Agrarianism

I have been reading many culturally (or is it agriculturally) conservative blogs recently expressing agrarian sentiments. While I enjoy working in the ground with my hands as much as the next man, I am no agrarian myself. My tepid view of agrarianism--I say tepid, because I actually think that the farm has some attractive attributes--springs partially from my own experience in farm-hand work, but also because I have a sneaking suspicion that there are very few voices of agrarian sentiment who are actually--or would actually be--farmers.

Today's primary voice of agrarianism, Wendell Berry, does own a farm, and he does appear to actually put a great deal of work into it and eat food which is yielded by the soil. That being said, he is also a teacher and a well-known writer; his father, who was also a farmer, was primarily a lawyer. In other words, the life that Berry has lived has always been immersed in agrarian values, but has never been dependent upon it. And Berry is an exception to mold; most agrarians--from Cleanth Brooks and Donald Davidson to Robert Penn Warren--were academics.

Agrarianism is nothing new (and, by that, I mean it wasn't something that was invented in the 20th century, nor was it created by Jeffersonian democracy when the United States came into being.) It is as old, in fact, as Thomas Wyatt's poem "To My Owne John Poins", if not older. (It is, arguably, even Virgilian.) But the one key factor of agrarianism among all of its propagators is the fact that it is unrealizable. Agrarianism is based on a desire for the past, not enjoyment of the present and, while this might give rise to some good writing, I don't see how, in the long run, it doesn't express the experience that people such as myself had while working in the ground.