Subsidiarity in Rural America

“Subsidiarity” has long been a central concept in Christian thought on the relationship between individuals and society. Most clearly enunciated in Roman Catholic teaching from the late Nineteenth Century onward, subsidiarity is a principle which holds that “a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1883). In other words, every activity in society should be carried out at the smallest manageable level, starting within the family and moving up as necessary through various layers of non-governmental and, eventually, governmental strata.

Perhaps the most basic illustration of this idea is in the area of child-rearing. Few people in modern, Western culture would disagree that the best environment for a child to be raised is with his or her parents. Likewise, most people acknowledge that there are situations in which parents are unwilling or unable to provide a safe home of their children and that, in such cases, it is usually preferable to place the children with grandparents or other close family or friends. Generally, we consider declaring a child to be a “ward of the state” to be a last resort.

However, it is not unheard of—either in art or in life—for the opposite approach to child-rearing to be taken. In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley describes shared nurseries in which children are raised by the State and, along the way, essentially brainwashed to accept their government’s complete control over their lives. Pamala Griset and Sue Mahan, in Terrorism in Perspective, point out that “real-life” totalitarian regimes have followed similar programs, including experiments during much of the existence of the Soviet Union in removing children from the homes of their parents and raising them in communal houses.

The contrast between these two approaches highlights the underlying premise of the principle of subsidiarity, which is that each individual human person is made in the image and likeness of God and has free will (autonomy) and inherent dignity. Put another way, all men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” As such, social groupings such as governments ought to exist to serve the human person, rather than—as in the case of Huxley’s vision above—the person existing to serve the government.

The First Brick

Rural people are different. It's really that simple. Yet, when you think about it, it's a bit more complicated than that. Rural people, despite being equally simple at first impression, are, on further study, incredibly complex folk. We are, by nature, jacks of all trades, and aces of none. We are, by necessity masters of our own lives, because in rural places, people on whom we could depend are further apart, and likely have the same problems of their own, anyway. For rural people, time moves differently – we'll probably do something tomorrow that's not unlike what we're doing today, and in a year, we'll be doing the same thing, too. From month to month, however, everything changes. Daily, there's a slow progress of things, that's almost imperceptible at times. Monthly, there's a natural movement of nature and of our lives. Yearly, however, we're reminded that the monthly appearance of progress doesn't change things much, at all.

This non-progressing progress of time has placed rural life at a unique place in this world. From the beginning, farmers and herders, Cain and Abel, were at odds. Farmers had their plots to tend, and were situated in one place. Herders had their herds to tend, and moved about the world. And the plots of farmers were probably pretty tasty to the flocks of the herders. If you travel to poorer countries, you can see the difference rather starkly, even today. In modernized countries, however, that eternal battle is over. It ended with the invention of barbed wire – an creation which separated forever the crops of the farmer and the pastures of the herder.