It was 1965, give or take a year. It was a hot dry late summer day on my uncles farm in southeast Limestone County in Alabama. I was a high school student working for my uncle as a farmhand. A lot of the work was just tractor-driving, pulling one implement or another, but some of it was hard labor. On this day we were hauling hay. I worked with a fellow named Randy, a big thick-featured young white man who was roughly my age, maybe a year or two older, but had given up on school some years before. We were worlds apart. My family was, in local terms, of the upper crust, an old Southern lawyer-planter family. I went home at night and, if I wasnt going out, read books or listened to Bob Dylan or Simon and Garfunkle. Randy went home and watched Gunsmoke, and when he talked about it I sometimes wondered whether he understood that it was make-believe. We were close friends.
It was hot and dry, but there was a thunderstorm building in the west, and there was a lot of newly-baled hay in the field. Randy and I stood by my aunts pickup truck discussing the situation with her. She was in charge of the farm, my uncle being in Montgomery serving in the state legislature. My aunt really wanted that hay brought inrain would dampen and possibly ruin it. But ordinarily we hauled hay with a crew of at least five or six men, and today only Randy and I were available. At a minimum we needed three: one to drive the truck, one to walk beside it throwing the bales, which were strung out at ten or twenty-foot intervals all over the field, up onto the bed of the truck, and one to stack them into a load that would stay put. Thinking about it now, I dont remember whether my aunt offered to drive the truck; she could have. But whether it just wasnt done, or, more likely, she had something else to do, Randy and I agreed to try to beat the storm by ourselves. I have no doubt that there was a lot of bravado in our offer, and maybe a touch of gallantry.
This is how we worked it. One of us got up on the bed of the truck while the other one started the truck down a line of bales. In first gear and with no foot on the accelerator the truck would drive itself at about the pace of a fast walk. The driver jumped out and did his best to snatch up as many bales as he could of those he passed while still keeping up with the truck. And when the truck approached a corner he jumped back into the cab, made the turn, and jumped back out. As this was pretty rough on the loader/driver, we swapped places frequently.
Im not sure now how much a bale of hay weighed: forty pounds or so, I guess. You had to crouch over it, work your fingers under the twine that bound it tightly, then snatch the bale up, maybe giving it a boost with one knee, and fling it up onto the bed of the truck, which I remember as being a little over waist-high. One bale was fairly easy, but several bales a minute was work. Unless you had a stout pair of gloves and a long-sleeved shirt, you would get pretty well scraped up by the hard dry cut ends of the hay, but of course these made the heat worse.
We finished the field and got the hay to the barn before the rain came. We were exhausted, covered with a thin mud of sweat and dust, scratched, chafed, and proud. And at times afterwardmaybe it was the following summerwe talked about that day as if it had been a celebration.
In 1971 I worked as a clerk in a record store in a mall in Denver. It was never hard work, though it sometimes got hectic on Saturdays. Mainly I helped people find records they wanted and stocked the racks. The great cave of the mall opened out a few feet away from me and I watched the people pass by as if they were fish in an aquarium, and felt like one myself, watchful and inert. The customers seemed to me to live in a different world because they had money to spend and I did not. The hours were many and tedious. There was small talk with the cashier, uneasiness around the boss (who seemed determined to fulfill the stereotype of the pudgy, bald, cigar-smoking capitalist), annoyance at the bosss father, an ill-tempered old man who smoked a cigar as big as his arm and drove customers away with his glares, and impatience with the bosss son, who wanted to bully people as his father did but lacked the charisma to make it stick.
At the far end of the store, which opened onto the parking lot, there was daylight, but little of it made its way to me. Where I stood it was all dead dry air and the sixty-cycle shimmer of fluorescent light bouncing off glass, giving the well-groomed suburbanites who were our customers a sickly bluish look. I was probably too disoriented even to compare those distant and watery faces with the red and brown of Randy grinning down at mehe was a head taller than Ifrom under his black cowboy hat, every detail sharp against the hard blue August sky.
On my lunch hour I would drift uneasily around the mall, eat my sandwich sitting on a bench or sometimes go sit in my car and read a mystery novel. The splendid Rockies rose up beyond the suburb, as out of reach as the moon. Never before or since have I had so strong a sense that I was dying.
When I worked on the farm I felt alive. When I worked in the mall I felt as a drop of water might feel during the process of evaporation. Are these merely my idiosyncratic reactionsjust my opinion, as we say nowadays whenever we want to dismiss a statement which seems difficult to verify objectivelyor was I perceiving something about the real nature of the two situations, something basically healthy about the farm and something basically unhealthy about the mall?
