The prejudice against country people. - - industrial agriculture - Cover Story

Progressive, The, April, 2002 by Wendell Berry

On June 21,2001, Richard Lewontin, a respected Harvard scientist, published in The New York Review of Books an article on genetic engineering and the controversy about it. In the latter part of his article; Lewontin turns away from his announced premise of scientific objectivity to attack, in a markedly personal way, the critics of industrial agriculture and biotechnology who are trying to defend small farmers against exploitation by global agribusiness.

He criticizes Vandana Shiva, the Indian scientist and defender of the traditional agricultures of the Third World, for her appeal to "religious morality," and calls her a "cheerleader." He speaks of some of her allies as "a bunch of Luddites," and he says that all such people are under the influence "of a false nostalgia for an idyllic life never experienced." He says that present efforts to save "the independent family farmer ... are a hundred years too late, and GMOs [genetically modified organisms] are the wrong target." One would have thought, Lewontin says wearily, that "industrial capitalism ... has become so much the basis of European and American life that any truly popular new romantic movement against it would be inconceivable."

Lewontin is a smart man, but I don't think he understands how conventional, how utterly trite and thoughtless, is his reaction to Shiva and other advocates of agricultural practices that are biologically sound and economically just. Apologists for industrialism seldom feel any need to notice their agrarian critics, but when a little dog snaps at the heels of a big dog long enough, now and again the big dog will have to condescend. On such occasions, the big dog always says what Lewontin has said in his article: You are a bunch of Luddites; you are a bunch of romantics motivated by nostalgia for a past that never existed; it is too late; there is no escape. The best-loved proposition is the last: Whatever happens is inevitable; it all has been determined by economics and technology.

This is not scientific objectivity or science or scholarship. It is the luxury politics of an academic islander.

The problem for Lewontin and others like him is that the faith in industrial agriculture as an eternal pillar of human society is getting harder to maintain, not because of the attacks of its opponents but because of the increasingly manifest failures of industrial agriculture itself: massive soil erosion, soil degradation, pollution by toxic chemicals, pollution by animal factory wastes, depletion of aquifers, runaway subsidies, the spread of pests and diseases by the long-distance transportation of food, mad cow disease, indifferent cruelty to animals, the many human sufferings associated with agricultural depression, exploitation of "cheap" labor, the abuse of migrant workers. And now, after the catastrophes of September 11, the media have begun to notice what critics of industrial capitalism have always known: The corporate food supply is highly vulnerable to acts of biological warfare.

That these problems exist and are serious is indisputable. So why are they so little noticed by politicians of influence, by people in the media, by university scientists and intellectuals? An increasing number of people alerted to the problems will answer immediately: Because far too many of those people are far too dependent on agribusiness contributions, advertising, and grants. That, I think, is true, but another reason that needs to be considered is modern society's widespread prejudice against country people. This prejudice is not easy to explain, in view of modern society's continuing dependence upon rural sustenance, but its existence also is indisputable.

Lewontin's condescension to country people and their problems is not an aberration either in our society or in The New York Review of Books. On June 29, 2000, that magazine published this sentence: "At worst, [Rebecca West] had a mind that was closed and cold, like a small town lawyer's, prizing facts but estranged from imaginative truth." And on December 20, 2001, it published this: "The Gridiron dinner, as the affair is known, drags on for about five hours, enlivened mainly by the speeches of the politicians, whose ghostwriters in recent years have consistently outdone the journalists in the sharpness and grace of their wit (leaving journalists from the provinces with a strong impulse to follow the groundhogs back into their holes)."

It is possible to imagine that some readers will ascribe my indignation at those sentences to the paranoia of an advocate for the losing side. But I would ask those readers to imagine a reputable journal nowadays that would attribute closed, cold minds to Jewish lawyers, or speak of black journalists wanting to follow the groundhogs into their holes. This, it seems to me, would pretty effectively dissipate the ha-ha.

Disparagements of farmers, of small towns, of anything identifiable as "provincial" can be found everywhere: in comic strips, TV shows, newspaper editorials, literary magazines, and so on. A few years ago, The New Republic affirmed the necessity of the decline of family farms in a cover article entitled "The Idiocy of Rural Life." And I remember a Kentucky high school basketball cheer that instructed the opposing team: