It has become a custom of mine, each year towards the end of June, to attend a daylily flower show organized by the local branch of the American Hemerocallis Society. Arrayed before the visitor, on these charming occasions, are row upon row of daylilies, their showy flowers erupting out of slender, leafless scapes and taking on the unlikely appearances of bells, trumpets, stars, and grasping spiders, their petals pinched, quilling, or curling, their colors and patterns so riotous and so intricately variegated that it is easy to see how some 100,000 cultivars have come into being over the centuries.
These daylilies, or ditch lilies as they are sometimes known, have something of a mixed reputation. The American writer and gardener Eleanor Perényi, to whom I generally defer in these matters, praised the foundational species of daylilies, the tawny and lemon daylilies, as the “yeomen of the garden,” “unbelievably sturdy and accommodating,” but she remained skeptical of the “newest, showiest varieties,” which seemed to her as “depressing as a woman with a face-lift: the past is erased at the expense of character…ninety-nine percent of the new varieties I wouldn’t have at any price.” Perényi loathed the “awful” names given to these novel cultivars — “I would blush to admit I was growing Precious One, Disney, or Bitsy” — and the sobriquets have only gotten worse since her passing, viz. A Moose Fishing on a Pond on Monday, Mama’s Hot Chocolate, Nude Yoga, and Crotchless Panties, to name only a few of the worst offenders against good taste. (READ MORE: A Summer of Satire: Let It Go, Let It Go. Can’t Hold It Back Anymore!)
There do exist cultivars, however, that you would have at any price. The Best in Show this year, for example, was a representative of the Black Velvet Baby cultivar, featuring trumpet-shaped flowers with burgundy hues bordering closely on black, with delicate gold throats and slightly ruffled edges. It is the precise sort of specimen one would expect to find in a Jacob Vosmaer still life, hanging on the walls of the Rijksmuseum, or the Museum Prinsenhof in Delft. There is something undeniably compelling about the individual personalities possessed by these members of the genus Hemerocallis, even if I, like Perényi, remain partial to other perennials. And while their overall hardiness makes them yeoman-like, their flowers are potent symbols of the ephemeral nature of life, here today and gone tomorrow, like day flies and “fleeting dreams, most swiftly o’er,” as Calderón put it. The Chinese character for the daylily, 萱草, can be read in Japanese either as kanzo or wasure gusa, the latter of which means “forgetting flower,” the flower that helps you forget your sorrows. As I peruse the Kachō Gafu, the bird-and-flower prints produced by the Meiji-era artist Imao Keinen, I always linger over “Daylily and Starling,” and as much as I adore starlings, it is the just unfurled, soon to be withered daylily blossom in the background that always catches my eye.
What I am most struck by at these annual daylily shows is the sheer dedication of the daylily breeders and hybridizers whose specimens are on display, most of whom have given perfectly dignified names to their cultivars, and some of whom plan their breeding programs, designed to create dazzling blossoms while maintaining thrip, rust, and drought resistance, in increments of as many as 20 years. The resulting daylilies are the product of lifetimes spent in the garden and the greenhouse, obtaining breeding stock, selecting for optimal traits, scrutinizing foliage habits, monitoring heat tolerance and cold hardiness, and gradually drawing out previously hidden attributes from the daylily gene pool. Darwin considered pigeon-breeding to be the paradigmatic example of artificial selection, but daylily hybridizers have elevated the art of selective breeding to seemingly impossible heights.
We Find Peace in Cultivating Our Garden
And so it is that each year, in the presence of all these extraordinary horticultural specimens, I am reminded of the Czech playwright, journalist, and avid gardener Karel Čapek’s writings on “the greatness of small things and the depth of everyday ones.” Čapek’s colleague and friend, František Langer, also explored this theme, observing that “small things bring people together,” while:
Big ones also bring people together, but at the same time they separate them. And they separate them cruelly. In the shadow of something as great as God, entire races have exterminated each other. There are wars of people with differing concepts of order in the world…. But never would associations of people who breed long-haired rabbits fight against associations of people who train carrier pigeons. Never would a class revolution arise between collectors of the stamps of Central Europe and collectors of stamps from around the world. Around small things is an atmosphere of sacred calm…. Roses, pigeons, dahlias, chess, cameras, radios, canaries, gardens on the outskirts of town, pipes, books, and who knows what other small pleasures, these are the areas of life where the bourgeois rubs shoulders with the proletarian, these are the domains of the international and the equality of religions. Over small things a sacred peace hovers.
