Rotate the Crops: Glance Down
An Essay in Three Parts: Part Three
Every metaphor has limitations, and crop rotation, a metaphor wrestled from Leviticus, is no more or less than a metaphor for living truths. A few serious limitations of crop rotation include the cost of perpetually delayed gratification (truth arrives last), a silence on the question of how to make quick decisions and snap judgments, and the burden of what Rosalynde Welch calls living airborne at low elevation amid sky-high community truth standards, among others. Crop rotation itself does not suggest all the needed answers; at any elevation, it does call us to glance down at the soil beneath us.
The single seasonal laborer is a stranger to satisfaction. The harvests and sabbaticals of truth only come after seasons and years of effort. Seven at least, according to shmita. Thus seasonal migrant farm laborers (those people most vital to modern-day industrial monocropping agriculture) are unjustly separated from the fruits of their labors. Harvests create sustainable surplus only after years and even generations of hard work, if then at all.
Again, crop rotation raises the bar for truth but also extends the season for its evaluation and cultivation over time. It asks all of our communities—whether professional, scientific, artistic, religious, and others—to attend to the consequences of enacted belief. Crop rotation communities are limited by the stubborn ordering of time: no one can know the truth until after they have tasted its fruit. Crop rotation attracts those in search of an antidote to the addiction of our attention economy, a nod to that rare reader who carries a long essay. Crop rotation does not end in a single lifespan: living wisely and sustainably together make enduring truths.
Crop rotators have no panacea for “solving” individual faith crises or life changes generally. It invites patience with our personal pathways: fragile faith crises, while felt intensely in the moment, deserving our full care, and bearing real consequence, often look more like unhurried multistage journeys to those long working the fields of truth claims with their fellow sunburnt laborers. Honoring emotional realism, it feels, observes, and sits with, without passing judgment on, the varieties of experience with faith, truth, and the other living arts. Rotators sit a spell with those who struggle in shared humility, modesty, and empathy. Rotators walk with dignity alongside those who would enter and exit the communities we bear together. An open door stands open in more than one direction.
Simultaneously, the rotator, who firmly holds truth worthy of cultivating together, separates truth claims from their cultivators, reserving careful judgment for the former, not the latter. The rotator may thus set aside worldviews eager to reproduce brittle orthodoxies and their reactionary critics as just two among many of the countless ways to make fragile sense of the world. Buoyant upon oceans of reactive nonsense, the rotator may hope to sit with, receive, and deliver healthy critique of the claims, and less so their cultivators who threaten to sink others.
Rotators must then also see in the temptation to feel superior, or somehow above it all, a profoundly impractical attitude toward truth: the rotators cultivate charity to cultivators by other names and responsibility to the claims. This imposes a hard limit: the rotator knows their own vocabulary is nothing special—it’s a metaphor whose point lies outside its attitude. Instead it seeks to paint a general yet practical image about everyone: we all are here laboring to develop more truth-led and better nourished communities. We all have room and time enough on the fertile plains and verdant valleys for many approaches, for charitable giving to the needy, and to let the richest fields restore themselves by lying fallow in rotation. Crop rotation takes a while. There’s good reason neither to rush nor to stop now, for we all have to sustain attention in the face of another serious limitation: crop rotators know they may never know the total truth even as they must learn to know and live on enough. Precisely because the full harvest of truth never comes until the end, we must at the same time stress that there is much good in having enough confidence and humility to act on provisional truth at any given moment. Voir dire: although the full truth hides perpetually away in jury, it remains both good and necessary, for example, to know where one’s child is at night, what the plan for tomorrow holds, or what communities one belongs with and serves.
Such forms of temporary knowledge are provisional, necessary, and as worthy as their works. They require the crop rotator to, in the act of rotating, mentally blackbox, compartmentalize, and control for what works and what doesn't in different situations. Daily life, nevermind experimental living, requires this and more; the same practical ways of knowing do not demand our shelving away unknowns and ignorances into perpetual deep freeze or bundling them up so tightly they never come under faithful review. By the same token, experimental living also discourages suddenly breaking the poor proverbial shelf or unbundling them into a tangled mess. They invite rotating our attention, letting truth rest and grow at times, and refreshing our responsible service to the amber waves of claims.
Here that signal objection—that truth and falsehood surely cannot be synonymous with long-term good or ill use—crumbles a bit for the simple reason the true often becomes the good only after it dons its overcoat and proves itself in joining hands and warming hearts while leaning, as Nathaniel and Terryl Givens put it recently, into the headwinds (in some ways a critique of the crop rotation method). All of the practical means by which we tell and then enact the good from the bad are also how crop rotators avoid fragile all-or-nothing, as well as contradictory epistemologies, and insist in its place on a sensible cultivation of the good toward the far-off harvests stretching into the horizons of truth.
