I really liked your blog, thanks for sharing this useful information……

-Claire, Projects Abroad Moldova Volunteer – 2007

I’m not talking about communities in the sense of villages or towns. I’m talking about groups of farmers who join together for new processing and marketing ventures and sometimes branch into policy. The lists of recipients of VAPG grants often contain dozens of examples. You’ll notice the states I’ve mentioned get far more than their fair share of these grants.

So great to find someone else interested in the village as a component of sustainable agricultural systems. I read an amazingly naive article the other day by someone who had just discovered that sustainability must be intergenerational. If it’s one generation, it’s nothing.

But we don’t want to white wash villages. As the Germans say: Town air makes you free.

Villages can be stultifying. They enforce traditions mercilessly. You are safe and accepted in a village if you become more and more the wise old woman looks askance and tries to thwart those who stray from the one true path and gives a big smile and a hug to all those who know the truth and act wisely.

If you see a different path than the traditions of the village dictate, you must negotiate very slowly if you are ever to change the traditional behaviors. But then, when change is achieved, it becomes as solid as a rock.

Only villages preserve the social traditions which make life work.
And they also provide the mutual help networks you need to survive and prosper.

Some call that guanxi and contend it has been crucial to the success of rural industrialization in China. Guanxi (which roughly equals the much less satisfying term “bonding social capital”) is seen to explain success of various ethnic groups including Chinese in the Mississippi Delta, Lebanese in West Africa, Armenians in Europe and US, Koreans in US inner cities, Indians in New Zealand, Palestinians in California and many others.

Some would contend that villages stifle innovation. So people from Appalachia have been successful in all areas of American life, but Appalachia remains mired in poverty. Something in the attitudes in the hill towns and villages must be to blame.

The Chinese were successful in the Mississippi Delta and the Lebanese in Africa and Indians in the US, long before success was seen in their own countries. Is something in the village mentality to blame for that? Or is rapid monetary success, rapid industrialization not our goal at all and perhaps unsustainable and actually undermines sustainability.

Just a few random thoughts from Lacassine, Louisiana.

I still remember the feeling of deep peace in the midst of poverty in the villages near the Hungarian border. When responding to one of the only hostile individuals (a mid-level city bureaucrat) I encountered while teaching seminars, I told him and the rest of the audience that the U.S. only appeared wealthy because of the “stuff”. That the wealth that Ukraine had was the wealth of community, in the villages as well as in cities like Kiev, where I saw goats hand-tethered along the roadways. That this wealth is real is evident from your description in this article, many kilometers and years away from my visit.

Ironic that I found yours now. I am also writing on the need to re-establish ‘village mind’ if we are to emerge from our current crisis of economics and ‘globality’ more grounded in real wealth, the kind built on relationship and mutuality.

Just takes a village.

Gladwell’s explanation of that genius who lives in a “modest cabin” in northern Missouri (no NY penthouse?) is lacking, comparing him to Bill Gates and others. The useful point is that if a person could see that they needed to adopt social skills to succeed, then they would. On the other hand, Henry Ford had a row of buttons on his desk where he could summon any expert he needed for a given problem. In this day and age, wouldn’t a person simply hire someone who had already achieved the social skills necessary rather than spend the 10,000 hours necessary to master new social skills? Each of us has their own chosen skill-sets.

Or perhaps there is more free choice involved in this. And as well, what does Gladwell consider “success”? For some of us, living and working on a rural farm is the epitome of luxury – safe, healthy, quiet. Values no amount of money (or perhaps only extreme amounts of money) could buy in our urban megalopolises.

Being able to stand out in a pasture on a sunny day with the only sounds being the wind and cows cropping pasture while you can smell the grass, flowers, and trees – all by exerting only the talent of standing still – qualifies as exceptional luck and genius in being able to arrive at the right time and place to experience it.

If there is a problem with this universe and how it doles out “luck” and “social backgrounding”, I’d say that rural areas have been unduly blessed with the fortunes of Nature, caring communities, and honest labor – which then is our responsibility to share with our urban cousins and their frenetic urgencies to “succeed.”