Mark T. Mitchell has a good piece up at First Principles, the ISI blog, on the rediscovery of small-scale agriculture, and why conservatives who oppose big government should get behind farmers like Joel Salatin. Excerpt:
Scale matters. The logic of industrialization, with a myopic concern with the economic bottom line, leads to specialization, standardization, and consolidation--in a word, centralization. If, instead, we broaden our concerns to include cultural and ecological matters as well as economic ones, we find that achieving those three goals simultaneously is best achieved on farms that are of a scale suitable to natural processes and human communities.But, of course, government agricultural policies, not to mention farm subsidies, are disproportionately weighted toward industrialized agricultural corporations. Thus public money is primarily directed toward corporate farming enterprises that are, by and large, motivated by bottom-line economic thinking and little else. Public policy and resources, then, are advancing the centralization of the food system and undermining the efforts of those who are concerned with economic, ecological, and cultural sustainability. Salatin's illuminating and entertaining book, Everything I Want to do is Illegal, provides a veritable cornucopia of personal anecdotes detailing the numerous ways small-scale agricultural operations are threatened by government agricultural policies and their agents. Salatin's prose is entertaining, often hilarious, but the fun is tainted when one begins to grasp the pervasive and perverse reach of the agricultural bureaucracy.
Mark has an earlier piece in the same place explaining why he is a conservative. It has a lot to do with gratitude. Excerpt:
José Ortega y Gasset has pointed out that modern man lacks a sense of gratitude, for he has no sense of the giftedness of that which he enjoys. The benefits of civilization, so long in their development, bought at such a high price, are taken for granted by those who have no concern for or interest in the past. If we ignore the past, if we fail to grasp the invaluable and delicate gift we have received, then civilization itself is in jeopardy. In short, our sense of indebtedness should induce in us a sense of gratitude and our gratitude should give birth to love and our love will manifest itself in responsible action.And how will this responsibility, born of love, manifest itself? A love of God will create in us a desire to obey the moral law instilled in us. We will seek to obey His commands, summarized quite simply as this: Love God and love others. But this love for others is not limited simply to loving those who happen to be alive. We can and should love those who have come before us. We can love them for the example they have set (both good and bad); we can love them as fellow travelers on this road of beauty and pain; and we can love them even as we love ourselves, for, as T. S. Eliot notes, we are what we are because they were what they were.
A proper love of the past induces both a love for the present as well as a sense of duty to the future. In truth, both the conservative and the progressive are mindful of the future (and rightly so), but because the progressive scorns the past, he rejects that which would both inform and temper his view of the future. He purports to march boldly into the future armed only with the blinding light of pure reason and the belief that he, being the most modern, is the most advanced, and being the most advanced is fully equipped to conquer the future. The conservative, on the other hand, feels a great degree of affection for the past and recognizes the debt he owes to those he can never thank. He recognizes that many of the best human things have been cultivated gently and passed down through many generations.
It is, the conservative recognizes, his sacred duty to tend the gifts of civilization as best he can and transmit them to his posterity with the hope that generations hence will enjoy the benefits of this gift even as they, in turn, feel the burden of its responsibility. In short, a proper love for the future requires a proper love for the past, and to love the future but disdain the past is to destroy the future with carelessness, ineptitude, and pride. Furthermore, ostensibly loving the future while despising the past is, in reality, only an exercise in loving the present, for such a love is without historical context and therefore is only a facile love of the self with a vague hope that the self will survive to witness that perfect future that haunts the progressive imagination.
Really and truly, read the whole thing. It's both true and beautiful. See, this is the reason why we need elites on the Right. Only an intellectual could have written that. Indeed, in the essay Mark writes about how a wise teacher awakened in him a sensitivity to these fundamental truths -- truths that are so often overlooked in everyday life. There will be people, young people especially, who will read Mark's essay, and a light will come on within them, and it will be a light that leads them home.
By the way, I finally figured out how to change my Blogroll on the right hand side of this blog. I've updated it for the first time since this blog launched, and added a lot more blogs. This is not an exhaustive list of the blogs I read, but these are blogs I check in with most every day, and I hope you will too.
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The irony is that industrial farming is supposed to be more efficient, but requires an endless stream of subsidies to survive.
As far as I can detect, I'm the only commenter to this blog who's ever been a farmer, or even lived on a farm. I'll be happy to be corrected on this point.
Yes, indeed, scale matters. And if you depend on farming for your entire livelihood, not just the food you eat, but the clothes you wear, your housing, your medical care, your transportation, all the physical goods of your life, you want to expand your scale--and you want those government payments. Even the government payments that encourage you to plow up as many acres as possible to invest in chemically fertilized monoculture. If you don't, yours is an eighteenth-century existence in a twenty-first century society, and I have yet to see any farmer content with that.
