The Art of Loading Brush. Wendell Berry

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СКАЧАТЬ authority who do not wish to think about problems. When and why did Mr. Clinton in 1995 think that the inevitable “shrinking of the farm sector” had ceased? In fact, “the farm sector” had not bottomed out in 1995; there is no good reason to think that it has bottomed out, at less than 1 percent of the population, in 2016. And how could he have helped young farmers except by giving them the protections against the free market that my brother had recommended three years before? Mr. Clinton was talking nonsense in Billings in 1995 because he did not have, and could not have had from his advisers, the means to think about what he thought he was talking about. The means of actual thought about the use and care of the land had been intentionally discounted and forgotten by people such as themselves.

      It appears to be widely assumed by politicians, executives, academics, public intellectuals, industrial economists, and the like that they have a competent understanding of agriculture because their grandparents were farmers, or they have met some farmers, or they worked on a farm when they were young. But they invoke their understanding, which they do not have, only to excuse themselves from actual thought about actual issues of agriculture. These people have found “inevitability” a sufficient explanation for the deplorable history of industrial agriculture. They see the reason for the present discontent of “blue collar” voters as low or “stagnant” wages. They don’t see, in back of that, the dispossession that made many of them wage-workers in the first place. The loss everywhere of small farms and small towns and the respectable livelihoods that they provided was ruled “inevitable” and thus easily explained and forgotten. In their perceived worthlessness and dispensability, at least, the people of the farms and small towns were in effect racially equal. If, for instance, black small farmers were helped to prosper, as some liberals would have liked, then white small farmers would have had to be helped to prosper, which would have pleased neither liberals nor conservatives.

      It was, then, “inevitable” that the independent livelihoods in the old economies of the countryside and the small towns should be replaced by the mainly subservient livelihoods in industry, or by unemployment. But if the “working class” counted for nothing and were dispensable as small farmers or farmhands or as small independent keepers of shops and stores or as independent tradespeople and craftspeople, why then should they count for something and be more than dispensable as “blue-collar workers”? In the corporate and urban economy the blue-collar workers were just as “inevitably” replaceable by technologies as they had been before. They were then notified that they were losing out because they were “uneducated.” They needed “a college education,” in default of which they were offered “retraining” and “job creation.” But these were only political baits, which left the blue-collared ones to their “inevitable” fate of low or stagnant wages or unemployment.

      This doctrine of inevitability, also known as technological progress, is in fact a poor excuse for an economic and technological determinism, as heartless as it is ignorant, which has belonged about equally to the political establishment of both parties. Realizing that they were the broken eggs of an omelet that others would eat, the blue-collar workers became angry. Their anger turned them to Donald Trump, who at least recognized their existence and the political usefulness of their anger.

      In the pre-Trump version of the history of progress, determinism and inevitability overruled any need for actual knowledge and actual thought. But with the ascendancy of Mr. Trump, at least some of the determinists seem to be reverting to free will. While the conservatives, who have strained at a gnat and swallowed a camel, endeavor to digest their dinner, the liberals talk of “connecting” with the blue-collar workers of rural America, to whom they have given not a substantive thought since Ezra Taft Benson, Eisenhower’s secretary of agriculture, pronounced to their grandparents the political death sentence, “Get big or get out.”

      Let us remember also the workers, white and black, who in their thousands became simply obsolete at the instant when “efficient” machines were brought into the coal mines, the factories, and the fields of sugarcane and cotton. I thought of them when I read in a column by Roger Cohen in the New York Times of November 19, 2016, that “the very essence of the modern world” is “the movement of people and ever greater interconnectedness, driven by technology.” Mr. Cohen approves of this “essence” and is afraid that Mr. Trump will stop it. What he has in mind surely must be the voluntary movement of people. The movements of people actually “driven by technology” are outside Mr. Cohen’s field of vision, surely only because of his political panic. Millions of people, as we know, have been driven away from their homes in the modern world by the similarly imperative technologies of industrial production and industrial war.

      I am uncertain what value Mr. Cohen assigns to “interconnectedness,” but he cannot be referring to the interconnectedness of families in their home places, or of neighbors in their neighborhoods. How the loss of those things can be compensated by movement, driven or not, is far from clear. The same obscurity clouds over any massive “movement of peoples,” as over the arguments by which these movements are excused or justified. It does not require a great refinement of intellect to see the harm that is in all of them.

      The experts who decided in the middle of the twentieth century that there were too many farmers had in fact no agricultural knowledge or competence upon which to base such a judgment. They and their successors certainly had not the competence to assume any responsibility for, or in any way to mitigate, the totalitarian displacement of about twenty million farmers.

      Farming is one of the major enactments of the connection between the human economy and the natural world. In the industrial age farming also enacts the connection, far more complicated and perilous than industrialists admit, between industrial technologies and living creatures. Some science certainly needs to be involved, also more and better accounting. But good farming is first and last an art, a way of doing and making that involves human histories, cultures, minds, hearts, and souls. It is not the application by dullards of methods and technologies under the direction of a corporate-academic intelligentsia.

      If we should want to revive, or begin, in a public way the actual thinking about agriculture that has actually taken place in some cultures, that is still taking place in some small organizations and on some farms, what would we have to do? We would have to begin, I think, by giving the most careful attention to issues of carrying capacity, scale, and form, to issues of production, of course, but also and just as necessarily to issues of maintenance or conservation. The indispensable issue of conservation would apply, not just to the farm’s agricultural “resources,” but also to the ecosystem that includes the farm and to the waterways that drain it. I think, moreover, that this attention to issues must be paid always outdoors in the presence of examples. The thing of greatest importance is to think about the land with the land’s people in the presence of the land. Every theory, calculation, graph, diagram, idea, study, model, method, scheme, plan, and hope must be caught firmly by the ear and led out into the weather, onto the ground.

      It is obvious that this effort of thinking has to confront everywhere the limits both of nature and of human nature, limits imposed by the ecosphere and ecosystems, limits of human intelligence, human cultures, and the capacities of human persons. Such thought is authenticated by its compatibility with limits, its willingness to accept limits and to limit itself. This will not be easy in a time overridden by fantasies of limitlessness. A market limitlessly usable by sellers and limitlessly exploitable by buyers is merely normal in such a time. And limitlessness is the common denominator of the dominant political sides, both of which tend to refer to limitlessness as “freedom.”

      We have the liberal freedom of unrestrained personal behavior, and the conservative freedom of unrestrained economic behavior. These two freedoms are more alike, more allied, and more collaborative than either side would like to admit. Opposition to the industrial economy’s ravaging of the landscapes of farming and forestry now comes from a small and scattered alliance of agrarians, not from liberals or conservatives.

      Conservatives and liberals disagree passionately about climate change, for example, yet liberal protests against СКАЧАТЬ