Even if that harvest never comes in a given season or lifetime, the ground for living truths remains fertile and deserves protection, nourishment, and care. Like any sustainable agriculture today, communities of crop rotators must also attend to and limit the damage their work does to growth environments. What greater common political project could conservative and liberal come to serve, and thus come to mean, than nourishing a collective growth that conserves, sustains, and gives itself away freely in turn?
Such practical fields of knowing and doing come with other interpersonal tensions: many loved ones, having assessed the fruit of an ambiguous crop or season, choose to leave those fields dry and uncultivated in order to move onto greener pastures elsewhere. I witness this regularly across my beloved communities, sometimes with heartache, often with dignity: talented teachers move to other fields, siblings in spirit remove themselves from local gatherings, and experimental navigators jump to other ships.
The great effort of continuously cultivating a crop whose value will not be determined for years, even generations, may continue to prove too much for too many. Even the time table of the short and medium term appears too long in many situations (including essays). This limitation is serious: crop rotation offers no wisdom on how to make immediate decisions or on how to curb the serious hurt and heartbreak of our immediate situations. Crop rotators cannot navigate the real damage—the negative works—of immediate structural and personal injustice and harm, except to see it for what it is: hurt, heartbreak, and blight. This limitation deserves facing face-on and sitting with, not embracing and not rejecting.
There may be other better metaphors for how to make quick or short-term decisions that affect us all but, at least as far as I see it, the crop rotation analogy is not it. If it suggests anything practical about how to help those who are hurting or upset in the present, it may be limited to this: generational community cultivation binds us all to serve forward without restricting the present. In other words, communities that are committed to cultivating and restoring truth have a responsibility to harvest the truths planted and cultivated by previous generations of laborers as well as doing the work of planting and raising new truths for future generations. Given our obligations to honor the past and build a better future, how much more sympathy, dignity, and understanding do we owe right now to all those whose truth cultivations or faith journeys take them elsewhere in the present tense? Letting go and giving away my personal or cultural expectations about others while also cultivating more welcoming, fertile fields for future seasons and generations yields a higher order of catharsis and crop rotation. It understands, welcomes, and builds better change without fear.
To put this personally, I don’t want our children to be like me. I want them to be open to the best their children may become. May they find joy in foreseeing, serving, and cultivating the best future for their children, or if childless, the best future others will seek. I pray that by serving well in many fields and raising many fruits, our children will become more like the people their children will one day strive to become, thus anticipating and speeding a better future. This attitude—welcoming a better future by attending to long-term consequences not yet fully known, modeled throughout this essay by quotes often from educators of children—is no contradiction of family history and tradition. In fact, it extends, not diminishes, the profound past we inherit from our honored parents and all those who came before, who, invariably, also lived for the future we now call the present. May we, like they did then, live today for a future that will realize the best for all children, and their children may build on their best terms. The past invites us to build a better present by yielding our future forward.
Letting go does not evade truth: sometimes releasing our grip on a fixed future lets truth find us. Perhaps the mature crop rotator reconciles with the deeply rooted fact that, because most truth occurs all about us and never fully in our grasp, my personal desires, demands, and expectations may be yielded and given away to those who glean. I hold up this central post of a tent large enough for all:
Our common faith—the faith common across all communities I know—holds that truth itself is worth cultivating.
That statement of faith roots me. The rotator may never know the certitude of believing themselves to be right. Each of us may accept the foreseeable costs of a simple article of faith: the best use of truth, whatever it may become, must be worth living for and cultivating for communities grander than the self. There could be no higher definition of truth than that truth which, once lived locally and collectively, will cultivate good for all.
Presumably, the sage farmer sees the fullness of harvest not just in packed feed silos and teeming barns. Nor even (although necessarily) in the poor and those with needs being fed, empowered, and dignified. Perhaps the canny rotator eventually spies the greatest harvest in the generations fed, raised, strengthened, bronzed, disciplined, and bent over years of service to the field of good works and uses; in learning and forgiving; in disappointment and loss; in birth, death, and birth anew; and in other ongoing eternal arcs of labor, deliverance, and rebirth in our efforts and patience. Perhaps if one can first fully sit in the bitter probability that one will never taste the full ripeness of truth and, even then, still live life committed to cultivating truth for all, perhaps then one casts the same shadow as the wise aged crop rotator who sees the finest bumper crop in their beloved communities themselves.
The term crop rotation, outlined here, offers no magic almanac or harvest menu. The modest metaphor suggests how already common and self-evident practices might save us from unserviceable all-or-nothing vocabularies for truth, such as latchable bundles of claims, doubts shelved in deep storage, and the rest.
