Реферат: Louis D Rubin On

the Confederate Dead."

The Agrarians declared in their symposium that industrialism was predatory, in that it

was based on a concept of nature as something to be used. In so doing, industrialism threw

man out of his proper relationship to nature, and to God whose creation it was. The

Agrarian quarrel, they declared, was with applied science, which in the form of industrial

capitalism had as its object the enslavement of human energies. Since all activity was

measured by the yardstick of financial gain, the industrial spirit neglected the aesthetic

life. It had the effect of brutalizing labor, removing from it any possibility of

enjoyment.

It must be remembered that most of the Agrarians were speaking not as economists or

sociologists or regional planners or even as professional philosophers; they were speaking

as men of letters. They believed that an Agrarian civilization was the way of life which

permitted the arts to be an integral and valuable social activity, and not, as Ransom put

it, "intercalary and non-participating experiences." Donald Davidson wrote of

the Agrarians that "they sought to force, not so much a theory of economics as a

philosophy of life, in which both economics and art would find their natural places and

not be disassociated into abstract means and abstract ends, as the pseudo-culture of the

world-city would disassociate them."

In an Agrarian community aesthetic activity would not be subordinate to economics. The

artist would be a working member of society, not a person somehow set apart from the

everyday existence of his neighbors. Nature, religion and art would be honored activities

of daily life, and not something superfluous and outmoded, to be indulged when business

permitted. Knowledge—letters, learning, taste, the integrated and rich fullness of

emotion and intellect—would be "carried to the heart," as Tate said in the

Confederate Ode, and not an unassimilated, discordant conglomerate of fragments. In the

words of the poem,

What shall we say who have knowledge

Carried to the heart? Shall we take the act

To the grave? Shall we, more hopeful, set up the grave