The Ouroboros of Humanity
Allen Tate on Provincialism, Regionalism and Southern Literature
In 1945, the poet Allen Tate wrote an essay entitled “The New Provincialism”1. In it, he discusses changes that were occurring in American literature and living. The remaining vestiges of Agrarian economics and a Traditional, Christian society were being expelled. Almost 80 years later, his pronouncements will be familiar to those of us who are read, even modestly, in the Old Right, or those who are currently working through the consequences of digital technology. However, it was notable to me, how early Tate recognized America’s deterioration, and as Tate was wont to do, with sensitive attention to its effects on the human mind.
Because we live within the workings of the Digital Revolution, it is quite difficult to parse what exactly predates the Digital and what is a consequence of it. Tate offers us a few insights on just how long we have been struggling with our current problems of alienation, memory and temporal displacement.
Tate identities a shift in attitude or outlook that he calls Provincialism. This is a socio-political shift that bears literary implications. His essay is concerned with those literary implications, specifically as it manifested in Southern literature, but he mainly uses the occasion to expound on Provincialism and Regionalism.
Something which I would like to remark upon here is the pertinence of the Southern insight, such as Tate’s, on the destruction of tradition and the triumph of isolation in our day. The reader may wish to have a look at Sam T. Francis’ essay “Foreign Policy and the South”2 to get an idea of why the Southern writer possessed an insightful understanding of the changing socio-political order. The Southern experience of the War and Reconstruction taught them many terrible truths about politics and history that others have still yet to learn.
I.
Tate begins with this question: “Will the new literature of the South, or of the United States as a whole, be different from anything that we knew before the war? Will American literature be more alike all over the country? And more like the literature of the world?”
He continues his line of thinking by dismissing the possibility of an American literary nationalism; He says that we would have to become a nation first. Contrary, “it is more likely that we may become an internation first.”
I believe it is fair to say that Tate’s initial questions have been answered in the affirmative. A great decadent sameness has fallen upon our literature. Literature which reflects differences in peoples, geography or worldview seems to have become merely differences of genre. Those differences are regarded more as ornamentation or even novelty than any expression of genuine identity.
(It may be remarked that since genre is now considered non-hierarchical, there is no difference in literary form or purpose of those forms. Genre is simply a poly-voice performing the same underlying score. Various voicings are applied atop the same literary constructions. Literary difference is only allowed as a difference in flavor.)
Tate is correct that America became an “internation.” America has operated upon the world, and in turn, the world has operated upon America. This goes a long way to explaining literature at present. There has been a radical influx of formal difference, a siphoning of American identity and as a result, a depreciation of American mores.
But why did America pursue the position of “internation?” Tate explains and gives us the reason why he wrote his essay. “These reflections are set down to prepare for something that I have long wanted the occasion to say: that mere regionalism, as we have heard it talked about in recent years, is not enough. For this picturesque regionalism of local color is a by-product of nationalism. And it is not informed enough to support a mature literature. But neither is nationalism.”
Tate recognizes the deficiencies of mere regionalism and nationalism. One of these deficiencies being the problem of “tribal savagery” along with the aforementioned ignorance which cannot form a mature literature. Apparently, those who ruled America recognized these shortcomings as well, or perhaps, they found the internation to be more lucrative than the nation.
Tate returns to the question of American literature's future. “It will not be a ‘national’ literature, or even an ‘international’; it may be a provincial literature with world horizons, the horizons of the geographical world, which need not be spiritually larger than Bourbon County, Kentucky: provincialism without regionalism.”
Thus we come to his main concerns: Regionalism and Provincialism. Tate will go on to provide descriptions of both. “For regionalism is that consciousness or that habit of men in a given locality which influences them to certain patterns of thought and conduct handed to them by their ancestors. Regionalism is thus limited in space but not in time.”
Counter-wise, “The provincial attitude is limited in time but not in space.” and “For provincialism is that state of mind in which regional men lose their origins in the past and its continuity into the present, and begin every day as if there had been no yesterday.”
The Regional Man belongs to something immediate and physical hence he is “limited in space.” Provincial Man no longer belongs to something immediate and physical, whether that be his mountain, his valley, his kin or his village. Instead, he now belongs to Humanity.
