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Aug 23rd, 2019
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  1. ORTHODOXY, MARGINS, AND CHANGE
  2. Our history forbids us to be surprised that an orthodoxy of thought should become narrow, rigid, mercenary, morally corrupt, and vengeful against dissenters. This has happened over and over again. It might be thought the maturity of orthodoxy; it is what finally happens to a mind once it has consented to be orthodox. But one may be permitted a little amusement, if not surprise, that this should have befallen a modern science, which was set up, as it never tires of advertising, to pursue truth, not protect it.
  3. But since what we now have in agriculture—as in several other “objective” disciplines—is a modern scientific orthodoxy as purblind, self-righteous, cocksure, and ill-humored as Cotton Mather’s, our history also forbids us to expect it to change from within itself. Like many another orthodoxy, it would rather die than change, and may change only by dying.* This determination is enforced both from within and from without. It is enforced from within simply by prosperity: the professors, experts, and executives of the agrifaith do not want agricultural policy to change because they are eating very well off of it as it is. From without, it is enforced by the mistaken conviction of millions of believers that it is the only true way, that they have no choice but to accept the agribusiness philosophy or starve. But it is also enforced by the very nature of orthodoxy: one who presumes to know the truth does not look for it.
  4. If change is to come, then, it will have to come from the outside. It will have to come from the margins. As an orthodoxy loses its standards, becomes unable to measure itself by what it ought to be, it comes to be measured by what it is not. The margins begin to close in on it, to break down the confidence that supports it, to set up standards clarified by a broadened sense of purpose and necessity, and to demonstrate better possibilities. Though it does not necessarily or always work for the better—though indeed this swing from the center to the margins and back again may be in itself a condemnation—this sort of change is a dominant theme of our tradition, whose “central” figures have often worked their way inward from the margins. It was the desert, not the temple, that gave us the prophets; the colonies, not the motherland, that gave us Adams and Jefferson.
  5. The pattern of orthodoxy in religion, because it is well known, gives us a useful paradigm. The encrusted religious structure is not changed by its institutional dependents—they are part of the crust. It is changed by one who goes alone to the wilderness, where he fasts and prays, and returns with cleansed vision. In going alone, he goes independent of institutions, forswearing orthodoxy (“right opinion”). In going to the wilderness he goes to the margin, where he is surrounded by the possibilities—by no means all good—that orthodoxy has excluded. By fasting he disengages his thoughts from the immediate issues of livelihood; his willing hunger takes his mind off the payroll, so to speak. And by praying he acknowledges ignorance; the orthodox presume to know, whereas the marginal person is trying to find out. He returns to the community, not necessarily with new truth, but with a new vision of the truth; he sees it more whole than before.
  6. In applying this pattern to agriculture, one is startled to realize that this is the first time it has been necessary, or possible, to do so. Not until recently have we had a widespread orthodoxy of agriculture in the same sense that we have had widespread orthodoxies of religion—an agriculture, that is to say, which is nearly uniform in technology and in its general assumptions and ambitions over a whole continent, and which, like many religions, aspires to become “universal” by means of a sort of evangelism, proclaiming that “Other countries would do well to copy it.”
  7. In agriculture there have always been prevalent patterns of technology, practice, and attitude that may have had the customary force of orthodoxy. But these patterns were local; they varied in response to local conditions. And, unlike orthodoxies, they were not imposed by external authority, but grew as part of a complex relationship between the human community and natural conditions. Until the triumph of the industrial values of the “agribusiness” vision, agriculture was very much a regional affair, a response at once to human need and to regional possibilities and limits, and it was successful and long-lasting in proportion to the sensitivity of that response.
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