The Country Gentleman's Dilemma

Standing on tradition in an age of accelerating change.

Our Town.

There is a rural revival happening. Driven by the search for a slower pace of life, increased remote work, and renewed focus on community. Yet it is not a return. There were 6 million family farms in America in the 1930s. There are fewer than 2 million today. 1 in 4 Americans lived in the country in 1970 and by 2022 that was down to 1 in 8. Rural population is now growing after a long period of decline. But that proportion has not changed. The farms have not come back. No, rural America is changing. Driven by the same forces at work across society as a whole. Economic pressures, technological disruptions, and demographic shifts. Forces which are accelerating. Today a Country Gentleman is faced with the problem of how to adapt to them while preserving culture and traditions to maintain their way of life long term.

Primary industries like agriculture, mining, fishing, and forestry are not only work. They are ways of life. Woven into the culture of a region. When they go people struggle with losing their identity as well as their livelihood. Wendell Berry wrote back in the 70's about how agribusiness had removed farming from its cultural context. Taking families off of the land and away from their history. He called it the Unsettling of America. The trend continued for the last 50 years, and most people are at least somewhat aware of it. Few understand the disproportionate harm to rural communities from the loss of manufacturing jobs in America. Everyone wants to live on a farm. No one wants to save a dying mill town. Right now the fastest growing industries in rural America are healthcare and social services. Occupations charged with managing decline. As rural population has grown older and smaller for decades. Remote work has allowed more people to escape to the country with their urban salaries. But that is not without its problems. As the influx of cash only serves to price townsfolk out if it does not circulate through the local economy. There is a lot of money in my town. There is a deep sense of responsibility too. Only seldom are they possessed by the same people. So let me say if your community asks nothing of you, you are not a part of that community. If you have nothing to offer it you do not have a home you have a consumer experience. Still, all these economic factors are not the main driver of cultural change. Technology is.

We live in an age of accelerating change because technological innovation is accelerating. Our grandparents had the local newspaper. Our parents read local and regional papers and watched three channels of broadcast television. I grew up with cable news and before I graduated high school the dot com boom was well underway. My son's generation is so awash in digital media that they take it for granted. A fish cannot feel wetness. Connecting every corner of the globe to the Internet made the world smaller and eroded regional culture and traditions by promoting globalized norms. That is not anything new. What is new is that algorithmic curation became ubiquitous across every social media and streaming platform. The set of rules that govern what you see online and what you do not favor things which have broad appeal. So the more people who see and interact with a piece of content the more likely you are to see it too. Because there are more people in cities this means content with urbanized and globalized perspectives. Rural youth get exposed to those more than their own heritage and folkways which have always been learned in person. Leading to cultural dilution over time. Older generations may understand tradition. But they rely on young people to carry it forward. Which make demographic shifts a major challenge to community cohesion.

Increased migration and generational division make it harder to sustain a shared culture. Right now there is a lot of talk about migration and the costs versus the benefits of multiculturalism. These are important conversations to have. At the same time I find rural people from different countries often have more in common with each other than they do urban people from their own countries. Rural communities are as at risk from urban transplants who do not share their values as they are from international migrants. Small town folks should do everything in their power to ensure that those who come do so to be a good neighbor and hold to the local culture. The biggest demographic threat, though, is their aging populations. The median age of people living in rural areas is 43. In urban areas it is 36. About 20% of the people living in rural areas are over age 65 compared to 16% in urban areas. I live in New Hampshire which us in a three-way tie with Vermont and Florida for the second highest median age at 43. Maine is the oldest state at 45. The median age in my town is 49.5. It is aging out of existence. Part of the problem is that the people who run everything in town are all in their 60's. Church, historical society, town government. If people my age and younger do not step up everything will come to a grinding halt within 20 years. The other side of that is when you have more retired people than children a community begins to lose touch with the needs of working families. It is hard to get people to care about preserving culture and tradition while struggling to make ends meet.

The mounting economic, technological, and demographic challenges are making it harder to preserve rural American heritage. What is a Country Gentleman to do? Work to create robust, local craft economies. Then support them with our patronage. Be a patron of the arts and local music, folklore, and dialects. Promote rural voices you encounter online. To fight back against the hegemony of algorithms. Be conscious which technologies you choose to adopt. Instead of using whatever the market chooses to offer. Technology speeds up our work. But we do not let that time savings create space in our days. We move on to the next task, and the next one after that, endlessly and it feels unnatural. Like Jevons' paradox of work. Try not to do that. Cultivate multigenerational friendships. Have plenty of children. Raise them up and teach them well the dying traditions and instill in them a sense of place. Above all we need to talk about these concerns with others. With family and in our communities. Resilience is, after all, a team sport. By reading this you have joined the team.