Alternatively, the collective agricultural vocabulary here commits firmly to the following first principle of faith: truth, whatever else it may be, is worth cultivating for all. We are all engaged in various ongoing restorations of truth. Those who take comfort in the existence of higher plans and powers need not possess every detail of the plan itself; they still plant and evaluate what they can with provisional assurance that they don't see the end harvest. Those who grow by critiquing and reworking plans—they too enjoy the same provisional lease on action. Action and critique are not two competing camps; they are compatible tasks in the same season. It is not that, as the lame phrase goes, those who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it; rather, it is that by rotating our crops, action and critique fuse together into critical action and actionable critique, or “the common task” as Nikolai Fedorov put it, of the restoration and cultivation of our species living truth in our lives on earth.
We all have part in the ongoing restoration of life and truth on earth. We taste fruitful truth by the continuous and unhurried individual and community efforts to live and plant nourishing beliefs, serve generously those fields of knowledge, lift standards of community evidence and inquiry, and plan to share surplus stores of truth and wealth in the short and medium term.
And then comes the saving kenosis: the seventh season, shmita, or the sabbath year. The Sabbath means release, and crop rotation models a two-step art of the regular release of private holdings (whether mental or material) and the rotation of those holdings in service to the public. On the proverbial seventh year (not just the seventh decade of the philanthropist’s accounts but more regularly), we keep holy the recurring sabbath of meaning; give away its surplus; take a step back from the cultivation of truth; let our fields of learning and service sit fallow; charitably offer, without demand, our excess to all those who would glean from the harvest of truth with our beloved communities; and especially, benefit the hungry and others with unmet needs. Then, after a due season of restoration and revolution, we prepare to begin anew by planting living crops in new fields.
In short, we rotate the crops.
If the reader feels tempted to try out the language of crop rotation, remember first its premise: to hold a truth claim as true in one’s mind does not yet make it true or false, nor least of all good. Indeed this essay’s own call to publicly advance the case for truth may do more damage than good unless its advocates experimentally practice its main point: the truth we celebrate must first do good work for increasingly many over time to even become true. Were crop rotation used to do collective evil, it would become false by its fruits. A worthwhile claim deserves faithful experiment and careful living: seek, serve, sort out truth and good works that bear fruit across many hearts and homes, communities and congregations, cultures and climates. Use it well.
Truth fully shorn from the soil of experience has less value than a proposition in a mislaid textbook; the truth of a claim sprouts in the soil of experience and experiment. How else could truth be known and tasted except by unspooling, line for line, rotation by rotation, the exercise of its claims?
In this we scratch up against its unbreakable bedrock claims about reality. Truth is real, and words matter that serve that fact. Even a child’s semi-literate scribble enriches reality infinitely more than every sonnet Shakespeare left unwritten. Taking a pencil in hand throws the world into potential limbo as all followers of the embodied word learn to domesticate and wield for warmth and light the scorching fire that is writing. As many of the prominent women leaders cited here pointed out over a century ago, how glorious and perilous the fields that facilitate developing minds!
John Milton, who went blind authoring Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, also developed a philosophy of truth wayfaring in Areopagitica. In it he reminds us that the struggle for truth animates across all ages. Norbert Wiener, sometimes a crop rotator by still another name, comments on the role of live truth in Paradise Lost: “if Milton’s poem is to have the dignity of being more than one of these groan-and-grunt exhibitions, the devil must be given a chance of winning, at least in his own estimation.” In other words, the experiment for truth runs ever live: if the outcome of the struggle for truth were already predetermined, if all truth were no more than the logical consequence of its priors, if an omnipotent, unchanging eternal clockmaker had already summed up all truth and just left it to work itself out among us, if prior dogmatisms had present-day standing, if these or many other if-then propositions were somehow to do the best available work, then the faithful stakes of truth, that very struggle between truth and falsehood—indeed the whole encounter with good and evil inside each of us thundering through the void of the cosmos—would sum to no more than a staged wrestling match. Its outcome predetermined, it might amuse a few for an afternoon. But its drama could never rivet, sustain, or enliven generations like our collective struggle to feed and raise better living truths for all must.
All alive inherit a noble tradition of truthmaking: we live out in our partial lives the production value of the ongoing struggle for truth that works well. From the barest facts to the unabridged cosmologies, the pursuit of truth, lived out as it must be in the scrum of all matter, energy, and relationships, raises the stakes of the whole world. How we live then asks the most faithful question not just because you or I matter (although we also do, especially when the pronouns you and I serve as an inclusive but not universal we) but because our cultivation of truth, however partial and piecemeal at any moment, cannot help but matter. Truth worth giving away—food, wealth, knowledge, relationships, communities—grows in vibrant matter. Heaven on earth makes up life lived together—modest, fractious, and in glorious moments here and now.
