When the Homily is about Immunology

Seeing Farmers Differently

In his book, Fields without Dreams Victor Davis Hanson paints two agrarian pictures, one commonly seen and portrayed today, and the other less often seen – for obvious reasons. He contrasts Virgil’s Georgics with Hesiod’s Works and Days. In the former, agrarian life is “romanticized” and is shown “in implicit contrast to the bustle and impersonality of urban life” with emphasis on the “nobility of the farmer and the natural beauty of his craft.” Hesiod, however, offers “an account of the necessary pain and sacrifice needed to survive on the land…soil is not kind, but unforgiving, and so must be mastered if it is not to master the farmer himself.” According to VDH, the American family farmer (in contrast to part-time converts like me – I think) “are not necessarily sympathetic or sensitive individuals, but often appear as more unattractive folk as the cost of their wager to live off the land…farmers have always been distasteful, independent, and of a different sort locked in a perpetual struggle with the “bribe-swallowers” in town, the princes who profit from, but do not partake of, an agrarian community.”

Much of VDH’s “issue” is in regards to the tragic loss of the American family farmer and what that means to us as a culture. Some would perhaps think it means little, but in that loss VDH sees much more at stake. His warning:

This bothersome, queer, oddball who is disappearing has been for twenty-five hundred years the critical counter voice to a material and uniform culture that at its basis is neither democratic nor egalitarian…[in his absences] where will be the often unpleasant individual, the veteran of a continual struggle with nature, the now cultural dissident, who will choose still to go it alone in order to protect his old notion of community, who will by nature have distrust for authoritarianism, large bureaucracy, and urban consensus? Is there another besides the ugly agrarian whose voice says no to popular tastes, no to the culture of the suburb, no to the urban enclave, no to the gated estate? What other profession is there now in this country where the individual fights alone against nature, lives where he works, invests hourly for the future, never for the mere present, succeeds of fails largely on the degree of his own intellect, physical strength, bodily endurance, and sheer nerve?

There are enough artists, writers, provocateurs, purveyors of fad, cant and chaos, enough sophisticated and educated to suggest what we see and hear is not what it seems, enough shiftless and transient who reinvent themselves with each move. But at the millennium there are far too few of the other in America, the traditional and time-honored brakemen on an affluent, leisured, and rootless society. There is a reason why farmers defiantly, brazenly, want their children raised differently, want them to subtract from, not add to, the current American madness, want them, I suppose, to be like themselves: to have fields without dreams, rather than dreams without fields.

I’d do well to point out that I do not see myself as such a farmer…very far from it. I have little hope of even aspiring to such a title or way of being as described here. VDH agrees with me that we “converts” are not going to save American family farming, though he does give us a hat-tip: “Genuine agrarians remain to be found at the ubiquitous farmers markets, the agricultural equivalent of theme parks and petting zoos.”

:)