Let me begin by discussing what "values" are. Values are the organizing qualities of our experience. They are the "whatever it is" that puts together our mental world in which we live. They have the following characteristics.
Values on display in Lewisburg, Greenbrier County, West Virginia
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One, values are prescriptive. Values can be stated in propositional injunctions, such as "farmers ought to own their land," "home and family should be the most important things in life," "do our duty to God, country, and family", and "we ought to preserve the beautiful landscape".
Two, they are universalistic in character. So we say, home and family should be most important for everyone, not just for persons who live in the countryside.
Three, values are objective. Everyone experiences their own values as a feature of the world, not as subjective, psychological phenomena. We experience our values as "out there in the world." Our values call to us. We say, "the world is beautiful", not "I am subjectively experiencing the world as beautiful and the beauty is all in my mind."
Four, values are emotional and motivational. We respond emotionally to the call of values to us. We are motivated to behave in certain ways, because of the values we see in the world.
Five, values organize our experiences for us. They provide guidance in sorting out what is important and unimportant in life. They rank our preferences. They assign different weights and importances to different experiences. They color our world, so to speak.
Six, values integrate the multi-colored experiences of life to create a coherent, unitary stream of experience that each of us individually recognizes as "myself".
Seven, values create meaningfulness. Everyone wants his or her life to "mean something". No one wants their life to be simply a random walk. Values are the agency, so to speak, that gives our lives meaning.
Eight, values are inevitable. We must have values. Our values are part and parcel of our humanity. Without our values, as without our ability to reason, we would be simple animals, reacting reflexively to stimulae in the world around us. Values make us human because they create "inside" us a world of meaningful experience.
I emphasize the importance and centrality of values, because they are nearly completely ignored in the dead and functional typologies of national agricultural policies and rural programs.
New London County, Connecticut, 1928. USDA Historical Photograph.
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Values make country living a complete, indivisible world of experience. People will rise early in the morning, work at hard labor all day in barn and field, and accommodate themselves to the perpetual insecurities of weather and markets, just to live in the country. They will put up with outdoor toilets, mud, and social isolation unimaginable to the city dweller. They will put up with the fools of the media who denigrate them and their way of life at every opportunity. They will endure low income and less material consumption in the name of maintaining their world of country living.
That rural areas have lost population and the number of farmers and farm families has declined dramatically over the past hundred years do not imply that this country living world of experience is easily left behind or was unimportant to the rural emigrants to cities.
This world of experience of living in the country with its organizing values is what a policy of reviving country living must aim to revive. No policies can be successful without making it central to their purpose.
In the next articles, we shall examine five values of country living: ownership of land, home and family, asethetic experience of the pastoral landscape, education, and regional identity.
Contents
A Theory of Rural Life
1. What is Country Living?
2. Social-Economic Classes.
3. Conditions for Successful Production.
4 pt. 1. Land-Use Stability.
4 pt. 2. Landscape Preservation.
5. Country Living Values.
6. What Are Values?
7. A Home Place.
8. Education and Identity.
9. Marketing the Countryside.
10. Conclusions and Recommendations.
(Revised, April 11, 2007.)
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