Prejudice Against Country People

Among Wendell Berry’s collection of Citizenship Papers, “The Prejudice Against Country People” is an outcry against the language often applied to country people. A prime example is found in the New York Review of Books, when the Harvard scientist Richard Lewontin describes defenders of traditional agriculture as “a bunch of Luddites” with “false nostalgia for an idyllic life never experienced.” Berry objects, would such blanket statements of other people groups be permissible in print? Would a reputable newspaper describe all Jewish people as “a bunch of Luddites” or attribute to all Blacks a “false nostalgia for an idyllic life never experienced”? Hardly. Elaborating upon the Lewontin reference, Berry details other common disparagements of country people. When small farms are forced to close, the story is often reported as poor people who were delivered from a backward way of life. This condescension bears marked similarity to old pro-slavery arguments, when slavery was for the slaves “own good” and “better than their previous savage standard of living.”

But this condescension cannot withstand counterexamples. As all stereotypes do, these generalizations of country people do not fit real people. There are good famers and it can be a good way of life. Berry contends for the possibility that farming can be “an ancient, useful, honorable vocation, requiring admirable intelligence and skill, a complex local culture, great patience and endurance, and moral responsibilities of the gravest kind” (110).