We announced in the first issue of Caelum et Terra that we would be especially attentive to agrarianism as part of our desire to begin laying the groundwork for a more human, hence more Christian, culture. We expected, and received, a certain number of warnings about utopianism, living in a dream world, and so forth. In one respect this admonition is needed and welcomed, for it is certainly possible, if not probable, that reform movements, hoping for more than can be expected in this life, will dissipate their energy designing unworkable schemes. In another respect, though, the admonition is merely irritating because it seems only an assertion that industrial-commercial society as we know it is the only reasonable or even possible organization for civilization. It assumes that the juggernaut of mechanization and centralization and commercialization neither can nor should be stopped, that these phenomena are the real world, and that to think otherwise is, automatically, romanticism or utopianism, a more or less culpable evasion of responsibility.
This charge is irritating precisely because industrial-commercial society is in many ways fundamentally out of touch with reality. Here are the facts: We are spirits a little lower than the angels joined to the bodies of mammals which are in turn inseparable from the physical world in which we are placednot simply the world of matter, but this planet, this system of physical and chemical forces and entities: oxygen, sunlight, water, photosynthesis, blood, and all the rest. We were made for paradise, but we lost it. Since then things have not gone well with us. God Himself intervened to save us, to show us how to attain that hearts desire by which we are all driven. However, He has left us with considerable latitude in the matter of actually living out our lives on earth, and it seems that we can be relied on to make the wrong choices a great deal of the time. And although we know enough to save our souls, it cannot be said that, in general, we know very much. We have a great deal of room for the improvement of our circumstances, but we cannot transcend them. The seal upon the bond which joins us to the earth is death. The promise that sustains us is not of the destruction of this bond, but its transformation and perfectionnot a purely spiritual existence, but a new heaven and a new earth.
The proper response to our situation is humility. But the characteristic posture of the modern world is pride. Everywhere we see abstract schemes for the elimination of human difficulties by the conquest of nature or some part of it, including what we call human nature, by which we often mean the effects of original sin. Everywhere we sense the presence of the illusion that we are answerable neither to God nor to nature, that we can subjugate the latter and forget the former and in time defeat even death itself.
Utopian dreams, as we find them everywhere from sociopolitical ideologies to New Age religion to the laboratories of biologists and engineers who want to tinker us into immortality, would have us believe that we can lift ourselves out of the limits of the physical, if not out of nature altogether. This denial of nature is as foolish from the practical perspective as it is erroneous when measured against Catholic doctrine. There is a simple fact which will ever stand ready to knock the props out from under our fantasies of a de-natured life: all our technology, all of it, relies on materials obtained from the natural world. Please note that I do not attribute the pride of which I speak to everyone who invents a new machine or starts a businessI am not talking about these natural and healthy human impulses, but about the secular religion which absorbs invention and enterprise into an ideology of self-salvation, which, though perhaps not explicitly held by a great many people, nevertheless greatly influences the mental and spiritual climate.
The realistic thing to do is to look for ways in which we can live more harmoniously with nature rather than for ways to crush or escape it. We need not be sentimental about this. We must recognize that if we feel at war with nature it is partly because nature struck the first blow, for whatever hospitality it affords us must be coaxed out of it by hard work. We are not truly at home here, and never will be. We can understand the irritation of the farmer who, when told by an unctuous preacher that you and the Lord have done a fine job on this place, grumbled You should have seen it when the Lord had it all to himself. Yet the created, now fallen, world remains a fundamental component of the gift of life and if it is meant to sustain us we are meant to nurture it. And the better we care for nature the more its fruitfulness will increase. Anyone who has ever planted a fruit tree knows that it needs pruning, and anyone with ordinary sense should be able to see that there is a difference between pruning the tree and felling it, though this distinction seems denied by both the despisers and the worshipers of nature.
Human work, like human life in general, cannot be detached from the earth. And a society in which more people have more contact with Gods creation is likely to be healthier. This is the simple source of what I must call for lack of a better word my agrarian beliefs. Agrarian is not exactly right, because there are ways of life besides farming that have a direct and healthy connection to the natural world: fishing, for instance. I dont even mean that everyone ought to farm or fish or hunt for a living. And there is a whole superstructure of craftsmen and merchants which ought to flourish on an agrarian base. I will refer to agriculture and to rural life throughout the rest of this essay, but would like for what I say to be taken as referring to any kind of work which has that direct and healthy connection to the natural world.
