The Fate of Fairholme

Way, way back in time in the years 1979-1981 I lived in the village of Turtleford, Saskatchewan, having moved there from suburban Toronto. Turtleford was a rural village of about 500 souls and my ministry as an Anglican priest took me to other villages, such as Spruce Lake and Livelong (and no, I am not making up any of these names).  When I first arrived in Turtleford as the village’s local Anglican priest, I needed a map to navigate the countryside to find other villages and towns.  The way from Turtleford to Prince Albert (where my bishop lived) took me past the village of Fairholme.   

At least that was what my map said.  But when I drove the long stretch of road and looked at the roadside to see where the map said that Fairholme was, it was not there.  Nothing.  Not even the perennial grain elevator for the town which once marked its location.  Fairholme had vanished without a trace.

       What happened to Fairholme?  In a word, progress (or, to give one of its other names, “mechanization”).  Mechanization meant that a combine could now do the agricultural work of many men.  That meant, of course, that many men were no longer required for farm work.  It also meant that one farmer could farm a very large area, much larger than previously. In older days, lots of farmers were required to farm such a large area.  Now only one farmer was needed.  What happened to the other potential farmers (i.e. the sons of the first farmers)?  They left Fairholme to go and find work in “the big city”.  The big city therefore grew and villages like Fairholme shrunk or vanished.  Google tells me that Fairholme in 2016 (see inset image) had a population of fifteen, living in about half a dozen old houses. No mention of the age of the fifteen survivors was given.  Doubtless the population now is even less.  Or nil.

       I mention this as an example of population shifts.  A book by Paul Kingsnorth Against the Machine (an essential read for those wanting to understand the true threat to human authenticity in the world today) gives some figures for the relentless drive towards increased urbanization (i.e. the swallowing up of villages by the cities). In 1900 only about 12% of the population lived in towns and cities. By 2050 (i.e. by tomorrow), nearly 70% will.  And, lest one imagine urbanites living happily in penthouses, about one third of the urban population will live in slums. Fairholmes, big or small, are on the way out.  Soon you will live in a city.

Urbanization, however, does not simply consist in a change of location à la the sitcom "Green Acres” whereby one exchanges “fresh air” for “Times Square”. Rather it involves the change from comparative independence and self-reliance to becoming a cog in the machine. In the city, you will not survive on your own, through self-reliance or through the help of family.  You will survive because the city will take care of you, whether you want it to or not.  And despite the crowds in cities, you will be more isolated and alone than you were living next to your smalltown neighbours.

Take, for example, Kingsnorth’s experience of contemporary London.  It features “till-less shops and cashless ice cream vans and train tickets purchased through smartphone apps and ever-present street cameras and proliferating 5G towers and soon-to-be-humanless train stations.  Soon enough,” he observed, “human contact will be a luxury good and like all luxury goods it will sell at a premium”.

Part of the problem with this isolation is not simply that extroverts will feel lonely.  It is that we will all be less connected to our neighbours and to the earth and to our history and will therefore be more open to whatever the City (an ideology and not just a locale) offers us and whatever lies it may tell.

In a word, we will be more vulnerable, for being a part of the collective, unmoored from the safety of a larger family, brings its own peculiar dangers.  We will find ourselves at the mercy and in the maw of the machine. That is perhaps why Kingsnorth quotes with approval Nicolas Gomez Davila: “The modern world will not be punished. It is the punishment.”  In the City the collective is everything and everywhere.

C. S. Lewis, ever discerning and prescient, saw the dangers of the collective clearly.  In his 1945 essay entitled Membership (read to a group of Anglicans and Orthodox!) he wrote as follows. “Collectivism is ruthlessly defeating the individual in every other field [than religion]… [Modern man] lives in a crowd… Modern collectivism is an outrage upon human nature and from this, as from all other evils, God will be our shield and buckler… The Christian is called, not to individualism but to membership in the mystical body. A consideration of the differences between the secular collective and the mystical body is therefore the first step to understanding how Christianity without being individualistic can yet counteract collectivism… The Christian life defends the single personality from the collective, not by isolating him but by giving him the status of an organ in the mystical Body”.  Briefly put, the antidote to the collective (and to the ever-devouring City) is the Church.

