Wittgenstein and the Language of Agriculture
I got into golf in my late 30s. In my university days, golfers and golf courses represented exclusivity and excess. While I’m still cognizant of these traits, I am certainly not in a position to throw stones and many golfers and golf courses have since proven me wrong.
Four years ago, I took a few golf lessons and began slowly developing a language for identifying the things I am doing right and, when a round falls apart, the things I am doing wrong.
When my slice is especially pronounced (for the uninitiated, a slice is when the ball moves from left to right – usually due to spin and usually, in my case, ending up in the bush), it’s usually because I haven’t been exercising enough and/or I’m subconsciously channelling all my unprocessed anxieties into a rigid stance and death grip on my club. Thanks to the golf pro at the Minnewasta Golf Course (a mixed-use course situated on the Pembina Valley escarpment), I have committed the elements of the ideal swing to memory. These elements bounce around as truncated, sometimes incomplete sentences in my brain every time I play. It helps.
“Legs, shoulder-width apart”
“Grip on club, loose”
“Knees, slightly bent”
“Draw power from hip rotation; not my arms”
And many more
These adages; this language, for me, gives expression to something that, before, would have manifested in frustration and confusion. I didn’t have this language five years ago. It has been key to my progress as a golfer and my increasing enjoyment of the game. I can talk myself through challenges. I am able to have perspective on why my game is going well or why it is deteroriating. Whether I am clear-headed enough to summon that perspective is another matter.
Using golf as an analogy for something larger, can we agree that our use of language – the way we use words within the bounds of the rules governing them – is a vehicle through which we learn, we play, we grow, and find meaning? Religion is a great example of this. For believers, rain and sun on their crops are often articulated as gifts from god. While for an agnostic or atheist, rain and sun on his or her crop may be still be a good thing, but gratitude for the same things the believer praised god for would be expressed differently.
This concept is what Ludwig Wittgenstein – the Austrian philosopher whose preserved cottage my wife, Jamie, and I visited (happened upon) in Norway – calls a language game. Put in a way that would/should make the philosophical community cringe, Wittgenstein’s theory was that language, meaning, and actions are inextricably woven together. The unique way we talk in agriculture and the fact that we’re largely understood by others in it is an example of this.
The words we use in agriculture and the various meanings we attribute to them are parts of a specific language, the rules of which are understood on an almost instinctual level by all participants. When we talk about tillage, pesticides, blights, root rots, etc., there’s a tacit assumption that others in the industry know what we’re talking about. It’s familiar. Outside of this context, though, our language would need further explanation or it would need to change entirely.
When it rains for days at a time and fatalistic thoughts about crop devastation begin to grip the mind, drawing on a language that taps into a deeper understanding of agriculture may not change the weather, but it will likely offer some perspective. “This happened in 1999, and we ended up with a great crop,” a farmer could hypothetically say.
In the two-plus years I have been running Burr Forest Group, I have intersected with the industry in familiar, comfortable ways, but I’ve also engaged with a segment that does not understand the rules of agriculture’s language game as deeply as the sector deserves.
Chess is straightforward. It can be learned quickly. If I did not already know how to play it and were to observe a match for the first time, I could commit each player’s moves to memory, repeat them on my own (playing both sides) and I would have successfully completed a round of chess. But I would have done so without having grasped the vastness of the game’s unique language. My gameplay would likely not include strategy, foresight, patience, and a myriad of other elements embedded in what it means to understand chess and play it well. “If she moves here, then I will place my knight there,” and so on…
There are a lot of people representing agriculture in Canada who have memorized the playbook at a point in time, but have failed to further develop their understanding. In the context of my language games analogy, they have learned enough to start playing, but not enough to compete.
The kinds of policy changes we fight for in agriculture often seem to be taken from a playbook committed to memory, but not properly understood. We’ve become accustomed to articulating the issues affecting the industry in ways belying their complexity – liberals vs conservatives, taxes, urban vs rural, and other false bifurcations, oversimplifications, red herrings, and straw men.
I think some of ag’s leaders are reenacting an old game and hoping we won’t notice – stale moves from an old playbook.
Citing a specific example here would be appropriate and add muscle to this article, but I am not going to do that. The point of this piece is to spur thought and not to attack the specific campaigns of familiar groups/organizations.
Allowing industry leaders who don’t know enough about agriculture to lobby on our behalf and/or set policy agendas is agriculture playing chess without strategy. Ag has too much potential for its direction to be set by those unable to see the board for the pawns.
If we don’t find ways to articulate the challenges faced by the industry relative to an ideal, we’ll continue to play poorly without knowing what we’re doing wrong and how we need to improve.
I’m far from a good golfer, but overall, I am getting better and I am able to celebrate the small wins along the way.