Work detached from the body and the physical is a dangerous thing. It is true that the highest work of which we are capable is the work of the mind, but the philosopher and the theologianand for that matter the accountantought to work near a window, and have a garden to hoe. Without this grounding, workers of the mind tend to lose the pre-philosophy of common sense (Maritain) and, starting with mind in nothingness, spin great webs of abstraction which often prove murderous when someone brings them down to earth. (We must assume, too, that they can do great spiritual harm even when they remain in the mind).
We often hear it said that we are becoming an information society or a service economy, which seems to mean that our work is supposed to become more and more a thing of the mind (except for those services, such as waiting tables in a restaurant, which provide physical conveniences and which far more people desire to receive than to provide). These terms seem to mean that we will no longer produce anything tangible, but only buy, or sell, or gamble on the buying and selling of, what others have produced. It seems that we are to be a nation of middlemen, a condition which I cannot help but regard as decadent. Since this is supposed to be an advance, I wonder what we will buy and sell when everyone has advanced as far as we.
Why is it considered an advance? Because the work becomes more and more mental, and the mind is higher than the body? For the same reason that we might onceit is not easy to do so nowhave considered the work of the philosopher higher than that of the brickmason? But the work of which we are speaking is only a caricature of the life of the mind commended by sages. It is all manipulationof people, of data, of financial abstractionsand thin, empty ratiocination, and all of it for gain, not for truth or beauty or goodness.
Physical work is generally regarded in our society as an evil and a humiliation. And there are some good reasons for this. Physical labor has, throughout history, often been brutal, destructive of both body and mind. To regard it and those engaged in it with contempt is not a new thing. But the great religions, and especially Christianity with its Carpenter-God, have regarded it as noble. Our attempt ought to be to ameliorate its hardships and deepen our appreciation of it, not to abolish it.
We dont want to sentimentalize farm life, or any life of mostly manual labor. Anyone who harbors reservations about industrialism ought to remind himself, or learn, what rural life is really like. There are good reasons why people have tended for some generations now to flee from it. Hard work, ignorance, and narrowness are commonly and not without reason associated with country life. The labor of farming is, even with machinery, harder than anything most of us have experienced. Without machinery it can be bitterly hard. To have the fruits of that kind of labor wiped out by frost or drought or rain or blight can crush the spirit. If the farmer does not learn resignation he may become fatalistic, or look for help in superstition, which flourishes on fear and helplessness.
That farming entails hard labor is certainly true, but the questions of ignorance and narrowness are more complicated. The city has generally looked down on the country for the latters ignorance. It is obviously true that the highest intellectual and artistic achievements are products of the city. The farmer has little time for these things, and in general one who is gifted in philosophy is not likely to be gifted at farming, and vice versa. But the farmers mind is hardly empty; he just knows things which the city dweller does not care about, such as land, weather, crops, and animals. If I were told that I must be locked up for a week with one of two people and knew only that one of them was a farmer and one an executive of a large corporation, I would pick the farmer as being more likely to be an interesting talker. For though it may not develop the narrowly analytic powers or expand the intellectual horizons, farm work seasons the mind with an earthy wisdom which is a more fertile ground for both faith and imagination than the agitated concern for ephemera more or less demanded by business and technical occupations.
A certain fundamental suspicion of change and of the unusual seems natural to most people, and is especially imputed to country people. This disposition may stiffen and become an unhealthy narrowness, and a close-knit community in which this narrowness prevails may present a blank wall to an outsider, at least until the stranger has somehow earned respect. And we should remember that in our own time a number of important social changes, such as the ending of legal racial segregation and advances in the protection of the natural world, have been forced upon rural areas and small towns by the central government and the cities. But though bigotry is a vice commonly attributed more to country folk than to city, the association seems illusory when we recall that Nazism flourished in the cultivated cities of Germany and that racism of all sorts is probably more virulent in our cities today than in rural areas. Besides, who is the more dangerously narrow, a farmer who doesnt care for foreigners but otherwise harms no one, or a technologist building weapons of mass destruction for whose use he feels no responsibility?
As for art, the country does not generally produce the large and complex works of a Dante or a Beethoven, but an agrarian culture is likely to have a rich folk art in which many if not most people can participate. And this is a far healthier situation than our own, where a tiny elite class of artists performs for a slightly larger group of devoted initiates, while the mass of the population is fed toxins from the factories of Hollywood. I have no doubt that there are folk ballads which will be remembered when the works of some of our highly regarded artists have become historical curiosities.
