On Oct 14, 2010, at 1:52 PM, 123hop at comcast.net wrote:
> Yes, there's a pejorative sense of peasant -- ignorant, isolated, backward. But it's not the work of farming that creates that.
>
> In fact, looking at the destruction of family farms and the growth of agribusiness after WW II, it's hard to escape the feeling that there was a political reason for this. That having a sizeable part of the population able to survive on its own and potentially feed others was not politically desirable.
Except that farmers in the U.S. and in many other countries are pretty conservative, and often vote in blocs for right-wing parties. And tilling the soil doesn't always make for a great curiosity about the wider world.