Tate also expresses the necessity of regionalism. He says that without regional consciousness, which is a “locality in the sense of local continuity in tradition and belief” that “no literature can be mature...it can only be senile, with the renewed immaturity of senility.”
We can conclude that regionalism is necessary but not sufficient. Literature cannot achieve maturity with regionalism alone, but neither can it do without. A leaf needs a blossom, but first, a blossom needs a leaf.
Tate’s phrase “the renewed immaturity of senility” deserves a moment of reflection. Literature today can often be baffling. On one hand, with its primitivism and its myopic scope, it seems unflaggingly young and stupid. On the other hand, it seems barren and decayed in its lack of meaning and vitality. Tate gives us the key. The provincial man will “begin every day as if there had been no yesterday.” Though the body be withered and decrepit, the spirit is daily renewed with immaturity. That is precisely my experience when I read modern poetry. It is as if I am affronted by the rotten stench of a corpse and the spiritual advancement of a fetus.
Returning to Tate’s main concern, he explains how the regional man degrades into the provincial man, “When the regional man, in his ignorance, often an intensive and creative ignorance, of the world, extends his own immediate necessities into the world, and assumes that the present moment is unique, he becomes the provincial man. He cuts himself off from the past, and without benefit of the fund of traditional wisdom approaches the simplest problems of life as if nobody had ever heard of them before. A society without arts, said Plato, lives by chance. The provincial man, locked in the present, lives by chance.”
The regional man, being constrained by place, is allowed freedom in time. Regionalism can be physically small but spiritually big. Having received knowledge from his ancestors, the regional man can accrue spiritual wealth from “the fund of traditional wisdom.” His locality of wisdom protects him from the catastrophic loss of memory that afflicts the provincial man. The provincial man, originating from everywhere and nowhere, possesses no placedness. He exists only in time, imprisoned to his whims and passions.
Tate says that the provincial man will “see with, not through the eye.” The provincial man is cut off from an antecedent part of his being. He has no past, no memory. He can no longer use his eyes, he is his eyes. His eye no longer possesses a teleology. He can no longer make sense out of what is transpiring. He can only observe and no longer perceive. His sight is merely material, for he denies the function of spirit. The eyes are not the windows of the soul, they are walls.
II.
Considering the creation of the “internation” and the deficiencies of regionalism, Tate asks, “If regionalism is not enough, is a world provincialism enough? It has been generally supposed in our time that the limitations of the mere regional interest, which are serious, could be corrected by giving them up for a ‘universal’ point of view, a political or social doctrine which would ‘relate’ or ‘integrate’ the local community with the world in the advance of a higher culture. What this higher culture is or might be nobody was ever quite clear about.”
He continues, “What it never occurred to anybody to ask was this simple question: What happens if you make the entire world into one vast region?” That is the crux of the issue. The globalism of the world-region is a “large extension of the political and philosophical limitations of the regional principle.” He goes further, “All this has a bearing on literature today, the literature of the United States”. His reasoning: “In our time we have been the victims of a geographical metaphor, or a figure of space: we have tried to compensate for the limitations of the little community by envisaging the big community, which is not necessarily bigger spiritually or culturally than the little community.”
Beginning from materialistic principles, globalism sees the inadequacy in regionalism and attempts to solve the issue with a material increase. The arrived upon solution, Transnational Progressivism, is an attempt to continually integrate all localities into one region. However, it is in all reality, what Tate might characterize as “mere rules of plunder which look like cooperation.”
Before we go further, allow me to elucidate a few possible confusions. It may have puzzled the reader to use words like local, regional and provincial in an abstract way. They suggest a geographical context, but Tate has used them with a more expansive meaning. I would say that we have been using these words to denote a worldview or attitude, and connote a sense of location. Indeed, the point of the concepts we have been discussing is that worldview cannot (or should not) be wholly divorced from physicality, in both the human body and geography. The fact that we are using these words conceptually despite their material sense is fitting to the communicated idea.
The other matter I would like to address is the literary aspect. Tate says that the global world-region “has a bearing on literature today.” I would like to draw out something that he does not quite discuss—the importance of the word “local.” The local is from where we draw our poetry. Our locality, what is immediately around us, supplies us with the materials of our art. Our poetic palette is composed of “colors” taken from the local. Our senses, our experiences and the events that occur around us, fill the artistic reservoir, which we later pour out in the workings of our art.
