The Persistent Fantasy of Rural Escape

I spent some time staring at this awful thing, wondering why it struck such a chord in me. It isn't because it's stupid. It's because it is *timelessly* stupid. It's just the contemporary white nationalist version of one of our most ancient dreams.

In the 1960s and 1970s we had the hippie version. I grew up with songs like this:

Baby I'll be there to take your hand
Baby I'll be there to share the land
that they'll be giving away
when we all live together.

(Who are "they"? And why are they giving away land?)

But it goes much farther back than that.

Marie Antoinette, queen of France, spent many hours playing at being a shepherdess, and she had a whole fake village built where she could act out her fantasies.

Thomas Cole, The Arcadian or Pastoral State, 1836

Pastoral poetry that evokes the simples pleasures of rural life is one of our oldest literary traditions; the earliest known examples are written in Sumerian.

Here is a famous example by Christopher Marlowe:

Come live with me and be my Love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dale and field,
And all the craggy mountains yield.

It seems that the high-pressure life of an old royal court, full of politics and intrigue that might end with a knife in your back, encouraged the fantasy that shepherds had a better kind of life.

But it's all nonsense. Simple rural life is hard even for people who grew up with it, and it is almost impossible for those who did not. I have a friend who actually spent some time on a hippie commune, and she once said to me, "You know, there are reasons why we all left."

Lots of reasons. The work is hard and unrelenting, with many chores that must be done every single day. The amusements are limited. And the politics of the average commune, while perhaps not as bloody as those of a Renaissance court, can be quite awful. The communes that still endure in our time all have very strict policies about who can join, along with probationary periods and the like, and they still have high turnover.

These days only about 2% of Israelis live on a Kibbutz, and some of these are actually more like gated communities than farming communes.

But when people feel under great social or economic stress, or feel that their beliefs are at odds with those of the majority, or believe that their societies have grown wicked and decadent, these fantasies keep coming up over and over.

Searching for images to put in this post I found all sorts of dumb claims about communal life "going mainstream" in the 2020s. Like this: "Today, it’s not uncommon to see people switching to solar power, growing their own food, or building off-grid Earthships" Unless you consider 0.01 percent "not uncommon," this is utter nonsense. 

But what is indeed not uncommon is fantasizing about it.