There is a reason that Nicolás Gómez Dávila proclaimed, “Paradise is hidden not in our inner opacity, but in the terrace and trees of a well-tended garden beneath the midday sun.” And there is a reason that the art historian and garden writer Sir Roy Strong, when considering the question “What is the most important thing I’ve done with my life?” could only answer: “To have made a garden.”
Candide, having survived the battle between the Bulgars and the Avars, the Lisbon Earthquake, an Inquisitorial auto-da-fé, and numerous other existential dangers, eventually settles down on a small farm, une petite métairie, where he comes to realize, as he snacks on preserved citrons and pistachio nuts, that “il faut cultiver notre jardin” — five simple words that have become perhaps the best-known maxim in the history of Western philosophy. Voltaire’s instruction to “cultivate our garden” might be a veritable cliché, but quietism will always have its adherents. Konstantin Paustovsky, in his novelistic memoir The Story of a Life, related an encounter he had with a Muscovite gardener in the year 1918, as Russia descended into revolutionary violence and famine. Showing off his garden, one “more beautiful than the most luxurious rose garden…full of the rich smell of dill and mint,” Paustovsky’s interlocutor expounded on his personal philosophy.
“So you see, my friend,” he said, “it just so happens that this too is a way of life. There are all sorts of ways to live. You can fight for freedom, you can try to remake humanity or you can grow tomatoes. Everything has its own price, its own dignity and its own glory.
“What exactly are you trying to say” I asked.
“That we need to be tolerant and understanding. As I see it, that’s the only path to real freedom. All of us should devote ourselves to the work we like best, and no one should try and stop us. Then nothing can frighten us and no enemy can stop us.”
A little more than a century later, the Ukrainian journalist Victoria Belim ended her haunting investigation into her ancestors’ suffering at the hands of the Soviet regime, The Rooster House, with the unforgettable image of her family’s ancestral garden plot and cherry orchard outside Poltava, where “every bud and every branch is a reminder of the irrepressible vivere memento that illuminates the darkest days with hope.” Despite the Russian bombs raining down on Ukraine, Belim and her relatives “carry on living and we tend to our garden one day at a time, one tree at a time. The orchard still stands full of sunlight and birdsong, and its bounty is a refusal to submit to despair and fear.”
Localism: Between the Scylla and Charybdis
In the hortus conclusus, the enclosed garden walled off from all the annoyances and atrocities this fallen world has to offer, a sacred peace hovers all around, a sacred calm prevails, we find “a Heaven in a Wild Flower,” and we can best experience life on a human scale. Here a vita contemplativa becomes possible, and such contemplations have given rise to an entire political philosophy predicated on the quietist, privatist entreaties of Voltaire’s Candide and Paustovsky’s gardener. This is what G.K. Chesterton attempted with his doctrine of distributism (or localism as Chestertonian scholars refer to it these days, wary of a potential conflation with “redistributionism”). Viewing the conflict between capitalism and socialism as essentially a struggle “between Centralization and Centralization,” Chesterton sought out an alternate route between the between the Scylla and the Charybdis of the Market and the Masses, between Capital and the Commune. Inspired by the 1891 papal encyclical Rerum Novarum, which criticized both socialism and laissez-faire capitalism while defending private property rights, and borrowing from the Catholic social doctrine of subsidiarity, which holds that matters are best handled at the most immediate or local level consistent with their resolution, Chesterton extolled localism and the “homespun ideal” that:
it is better to do things inside rather than outside the frontier or the fence: that we often lose more than we gain by chaffering with strangers, whether they are pedlars on the road or brokers on the Stock Exchange; that there are not only domestic virtues but domestic values, in the sense of utility and beauty, which are best safeguarded by purely domestic traditions; that not only dirty linen, but much more emphatically, clean linen, is best dealt with at home.
Local political control, local production, local purchasing, local consumption, local values, local traditions, local history, local identity — all these, for the “Apostle of Common Sense,” represented bulwarks against what Nicolás Gómez Dávila would later call an inundation of “industrial and human filth [inmundicia industrial y humana].” Ultimately, the only “way to make a living thing,” Chesterton determined, “is to make it local.”
