Lewontin responds to Berry.

• Author: Lewontin, R.C.
• Position: Letters to the Editor

The claim by Wendell Berry ("The Prejudice Against Country People," April issue) that my attitude toward "country people" is one of "prejudice" and "condescension" is ludicrous. The next time that, called to duty as a volunteer firefighter in the rural Vermont community in which I live, I find myself crawling on my belly in a smoke-filled house, I will be sure to ask the man ahead of me on the hose-line whether he thinks I show condescension and prejudice toward him.

No, the real prejudice against country people is shown by those who scorn rural life as it is actually lived by most country people, and who play at living in the world of their grandparents, sitting in privies, doing their laundry on wringer washing machines, plowing with horses, heating with wood, and avoiding electric lights at night. My farmer neighbors have flush toilets, automatic washers, and tractors and gave up the real pleasures of wood stoves, which I too have known, when the price of oil went back down, because they are too busy trying to make ends meet to spend precious hours and energy splitting wood. (I am glad they did because my temptation to prejudice and condescension was greatly increased when I found myself on winter nights on slippery roofs helping to put out chimney fires that could have been prevented by elementary precautions.)

Berry's passions have interfered with his ability to read plain English. I did not speak of Vandana Shiva's allies as Luddites, but, rather, made a special point of the incorrectness of such a claim. I wrote that the Luddites were "industrial and rural laborers thrown out of work or trying to live on...