The point of going to the bookstore is to experience its glorious inefficiency, its Romantic signaling of something transcendent, its countercultural cultivation of quietude and dignity. 

The preservation of these qualities, the qualities which the remnant of independent local bookstores represent, ought to preoccupy conservatives. It is we, those who most ardently resist the values of our age, who ought to be about the business of actively cultivating all that the small, independent bookstore betokens. Regardless of what they stock, such places serve as an outpost of ideas and attitudes our culture has rejected, an oasis of value in a copious sea of junk.

Unfortunately, we conservatives are too often in the grip of the kind of free-market fanaticism that fetishizes global competition and its twin evil, efficiency. In this, as in so many other things, conservatives have operated in ways counter to our professed goals. Like everything else in modern America, our conservatism is shallow, geared not toward the active cultivation of institutions which, like the neighborhood bookstore, propound in their very being lasting values, but rather geared toward reflexive hatred of Democrats and kneeling football players. 

For this reason, movement conservatism has something dire in common with the local, independent bookstore: Both could disappear. Preventing that will require turning conservatives’ attention away from the daily convulsions of the mainstream media and back to deep reflection on the lasting virtues of the true, the good, and the beautiful. We must deepen our hearts and refine our minds if we desire a future that reflects all we hold dear. Such a change can only happen, of course, on the individual level by those willing to sit a while, willing to read and consider, willing to be quiet and inefficient.

Dean Abbott, "The Glorious Inefficiency of Local Bookstores"

In this difficult time of failed public expectations, when thoughtful people wonder where to look for hope, I keep returning in my own mind to the thought of the renewal of the rural communities. I know that one resurrected rural community would be more convincing and more encouraging than all the government and university programs of the last fifty years, and I think that it could be the beginning of the renewal of our country, for the renewal of rural communities ultimately implies the renewal of urban ones. But to be authentic, a true encouragement and a true beginning, this would have to be a resurrection accomplished mainly by the community itself. It would have to be done, not from the outside by the instruction of visiting experts, but from the inside by the ancient rule of neighborliness, by the love of precious things, and by the wish to be at home.

Wendell Berry, "The Work of Local Culture"

Gaining Ground: A Story of Farmers' Markets, Local Food, and Saving the Family Farm by Forrest Pritchard
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a great story by a man (an English major nonetheless) who realized that farming was just in his blood, and who didn't want to lose the family farm to Big Ag or urban sprawl. This book is well-written and encouraging. My wife and I are now following Smith Meadows on Facebook, and I hope to read his next book too.

View all my reviews

In an essay republished on The Imaginative Conservative, T. S. Eliot gives his views on local culture.

Nearly every country, that has been long settled, is a composite of different local cultures; and even when it is completely homogeneous in race, it will, between east and west, or more often between north and south, exhibit differences of speech, of customs, and of ways of thinking and feeling. A small country of course, is usually assumed by foreigners to be much more unified than it r is: and although the educated foreigner is aware that Britain contains within its small area several races and several languages, he may underestimate the importance of both the friction, and the often happy combination toward a common end, of the different types. It is a commonplace that industrialism (of which totalitarianism is a political expression) tends to obliterate these differences, to uproot men from their ancestral habitat, to mingle them in large manufacturing and business centers, or to send them hither and thither as the needs of manufacture and distribution may dictate. In its political aspect, industrialism tends to centralize the direction of affairs in one large metropolis, and to diminish that interest in, and control over, local affairs by which men gain political experience and sense of responsibility. Against this tendency, “regionalism”—as in the demand, from time to time, for greater local autonomy in Scotland or in Wales—is a protest.

T.S. Eliot, "The Man of Letters and the Future of Europe"

Some highlights from Rod Dreher's "Manifesto" in Crunchy Cons:

• "Modern conservatism has become too focused on material conditions, and insufficiently concerned with the character of society. The point of life is not to become a more satisfied shopper."
  
• "The economy must be made to serve humanity's best interests, not the other way around."
  
• "Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government."
  
• "We believe that culture is more important than politics, and that neither America's wealth nor our liberties will long survive a culture that no longer lives by what Russell Kirk identified as 'the Permanent Things'--those eternal moral norms necessary to civilized life, and which are taught by all the world's great wisdom traditions."
  
• "A conservatism that does not recognize the need for restraint, for limits, and for humility is neither helpful to individuals and society nor, ultimately, conservative. This is particularly true with respect to the natural world."
  
• "A good rule of thumb: Small and Local and Old and Particular are to be preferred over Big and Global and New and Abstract."
  
• "Appreciation of aesthetic quality--that is, beauty--is not a luxury, but key to the good life."
  
