(Buckle, Farmers)

I ❤️ farmers. For several reasons: 

- My Dad longed to live on a farm before he died. (And bought one and was going up on weekends to get it ready when he died, just short of fulfilling his dream.) 

- There are people I love who are full-time farmers. 

- Wendell Berry is a farmer. 

- And besides all of that, I like to eat something other than dead animals.

So when I read Henry Thomas Buckle's comments on farmers ("agriculturists"), I was taken aback. After praising the expansive minds of Merchants, Buckle has this to say about the farmer:

"His views are confined to one country, and often to one place in that country. What he gains in intensity he loses in grasp. His interests, his views, his very aspirations are small and cramped; and, unless he be a man of considerable natural power, he dwindles away in point of intellect to a gaping rustic who cultivates his soil. Now look at history. In every struggle for freedom, in every struggle for onward progress, the merchants and the inhabitants of towns have thrown themselves into the breach, and often have led the forlorn hope. But the agriculturists, the inhabitants of the country, always have been and still are in the rear of their age. Their voices have always been lifted against improvement; and they have but too often succeeded in drowning by clamour what they never could hope to convince by reason. Thus, too, a nation of agriculturists is more liable to superstition than a nation of traders or manufacturers. The farmer is very dependent on nature. A single unfavourable season will baffle the most scientific calculations that he can make. Hence, we find that they resort to astrology, &c. But the manufacturer is not so much operated on by the whims of nature. Whether it is wet or dry, whether it is cold or warm, little matters to the success of his operations. He learns to rely on himself. He puts his faith in his own skill and in his own right arm; nor is he very anxious about the prognostication of the astrologer, or the prayer of the priest . Besides this, in manufactures the inventive powers are infinitely more used than in agriculture. A very obvious consideration will explain the cause of this. In agriculture the principal, I may say the sole expense, is that incurred by producing the raw material, the corn; but in manufacture, the price of the raw material is generally much less than the value of the labour by which that raw material is worked up. Now, it is a well-known law, that the produce of land increases in a diminishing ratio to the quantity of labour employed. But, to the productiveness of manufacturing labour a precisely opposite law is applicable. The consequence is that manufactures are much more susceptible of mechanical improvement than agriculture, and therefore to them mechanical improvements are oftener applied."

Ouch.

But...

Well, it reminded me of Alexis de Tocqueville's comments about the man working on the assembly line, who, because he is forced to focus his attention on making heads for pins for almost one half of his waking life, shrinks in intellectual capacity.

And I had to think about some of the people one of my farmer friends has told me about...how narrow-minded they are...how much they support Trump...without questioning his bullshit. 

So I don't know. How about you? Any thoughts?