Adjacent to the noble savage myth, the good ol' days illusion meets the grass is greener on the other side. Just 4 generations ago, when people worked a low tech, hand-to-mouth agrarian existence without powered equipment, proper nutrition, or antibiotics, they were at constant risk of starvation from a single low yield harvest. It's a very hard life.
This is a misrepresentation of Berry's thought. Like many traditional Amish or Mennonite communities, he wasn't at all adverse to mechanized agriculture, he simply believed that technology be used considerately, and that people seeing agriculture up close made for a rooting in local community that he believed beneficial. Even Berry's critics (and he had his share, me included) did not dismiss his ideas so readily as your post.
I grew up in rural Texas, descended from sharecroppers. He's romanticizing a kind of farming that hasn't existed in the US in 70+ years, one that would make it impossible to feed the country.
Not only that, but I know from my parents generation that small hold farm work is brutal an naturally leads to certain dynamics that contemporary Americans would find quite objectionable. When a bad harvest could starve your family directions are never polite requests and norms are very strictly enforced.
> norms are very strictly enforced
And now norms are not enforced at all, and look at who we have in the white house. This is why we can't have nice things.
I think he romanticized the old ways of farming, but I think the overall point was to question what was good about the past and question the line we are fed that all technology is for the general good of all people.
I think it is possible to say that subsistence farming leading to disease and starvation is bad, and a gigantic corporate oligopoly run monoculture farm is also bad. One of his biggest points is really that life should be human scale and speed with human relationships as a priority, the idealized farm was just a way to show what that life looked like in the past.
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Reading McCullough bio of Truman and Caro bio of LBJ lead me to the same conclusion. It was brutal, and most who saw any means of escape seized it
I’m compelled by the romantic nostalgia, but I know I personally couldn’t cut the mustard
My grandfather nearly starved to death on his parent's farm a couple of times during the Dustbowl and he contracted a disease while in an immunocompromised state due to malnutrition that left its mark throughout his bones. Later, he helped his mother buy a combination general store and house to support herself.
Surely there is an agreeable third option between life-and-death subsistence farming and spiritually/ecologically/gustatorily desolate conglomerate monocrop agriculture.
Food literally grows on trees.
Pay 2x for organic vegetables at the fancy grocery store
Organic vegetables are still monocrops grown by large companies, which I don’t think is a bad thing. Large scale agriculture has made food plentiful and cheap, that’s a good thing. We’ve eliminated famines in every nation with a stable government and market access outside or war zones.
>Just 4 generations ago, when people worked a low tech, hand-to-mouth agrarian existence without powered equipment, proper nutrition, or antibiotics, they were at constant risk of starvation from a single low yield harvest. It's a very hard life.
That's why we like it. The people in chairs in Wall-e don't.
https://jonnegroni.com/2015/04/15/the-humans-of-wall-e-were-...
I was shocked to notice the date in the URL. I think I understand where the LLMs are getting it from now
I was a bit surprised by WALL-E and its premise; here was a space movie with a large corporation at the center, but it wasn't "evil" in the mold of Weyland-Yutani. BnL's CEO, Shelby Forthright, lived up to his name and generally meant well. The tragedies of the film lay entirely in unintended consequences.
Which is even darker in a sense, because it seems to try to tell us we're going to gum up the Earth even without the usual motives of greed and a lust for power, just a desire for the best life for everyone.
Yeah, hard disagree.
Easy to say when you never had to live that life.