Wendell Berry's Agrarianism

I don’t know if I can convince anyone to respond to my question, but I can ask it anyway.

The first thing for you to do would be to read the essay, ‘Money Versus Goods,’ by Wendell Berry because I think that my question involves the apparent impracticality of Mr. Berry’s writing. In this essay he expounds an ideal that has never existed since Capitalism and Industrialism became the dominant ideals of our society except, of course, in undeveloped regions of the world. Mr. Berry advocates a kind of Agrarianism.

And yet to me although many of his ideas as I read them seem intrinsically sound, they often seem to float free above the real world our society has become. This is the way of philosophy, I suppose. We attempt to describe ideals and then with our reason we connect them to our lives. I think Mr. Berry begins a good effort in the first part of this Agrarian program, although at a level of abstraction that will leave many readers who have not applied their own thinking to these very fundamental questions somewhat adrift.

But if I think Mr. Berry is correct on several key points, a more specific way to connect his critique to our real circumstances must be found.

In ‘Money Versus Goods’ Mr. Berry makes the argument that sustainability is essential and that to achieve sustainability our economy must be ‘real,’ not primarily numbers and abstractions. The land and people are real and with those two elements we should be able to produce food and fiber in ways that are healthy and humane. This is hard to imagine in the present context in which normal production results in yearly losses of topsoil and repeated applications of poisons which end up in our water supply. I won’t repeat all of Mr. Berry’s points, but his criticism of the very common practice of ‘usury’ also points to our difficulty in getting from here to there even if some people see the merit in what he is saying.

I cannot see myself abandoning some of the achievements of Capitalism and Industrialism. I don’t want to live in a skyscraper and I’m glad not to rely on a subway system on a regular basis but I find much to admire in the concentration of wealth that makes cities a potential way of making buildings and institutions that are much more complex than an Amish barn. And some complex technologies, each advance built on earlier advances, might well be worth preserving. Not every application of a computer necessarily has cultural merit, but how do we mesh what does make sense with Agrarian ideals?

Mr. Berry concludes his essay with possible, if unlikely, changes in agriculture - a likely place to begin to try to be more practical in bringing the ideals of Agrarianism to bear within our society.

And so here begins my question. I have thought for some time now that the best solutions to what ails us as a society is to try to live some better way within the husk of a failing culture. The apparent increase of people farming on small scales and selling their produce at local farmer’s markets matters more to me than the perennial hope of electing better representatives to government.

But if ever growing numbers of people are going to see and embrace Agrarian ideals - that is better, sustainable ways of living – it will require a cultural shift that eventually involves many different facets of our society. So the question I now am wrestling with is how do I learn to think new ways of thinking and begin to live in ways that don’t lend my support to systems I abhor but give more of my efforts to better ways of being human? Inevitably the question I now pose is too big. So my real question is what are the questions that have answers that are within my reach?

Still too big? That’s why I would like to hear some responses. In dialogue and over time I think we have a better chance to bring ideals into connection with the real.

I planted potatoes on Friday. Some spinach, lettuce and arugula, as well. I won’t feed myself for very many meals, but I think at least that I’m keeping the faith. If something will get better, it won’t all be up to me, but my goal is to do less in the old world and more in the new with each year I have to live.

Any other ideas?

Mike’s Prairie Numbers

I am mostly interested in these questions of plant germination because they’re interesting – a tautology if there ever was one. I have great respect for the scientific method – call it basically a careful recording of occurrences of things over time. But where science hasn’t gotten around to looking - and examples are numerous – some people have still more loosely employed this method, possibly then noticing some things that a more rigorous study would overlook. Consider Edward Abbey’s descriptions of the desert.

Given the slipperiness of human memory and our easily biased perceptions, there’s a lot to be said for rigor, particularly when we really want to understand how things work. But it seems today, except where money is to be made (think Monsanto), it isn’t much applied. And neither is a more simply observant approach, I fear.

