It is here where we can enlarge our frame of reference and consider an expanded view. So we have a modern form of homesteading - which in essence is very similar to the premodern form - that in its actual day to day operations differs dramatically from its popular connotations, images, and ideals.
We have accounted for this gap, and really, we can expect to find these divergences when looking at any sort of ideal and its corresponding reality side by side. It is the natural way of things, much like friction and gravity slow down our deliberate progress in a given direction.
Yet we often reason in accordance with pure ideal and its attendant expectations. This can be useful in a highly specialized society which is actually functioning properly, in which there is a circulation between the regions of production of pure reason and the regions of production of practicalities that this reason touches upon, say when academia interfaces with various political and social institutions to form policy. When and where these relationships are functional and accessible to most of the populace is a different question for a different time.
Instead, it may be useful to set this pure reasoning aside and evaluate the combined nature of idea and action. As power in a society concentrates and the society contracts, it may be useful to mirror such a relation and attempt to compress one's understanding across ideas and practicalities, and where these ideas become action and how these relations progress naturally. Much as the idea of "praxis" crops up in times of crisis, there are times when we can alter our approach altogether.
But what I'm getting at is that the resurging interest in homesteading and the drive towards simplification, deceleration, and degrowth seems to pull against the seemingly fundamental drives of what we call "civilization" itself. If one briefly evaluates the defining characteristics of Western civilization for instance, one sees an obsession with an endless expansion into space, of getting off of the ground and out of the dirt, of resisting gravity, of deepening specialization and material complexity, and of accelerating motion and increasing the consumption of energy indefinitely.
On a homestead one slows down, one sets oneself back into the dirt, one generalizes one's skills and simplifies one's material extensions, one contracts and localizes one's efforts, one lowers energy expenditures, and etc. At least this is all relatively speaking.
Indeed, the image of civilization begins to emerge in the homesteading experience itself. As touched on before, one is still working with industrial and manufactured products and resources, and one still harbors sensibilities, instincts, knowledge, and desires taken from that world.
As one labors towards the ideal of simplification and divestment, one witnesses the persistent and recurring interconnections and bindings which form a bridge to the industrial world. As opposed to a clean break, one finds that one is leaving industry slowly, one's motion is decelerating and one's nature is changing, but one is still a product of industry and civilization, and it is a desire that emanates from this corrupting world to seek out previous iterations of simpler and less destructive living.
A picture of civilization begins to emerge which is far stranger than what we tend to imagine. Civilization is not merely that outwardly expanding accumulation of human artifice, but also the product of the effects that artifice has on its surroundings, and it is also the product of its own internal contradictions and pressures - which are partially a result of its interactions with its surroundings and the effects of its own influences - which transform it and regenerate it. We can take a look at all that next, and then finally wrap things up.
