The Reclamation of Agency

I get to work with these fine folks! Lucky me. If you are reading Ben, Sam,Zary, Allison, LeAnne, Catherine or Jaecub, please know that your courage and kindness keep me afloat. May that our shared labors build a life raft for others.

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

Months ago, the freestanding front steps frost-heaved such that the porch door opened only with great effort. Big, warm, South Wind pours over the land this week, wicking winter cold from frozen ground. Suddenly the door swings freely on its hinges. The moment is metaphorically astute; the arrival of springtime invites rusty hinges into oiled motion. Habits of hunkering, hiding, and hibernating loosen their grasp on a fearful human mind.

Writing a book about neighboring has, ironically, meant that I spend considerably less time neighboring. For whatever intimacy these written stories achieve, this is not neighboring. We do not share breath across the digital abyss. I don’t see your patterns of coming and going when I bike by on my daily trips up and down the road. I won’t be knocking on your front door with a box of Farm beef (that’s on the spring list for the neighbors on the road) or an invitation to carpool to the Friday supper at the Church of the Nazarene. I won’t be asking you to mow the Farmhouse lawn this summer or join us for one of our Sunday work days called Farm Frolics. I won’t learn that your husband just lost his job or that your son’s at the hospital after a mental breakdown. I won’t be kept up at night wondering how I might make myself available to you in your moment of distress, or whether the dollars in my bank account might be of greater service in your hands right now. But I will continue to write stories that encourage you to pursue such emotional and material entanglements. And I will continue inviting you to contribute to my personal stipend request of $4K/year, which is currently more than covered. Those of you who said yes to this request: your kind affirmation travels with me every day. You encourage the work on the ground by helping remember that these ways of being are indeed possible. Thank you.

I’ve heard a lot of talk about the fallout from the freeze on federal funds, especially upon the most vulnerable among us. What strikes me most is the felt sense of powerlessness. In order to become citizens, we had to relinquish the basic human agency that comes with being a responsible, trustworthy neighbor. Whatever sense of allegiance we feel to the nation-state and industrial economy under whose rooves we have been sheltering, voting and consuming are not forms of neighboring.

In order to become citizen-consumers, we had to relinquish the basic human agency that comes from a cultivated capacity to sustain others through acts of voluntary restraint and service. We might call it neighborly direct action. We could decide to make it our national pastime. No executive order required.

Instability in the state-market-charity complex brings this loss of agency thundering into view. In a moment like this, we could allow ourselves to be seduced by grievance. It is so darn tempting to find someone to blame. Brene Brown calls this pattern “common enemy intimacy.” In a society desperately short on belonging, grievance makes an attractive, and addictive, quick fix.

Instead, we could turn toward one another and weep for these atrophied capacities of service and restraint, of neighborly care and concern. Grief begets a very different sort of action plan than grievance, one that builds bridges rather than burning them down.

But in order to grieve our lost agency we have to be able to imagine that the people we come from once maintained such capacities. I’ve been reading a fine book¹ filled with remarkable stories from the lost peasant villages of Europe. The fall of peasant culture to the marketplace and the nation-state might offer a sobering perspective on our current political moment and the work waiting for us to take up again.

In 1978, the village of Santa Maria del Monte in northwest Spain still had an active village council which ensured, among other things, attendance at funerals (grief seems to unite people) and the extension of hospitality to the wandering poor. When beggars walked into the village, they would ask in whose house the ‘stick of the poor’ currently resided, and then carry the stick to the next house, knocking on the door and requesting shelter. This way townspeople shared the responsibility for providing hospitality. Villagers in Santa Maria del Monte more than distrusted the transactional norms of the marketplace; a sense of shame was associated with the pursuit of profit and self-interest.

But the arrival of economic prosperity quickly eroded these old patterns of neighborly care and concern. When researcher Ruth Behar returned to the village just six years later, many of the old ways had already been lost to the inrushing consumer culture. The older generation grieved the changes they saw in the young, their lost capacity for neighborly restraint. “For people long accustomed to the moral economy of the village, with its customary forms of reciprocity, cooperation, and exchange, the materialism of their own offspring easily takes on the appearance of greed, ambition for its own sake, vice in short.” If this much cultural capacity can disappear in just six years, imagine the state of the moral economy a few generations later. Imagine the loss of agency and trust. Then look around with fresh eyes.

At the opening meeting of our modern village council we could begin with a grief ceremony, wherein we forgive ourselves and one another for these dark generations of culture loss. Would anyone be willing to carve a ‘stick of the poor’ and host the first wandering beggar? In the town where I live, this isn’t hypothetical. This is the sort of cultural renewal knocking at the door in the waning light of the story of modernity.

With love,

Adam

1. Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World, by Patrick Joyce.