I think of the new generations of organic farmers, with seemingly less attention to collecting hard (quantified) data that they might use and also without the intricate details about beneficial practices that careful farmers used to pass down from old farmer to young farmer. The new breed has books, I guess. I electrified part of my house using one. No fires yet. But nature is far, far more complex than house wiring. Perhaps I’m well off the mark - after all, I have not done a careful survey of farmers’ practices. But there seems to be an awful lot of sloppy thinking in the world of growing and eating food that is more natural or organic.

The Land Institute is a notable exception to this trend, in my opinion.

Where you could benefit as you study your prairie, I suspect, is getting more connected to other people who are interested in prairies and these plants and who are also applying some rigor. But this is also important: although you have some practical objectives, they haven’t submerged your fundamental desire to understand and respect the natural world for what it is.

Where have you gone, Donald Rumsfeld, when we finally get to an area where you begin to make sense?

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know. 

There is little that I enjoy more than catching a glimpse of something that I didn’t even realize I knew nothing about. A good question in the hand is worth a thousand answers in the bush. Except, of course, for actually getting something done now.

And here’s Wendell Berry in ‘Manifesto: The Mad Farmer’s Liberation Front.’

Give your approval to all you cannot understand. Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed. Ask the questions that have no answers.

On the other hand, you can show no greater respect to Nature than observing her ways carefully and recording what she is doing. If that practice leads us reverently into the unknown, so be it.

Except for first securing my fundamental respect, rarely, I find, is there only one right way to look at things. But how is it that so many people have lost even their interest in Nature?

Distracted by what we tell ourselves

What if instead of distilling a philosophy of life based on what people say their ideals and values are, we looked at what people actually do – the way people live and actually spend their time and energy? What if we looked at the greatest society in the history of the world?

We say that we all have a right to pursue happiness but we don’t give everyone a job, or merely the opportunity to work somehow for themselves so that they could earn with their time and effort the money needed to purchase, not just happiness, but their very survival. We insist that the market must be free. That freedom, we imply, is sacred, not human lives.

Yet some easily find exceptions to the idea that people should work for their living. Many are willing to say that anyone has the right to inherit and spend money they never worked a day in their life for.

Clearly the rights of accumulated property overrule the rights of people to earn even their daily bread. But even if it weren’t ordained, our economic system must be the best, the winners say. Look at what wonders we have produced with our accumulated wealth and your labor – when we could benefit from your labor and minimize its costs, that is.

Of course I’m not suggesting that people shouldn’t be entitled to enjoy the fruits of their labor, their property protected, and even shared with their children. Everyone should be granted that opportunity. Everyone. But many of our stated rights are clearly not inalienable when you realize how much of people’s opportunities depend on to which family they are born and how wealth actually accumulates.

There need be no class warfare if we would make better attempts to structure our society fairly. But if, at some point, the rich will have taken too much and the poor will realize they have not be allowed their share, or even the opportunity to earn something close to their share, there will be strife.

So far our society’s repeated talk about freedom and opportunity has kept most of us from noticing that it’s not just life that isn’t fair. We continue to accept somehow that it must be mostly their own fault if people are poor. Or we’ve accepted the idea that we don’t have the power to make our society more fair. But in history, we can see that sometimes rights are claimed and won.

Some people died along the way to give Barack Obama his chance, for one example.

Some of us get much more than we deserve and some of us get less. Look who gets to make the rules, and look who gets to decide what’s fair. Ask yourself who decides whose time and energy is worth more and whose is worth less. If you think the market of opportunities for pursuing happiness is free, look again.

The middle class, moderately comfortable, mostly passive, separates the rich from the poor. If they disappear, or begin to realize that their interests are more in line with the poor, watch out.

Humans will live with a lot of hardship, but when they think someone else is taking their rightful share, there will be strife.

Martin Luther King may rise up again. This time his parents might be from Mexico. Everything but the details and the dates are already written in the history books. More of us should have talked less and looked more closely at how we actually live – and how people have come to decide when they’d finally had enough of all the talk in the face of obvious human unfairness, and they struck back.