Progressivism had failed in the 1930s. Despite technological innovations, all of the social problems of humanity were just as bad as they had ever been—or even worse. The Great Depression was global, and people all over the world began to wonder if an industrialized economy could ever recover. There had to be something more to life, something that mere material progress could never provide. And according to several Catholic social thinkers, the answer was to return to a faith-based agrarian society.
“They that would malform, distort, and torture humanity into a mechanical mold, grinding at its very soul, are necessarily at war with the Incarnation,” Catholic writer Hillaire Belloc warned in his 1937 book The Crisis of Civilization. “We cannot build up a society synthetically, for it is an organic thing.” The model for human society, Catholic agrarians emphasized, was the Mystical Body of Christ—the Church. “Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others,” St. Paul wrote in Romans 12:4-5. In the same way, a properly functioning society (held together by a common faith in Christ) would also work together like an organism.
But it was hard for people in an urban, industrialized society to work together like the parts of a body. Modern life was just too unnatural. Looking to the village-based society of the Middle Ages as a model, Catholic agrarians believed that the best hope for humanity was a return to an agrarian society which was “perpetually revived by intimate contact and incessant conflict with nature,” as Kenrick Lloyd Kenrick wrote in the 1934 compendium Flee to the Fields.
What would agriculture look like in this type of organic society? “The true art of agriculture establishes a relationship with plants and animals that is symbiotic, founded, that is, on a religious feeling of respect and love for the creatures that God has given us for our use,” Graham Carey wrote in the Catholic agrarian magazine Land and Home in September 1942. “If the farmer is to work intelligently with Nature on his farm, he must keep in mind the wholeness, the oneness, the completeness of Nature in the life on his farm,” John C. Rawe wrote in the September 1943 issue of Land and Home. “This organic ordering is Nature’s law. In order to survive, each part is dependent upon some other.”
When Rawe and the other Catholic agrarians found out about biodynamic farming and its concept of the organic whole, they were elated. This was exactly what the agriculture of an organic society should look like! Biodynamic farming, Rawe and Luigi Ligutti emphasized in their 1940 book Rural Roads to Security, was one of the ways in which “the concept of the organic in society must return as the basis of thought and action.” They concluded:
For the man who plants, and waters, and watches things grow, nature unfolds her secrets and the great fundamental truths of life and death, toil and pain, time and eternity, and God takes on a new and deeper meaning….Life on the land is not artificial, mechanical, a matter of trade and commerce. It brings into human existence a closer alliance with the open field, the starry sky, the growing plants, and the animal world—an alliance which is good for the human mind. Intimate association with God’s creative work and the self-sustaining power of an agrarian civilization are great foundation stones of right human existence.
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