Part 1 ofAllan C. Carlson's"The Natural FamilyWhere It Belongs"(a book review)

Dateline: 13 February 2014

I have received my hot-off-the-press copy of Allan C. Carlson’s The Natural Family Where It Belongs: New Agrarian Essays. This is the much-anticipated book that I blogged about (Here) a few weeks ago. It was hard to not immediately drop everything I was doing and just start reading the book. But I held off until the evening. Thus far, I have only read the Foreword and an introductory chapter titled, “The Natural Family at Home.” 

If the introductory chapter, “The Natural Family at Home,” were a sermon (and it could easily be adapted into a sermon) I would have been saying “Amen!” repeatedly, and I would have walked out of church thanking God for such a powerful exposition of fundamental truth. 

I can imagine, though, that “The Natural Family at Home” has been presented to a class as a lecture at Hillsdale college where Allan Carlson is a visiting professor. If it isn’t taught there, it should be. Better yet, this beginning chapter in the book could be adapted into a wonderful homeschool lesson. 

“The Natural Family at Home” presents the necessary elements for a strong, healthy, resilient social structure. First comes the “most crucial social bond” of marriage. Carlson explains that marriage, as a covenant between one man and one woman, for life, is the “foundation on which humans build other social bonds.” Carlson writes...

“Humans instinctively understand that the strength of their community is dependent, in the end, on the strength of their marriages. If the marital institution weakens—or worse, if it is politicized and subordinated to ideology—then the social pathologies of suicide, crime, abuse, poor health, and crippling dependency surely follow. If continued over several generations, these pathologies, born from the decay of wedlock will consume the community itself.”

Carlson states that marriage creates a household, and collected households make up the second tier of “natural social life.” Regarding these households he writes (read this carefully)...

“Successful households are the natural reservoir of liberty. They aim at autonomy or independence, enabling their members to resist oppression, survive economic, social, and political turbulence, and renew the world after troubles have passed. Complete households must have the power to shelter, feed, and clothe their members in the absence of both state and corporate largesse. Such independence from outside agency is the true mark of liberty, making possible in turn the self-government of communities. Households functionally dependent on wages, benefits, and services provided by an outside agency or the state have surrendered a significant portion of their natural liberty, and have accepted a kind of dependency indistinguishable, at its roots, from servanthood. Independence requires that responsible adults in a household be able to forego these forms of support, if necessary, and still be able to ensure the survival of themselves and other household members.

The basic human need for functional independence in food, clothing, and shelter dictates the eternal importance both of a household’s bond to property in land and of husbandry skills. Full autonomy requires the capacity to produce a regular supply of food, and the ability to preserve a substantial share of this bounty for consumption during the adverse seasons. The keeping of grazing and meat-producing animals, supplemented by hunting and fishing, adds further to the independence of households and their ability to survive wars, famines, stock market crashes, depression, inflation, and bad government. In arable climates, intensive cultivation of even a few acres of land can provide the necessary bounty that delivers such autonomy; ten to a hundred acres of soil and timber offer an independence more sure and complete.”

I would love to continue quoting from this introduction but I don’t want to overstep my bounds. If this book were an old and long-out-of print volume, like Liberty Hyde Bailey’s, The Harvest (from which I have recently excerpted long passages at this blog), I would post the whole chapter. It’s that good.

Suffice it to say that Allan Carlson goes on to explain the importance of “functional households” being a place where “responsible patriarchy” operates. 

Responsible patriarchy? Why, it was just a few days ago that I was quoting Liberty Hyde Bailey’s use (in his 1927 book) of the term, “independent patriarchal units” in a discussion about families on the land being a bulwark of freedom.

Allan Carlson has, undoubtedly, read Bailey. But Allen Carlson is a social and cultural historian. He has read far more than L.H. Bailey, and studied the historical evidence to support the validity of what he writes. I find it fascinating.

The third layer of a healthy social order, after the family and household, is the village, town, or neighborhood. Within this layer we find the natural bonds of things like shared religious faith, an extended network of kin, shared ethnicity and common history. 

Carlson also writes of the importance of attachment to the physical and biological environment of a place at this third level. I can’t resist giving another quote at this point...

“This grounding in a small niche of the natural world is vital to the full development of the human personality, and necessary to the attachments which define and hold households and communities together. Deep affection for a place is normally the product of growing up there, whether it be the lake country of Michigan or the soaring mountains of Switzerland. Persons without this sense of native place are left incomplete. They often become perpetual nomads, given to grand visions and ideological constructs designed to fill the emptiness of their hearts.”

That is profoundly insightful and it's a paragraph that I hope to further discuss in a future blog post.

The fourth tier of society is the state, then comes what Carlson calls the “wild card in human social relations,” which is the corporation. Of the corporation he writes...

“The common characteristic of the corporation is the manner in which it transcends the natural social constructs of family, community, state, and nation, by claiming the direct and primal loyalty of individuals. Persons joining the corporation weaken, or in some cases even abandon their bonds to the tiers of natural family order, accepting a new master.”

And there again we see shades of the agrarian writings of Liberty Hyde Bailey that I recently quoted here. Coincidence? I think not. Marriage and traditional family economies (working households), rooted on the land, are fundamental to the agrarian ideal, which is fundamental to freedom. 

To see these contra-industrial understandings clearly expressed in just the introductory chapter of Allan Carlson’s new book is a delight. 

These understandings are critically important to those of us who are looking to restore agrarian-based "islands of freedom" (a term I've borrowed from Kevin Swanson). These islands of freedom consist of families on the land, developing productive, autonomous family economies, to the best of their ability, within the industrial culture we live in.

These understandings, and these agrarian families, represent a way of life that is not only "natural" but biblical. As I've stated many times, I believe the agrarian context is the proper paradigm for Christian life.

Beyond that, these understandings will be especially important in the aftermath of the collapse of the industrialized economic and social structures of Western civilization. 

Thus far, I'm certainly enjoying Allan Carlson's new book, and I haven't even read Chapter 1 yet.

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Click Here to read Part 2 of this book review