Healthy Peasant Common Sense

Many who are old enough will probably remember the joke about a communist bigwig (insert any name) who, during a stroll through the countryside, met a peasant with a nag in a sorry state. “What’s wrong with the horse, comrade peasant?” “I don’t know, comrade (insert any name), it won’t eat, it’s losing weight, and it looks at me so sadly.” “Play it revolutionary music. It lifts people’s spirits, so why not livestock?” A week passes and the bigwig goes for another stroll to check the effects of his advice. This time the peasant is seriously worried, as the horse’s knees are buckling from wasting away. “Rub it with garlic,” comrade (insert any name) tosses off cheerfully, smiling condescendingly. When he runs into the peasant again a few days later, the peasant is sitting glumly on a stump. “Where’s the horse?” the man from the Central Committee (insert any name) asks him. “It croaked, comrade,” the peasant replies grimly. “What a pity,” replies the party official, “I had so many more ideas.” Like most jokes from the socialist era, this one caricatures the painful reality of the time. It mocks the party’s approach to organizing agriculture. In reality, that approach had consequences that were not funny at all and often tragic. Millions of Ukrainians died in 1932 and 1933 from a famine to which political decisions from Moscow largely contributed. Even more murderous was China’s Great Leap Forward, which began in 1958 and in four years claimed tens of millions of human lives.

All this happened in systems that, in their ideological iconography, held peasants in very high regard. Today in Slovenia there are no more communists, except in the heads and behavior patterns of some former communists. There are fewer and fewer farmers too, but they still represent, in democracy as well and at least for some, a very important part of their ideological paradigm. As in communism, the farmers themselves often benefit least from this attention. This is nicely illustrated by the ideologically charged fetishization of the phrase “healthy peasant common sense.” It is so often abused to justify and cover up all kinds of nonsense and prejudice that it has become almost insulting. Especially to farmers.

A few days ago, I saw a news report about a young Slovenian farmer. The guy struck me as a bit of an enthusiast and as stubborn as a farmer has to be, but above all well-read and smart. Not peasant-smart or common-sense-smart, but simply intelligent. My first objection to the phrase “healthy peasant common sense” is that it suggests an absence of ability and interest in tackling the more complicated intellectual knots we associate with “ordinary,” unhealthy and non-peasant intelligence. Romanticizing “if it’s round it’s a shovel, if it’s pointed it’s a pickaxe” is condescending to farmers. I have enormous respect for this profession. It requires a great deal of knowledge, experience, understanding of nature and harmony with it, as well as sacrifice, very hard work and the ever-present risk of loss and defeat. On the other hand, there is also the satisfaction that comes from producing food. Something you have created yourself, from the soil and with nature. That pride, raised to the hundredth power, that we ordinary mortals feel at every cherry tomato or basil leaf we manage to grow on our balconies. The importance of agriculture for society is also exceptional. The level of self-sufficiency in food production is of strategic importance. Locally produced food has enormous environmental potential. Successful farming requires a lot of knowledge. A good farmer is an expert worthy of every respect. In his field.

It is quite another matter, however, when the expertise associated with cultivating the land and raising livestock begins to be attributed a kind of magical status as the only original, pure and uncorrupted wisdom, holding the key to understanding and solving absolutely all the increasingly complicated and difficult social, economic and political challenges of the modern world. To solve the problems with vaccination, all we need is healthy peasant common sense, the health minister recently declared. Really? Why? Because their authenticity and connection to the land give farmers supernatural abilities to understand the predicaments of the epidemic? If it’s round it’s the virus, if it’s pointed it’s the spike? A health minister who relies on healthy peasant common sense to help solve the epidemic is like a peasant who relies on the advice of the comrade from the Central Committee to treat his sick horse. In the context of a health crisis and distrust of experts, this is pouring oil on the fire. If anywhere, “healthy peasant common sense”—in its ideological anti-establishment version, of course, not in the intelligence and knowledge needed for farming—is reflected in the thinking and arguments of anti-vaxxers. “Healthy peasant common sense tells you that to breathe you need air, not a muzzle,” an indignant anti-vaxxer snapped at me a few days ago in a comment on my post about the need to respect protective measures and vaccination. If anything, solving the problems in responding to the epidemic requires an understanding of the social damage caused by populism in league with social networks. Politics that paves its way to power with conspiracy theories, alternative facts and exploitation of distrust of the establishment risks having trouble persuading the public about the response to the pandemic, because with its ideological discourse it legitimizes and fuels anti-vaccine ideas and instincts. Remember what happened to Trump when, at a recent rally, he suggested his supporters get vaccinated.

Just as communism did with the working class, for part of politics today the glorification of peasantness is full of ideological charge. As in the time of the Cultural Revolution, today, if somewhat more refined and less crude, peasantness is an instrument of the culture war, aimed at everything stigmatized as elitist, bourgeois, intellectual and corrupt. As in chess, pawns are used and sacrificed to achieve higher goals and victory over the opponent. The “purity” of the rural spirit and world, as opposed to the decadence of the bourgeois West, is the main message of the newly composed political conservatism that has spread to us via the East. Of course, in all societies there are differences in prevailing political beliefs between cities and the countryside. But these are differences that are legitimate and normal in every democratic community. Democracy needs a left, a center and a right; leftists, liberals and conservatives. There are more of some in the cities and more of others in the villages. But today it is often a polarization that spills far beyond the outer limits of the pluralist democratic space. Farmers, entirely innocent, are abused as a symbol of the defense against openness, tolerance and modernity. The ideological charge does not mean that peasantness has supporters only on the right. The mystification of the natural order and wisdom also excites the odd kumbaya alternative type in a stretched-out sweater, but that doesn’t make the mess any smarter, more progressive or more respectful of farmers. Even more than in peasantness, the ideological bias is evident in the emphasis on “healthy.” “Common sense,” said Albert Einstein, “is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.” And prejudices are the driving force of far-right political populism. A healthy nation against an unhealthy one, purity against impurity, us against them. Healthy peasant common sense tells you that homosexuality is unnatural—stallions don’t mate with each other, you know. Heh, heh, heh.

The rebelliousness offered by the anti-establishment message of healthy peasant common sense is not critical; rather the opposite. It is often manipulation, disguised in the apparent authenticity and openness of social networks. The ideological interpretation of “healthy peasant common sense” is not aimed at every elite, but above all at political competitors. It revives another trait that has always been very dear to authoritarians of all colors. An attitude to authority based not on democratic legitimacy and trust but on obedience to the master. This is also reflected in the joke above. The poor peasant knew very well that following the comrade’s advice would not end well, but, as healthy peasant common sense says, authority is authority; if it demands it, you hand over your lard too. Intelligence without adjectives would have told the peasant to ignore the party directives and go to the vet for ivermectin. For the horse, not for himself.