I feel overwhelmed at times. If truth grows here and now, how can I possibly bear the weight of cultivating a more true world here and now? The long implications of crop rotation’s otherwise chill, patient, flexible metaphor overpowers me at times. Like my teenage self sweltering amid the sunscorched cornfields, who can bear the thought that each of us bears the stakes of living truth in the world? My heart quickens, I tense up. It is an overwhelming thought, and I feel myself crumbling under such sky-high standards. And then, I glance down and, seeing the soil enriching my communities, I take courage and comfort as I remember that truth is not my burden alone to bear. No one, except in the meridian of time, has ever borne living truth alone and no one labors alone since then. Given this ritual confidence and regular release (the literal meaning of the sabbatical shmita, or “release”), I feel my feet grounded. I begin to relax. I breathe in. The existential hum of overstrict orthodox epistemologies, insatiable scrupulosity, and metaphysical cliffs fade from view. I breathe again and then again more slowly. “I” becomes we, we become you all, you all become they, they become it, it becomes nameless. Why me becomes why not and how to. I look around, focus, and see all about me living truths, a shared anthropology of orthopraxy. No longer alone, I glance down again, see the rich soil luring me to pick up the best tool at hand, and dig in where I stand.
I glance down.
Life works better as an orthopraxic anthropology than an orthodox epistemology.
That’s it—it just works better.
Not all truth can be tended at once, and it takes all of us working in rhythms to make it to the harvest. I too am part but only part of my many beloved communities—my family, communities, field and profession, faith tradition, languages and nations—and thus of all of us, and so I can try to do my part alongside others in this saving work of restoring and cultivating truth. Invite one another to belong to many different communities that do different kinds of good work. In my experience, truth tends to blossom in, as I’ve noted elsewhere, second-order social orbits, such as school classrooms, scientific fields, churches, organizations, and languages—all means to greater, more sustainable ends.
Whatever the season at hand—whether the muted gray clouds that blanket the heavens in silence, the endless rows of sunlit crops in need of detasseling, the flashy storms of insight and rain-drenched twilight, all the peril with which we change the climate—I take confidence in a few hardy perennials: the practical truths of discipline and patience, collective action and future-forward conservation, prudence and courage, solidarity and experimentation feed our beloved communities year in and year out.
Glance Down, Again: The End of a Row
At last we approach the end of this essay’s proverbial cornfield row. It has been days. The stalks have grown tall, and the rolling horizon begins to break open before us. Before we part, glance down again. What if I found myself at the wrong end? What if I met with disorientation and isolation in the future? How would and should I fare? What if, despite all my belief and experience, privilege and plantedness, I were to lose my beloved communities—my discipline, my faith, my language? I would stand lost, bitten with blight, alone.
In such dark futures, truth and goodness might wither at the touch of my hand: who among us would not recoil at a curse worse than Midas, not tremble before such live questions?
Even then, would I not—in time, with space, amid care—glance down again and see underneath the scorched surface of my desires a fertile topsoil and firm ground on which we all stand? Would I not, in time, release with shmita, rotate my view, and, amid my blight, see fertile fields all around?
I pray I would see cycles of plowing, planting, watering, waiting, cultivating, harvesting, and then giving truths away wherever they grow all about me? But would I?
I cannot know. How could anyone?
Crop rotation entertains neither ignorance nor certitude. Rather it bows to the faithful proposition:
If the question is live, the solution is living.
I do know that as a teenager detasseling corn in Iowa, I thought that if I squinted just right, I could glimpse the eternities bursting through the sweat-blurred horizon at the end of the cornfield row.
I am glad I toiled but perhaps I did not have to strain to look so far away. Truth was not hidden beyond the horizon. It has always already been at hand. Truth lives in action all around us, between us, beside us, underneath us, surfacing, surprising, and sustaining our ways. It is at foot. “Look upon the earth beneath,” intones Jacob.
For the soil of reality is already everywhere fertile. Profoundly, practically, unevenly. It is here, there, elsewhere—and all of it rewards effort and experiment with truth and goodness.
I stand rooted in that fact, and no one stands alone.
What community of crop rotators on our living, imperiled, and fertile earth would not essay to walk the long rows together, working to seed, cultivate, and share a perennial return, a harvest worth living for?
What else does faith in living truths consist of except the modest means for cultivating heaven up from earth?
Glance down and rotate the crops, for if truth sprouts even in the abyss, will not our efforts to cultivate the good fruit of truth take root across fields, as another second-order farmer once observed, more sunlit and verdant?
Benjamin Peters is a Wayfare Associate Editor. He is also a media scholar, author, and editor interested in Soviet century causes and consequences of the Information Age.
Artwork by Jeffrey R Pugh.