As with almost every political philosophy, localism fares better in theory than in practice, particularly in an age of digitalization and deracination and high modernism and globalization. Localism today all too often has less to do with Chesterton’s “local customs, individual craftsmanship, variety of self-expression, the presence of personality in production, the dignity of the human will,” and more to do with buying organic produce at farmers’ markets and guzzling hop-centric double IPAs at craft breweries. While there is much to be gained from supporting farmers practicing regenerative agriculture, paying list price for a book at an independent bookstore, or otherwise upholding the “homespun ideal,” it must be admitted that to be a localist in this day and age, to adapt William F. Buckley Jr.’s well-worn phrase, is to stand athwart a container ship filled with plastic slave-labor Temu bric-a-brac, yelling Stop, at a time when few seem inclined to do so. (READ MORE: Arkansas AG Claims Temu Is Chinese Spyware)
Mind you, not all localisms are equal. Consider the disturbing case of the Oxfordshire County Council’s experimental scheme designed to turn Oxford into a “Fifteen-Minute City.” According to Councillor Duncan Enright, the project is all about “making sure you have the community centre which has all of those essential needs, the bottle of milk, pharmacy, GP, schools which you need to have a 15-minute neighbourhood.” As the Council continued to fine-tune its approach, it added on five minutes, with a commitment to “20-minute neighbourhoods: well-connected and compact areas around the city of Oxford where everything people need for their daily lives can be found within a 20-minute walk.” This is all very well and good, yet, as Alex Klaushofer noted in the Critic, there was something rather suspicious about these plans, given that
the Central Oxfordshire Travel Plan made no provision for new services or even assessing existing amenities. Instead, flourishing neighbourhoods were to be achieved by the simple expedient of making it difficult for people to drive across the city. Residents, visitors and businesses would make only “essential” — the word was highlighted in bold — car journeys. And while they would still be able to enter and exit Oxford via the ring road, “a package of vehicle movement restrictions” would “encourage” people to live locally.
Localism, in this case, seems mainly to involve the generous assessment of fines.
Localism Gone Wrong Turns Into Draconian Lockdowns
Critics detected the dread hand of the World Economic Forum in these machinations and suspected that 15 (or 20) minute cities were really meant to facilitate draconian, CCP-style lockdowns. The WEF, the United Nations Human Settlements Programme, and other international and non-governmental organizations have in fact been pushing for new urban models as part of an “integrated approach” to “post-COVID-19 recovery,” the better to “tackle the pandemic, car dominance, climate change, and urban inequality by reintroducing the qualities of proximity within urban planning.” In Oxford, this would mean that “residents would be allocated passes for up to 100 journeys a year and those living outside the permit area 25. The zones would be monitored by automatic number plate recognition cameras and any journeys taken without permits would result in fines.” Klaushofer could only conclude that the entire scheme, versions of which have been considered from Paris to Melbourne, represented a “fundamental shift in the power of the state to regulate how people lived their lives …one that eroded not the principle but the practicality of the freedoms of movement and association. Enforcement would require an unprecedented level of surveillance, with cameras on street corners and at the borders of artificially-created zones.” Here we encounter an ersatz form of localism as conceived not by luminaries like G.K. Chesterton and Leopold Kohr, but by dystopian writers like Kafka and Orwell.
Just as this plastic modern world of ours is not terribly conducive to high total fertility rates, fervent religiosity, or social solidarity, it is not conducive to genuine, durable localism. The Spanish traditionalist philosopher Juan Vázquez de Mella y Fanjul (1861-1928) convincingly argued that the legacy of the French Revolution was to blame, as “the political work of the French Revolution consisted mainly in destroying that whole series of intermediate organisms — family inheritances, guilds, autonomous universities, municipalities owning their own goods, regional administrations, the very assets of the Church — that extended between the individual and the state as protective bodies.” Localism is fundamentally a product of those “intermediate organisms,” almost all of which have been ravaged, some fatally, by modernity and leftist entryism. (READ MORE: You Can Never Have Enough Kids)
The reader will perhaps be able to recall those impossibly distant days of yore, back in August of 2023, when the country-folk singer-songwriter Christopher Anthony Lunsford, a.k.a Oliver Anthony, released his chart-busting single “Rich Men North of Richmond,” which upbraided those “obese” “300-hundred-pound” welfare recipients and their ill-gotten Fudge Rounds, and elites who have more affection for “minors on an island somewhere” than for hard-working miners, and so forth. The song became an anthem for many on the Right, but Lunsford immediately resisted attempts to “stick me in a political bucket.” “I see the right trying to characterize me as one of their own,” he protested, “and I see the left trying to discredit me, I guess in retaliation. That s—t’s got to stop.” Guaranteeing his legacy as a one-hit wonder, he tweeted “I. Don’t. Support. Either. Side. Politically. Not the left, not the right. Im about supporting people and restoring local communities. Now, go breath some fresh air and relax. Please? ???? I’m not worth obsessing over, I promise. Go spend time with your loved ones.”