The question of locality becomes: What happens when the local is everywhere? What happens when the local is integrated into the world-region? Transnational Progressivism compels transhuman artistry. Our “palette of colors” (which is our senses and our surroundings) becomes every color—every sense, from everywhere, all the time. Our poetic palette is afflicted by intense and ceaseless positivization. It is always accruing more senses and more surroundings. Every locality has to be integrated into the world-region.
As Tate sees it, when the “regional principle” is extended to the global scale, regionalism degrades into provincialism. Our localities (which is the language we use to express ourselves) constrain our regions—the area wherein we can effectively communicate. Local and regional limits, having been broken by transnational progressivism, no longer maintain language and therefore we suffer communicative and expressive breakdown. Behold the New Provincialism.
Tate gives us another peek at the positivization that afflicts our locality, “Having destroyed our regional societies in the West, we are fanatically trying to draw other peoples into our provincial orbit, for the purpose of ‘saving’ them.” I might add that nowadays, we seem to believe that it is they who will save us.
Tate examines the economics of the world-region, “Industrial capitalism has given us provincialism without regionalism: we are committed to chance solutions of ‘problems’ that seem unique because we have forgotten the nature of man.” He adds, “nineteenth-century industrial capitalism and our own more advanced technology have made it very difficult for ‘backward peoples’ (to say nothing of ourselves in small units and groups) to make their living independently of somebody else nine thousand miles away. In other words we have destroyed the regional economies, and we offer a provincial remedy for the resulting evils; that is to say, a Utopian remedy which ignores our past experience.” I think it's fair to assume he would agree that the literary “economy” has been destroyed too. The “fund of traditional wisdom” is overdrawn.
Tate describes the destruction of the regional economy, “For the myth of science which undermined this culture and created the modern economic man rooted out the regional economies, and is now creating a world regional economy. Regional economy means interdependence of the citizens of a region”.
He warns us, “The individual human being will probably have in the future as in the past a natural economy [local production of goods] to which he can occasionally return, if he is not meddled with too much by power at a distance. This natural economy cannot be an effective check upon the standardizing forces of the outside world without the protection of the regional consciousness.” Without regional consciousness, our unprotected provincial consciousnesses will be standardized—remade in the image of the modern economy of money and of words. We are being “meddled” with.
III.
Now if in Tate’s view, regionalism and nationalism are deficient, and the global solution is intolerable, what is sufficient? He begins, “For the logical opposite, or the historic complement, of the isolated community or region is not the world community or world region...The complement of the regional principle, the only force which in the past has kept the region (of whatever size) from being provincial, from being committed to the immediate interest, is a nonpolitical or supra-political culture”
What is this supra-political culture? Historical Christianity in the West: “A peculiar balance of Greek culture and Christian other-worldliness, both imposed by Rome upon the northern barbarians. It was this special combination that made European civilization, and it was this that men communicated in the act of living together.”
He elucidates further, “In the West our peculiar civilization was based upon regional autonomy, whose eccentricities were corrected and sublimated by the classical-Christian culture which provided a form for the highest development of man’s potentialities as man. Man belonged to his village, valley, mountain, or seacoast; but wherever he was he was a Christian whose Hebraic discipline had tempered his tribal savagery and whose classical humanism had moderated the literal imperative of his Christianity to suicidal other-worldliness.”
Our new provincial status has been caused by a decline in Christianity. “Only men who are committed to perverse illusion or to public oratory believe that we have a Christian civilization today: we still have Christians in every real sense, but in neither politics nor education, by and large, do Christian motives or standards, or even references, have an effective part.” I would like to remind the reader that Tate is writing in 1945.
He says succinctly, “Regionalism without civilization—which means, with us, regionalism without the classical Christian culture —becomes provincialism; and world regionalism becomes world provincialism.”
Without the supra-political unity of Christianity, the world-region has fallen into world provincialism. He characterizes this non-Christian civilization as saying, “We do not ask: Is this right? We ask: Will this work?” That question is representative of only half of our tradition—the Greek half. Further, “it stands for only half of the Greek spirit, the empirical or scientific half which gives us our technology.” The empirical part of our tradition is only a fraction of the complete patrimony, yet it became the dominating characteristic of our culture. It was founded as the “myth of science.”
