Mercy and Democracy: a mid-week musing

An interaction and an incident yesterday, one that I will not elaborate on in these pages, had me thinking about both mercy and democracy. Mercy is certainly not the sole providence of small farms. But Victor Hanson, in his excellent history, The Other Greeks, makes a persuasive case that Greek democracy developed out of the small farm culture of ancient Greece. That the nature of agrarian interactions, of modest finances and the need to accomplish the work with few hands led to an independence of culture and the martial willingness to defend it. Which led me back to wondering if mercy has some roots in an agrarian past? Whether mercy, in the end, is the ability to act decisively and also with compassion, all informed by the daily practice of intimate familiarity? And whether democracy without an informed exercise of mercy can thrive?

From my Winged Elm Farm Alphabet:

M is for Mercy

Mr. Blake says that “mercy has a human heart.” As a quality based on compassion for those in one’s care, mercy on a farm gets a lot of experience. It is frequently exercised in dispatching an animal when butchering, mercifully killing an injured duck whose leg has been pulled off by a turtle or any of the other seemingly endless ways of dying or being injured on a farm. Farming expands with a clear-eyed view the means and ways of compassion, strips the sentiment and leaves you with choices that cannot be put off on anyone else.

A Winged Elm Farm Alphabet Book: “M”

M is for Mercy

Mr. Blake says that “mercy has a human heart.” As a quality based on compassion for those in one’s care, mercy on a farm gets a lot of experience. It is frequently exercised in dispatching an animal when butchering, mercifully killing an injured duck whose leg has been pulled off by a turtle or any of the other seemingly endless ways of dying or being injured on a farm. Farming expands with a clear-eyed view the means and ways of compassion, strips the sentiment and leaves you with choices that cannot be put off on anyone else.

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Reading this weekend: Along the Enchanted Way: a story of love and life in Romania by William Blacker. It is a beautiful and ultimately heartbreaking story of so-called global progress that is worth picking up. And I just started Dimitry Orlov’s new book, The Five Stages of Collapse.