It is not romantic, though it may become so, to desire that ones culture have deeper roots in the earth. Whatever naive expectations may be attached to this desire, it is fundamentally a rational and realistic impulse. We always want to get closer to reality. And so there are two reasons why it is, generally speaking, a better thing to load hay in the hot sun than to work in the mall. First, there is in farm labor a more direct and clear connection to the basic nature of the human situation. Second, the natural environment which is the source and context of farm labor comes more directly from the hand of God. For both these reasons, it seems that an agrarian society ought to be more likely to produce people of faith than an urban-industrial one. So strong is the testimony of creation to the hand of the Maker that true naturalistic atheism is hardly ever to be found among people who live in the midst of that testimony. (A humanly-created environment may, if created with the right intentions and great skill, lift our hearts even higher toward God. But of course our modern urban structures are more like acts of defiance and rejection, intended to foster a sense of human, not divine, power.)
I would not want to be understood as recommending agriculture or manual labor because they are difficult and therefore good for us. I do not want people to be miserable that they may better appreciate the prospect of heaven. I have children and am well aware that some of them would most likely have died in infancy or early youth in a society without modern medical knowledge. I thank God that most people in our society do not have to worry about starving or dying of exposure, and recognize that modern technology has made it easier for large numbers of people to live without these fears than has been true for most of the worlds history. I do not want to throw out everything we have learned which helps to shield us from natures vicissitudes. It is in fact because I value what we have gained that I want us to learn humility, gratitude, and stewardship. For the pride that lets us believe we have transcended nature is certain to destroy us, one way or another, body and soul, while the salvation of both is the business of Christianity and the ultimate, if not the immediate, purpose of human society.
The title page of the first issue of Caelum et Terra carried a small sketch of a man sowing a field broadcast, flinging seed from a bag. I have never actually seen anyone do this, or done it myself. When I worked on the farm I planted soybeans with a machine I pulled behind a tractor.
It may be that the depiction does not tell the whole story. The sower appears to be striding energetically, and one feels that he finds the work easy. There is an almost light-hearted quality about him. Perhaps he would, in real life, seem more grim or burdened, more weary, more anxious about the results of his work, about late frosts and summer droughts. No doubt it is very difficult nowadays to farm on a scale small enough to make broadcast sowing effective.
In any case, it is unlikely that many of us who are nurturing this magazine will ever make our living as the man in the sketch does. Yet there is truth in the sketch which makes it fitting as an image of what we are about. It is an image of man in right relationship with the physical world, by his own toil and skill drawing out the nourishment latent in the earth. The fisherman with his boat and net or the herdsman with his animals might serve as well. The mother with her child is an image of even deeper power, showing forth both the physical and the spiritual fecundity with which humanity is gifted. The scholar at his books, the smith at his forge, the craftsman, the housewifethese, though a step or more removed from the direct relationship with nature shown in the first four images, are fitting companions to them. All show us an engagement of mind, body, and matter which strikes us as true, right, and lasting.
But where in the industrial-commercial worldin the information society, in the service economyshall we find such archetypical images? The executive at his desk planning corporate strategy? The bureaucrat drafting regulations? The teenager in the McDonalds uniform speaking scripted greetings and handing out mass-produced burgers? The computer programmer at his terminal building abstract machines? The clerk in the video store? The stockbroker? The producer of television commercials? To name them is to recognize something unreal and slightly absurd in the activities. But the man sowing the field remains a figure of dignity, though we have never met him.
I have no program for restoring this image or something like it to its rightful place in our thinking and in our economy. I regard even the demand that I enunciate a program as premature; I cannot see that far ahead and, as Thomas Storck says elsewhere in this issue, until we get our thinking straight we can hardly hope to get our acting right. And the last thing we want to do is to become ideological: to draw too many or too fine lines between good and bad work or to labor over formulas for determining the precise percentage of farmers there should be in the population. I read somewhere that Eric Gill and his friends used to argue at length over the difference between a tool and a machine. Let us have that discussion, and others, but never construct a master plan to be imposed upon the world. Such specifications will be demanded by those who do not wish to change the existing order of things. But they are a snare. The plan would inevitably be foolish and the imposition of it not only a failure but a crime and an act hostile to everything we believe. The culture we want to see must grow because of the life that is in it, not because we will that it should. What we need are only a principlethat grace and nature, spirit and flesh, culture and earth, are inextricably meshedand an observation that our culture is at present seriously out of balance in the direction of abstraction and mechanization, tilted dangerously away from both the spiritual and the natural. What presents itself to us then is not the need to construct yet another abstraction, but to choose to work against the drift of the times by such means, small or large, as may be available to us.
Maclin Horton writes from the Deep, Deep, Deep South, where its hardly even cold this winter.