Here is contemporary localism manifest, stridently non-partisan, and imbued with unspecified and ultimately insipid notions of “restoring local communities.” Yet the explicitly political concerns raised in Lunsford’s hit single — the “total control” exerted by Washington, D.C., unfair tax policies, labor laws, food stamp administration, federal criminal impunity, etc. — are anything but purely local issues and would have to be addressed primarily at the federal level. Localism, privatism, and quietism are all laudable values unless they lead to passivity, lethargy, and acquiescence. Would it have been better for Caesar to have whiled away his days in his lush Horti Caesaris on the right bank of the Tiber, pursuing a vita contemplativa? Should Washington have stuck to caring for his espalier trees, greenhouses, orchards, and planting beds at Mount Vernon? Paustovsky’s gardener preferred growing tomatoes to fighting for freedom. A sensible approach to self-preservation, but his like would not be found at the Solidarność protests at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, or joining hands as part of the Baltic Way, or braving sniper fire on the Maidan Nezalezhnosti in Kyiv.
True Peace Is Achievable In ‘Eternity Alone’
Perhaps we should not be too hard on Paustovsky’s gardener, whose life was gratifying in its internal consistency, and whose garden represented a much-appreciated oasis of calm in the inhuman hell of revolutionary Russia. And his central point, that “everything has its own price, its own dignity and its own glory,” is certainly true. Small things, and small pleasures, as Čapek and Langer rightly held, should be protected and cultivated, for they provide the atmosphere of sacred calm and sacred peace that helps make life worth living. But modern life is like a motte-and-bailey castle. To withdraw into the motte of localism is to cede the bailey of the broader culture and civilization. Localism requires robust communities, but, as Byung-Chul Han noted in his recently translated treatise Vita Contemplativa, our culture is increasingly hostile to local and traditional forms of organization:
Today, people frequently invoke the term “community,” but in doing so they refer to a commodified form of society. It does not create a we. Unbridled consumption isolates and separates people. Consumers are lonely creatures. Digital communication, too, turns out to be a form of communication without community. Social media accelerates the disintegration of community.
In such an environment, the sacred peace provided by localism is fragile indeed.
The Spanish counter-revolutionary writer and diplomat Juan Francisco María de la Salud Donoso Cortés y Fernández Canedo, marqués de Valdegamas, in his Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism and Socialism (1879), warned that “there is no man, let him be aware of it or not, who is not a combatant in this hot contest” between the forces of tradition and the forces of so-called progress:
And don’t tell me you don’t wish to fight; for the moment you tell me that, you are already fighting; nor that you don’t know which side to join, for while you are saying that, you have already joined a side; nor that you wish to remain neutral; for while you are thinking to be so, you are so no longer; nor that you want to be indifferent; for I will laugh at you, because on pronouncing that word you have chosen your party. Don’t tire yourself in seeking a place of security against the chances of war, for you tire yourself in vain; that war is extended as far as space, and prolonged through all time. In eternity alone, the country of the just, can you find rest, because there alone there is no combat.
For Cortés, the sacred peace of small things was illusory, with true peace achievable in “eternity alone.” It is a stirring, but troubling, image, and one imagines that the oblivious quietism espoused by Paustovsky’s gardener is more appealing to the average human soul and mind, and understandably so.
Localism and the vita contemplativa are eminently worthy goals, as long as they do not become mere coping mechanisms. Subsidiarity is an admirable principle, holding that matters are best handled at the lowest possible level consistent with their resolution. Thus we must work to protect the beauty of those small things that are at risk of being broken on the wheel of hyper-modernity, we must cultivate our gardens, and do our utmost to uphold Chesterton’s homespun ideal, but we can never forget that there are problems that can only be resolved at higher levels, or they will never be resolved at all.