OPINION: Farmers-turned-hedgehogs transform back to foxes

An ancient Greek poet left a scrap of paper on his desk that somehow survived, got copied and passed down all the way to the modern era. The fragment said: “The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

The message may be fuzzy for that half of the world which has never met a hedgehog. It is a curious little mammal that rolls itself up into a ball and exposes its sharp spines whenever it feels threatened. The rest of the time it waddles around eating any small creature that moves. The fox, on the other hand, is a wily and adaptable creature that uses keen observation and cunning to get what it wants.

Isaiah Berlin’s 1953 essay took the concept a step further by suggesting that people fall into one of two groups: Hedgehogs rely on one simple, over-arching idea for making sense of the world, while foxes look at each situation as they meet it and make up their minds how to cope with it. He wrote the piece as a bit of a joke and was not terribly pleased when the world picked it up, made it popular and remembered it long after everything else he wrote had been forgotten.

When I was at school in the 1970s, no smart person wanted to be labelled a simple-minded hedgehog. All of us wanted to be crafty foxes. But then the business management school decided that having one big idea and refusing to be distracted by any details was actually a Very Good Thing. Suddenly everyone was supposed to be a hedgehog. In the insurance industry, I listened to one keynote conference speaker after another insist that we must focus on the one thing our organization was good at and concentrate on that alone. We were supposed to forget about diversification, get ‘back to basics’ and find our ‘core competency.’

Farmers converted to hedgehog thinking about as enthusiastically as any other sector of the economy. The 25 crops of my childhood got winnowed down to corn, soy and winter wheat. Livestock operations were concentrated into specialized barns. Fences fell down and fencerows were bulldozed to make hundred-acre fields. Many farm kids were just as likely to grow up without seeing a chicken or a pig as any of their city cousins. Hedgehog thinking in North American agriculture built a lot of fortunes while the rest of the world was figuring out how to catch up.

But Mark Twain had some good advice for people who put all their eggs in one basket. “Watch that basket,” he said. Stuff happens. Things change. Just because you are very good at one thing doesn’t mean the rest of the world will always need or want your one big thing. I thought of this over the holidays after three separate conversations with cash croppers who told me that 160 bushel corn simply does not pencil out at today’s price or cost of production. One of them put his corn head away five years ago and hasn’t pulled it out of the driveshed since. End-of-year stocks of everything are once again at the highest levels we have ever seen and the bank economists tell us prices are unlikely to move much. What is a poor hedgehog to do?
Suddenly everyone I’m talking to has decided that a little diversification might be a good thing. My cash crop brother-in-law is now a full-time mechanic in his own shop and his son runs the town snowplow. What was once an unbroken strip of corn and soy fields along the highway to the village now sports a cider operation, three market gardens, a mushroom barn, a hops plantation, a rabbitry, as well as pottery sheds, a koi fish pond and a bed & breakfast.

Any attempt to pigeonhole our species will come up short because we are not hedgehogs or foxes, or even sheep for that matter. We are homo sapiens and our special gift is our ability to change our minds as circumstances require us to.

I am actually a little bit reassured that the guy who started this conversation 2,600 years ago wasn’t a philosopher or a business guru. He was a simple scribbler like myself. Perhaps he had just learned that the price of poetry was no longer meeting the costs of production and it was time for him to start growing figs and olives behind the house. I hope things worked out for him.

In the end, there is only one clear distinction between any group of humans. There are those who divide the world into two groups and those who don’t.