• "The cacophony of contemporary popular culture makes it hard to discern the call of truth and wisdom. There is no area in which practicing asceticism is more important."
  
• "Politics and economics will not save us. If we are to be saved at all, it will be through living faithfully by the Permanent Things, preserving these ancient truths in the choices we make in everyday life. In this sense, to conserve is to create anew."

If there is no household or community economy, then family members and neighbors are no longer useful to one another, and . . . family and community fails, and people fall into dependence on exterior economies and organizations. The hegemony of professionals and professionalism erects itself on local failure, and from then on the locality exists merely as a market for consumer goods and as a source of "raw material," human and natural. The local schools no longer serve the local community; they serve the  government's economy and the economy's government. Unlike the local community, the government and the economy cannot be served with affection, but only with professional zeal or professional boredom. . . . This love cannot exist, because it makes no sense, apart from the love of a place and a community.

Wendell Berry, "The Work of Local Culture," from What Are People For?

[Today's] schools are no longer oriented to a cultural inheritance that it is their duty to pass on unimpaired, but to the career, which is to say the future, of the child. The orientation is thus necessarily theoretical, speculative, and mercenary. The child is not educated to return home and be of use to the place and community; he or she is educated to leave home and earn money in a provisional future that has nothing to do with place or community. And parents with children in school are likely to find themselves . . . made useless to them, by the intervention of new educational techniques, technologies, methods, and languages. School systems innovate as compulsively and as eagerly as factories. It is no wonder that, under these circumstances, "educators" tend to look upon the parents as a bad influence and wish to take the children away from home as early as possible. And many parents, in truth, are now finding their children an encumbrance at home, where there is no  useful work for them to do, and are glad enough to turn them over to the state for the use of the future.

Wendell Berry, "The Work of Local Culture," from What Are People For?

When a community loses its memory, its members no longer know one another. How can they know one another if they have forgotten or have never learned one another's stories? If they do not know one another's stories, how can they know whether or not to trust one another? People who do not trust one another do not help one another, and moreover they fear one another. And this is our predicament now. Because of a general distrust and suspicion, we not only lost one another's help and companionship, but we are all now living in jeopardy of being sued.

. . . A good community, as we know, insures itself by trust, by good faith and good will, by mutual help. A good community, in other words, is a good local economy. It depends on itself for many of its essential needs and is thus shaped, so to speak, from the inside--unlike most modern populations that depend on distant purchases for almost everything and are thus shaped from the outside by the purposes and the influence of [advertising].

Wendell Berry, "The Work of Local Culture," from What Are People For?

The nearly intolerable irony in our dissatisfaction [in our lives] is that we have removed pleasure from our work in order to remove "drudgery" from our lives. If I could pick any rule of industrial economics to receive a thorough re-examination by our people, it would be the one that says that all hard physical work is "drudgery" and not worth doing. . . .

That [harvest] can be drudgery is obvious. . . . But for me, and I think for most of the men and women who have been my companions in this work, it has not been drudgery. None of us would say that we take pleasure in all of it all of the time, but we do take pleasure in it, and sometimes the pleasure can be intense and clear. Many of my dearest memories come from these times of hardest work.

The [harvest] is the most protracted social occasion of our year. Neighbors work together . . . There is much talk. . . There is much laughter . . . And there are memories.

The crew to which I belong is the product of kinships and friendships going far back. . . As we work we have before us not only the present crop and the present fields, but other crops and other fields remembered. . . . Old stories are retold; the dead and the aabsent are remembered. . . . Such talk in barns and at row ends must go back without interruption to the first farmers. How long it may continue is an uneasy question; not much longer perhaps, but we do not know. We only know that while it last it can carry us deeply into our shared life and the happiness of farming.

On many days we have had somebody's child or somebody's children with us, playing in the barn or around the patch while we worked, and these have been our best days. One of the most regrettable things about the industrialization of work is the segregation of children . . . [But] the small scale and handwork of our [harvest accomodates their play]. In their play, the children learn to work; they learn their elders and their country. And the presence of playing children means invariably that the grown-ups play too from time to time.

The loss of local culture is, in part, a practical loss and an economic one. For one thing, such a culture contains, and conveys to succeeding generations, the history of the place and the knowledge of how the place may be lived in and used. For another, the pattern of reminding implies affection for the place and respect for it, and so, finally, the local culture will carry the knowledge of how the place may be well and lovingly used, and also the implicit command to use it only only well and lovingly. The only true and effective "operator's manual for . . . earth" is not a book that any human will ever write; it is hundreds of thousands of local cultures.

Lacking an authentic local culture, a place is open to exploitation, and ultimately destruction, from the center.

Wendell Berry, "The Work of Local Culture," from What Are People For?