Principle 6

A New Agrarian strives to integrate the economic and spiritual aspects of his or her life.

Modern society—or capitalist, industrial, postindustrial, postmodern, however you choose to categorize it—asks us to separate our work from the rest of our lives. Work and family, far from being integrated, compete for our attention. Home and workplace are separated not only psychologically but physically, requiring long and wasteful commutes. Worse, work is rarely expected to be personally meaningful in any way. Most of us are happy if our work does not too openly conflict with our values; that it could actually put our values into practice is nearly unthinkable.
The psychological and cultural damage done by this separation of the economic and spiritual aspects of our lives I will, for the moment, take to be self-evident. The New Agrarian believes that it is both possible and necessary to unite the two, to make our work both economically productive and spiritually satisfying. This is not an endorsement of the Protestant work ethic. The New Agrarian does not value work for its own sake, but values work to the extent that it produces something of value and to the extent that either the product or the process is spiritually rewarding. Work should be more than an exchange of labor for capital; it should have a positive personal, social, and cultural context.
This unity of the economic and the spiritual extends beyond work. We would be happier, the New Agrarian believes, if the food we ate came from land and people we knew or from our own labor, if our purchases reflected our beliefs, if the products of our labor remained in a community of which we were a part and might make that community stronger—in short, if every aspect our lives had a positive social or cultural context.

>> 7. neighborliness