Modernizers v. agrarianizers

Gary Comstock, editor. Is There a Moral Obligation to
Save the Family Farm? Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1988.
Pp. 427 with index. $34.95 (cloth) $12.95 (paper).

America's secular, pluralistic society has tended to see religion and morality as personal and subjective, almost as matters of taste. This point of view can be contested on a number of grounds. It certainly runs into trouble in the face of some public issues which have a clear moral and even theological significance — among them, nuclear deterrence, capital punishment and abortion.

Another issue with moral implications has surfaced recently, though usually in a muddled, sentimental way. Pop musicians and movie stars have brought their agricultural expertise to bear on the subject of the family farm, a much-loved American institution which is threatened. The "Farm Aid" concerts, several movies and congressional testimony all underscore the crisis.

Two conflicting schools of thought on this issue have fought for the attention of policymakers and legislators. One emphasizes the farm as a primarily economic entity whose fate should be governed entirely by market forces; if family farms must give way to more efficient corporate farms, so be it. On the other side are those for whom the family farm is a vital repository of our most important values, representing an attitude toward land, family and community which we dare not lose. The two sides have proceeded from different assumptions, talked past each other and left a large segment of the public confused. The crisis has hardly abated, though it is no longer a media fad; if anything, the problems faced by the family farm have been worsened by the recent drought.

Is There a Moral Obligation to Save the Family Farm? offers readers an enlightened understanding of the problem. Gary Comstock, its editor, believes that religion "can be brought out of its modern, privatized existence, giving it what it ought to have: a healthy, carefully circumscribed role in American civil life." This anthology includes the best arguments for and against the idea that the survival of the family farm should engage society's attention. Comstock places the right questions in the right contexts, and his selections could not have been more intelligently chosen.

The book begins with an article by journalist Gregg Easterbrook which caused some controversy when it first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly. Easterbrook argues that excess production must be curbed even if this involves the loss of family farms. One can disagree with this conclusion — do — but the essay provides a superb overview of farm economics and governmental agricultural policy. It is a good choice for opening the anthology, and it is followed by sections which offer the testimony of farmers themselves, historical overviews of the family farm, discussions of the role of the university in agriculture, attention to related questions of justice as well as theology, and consideration of the place of legislation in dealing with the problem.

Comstock allows space to those he calls the "modernizers" (who argue that if the market rids us of family farmers, this is an unfortunate necessity which we must accept for the greater good of the market) as well as to the "agrarianizers" (who see the family farm in Jeffersonian terms as an essential element of democratic society and a guardian of important community values). Among the former are Easterbrook, Michael Novak of the American Enterprize Institute and Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina; among the latter are poet, essayist and farmer Wendell Berry, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower, and the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Each section is intelligently introduced by Comstock, who — despite his clear sympathy for the "agrarianizer" point of view — asks probing questions of all concerned. Why, for example, should more attention be paid to family farmers than to auto dealers, 758 of whom went bankrupt in 1981? Why does the problem of the family farmer strike us as more threatening to our common life than the problems facing the manufacturing segments of the economy? On the other hand, aren't important questions of value lost when the bottom line becomes the sole criterion for evaluating a way of life which has an important place in our national history?

Wendell Berry's wise essay, "A Defense of the Family Farm," profoundly challenges a market-determined view of the question. He points out that "the small farm of a good farmer, like the small shop of a good craftsman, gives work a quality and a dignity that it is dangerous for human work to go without." Berry places the question in a broader moral context: "The family farm is failing because it belongs to an order of values and a kind of life that are failing. We can only find it wonderful, when we put our minds to it, that many people now seem willing to mount an emergency effort to 'save the family farm' who have not yet thought to save the family or the community or the neighborhood schools or the small local businesses or the domestic arts of household and homestead or cultural and moral tradition — all of which are also failing and on all of which the survival of the family farm depends." Berry argues that by allowing the market to determine everything, we assure "that our highest principles and standards have no practical force or influence, and are reduced merely to talk."

Plenty of voices represented in this anthology would disagree vehemently with this assessment. That is what makes Is There a Moral Obligation to Save the Family Farm? such a valuable resource: It is a full, rich presentation of a complex problem, and people on both sides of the issue are well challenged. I can think of no better introduction to a question which has so much to do with our common life and with the values we share, or claim to share, as a nation.□

John Garvey is a regular columnist for Commonwealth, a New York-based review of politics, literature and the arts. His work has appeared in a number of magazines, and his most recent book is The Prematurely Saved (Templegate).

October 1988 | Illinois Issues | 27