.

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