I think it would be wonderful if people who earned an income in any other way also grew their own food in their own small holdings. And if you'll forgive my not developing the theme here, I have found that the most successful farmers invariably have a sense of humility and don't try to second-guess Providence. Every year farmers who guess droughts or floods or early frosts or hot summers have lousy crops, while farmers who do the same thing year in year out, trusting in God, tend to continue. But do the hard work of farming, really get out their and risk and sweat and wait, and see if you remain independent or conservative or eloquent!
A proper love of the past induces both a love for the present as well as a sense of duty to the future.
Very true. I would say natural law rather than "past", however, because most of our recent past has been screwing up and struggling against natural law...a modern Tower of Babel.
See, this is the reason why we need elites on the Right. Only an intellectual could have written that.
Yet only the non-elite seems to be able to actually live it (what is the average family size of the conservative elite?). I agree ideas have consequences, but all this stuff has been written elsewhere. We are awash in ideas yet lack simple folk who actually live it. I find elites rarely walk the walk.
Heck, elites don't even talk the talk. I cannot help but notice no elite I read wants to deal directly with the thorny issues of modernity - they want far too much to be liked, to be seen as moderate and likable. They value the opinion of man over that of the truth. I never see elites addressing the really tough nuts of natural law our culture stands for: homomsexuality and sexual sin, men and women assuming their proper roles, voluntary poverty, the acceptance of death and humility before God, or putting family and community first. All I ever see are constervative elites trying to "fit in", to seem moderate and popular, and certainly not living it out. When elites start to really do their job, well, then elites will start getting the respect they deserve.
Thanks for this post.
Just a further thought on the 'liberal-conservative' thing. I'm increasingly unclear what this means to a whole lot of people. As used here, the term 'liberal' seems to imply that liberals don't have enough gratitude, or that they are always reckless.
'Lib' is associated with many terms, including: liberty, li(terature), library, librarian. As I think of it, the meaning is closer to 'trying to see things clearly, even new things, without being blinded by false, outdated ideas'. That's my meaning. It doesn't mean that all old ideas are bad; it means, keep your mind clear so that when someone tries to toss sand in your eyes you can keep a clear head. I should think that 'conservatives' use things that 'liberate' thinking: libraries, blogs, etc.
I don't suppose that I am the only 'liberal' who feels gratitude, nor the only one who looks at an autumn pear and marvels at how many months it took to grow, on a tree that took years to grow, in soil that took eons to be broken from the hard rock of the earth's crust. What a miracle was my morning pear! How grateful I am to have such a rich perspective as I ponder such a simple thing.
What we need -- 'liberals' and 'conservatives' -- is a new focus on how and where our food is grown, and who grows it. We need to educate people about the fact that what they put in their bodies becomes manifest as the skin, bone, and tissue of their very lives. That paving over rich farmland is stupid, and that any government policy that would promote such blindness through tax credits or other policies is death-dealing over time. That promoting and sustaining ag lands, and better understanding how to sustain local ag in all regions of the world, is life-enhancing.
It's not about your political perspective.
It's not about whether you'll vote for McCain or Obama.
It's not about whether you're a 'patriot'.
It's about the fact that you're a human being, and to live is to wonder.
Personally, I think that couching this in terms that some view as partisan only moves us all farther backward.
Everywhere, all over this nation, we need to halt the paving of farmland, and the terrible economic burdens we place on small farmers. And we need to find ways to help children and everyone else grow plants.
Because humans learn by DOING. By taking actions, and watching what happens.
When we live in a nation where kids and the rest of us assume that the "Milk Carton Factory" produces milk and cheese, and where food magically pops up at any season, we've become too disconnected from the biological processes that feed us to be able to make wise, prudent decisions.
It's not a partisan issue.
It's a human problem.
We need more ways to connect people to their food; THEN gratitude will follow quite naturally, as they see what's involved in growing something as simple as a carrot.
"yours is an eighteenth-century existence in a twenty-first century society, and I have yet to see any farmer content with that."
Interesting point Rob, I lived on a small farm for about 6 years of my adolesence. My family works full-time but also maintains a few heads of cattle, horses, a small garden, etc. It's definately more of a "connection with nature" than a sustainable living thing as the work is extremely difficult and I can understand how challenging it must be to create a life off of your land.
I've always been taken back by the agricultural philosophy of America. Its become a lot worse these days as more and more family farming operations are forced to buy into the agri-business model just to stay competitive. It's very hard on the land, and even harder on the overall environment. If more people grew a modest patch in the yard and we returned to a regionalized agricultural system, we could help the environemtn while increasing effective efficiency. Tack this on to the long list of things that need to be overhauled over the next decade.
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