OPINION/COMMENTARY

Beware the Agrarian Utopians The Hameau is a timber and thatch metaphor for what's now called "agrarian utopianism." Its devotees look back with longing on the time when people lived in tiny villages, and virtually everybody was somehow involved in farming. They believe the world would somehow be a better place if we all just hooked a plow to a pair of oxen and eked out a living on a few acres of soil. The most famous current agrarian utopian is another monarch, Prince Charles of Britain. While Marie Antoinette played a milkmaid, Charles plays a farmer. He has his own plot of organically-grown fruits and vegetables that he pays someone else to oversee. Like Marie Antoinette, he can go there whenever he likes, do what he pleases, and then take off his designer boots and become again a pampered prince. His farm is not his livelihood; it's a game. Yet this is how he perceives agriculture. Like all agrarian utopians, Charles views the past through thick lenses of nostalgia, sentimentality, and romanticism. He has no worry that his family will starve if insects or weeds ruin his crops....