Tate continues, “Technology without Christianity is, I think, barbarism quite simply; but barbarism refined, violent, and decadent, not the vigorous barbarism of the forest and the soil.” By destroying regionalism, we have attempted to curb the excesses of “tribal savagery” but the resulting provincialism has only served to remove the tribe and retain the savagery alone.
IV.
Tate reflects on the provincial consciousness, “We are committed to this state of mind. We are so deeply involved in it (I make no exception of myself) that we must participate in its better purposes, however incomplete they may be”. Tate does not see much of an alternative, “From now on we are committed to seeing with, not through the eye: we, as provincials who do not live anywhere.”
Tate says that despite the prevailing provincial consciousness we must continue to act and write. “I am convinced that even the die-hard traditionalist would deny his own shrinking tradition if he refused to act for the remnant of it left because he can’t have it all.”
Tate concludes his thinking by discussing how provincialism has colored the reception of Southern literature. “The provincial views [that is, the provincial ideas of Northern and Eastern critics] of Southern writing of the recent renascence followed a direction somewhat as follows: The South, backward and illiberal, and controlled by white men who cherish a unique moral perversity, does not offer in itself a worthy subject to the novelist or the poet; it follows that the only acceptable literature that the South can produce must be a literature of social agitation, through which the need of reform may be publicized.”
Having been subjugated to provincialism, Southern Literature, and indeed all regional literature, must act towards a certain social purpose. Literature must serve the Transnational Progressive project. Under world-provincialism, art must work to integrate all localities and regions into a uni-vocal expression of Humanity. Returning to our analogy of the “color palette,” all the colors must be represented all the time. The Other must always be shown to be the Same.
Individual “colors” (individual localities) are allowed, but it must be demonstrated that they fit into the provincial schematic. They must show a willingness to evacuate their memories and submit to the strictures of time, and therefore manipulation by the world provincialism. Southern literature can continue to speak, but only in pretense. As Tate says, it must produce “social agitation.” Hence why the critic’s praise-word of choice became: “Subversive.”
The literature of social agitation isn’t even properly moral. If it was moral, it would be concerned with dividing good and evil. However, social agitation is about the need for reform and the ability to control the socio-political order. The agitating literature of the provincial writer ceases to be art and degrades into propaganda. Instead, we would be better served by its opposite—the literature of the traditional writer.
Tate contrasts the two writers, “By the traditional as opposed to the provincial writer, I mean the writer who takes the South as he knows it today or can find out about it in the past, and who sees it as a region with some special characteristics, but otherwise offering as an imaginative subject the plight of human beings as it has been and will doubtless continue to be, here and in other parts of the world.”
Even when the provincial and traditional writers agree on the same set of facts, or the same problem to be addressed, there is a great divide between them. “It is a difference between two worlds: the provincial world of the present, which sees in material welfare and legal justice the whole solution to the human problem; and the classical-Christian world, based upon the regional consciousness, which held that honor, truth, imagination, human dignity, and limited acquisitiveness, could alone justify a social order however rich and efficient it may be”.
Tate encouragingly posits that the traditional world “could do much to redeem an order dilapidated and corrupt, like the South today, if a few people passionately hold those beliefs.” Perhaps we could try seeing through the eye once more, and reporting what we see.
V.
I would like to conclude with a few reflections on what we can take from Tate’s essay. My first reflection is about the supra-political unity that Tate claims is necessary for a mature regionalism (and for a mature literature.) Tate argues that when the principles of regionalism are applied to the entire world, the social order degrades into provincialism. He also says that regionalism has certain inadequacies, which carry over to the provincial society. It appears as if our current world provincialism—the Transnational Progressive project—also has realized this weakness; And has attempted a solution.
I believe that the Transnational project has attempted to create a supra-political unity to shore up its own vulnerabilities. It has chosen to adopt the Religion of Humanity. The provincial world has played a Humanitarian gambit to advance its aims and solve its problems of social cohesion. They are using this “religion” to produce a moral vision for their subjects. In Christianity, we are sinners, we are servants and we are disciples of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ; In Humanity we are a “decent heckin’ person.” Our moral imagination is fed with the thin gruel of “being a good human being,” showing “empathy,” and rectifying “marginalization.”
In the religion of Humanity you practice the sacrament of confessing your sins of discrimination, the sacrament of consumerism and the sacrament of abortion. (There will always be blood. There is no religion without expiation by blood.) We will never annihilate the need to worship. The question is always: What will we worship? And how?
