In a healthy culture, people, land, and communities are joined in a complex and mutually beneficial way. Unfortunately, as we gain more knowledge, we struggle to be able to determine which new solutions we should adopt and which will make us more ignorant. It is difficult to make an informed decision about how to improve our lives.

The institution of marriage is one example: we cannot ever have enough knowledge to know whether marriage will be a good thing until we have already been married. Marriage used to be understood as a solution to loneliness, but this is no longer the case. Now we do not know who can inform our decisions about marriage or other worldly decisions.

We can argue that love can inform our choices, but this is dangerous. Love can be fraudulent and misleading, and people can sensibly stay married for other reasons. We are all bewildered by the human condition, but we are, at least, all the same in this.

Making a marriage is much like making and keeping a farm. Agricultural sources are now diminishing, and technology is limiting our capacity to nurture. The same is true of marriage. At the same time, a farmer’s connection to his farm should be one of love. A farmer should think of a farm as a permanent place to live and invest their nurture and love. Discipline should enable the farmer to improve and keep their farm and come to love it better.

Discipline is something that develops over time. Once work has been done, it takes some time before it can prove its worth. A farmer must stay on their land to understand the consequences of their work and then correct them if necessary. In modern America, it is now commonplace to move away from land after it has been farmed, but this is not sensible or productive. A good farmer understands that they must listen to nature and wait, taking their time to let the land come to fruition.

Once a person starts to farm a place, especially a place that has not been farmed before, they have to put in the work to be able to use that place without diminishing it or causing it to erode. Over years of understanding the place, the farmer and their family become better at farming it. They also develop a community that enables farming to take place within a group of mutually dependent people who place great value on good farming. They build, together, the fertility of the soil.

Land, work, people, and community all come together to form a culture. These elements should not be in competition and should not exploit each other—but today, of course, they do, because of the corporate nature of our culture. The Amish, who reject that culture, have managed to remain farmers, and remain productive, while many others cannot. We cannot depend on “information,” or modern knowledge, if we do not understand the nature of our lives in the whole context of our world. Amish horse-powered farms work well not only because horses are efficient, but because they are living things that fit into the holistic cycle of agriculture and the land.

Farming with a tractor does not necessarily make a person a bad farmer, but a tractor does not fit into the natural pattern of a farm. A farm built on machines is not harmonious. Although machines may shorten our work, they also wear out quickly and do not fit into the order of things or into the connection that should exist between humans and the land they work.

A truly...