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The Magnificent Seven is a post-liberal idyll The epic western is an extended metaphor for the contrast between liberals and communitarians


April 2, 2020   5 mins

It was 60 years ago that the beautiful and shaven headed Yul Brynner muscled his way onto the big screen in The Magnificent Seven, the best western movie ever made. Initially, at least, the film didn’t do well in the US. But in Europe we loved it. And I particularly loved it — both as a teenager, and even more so as the years have gone by. So much of my politics and theology are distilled in that film.

Watching it again this week, I was amazed by how it also echoes our contemporary political concerns. Over half a century before David Goodhart pointed out the contrasting ‘anywheres’ and ‘somewheres’, The Magnificent Seven dramatised precisely this tension in its depiction of the anywhere gunfighters and the somewhere farmers. The Magnificent Seven strikes me as the post-liberal film par excellence.

If you haven’t seen it, you really should stop reading and go do so immediately. And for those with sketchy memories, here is a quick recap. Bandits, led by the wonderfully slippery Eli Wallach, descend from the Mexican hills to terrorise a village of very ordinary (and rather boring) arable farmers. Unable to defend themselves, the village leadership decides to recruit a number of hired guns to do so on their behalf. So off they go to the local town, without much in the way of money to offer their would-be defenders. And there they meet Chris – played by Brenner. Chris recruits six more misfits, all of them drifters, all of them super cool, none of them able to stay in one place.

Spoiler alert: the alliance of farmer and gunfighter is successful in seeing off the bandits — at the cost, though, of several lives. And the action scenes are terrific. But philosophically, it is this contrast between gunfighter and farmer that I have long found fascinating. And the crucial difference between them is one of mobility.

In Sapiens: A brief history of humankind, Yuval Noah Harari locates the agricultural revolution to a period roughly some 10,000 years ago when humankind, having survived as a hunter and forager for over two million years, began to domesticate various plants and animals, thus to have a better control over its food supply. Harari calls this revolution “history’s biggest fraud” because he believes that what actually happened here is that plants, like wheat, domesticated human beings rather than the other way round, crops turning people into its willing slaves. Humans ended up doing back-breaking work in the fields so that crops like wheat could spread themselves over every corner of the planet.

Of course, the cultivation of crops enabled human beings to produce far more calories per unit of territory than foraging ever could. And this enabled the human population to expand exponentially, thus putting even more pressure on the food supply, thus necessitating an even greater emphasis on agriculture. Alongside this deepening spiral there were other unintended consequences as well. As Harari puts it: “Nor did the farmers foresee that in good years their bulging granaries would tempt thieves and enemies, compelling them to start building walls and doing guard duty.” In other words, the premise of story of The Magnificent Seven is as old as human settlement itself.

The agricultural revolution produced a class of human beings who were, for the first time, rooted — their crops, quite literally — to a particular geographical spot. The metaphor of rootedness is one that had been picked up by the post-liberal moment as key to understanding our current predicament. Sir Roger Scruton told me before he died that Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots was one of the foremost influences upon his philosophy of place. And the lament at feeling “deracinated” — uprooted — is a familiar complaint in contemporary discourse.

But with rootedness comes vulnerability. For to grow crops is to be tied to one place. There is no running away, no moving on when the going gets tough. One’s very survival is staked to a particular geographical patch of land. And staying put, in the face of bandits like Calvera (played by Wallach) requires courage.

Back in the late 1990’s, I was teaching philosophy at Oxford, and I would often encourage my students to watch The Magnificent Seven. So many of them were brilliant at pulling down the philosophical positions of other people without ever proposing a position of their own. I used to call this “gunfighter cool”. They would arrive into a subject, shoot things down and blow things up, then move on. Like the gunfighters, they took no responsibility for anything.

But if you want to impress me, I used to say, try defending territory. Say what it is you stand for, and not just what you are against. And then wait for the bandits that will come over the hill for you. That is intellectual bravery, I would say. Defending territory is the only way to develop ideas, to make them grow.

This story of the vulnerable heroism of the farmer was one that I would draw upon quite heavily later in my life, during and after my troubled time at St Paul’s Cathedral. A few months after I resigned following Occupy, I gave a lecture at the BBC Free Thinking festival in Gateshead. I called it ‘The Magnificent Seven and the Crisis of Commitment’,  and in it I began to develop the idea that the bravery of the farmer, that of being staked to a place, was also a kind of spiritual bravery. There is a sort of “here I stand I can do no other” quality about the spirituality of the farmer. Someone one might even call “belief” – which is to say, something I don’t always know how to defend, but which I know to be the source of deep nourishment nonetheless.