The Religion of Humanity is the simulacrum of Christianity. The Christianity of Humanity is only pretense, just as expressed identity in Humanity is only pretense. It is a pretense for the exercise of religious power. The political philosopher Pierre Manent says “This religious power or authority is exercised ‘democratically’ by all the members of the body on each one, and by each one on all. Thus, one can describe this power, not as that of religion over society, but as that which society exercises over itself by means of religion.”3
One more important point: Humanity appeals to the pious and impious alike. Using Tate’s phrase “mere rules of plunder,” we can see that Humanity is attractive to the materially inclined as well: What Chivalry was to Conflict, Humanity is to “Mutual Plunder.” In the religion of Humanity, countries can rob each other and still get rich.The question, of course, is who gets the lucre?
My second reflection is concerned with the consequences of the Digital Revolution. The provincial mindset which Tate describes, especially with its isolated time-sense, is extraordinarily akin to the Digitally induced mindset of today.
Self-alienation and bewilderment have their beginnings much prior to digital technology. Under this conception, networking technology has served to exacerbate the latent provincial mind. It has only increased the “democratically” exercised power of all upon all. The increased velocity of the digital mind has heightened the “immature senility” of provincialism, and it has made that senility accessible to everyone at all times. If Tate was exaggerating when he said that the provincial man will “begin every day as if there had been no yesterday”, it is hyperbole no more.
However, the consequences of the Digital revolution are not yet over, and many have not yet begun, and indeed things have changed since Tate’s writing in 1945. Things have gotten better and worse. Our provincialism has gotten worse. The narcissistic myopia has intensified—often manifesting as belligerent and autistic communication. Christian efficacy has continued to shrink, though its remaining adherents (and converts) are growing in fortitude.
The “myth of science” is steadily waning as a means of knowing. However, the myth of technology stays stalwart, for technological gains at the moment continue apace. Industrial capitalism is no longer creating globalism—it has created globalism. Its long-term effects are now beginning to settle in.
Personal digital practice has, yet again, caused a shift in our relation to language. Personally, therein lay some of my greatest hopes and greatest concerns. What are the limits of a self-referential, hyper-real language? What are the psychic consequences of its use? The probable damages leave me uneasy. Provincial men are increasingly comfortable with the severance of Language and Being, or at least Language and Responsibility.
Let us return to Tate’s phrase “seeing with the eye, not through the eye.” What happens when the eyes point inward and man only sees himself? Or if the eyes cross, and gaze only at each other? Certainly a deformation of Man and Reality, just as it would be a deformation of the human face. The provincial man looks self-ward, not reflectively but defensively, to set his sight upon the darkness of the void where he no longer understands himself.
In the deformed provincial configuration, Man folds himself round and eats his own feet—the Ouroboros of Humanity. This is an attempt to become wholly self-sufficient and complete unto himself in hopes of an earthly construction for eternal rest. He may have immanentized the eschaton, but he has only managed to enter the Eternal Moment of Senility.
As a point of optimism, I will say this: No simulacrum is made ex nihilo. Even at the highest levels of simulation and self-reference, signs have grounding in created things. The simulacrum originates from somewhere. Men originate from somewhere. It seems an absurdity to use Creation to erase Creation from Creation.
Even if we see with our eyes, we still see. Though the light is dim, indeed even when the light has gone, hope remains—even in darkness the Voice remains.
“Who among you fears the Lord
and obeys the voice of his servant,
who walks in darkness
and has no light,
yet trusts in the name of the Lord
and relies upon his God?
Behold, all you who kindle a fire,
who set brands alight!
Walk by the light of your fire,
and by the brands which you have kindled!
This shall you have from my hand:
you shall lie down in torment.”
Isaiah 50:10-11The essay can be found in Tate’s Essays of Four Decades. The essay is a profitable read, I have certainly not exhausted it in this piece.
This essay can be found in Francis’ Beautiful Losers. In fact, the entire book has many elucidations of the Southern Insight.
Taken from the chapter “Christianity and Democracy” from Manent’s The Religion of Humanity. I have taken this quote somewhat out of context, but I believe I have fairly applied it.
You should send this in a letter to IKEA, architects of our narcoleptic beige-world. Great as always, Nik