I could have said we professionalize burials (professional undertakers), or cooking (take-out, frozen dinners, fast-food, etc.).

Not all these changes are bad. I’m glad we have some degree of inspection of food, imaging techniques for the sick, and so on. We do, however, pay a price for all this in disconnection from things that are in some sense more “real” and from one another.

Would I give up clean running water, vaccination, and epidurals? No. Would I like to see more community, less anonymity, and more connection to weather, soil, life and death? Yes.

Do I have any very good ideas on how to get there? Nope.

2. I have a rather small quibble with GOM’s comment about childbearing. All the professionalizing in the world can’t really change the substance of the activity, it just makes it more pleasant. Having had two sons, I really can’t endorse any idea that would deprive pregnant women of epidurals. Mr. Berry has a rather, er, rosy idea of the benefits of pain, which in my view can really only be advocated by those who rarely feel it. Pain, in and of itself, is just that. To the extent that pain appears to produce a spiritual benefit, it’s due to the manner in which the sufferer reacts to it and demonstrates her virtues, not because she hurts. If we make suffering by itself a good thing, then we’ll have to canonize Stalin, since he provided so much of it.

We are alienated from concrete tasks, having either professionalized them (childbirth) or relegated them to an underclass (gardening). This process is inconsistent with incarnational theology, and although technical progress is in some respects wonderful, unhealthy.

Wordswoth:

Getting and spendng, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in nature that is ours.

Thoreau:

We do not ride on the railroad; it rides on us.

I say this, of course, having been raised in Manhattan, dwelling in the midst of the Southern California conurbation and living now by pushing paper.

If “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.”, how would we qualify religion that abdicates the care of the fatherless and widows by paying our elected officials to do it for us. And how much more damning that the time we have “saved” by such outsourcing is directed instead to sullying ourselves in “The World” with less meaningful pursuits.

And the directly human aspect is just one area of the divorce from moral traditions. Wendell Berry explains that our alienation from the land and physical processes that are necessary to sustain life. In the “Unsettling of America”, he writes “The willingness to abuse others bodies is the willingness to abuse one’s own. To damage the earth is to damage your children. To despise the ground is to despise its fruit; to despise the fruit is to despise its eaters. The wholeness of health is broken by despite”.

So, in short, the agrarian tradition extends far beyond dirt and corn - it reflects the idea that truth is a whole.

Most of all, they have a nearly idolatrous view of the nation-state and its prerogatives and authority. I think that there is something to John Dean’s argument that they have embraced an authoritarianism that sets them free from the burden of moral judgment.