In more recent years, I have come to see my favourite cowboy western as an extended metaphor for the contrast between liberals and communitarians. The gunfighters are all classic liberal individualists. They prize self-reliance, mobility, they hate being tied down, without loyalty to country or town. Their fantasy is of the unencumbered life.

Three years before The Magnificent Seven was released, Jack Kerouac published On the Road, that seminal text of the beat generation that one critic of the described as “a portrait of a disjointed segment of society acting out of its own neurotic necessity”. On the Road was a stunning achievement, the critic argued, “but it is a road, as far as the characters were concerned, that leads nowhere”. The Seven’s gunfighters are cut from the same cloth. They too are drifters, with nothing to pattern their existence other than their immediate desires.

At the film’s end, the youngest of the gunfighters falls for a beautiful woman in the village. He is faced with a choice: follow the two remaining gunfighter heroes to a life of effortless cool, living out of cheap hotel rooms and under the stars, going from bar to bar and fight to fight; or give it all up for decidedly uncool, settled domesticity. Gunfighters make terrible fathers, of course. Because children — like crops — require those who planted the seed to stay put. The gunfighter chooses the girl, symbolically takes off his gun belt, lets it fall to the floor, and settles down to help her with the harvest.

The US was not ready for this message back in 1960. And not for many decades after. Yet for me, it was people like the poet/farmer Wendell Berry that most fully exemplified resistance to the dominant culture of liberal individualism, with its emphasis on continual mobility and disparagement of place. And it is other farmers also — like James Rebanks writing beautifully in UnHerd yesterday — that remain the foremost exponents of this heroic loyalty to place, and from whom we in these lock-down times have so much to learn.

The final scene of the film sums up the message. As the final two gunfighters ride out of the village, the village elder warns them that the gunfighters are always destined to lose. They are “like the wind, blowing over the land and passing on”. The Yul Brynner character agrees. “The Old Man was right. Only the farmers won. We lost. We’ll always lose.”


Giles Fraser is a journalist, broadcaster and Vicar of St Anne’s, Kew.

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Andrew Baldwin
Andrew Baldwin
4 years ago

It’s odd that Gilles Fraser doesn’t mention Kurosawa’s film “Seven Samurai” on which “The Magnificent Seven” was based. I liked them both, but there was a melancholy sadness about the passing of an era about “Seven Samurai” that wasn’t, and couldn’t be duplicated in “The Magnificent Seven”. All the samurai in the film that are killed die of gunshot wounds. They have awesome fighting skills, but they aren’t really appropriate to the modern age, and so their days are numbered. The samurai leader is aware of their weakness himself, which is why he keeps such a meticulous tally of how many guns the outlaws still have since they seize some in the fighting.
As Gilles says, one of the gunslingers decides to stay in the Mexican village with a beautiful Mexican peasant girl. It is a very one world kind of movie. True love will win out over differences in race, mother tongue and nationality. “Seven Samurai” takes a more realistic view of the strength of the forces that divide people, however well-intentioned they may be. I had misremembered “Seven Samurai” and thought that the samurai who falls in love with the peasant girl (remember, they are of the same race, mother tongue and nationality, only their social class is different) goes off with the two other surviving samurai at the end of the film. But watching the ending again, Kurosawa actually left the viewer hanging. The beautiful peasant girl brushes past the samurai without saying anything to him. She thinks he has already decided to leave and has no use for him. His two companions are on horseback waiting for him to join them. He walks partway in the direction of the girl, who is working in the rice paddies, singing with the other peasants. We are left wondering whether he will leave with his friends or stay and try to win her back.

Douglas Hall
Douglas Hall
4 years ago

Hi Giles. Brilliant article! How come I appreciate your writing so much more here than when I used to read it in The Guardian?

Dave Weeden
Dave Weeden
4 years ago
Reply to  Douglas Hall

I’ve had exactly the same experience.

Calvin Goddard
Calvin Goddard
4 years ago

The young gunfighter who stayed in the village with the girl wasn’t really one of the “nowhere” gunfighters. If you remember, we discover at the end that he came from such a village himself. He desperately wanted to be a gunfighter like the rest, but in the end, he admitted that he was only fooling himself. He was like the villagers and knew that for him, staying as a farmer with the girl was the right thing to do.

