Chris Smaje. Finding Lights in a Dark Age: Sharing Land, Work and Craft. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2025. $24.95. 256 pp.
Most of us don’t live an agrarian lifestyle because we don’t want it badly enough. I’ve got a collection of the Foxfire books on my shelf, with their instructions for rustic Appalachian living. I toy with the idea of homesteading in some mountain valley, but the truth is I like my weather-tight home and indoor plumbing. I don’t want to give up the gadgets that make me comfortable. I also realize that to carve out that lifestyle requires a strong support network of similarly minded neighbors.
The most significant barriers to the sort of society that could rebuild after an ecological and economic collapse aren’t technological, they’re social. That’s where Chris Smaje, a small-scale farmer and sociologist, can help with his book, Finding Lights in a Dark Age: Sharing Land, Work and Craft. He lays out some of his reasons to believe that modernity is on the verge of collapse, but more significantly he points readers toward the primary solution to flourishing in the future: building community.
According to Smaje, our current civilization is certainly going to end. When it does, he anticipates a return to something like “the ruralism and political innovation of the post-Roman or postimperial Dark Ages.” Such a shift would require the adoption of distributism, a political economy in which “there’s widespread or distributed private access to land and other means of generating a livelihood for most people.” Distributism entails rejection of the centralizing tendencies of both industrial capitalism and socialism. It is drawn from Catholic Social Teaching. It’s also never been implemented at any scale.
Smaje, who isn’t a Roman Catholic, first published his version of distributism in his 2020 book, A Small Farm Future. His general critique of the social, political, and ecological effects of large-scale agribusiness fits within the agrarian perspective, alongside writers like James Rebanks, Wendell Berry, and the late Gene Logsdon. The idea is that culture was more humane and environmentally friendly when a larger portion of the population understood where their food came from and took an active role in putting it on the table.
His social vision isn’t constrained merely to farming; it also includes a deep concern for other vocations. Smaje notes that to achieve his desired future “will involve rebuilding local mosaics and making ourselves local ecological protagonists as farmers, craftspeople and weavers of human and ecological connection.” He admits freely that such a future will require economic self-limitation, a willingness to build and maintain inconvenient human connections and, especially, a deeper focus on the family as a basic social unit. There’s something to offend and attract every conventional thinker.
There is no doubt that Smaje is thinking carefully about alternative options for the future. His previous book, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, was a direct and detailed response to George Monbiot’s ecomodernist vision in Regenesis. Not only did Smaje debunk the rosy assumptions Monbiot relied upon, but he raised meaningful concerns about vocation, a sense of place, and whether a diet of food sourced from vats of bacteria is worth living on.
I have my own concerns about some of Smaje’s proposals—for example, his support for the Marxist squatters in Brazil, known as the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST)—yet on balance, he should be applauded for presenting a constructive proposal for the future. It’s much easier to critique the imperfections of existing systems than to make real proposals for alternatives.
It’s unlikely that Monbiot’s proposal would work mathematically; it’s impossible for his ultra-urbanist future to arise without a level of centralized government coercion unthinkable to most readers. To Smaje’s credit, he’s not only proposed a better solution, he’s taken steps to live in the manner he prescribes to the extent reasonable in this culture, including dealing with the interpersonal conflict that arises from shared access to a freezer.
There’s little romanticism as Smaje wrestles with the low-wages and general inconvenience of the small, non-monetary markets that would result from his distributism. He also admits that “for all the positive stories and good energies they involve, current localist efforts cumulatively aren’t anything like enough” to overcome the excesses of our culture. It’s unlikely we can avoid the cultural collapse; he’s just trying to prepare readers to rebuild in the midst of ruins. A smattering of doom and hope are intermingled in judicious measure.
Real Challenge
The biggest obstacle to the sort of humane culture Smaje imagines isn’t politics or economics. It’s that, whatever we might say, we aren’t ready to make the lifestyle changes required to achieve it. Most of us really want the comforts of modernity and the ethos of an older era—this is why the parking lots of Renaissance fairs are so full. We’re happy to play at antiquity on a weekend, knowing zippy WiFi and grocery delivery await us back home.
In fact, there are already communities, like the Bruderhof, where something close to an anti-modern culture is available to those willing to uproot and live by their guidelines. Though the Amish population consistently doubles every 20-25 years, that’s primarily due to high retention and birth rates. Little is stopping anyone from approximating at least some of the communitarian suggestions Smaje outlines.
However, unless circumstances force our culture broadly to adopt an alternative lifestyle, it’s unlikely to become popular. Part of this is that the localist agrarian life requires people to “let go of a sense of individualist freedom and self-fashioning, and to embrace the idea that self-realization is possible only within the limiting (but also enabling) structures of already given communities and families—and, what’s more, communities with spiritual underpinnings.” We’d have to give up our right to self-expression and adopt a religious outlook that fits within the community.
This is the sort of book that is worth reading, because Smaje makes his arguments so carefully. More significantly, he’s knocking on the door of deeply Christian ideas like the value of community, family, and vocation, though he does so via common grace. He borrows from thinkers like Alasdair MacIntyre, but believes he can achieve the same results without a Roman Catholic foundation. I’m skeptical that the sort of durable community many of us long for can be achieved without a substantially shared worldview. Nevertheless, Finding Lights in a Dark Age offers a powerful encouragement to build stronger bonds where we are, even before civilization collapses.