Abstract
Paul Thompson’s agrarian pragmatism (Thompson 1990, 2010) is a compass of valuation that (i) pays homage to the people (including real farmers), animals, and places that contribute to the food value chain (Thompson 1983, 2017a), (ii) explores the mourning, uncertainty, and vulnerability that accompany loss of focal practices and the agricultural landscapes that give them expression (Thompson 2000, 2010), and (iii) inspires discovery of new “platforms” (2020a) or “social imaginaries” (Berry 2012) that beckon shifts in our ethics, praxis, culture, and politics that reach beyond technological innovation (Thompson 2007, 2015, 2020b) to steward how humans coexist in and shape the natural environment. My discussion of Thompson’s impact on “Food Ethics Futures” draws on the significance of Peirce’s Evolutionary Love (1893) as a formula for understanding moral growth and self-transformation. Thompson’s agrarian pragmatism (1999, 2010) reflects a vital human agapic formula that contains the blueprint for our growth amidst the dominance of industrial capitalism. Its “good elements of living” (Bailey 1915), marked by the development of caring and trusting relationships that involve gratitude, humility, solidarity, healing, growth, and moral responsiveness, invite “affection” (Berry 2012) that inspires lessons on how to strengthen human relationships with the natural world and land-community. The essay ends by raising some lingering anxieties about whether agrarian pragmatism is up to the task and the resources from without agrarian pragmatism that are necessary to advance agapic love.
It is not by dealing out cold justice to the circle of my ideas that I can make them grow, but by cherishing and tending them as I would the flowers in my garden.
C.S. Peirce Evolutionary Love, 1893.
A garden requires patient labor and attention. Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them.
Liberty Hyde Bailey, Country Life in America, 1903.
The cultural cycle is an unending conversation between old people and young people, assuring the survival of local memory, which has, as long as it remains local, the greatest practical urgency and value.
Wendell Berry, It All Turns on Affection, 2012.
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Notes
- 1.
I am appreciative for the comments raised by both Julia Gibson and Lee McBride during the Food Futures Workshop regarding the significance of evolutionary love as inspiring spiritualism regarding the land-community (a numinous feeling of the sacred, the divine’s presence and power or nature’s capacity to evoke awe or nurture) and reading Peirce through naturalistic lenses, common among most pragmatists, respectively. Thompson himself has discussed Peirce’s view of God in light of “God-talk” and the “religious aspect of philosophy,” suggesting that “[the subjective mood] is a social but entirely human creation” (Thompson 2002, p. 203). Also, ‘love thy neighbor’ expressed through the Golden Rule is a formulation found in many of the world’s religions (Hick 1993) and is common in secular practices too (as exemplified in Thompson’s agrarian pragmatism).
- 2.
In EL, Peirce distinguishes between three kinds of growth to highlight the impact of agape as a driving force behind cultural evolution, motivating people to bring about something that is beyond their present situation, state of mind or form of life. The first is tychasm, which centers on the view that growth is the unintended consequence of chance. With his sights on Darwin, Peirce describes the conditions of organic evolution and argued that the directionality of the evolutionary process is not oriented by the purpose, needs, or desires of the organism in question. The second model is anancasm. It is growth by force or necessity, growth in the absence of spontaneity. Thus, habits of action are predictable given the laws of nature and antecedent states; they are in effect fixed. Finally, there is agapism, habit-taking modeled on Christian love (Peirce 1893).
- 3.
I’m indebted to Thompson for recommending Berry’s (2012) Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities, which grounds much of the comparison in this chapter. Citations are from It All Turns on Affection: The Jefferson Lecture and Other Essays, retrieved from https://www.neh.gov/about/awards/jefferson-lecture/wendell-e-berry-biography. The Jefferson Lecture has also been published by Counterpoint Press in It All Turns on Affection: The Jefferson Lecture and Other Essays (Counterpoin, 2012).
- 4.
I am grateful to Zach Piso’s elegant characterization here.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Paul Thompson for his mentorship and friendship throughout several decades. His commitment to his art is both admirable and worthy of emulation. Thanks to Zach Piso for insightful comments on a previous draft and to the farmers I’ve had to pleasure to learn from and fellow workshop attendees for their sage insights.
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Anthony, R. (2023). Thompson on Functions of Pragmatism: Adding Food and Agricultural Valuation to the Philosophy of Technology. In: Noll, S., Piso, Z. (eds) Paul B. Thompson's Philosophy of Agriculture. The International Library of Environmental, Agricultural and Food Ethics, vol 34. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37484-5_4
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