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:

Farm Resettlement Agency poster from the Great Depression. The FRA was not a success, by and large.

Agriculture has always been close to the hearts of Distributist and in regards to it they can really be regarded as the close associates of Agrarians. When we read older Agrarian texts, we're basically reading Distributist ones. That's why modern Distributists can be found quoting Thomas Jefferson, who basically lived in a naturally Distributist world, mixed with Mercantilism, and who never heard the word Distributist.

Agriculture, for that part, has remained somewhat in this category anyhow, although in recent decades this has been heavily impacted by various developments that threaten that.  Absentee land ownership has always been a problem that has been there.

In a Distributist economy the US would adopt policies that actually do exist in other Western nations. France, for example, has had a Distributist set of agriculture policies since World War Two and I believe that Germany has as well. Greece also does.  In Germany's case, the road map for a Distributist agricultural sector has been set out in book form at that, in Wilhelm Von Roepke's "Economics of a Free Society", in which he addresses it.

In short, in a Distributist economy those employed farming would own the farms.  Absentee landlords and remote corporate ownership of land would not be allowed.  Indeed, a purse Distributist might take this even further on land ownership, and not allow it for use outside a person use or business entity in general, but that's straying from main topic.  In agriculture, it's pretty clear that's what Distributist would have to advance. So, no more wealthy people from one state buying a land and claiming to be "ranchers" in another.  And no more lawyers or doctors in town claiming that their small hobby farm is a farm.  Farm, or practice law, but don't do both.

This part of this is, we'd note, truly radical.  More on that in a moment.  But what this would do, is to make individual farms more viable economically, but worth considerably less individually.  It would therefore be easier for people to enter agriculture, but it would be much less lucrative to sell out of it in some ways.  And I suspect in a pure Distributist economy regulation in this area would come in to further advance this set of goals.

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.

Last prior:

A sort of Agrarian Manifesto. What's wrong with the world (and how to fix it). Part 2. Distributism