I would suggest that membership in the mystical Body of the Church is indeed the last and only real defense against the collective.  In Christ we are not simply isolated individuals, cogs in the secular machine relentlessly grinding out “progress”, but members one of another, valued and called to truly authentic human existence.

In the Church we find an alternative to the collective with its atomized and uprooted individuals: a rival society, a family in which every member (i.e. member in the Pauline sense) has a role, a task, a ministry, and a value. It is a family where all bear one another burdens and so fulfil the Law of Christ (Galatians 6:2), a place where when one is honoured, all rejoice with together and when another suffers, all suffer together (1 Corinthians 12:26).

This means, however, that to fulfil its task and to be true to its own nature, the Church must live differently than the world does and recognize the dangers that the City represents. She must return to the truths and sanities enshrined in her apostolic Tradition, rejecting the world’s inversions of those truths along with (to quote the baptismal service) the rest of Satan’s works and angels and service and pride.

Perhaps more importantly, she must resist the temptation to imagine that the answer to secular liberalism is cultural conservatism, for both secular liberals and conservatives tend to seek political solutions to spiritual problems.  Politics cannot provide the antidote for the Collective; it created the Collective.

No, the challenge confronting us— indeed, the enemy confronting us— is within, and the frontline between light and darkness runs down the center of the human heart.  We must realize that the relentless drive towards “progress”, the frantic pursuit of individual self-fulfilment apart from Christ, is the true problem. 

In the midst of all this, God says to each heart, “Be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10).  He calls us to cease, to find our root in Him, and to make the Christian story and Christian history our own.

Kingsnorth refers to this enemy as “the Machine”.  He writes, “To liberate ourselves, steadily, one human soul at a time, we simply have to walk away from the Machine in our hearts and minds, as the Israelites of the Exodus walked away from its original master, Pharaoh”. 

I agree.  That is what our journey into Christian maturity and salvation entails— a constant and repeated departure from the world and its false values, a refusal to let the world squeeze us into its own mould (Romans 12:2 Phillips’ paraphrase).  But I would make one observation: the Israelites walking away from their original master Pharaoh was no easy matter.

In fact, reading the Book of Exodus, it took ten plagues smiting Egypt, the death of the firstborn, and a harrowing trip through the Red Sea to walk away from Pharaoh.  In other words, Pharaoh did not let them go immediately or easily.  He fought back with all that he had, pursuing them with the sword of death even into the Red Sea and if God hadn’t closed up the sea upon the Egyptian chariots, Israel never would’ve made it into the wilderness, much less to the Promised Land.

That means that we must also be prepared for pushback from the enemy.  As we attend Liturgy together on Sundays and say our daily prayers and read our Bibles and keep the fasts and feasts and (in a word) seek to be melded into a single-hearted community of love and truth which is the Body of Christ, we can expect counter-attack.  This age, the age before the Second Coming, is the age of martyrdom.  We might imagine that the age of the martyrs has passed and receded into history.  Alas, it is not so.  That age is always with us although sometimes it knows periods of comparative peace.  But we need not fear the future, for greater is He that is in us than he that is in the world (1 John 4:4).

In this age, the Fairholmes, “that small town in each of us”, are on the way out; the secular city is increasingly our home now.  It is within this city that we are called to build Jerusalem, to plant a watered oasis in the desert of this world, an island of light in the deep darkness, a corner of sanity in the madhouse.  We heed a different story than the one offered by the Machine and therefore we live counter-culturally and authentically as members of a new and remade family, thereby revealing a shining alternative.  We are the disciples of Jesus, members of His holy Church militant in the earth, following the apostolic Tradition, filled with His Spirit.

Fight on, brethren!  The secular city will not last forever.  One day another city will descend from heaven, adorned as bride for her husband: the new Jerusalem, the city of the living God. That is the world’s true and fair home.