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Comment by burnt-resistor | Hacker News Reader

Adjacent to the noble savage myth, the good ol' days illusion meets the grass is greener on the other side. Just 4 generations ago, when people worked a low tech, hand-to-mouth agrarian existence without powered equipment, proper nutrition, or antibiotics, they were at constant risk of starvation from a single low yield harvest. It's a very hard life.

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This is a misrepresentation of Berry's thought. Like many traditional Amish or Mennonite communities, he wasn't at all adverse to mechanized agriculture, he simply believed that technology be used considerately, and that people seeing agriculture up close made for a rooting in local community that he believed beneficial. Even Berry's critics (and he had his share, me included) did not dismiss his ideas so readily as your post.

Yeah that comment isn't quite fair but Berry does have a massive blindspot around labor. His entire like, deal, is built on the nearly-unmentioned-in-his-entire-works fact that he's describing a world of agrarian landowners who do relatively little productive work themselves. We can't all be gentleman farmers!

The fact that his writings are still so good and useful and interesting speaks incredibly highly of his powers of perception and skill as a writer. But it makes them nearly useless in a "how ought we to be" conversation, which is one of the main things his works engage with. So it really is a huge problem with his entire project.

I grew up in rural Texas, descended from sharecroppers. He's romanticizing a kind of farming that hasn't existed in the US in 70+ years, one that would make it impossible to feed the country.

Not only that, but I know from my parents generation that small hold farm work is brutal an naturally leads to certain dynamics that contemporary Americans would find quite objectionable. When a bad harvest could starve your family directions are never polite requests and norms are very strictly enforced.

> norms are very strictly enforced

And now norms are not enforced at all, and look at who we have in the white house. This is why we can't have nice things.

Have you ever been beaten across the legs with a tobacco stick for so long that you couldn’t walk the next day?

I think he romanticized the old ways of farming, but I think the overall point was to question what was good about the past and question the line we are fed that all technology is for the general good of all people.

I think it is possible to say that subsistence farming leading to disease and starvation is bad, and a gigantic corporate oligopoly run monoculture farm is also bad. One of his biggest points is really that life should be human scale and speed with human relationships as a priority, the idealized farm was just a way to show what that life looked like in the past.

Reading McCullough bio of Truman and Caro bio of LBJ lead me to the same conclusion. It was brutal, and most who saw any means of escape seized it

I’m compelled by the romantic nostalgia, but I know I personally couldn’t cut the mustard

My grandfather nearly starved to death on his parent's farm a couple of times during the Dustbowl and he contracted a disease while in an immunocompromised state due to malnutrition that left its mark throughout his bones. Later, he helped his mother buy a combination general store and house to support herself.

The catastrophes caused by the Dustbowl would be an argument against modern mechanized farming:

https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-scienc...

https://explaininghistory.org/2026/03/11/the-dust-bowl-an-en...

Is that the fault of mechanization or the fault of capitalistic greed?

The trendy buzzwords are not even necessary here. It’s just poor application (born from a combination of both greed, yes, and ignorance)

Is it any less a myth or illusion to romanticize aspects of the past than to romanticize a technocratic utopian future? Culture is built on picking and choosing what to adopt and what not to adopt in one's own life. It's not an either-or scenario in any case.

Surely there is an agreeable third option between life-and-death subsistence farming and spiritually/ecologically/gustatorily desolate conglomerate monocrop agriculture.

Food literally grows on trees.

Also, Berry wrote a foreword to one of Joel Salatin’s books. Modern intensive rotational grazing imitates nature, improves soil, and produces an important crop very profitably at scale.

Pay 2x for organic vegetables at the fancy grocery store

Organic vegetables are still monocrops grown by large companies, which I don’t think is a bad thing. Large scale agriculture has made food plentiful and cheap, that’s a good thing. We’ve eliminated famines in every nation with a stable government and market access outside or war zones.

>Just 4 generations ago, when people worked a low tech, hand-to-mouth agrarian existence without powered equipment, proper nutrition, or antibiotics, they were at constant risk of starvation from a single low yield harvest. It's a very hard life.

That's why we like it. The people in chairs in Wall-e don't.

https://jonnegroni.com/2015/04/15/the-humans-of-wall-e-were-...

I was a bit surprised by WALL-E and its premise; here was a space movie with a large corporation at the center, but it wasn't "evil" in the mold of Weyland-Yutani. BnL's CEO, Shelby Forthright, lived up to his name and generally meant well. The tragedies of the film lay entirely in unintended consequences.

Which is even darker in a sense, because it seems to try to tell us we're going to gum up the Earth even without the usual motives of greed and a lust for power, just a desire for the best life for everyone.

I was shocked to notice the date in the URL. I think I understand where the LLMs are getting it from now

Man, I hope for that guy he one day wisens enough to let out a "God I was stupid!" while re-reading this.

Yeah, hard disagree.

Easy to say when you never had to live that life.

A key point that's always missed in this kind of discussion is that people in the past didn't worship comfort quite to the extent people do now (although of course they'd often prefer it).

Sure, a materialist could go back and psychologize any glimmer of satisfaction anyone in the past might have felt as some kind of "cope", but we should at least give our ancestors the respect of properly representing their hierarchy of values.

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