G. Ian Goodson
G. Ian Goodson
4 years ago

There’s a John Wayne film where Wayne’s character (gunfighter) is idolised by a small Mexican boy who despises his peon (farmer) father. Wayne gives the boy a talk about real courage. Staying in place through good and bad harvests; never giving up etc. It’s a sort of one man version of TM7. it’s a neat speech as well. I wish I could remember which film it was.

Chris Waghorn
Chris Waghorn
4 years ago

Excellent article; a film I have admired since childhood. Like Andrew Baldwin below, I am surprised by the omission of any mention of the Seven Samurai.

The late author David Gemmell used to explore this point about farmers and warriors in many of his works. I recommend them wholeheartedly.

JR Stoker
JR Stoker
4 years ago

Never contradict the Rector during his sermon, of course. But I have to shout “No!” in the opening sentence. The best western ever made is of course “Once Upon A Time In The West”, Sergio Leone directing, Ennio Morricone musicing, and a star list much too long to attempt – but starting with Henry Fonda as the seriously sadistic baddie.

The point of this irruption though is not to argue westerns – but to congratulate Mr Fraser on his brilliantly argued analysis and explanation of the philosophy underlying “The Magnificent Seven”, at a point in our suddenly changed lives where these themes will be played out again, though hopefully not to the sounds of gunfire. “Once Upon A…” holds the same truths: the end of the individualism of the frontierman, the rise of society where none grew before, orderly governance replacing the six shooter. As our wounded semi-heroes depart in search of one final frontier to make free on, the township is running horse-bus services, sustains a Chinese laundry, and Jill is feeding the railroad workers who will make her ranch prosperous.

The Wild West is leaving and the liberal inclusive democratic American dream is arriving. With results the store keepers and ranchers cannot possibly have imagined. The message is the same as “Seven”, but maybe spelled out a little more emotionally, with some remarkably fine acting and cinematography, and the finest score of any movie.

Michael Whittock
Michael Whittock
4 years ago

Thanks for your article Giles.
Two points.
I think the Anywhere/Somewhere phenomenon is actually illustrated in many westerns. I’m thinking of Clint Eastwood’s “Pale Rider” and “High Plains Drifter ” in particular.
Secondly the Church of England continues to show its commitment to both Somewheres and Anywheres through its parish system. The theory is that every person in England lives in a parish which has a parish priest and a parish church to whom and to which they can turn at anytime. The system is creaking because reduced person power and reduced finances have meant that a priest can now have several parishes to look after. But the commitment remains and many priests are heroic in the way they continue their ministry, often single handed, in difficult and stressful circumstances. And their commitment is to all who need them including Anywheres who have to live somewhere in somebody’s parish.
So God bless you Giles and all parish priests.

JR Stoker
JR Stoker
4 years ago

Which makes it a loss that the churches are now closed and the doors locked against those who may not need formalised religion, but would appreciate a sacramental place to pray and contemplate

Michael Whittock
Michael Whittock
4 years ago

Yes- parish churches are another sign of the Church’s commitment to communities and most are normally open for the very purpose you describe. Those that aren’t are often in high risk areas ( theft, vandalism ) and insurance costs are prohibitive.
Some body once said that churches make God “findable”. The reference was not only to the building but also to the worship, preaching, praying and fellowship which goes on inside it

Marco Federighi
Marco Federighi
4 years ago

I remember the film, and the way Giles relates it to the anywhere/somewhere dynamics seems spot on to me. However, I don’t think that everyone falls into one or the other of the two “tribes”: most of the people I know have elements of Anywhere and of Somewhere in their personality, culture and in the way they act and react to what life throws at them. This is true of peoples as well, Jews being a case in point – Somewheres in their attachment to the land of Israel, but Anywheres in their ability to survive and thrive in different places and cultures. And their contribution to our civilisation falls into both realms – the Torah, and the individual contrbutions of so many Jewish thinkers, artists, scientists – complementary, not in opposition.

simonclarke74
simonclarke74
4 years ago

This is a really good point, and not made enough in the ‘anywheres/somewheres’ dichotomy. Is it also possible that one can be an anywhere that is nostalgic for the lost somewhere that can never be recovered? Or be a somewhere that yearns for the anywhere that will never be possible to achieve?

Marco Federighi
Marco Federighi
4 years ago
Reply to  simonclarke74

Yes, I think it is possible. There are historical examples – John Adams, the second President of the USA, being one, a somewhere by instinct who understood the need for anywheres in his new country. I also think that the movie, the Magnificent Seven, shows that the Somewheres sometimes need the Anywheres – in this particular case, the farmers needed the good gunmen to eliminate the bad ones. The two are complementary, I think. At certain times the ones, or the others, are needed – most often both.