Wednesday, March 6, 2024

The Agrarian's Lament: What's wrong with the world (and how to fix it). Part 3. Agrarianism.

The Agrarian's Lament: What's wrong with the world (and how to fix it). ...

What's wrong with the world (and how to fix it). Part 3. Agrarianism.


And what's this thing about Agrarianism?

I believe that this contest between industrialism and agrarianism now defines the most fundamental human difference, for it divides not just two nearly opposite concepts of agriculture and land use, but also two nearly opposite ways of understanding ourselves, our fellow creatures, and our world.

Wendell Berry.


Given the above, isn't Agrarianism simply agricultural distributism?

Well, no.

Agrarianism is an ethical perspective that privileges an agriculturally oriented political economy. At its most concise, agrarianism is “the idea that agriculture and those whose occupation involves agriculture are especially important and valuable elements of society

Bradley M. Jones, American Agrarianism.

Agrarianism is agriculture oriented on an up close and personal basis, and as such, it's family oriented, and land ethic oriented.

We have noted before:








But Agrarianism goes much further than this.  It retains something that the rest of society has tragically lost, which is that we are inseparably bound to the soil, and inseparably bound to nature.

The fact that we have lost this has been massively corrupting and is massively destructive.  Indeed, it threatens to destroy us.

Not everyone in a modern agrarian economy would be farmers, as some like to either imagine, or criticize. But society would be family farm oriented.  And it would value the land ethic.

All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants and animals, or collectively the land.

The Land Ethic, A Sand County Almanac.  Aldo Leopold.

Realizing that agrarianism is, whether we like it or not, and that we ignore it at our ultimate peril and destruction, is the paramount task of agrarians today.  No one thing every cures all of a society's ills, but a modern agrarian economy would come pretty darned close.

Which presumes not only a well grounded society, but a well-educated society.

We've lost that.

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