Norman Borlaug is not the sort of name you think of when it comes to world-historical heroism. A Norwegian Lutheran son of Iowa, he grew up on the prairie, went to college during the Depression, studied the thoroughly unglamorous subject of agriculture, enjoyed wrestling, met his wife while waiting tables at a university Dinkytown coffee shop where they both worked, and had three kids. He never starred in a movie, never ran for office, never led men into battle, and would not have been noticeable to you if you saw him in the street.
Oh yeah, and he saved the lives of a billion people.
Norman Borlaug was the father of the Green Revolution, an awesome scientific undertaking of twentieth-century American agricultural science that resulted in the breeding of fantastically fruitful strains of food plants that kept the burgeoning population of the world (especially the Third World) from starving to death. Almost nobody has heard of him owing to the characteristic modesty of his generation and cultural background, but without him we could well be living in a post-apocalyptic nightmare.
That nightmare was sketched for us in 1968 by a self-anointed prophet named Paul Ehrlich, who knew everything except what he was talking about. In his book The Population Bomb, Ehrlich set the pace still followed by our culture of death when he embraced the Malthusian approach to the problem of feeding humanity by curling up in a ball, proclaiming defeat, and saying with Scrooge, “If the poor be like to die, they had better do it and help decrease the surplus population.” As Ehrlich put it, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over…. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” He added, “I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971,” and “India couldn’t possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980.”
The prophet of doom didn’t reckon on Norman Borlaug, whose new strains of plants produced enormous yields that doubled India’s food production, made Mexico a grain exporter, and saved the lives of a billion people throughout the world.
When Ehrlich dies, I sincerely hope that this apostle of defeat and contraception will not hear the words spoken to the servant who hid his one talent in the ground (see Matthew 25:14–30). But I am confident that if anybody stands a good chance of hearing from Jesus “I was hungry and you gave me food,” it will be Norman Borlaug, who goes down in history, without any possible comparison, as the guy who gave more food to the “least of these” than anybody who ever lived. We can certainly pray with hope that when he died on September 9, 2009, he heard (perhaps with the same surprise as the sheep in the parable), “Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world” (Matthew 25:34).
Borlaug symbolizes one pole of a dynamic tension that always exists in the Catholic tradition: the tension between practical results and good intentions. The woman at the temple treasury who put in two small copper coins is at the other pole (see Luke 21:1–3). In terms of “results,” they couldn’t be further apart. The woman could barely feed herself, much less the world. Nonetheless, the two have something in common: They did the most they could with what they had. Borlaug used his gifts and exploited his opportunities in order to feed a billion people. The woman at the treasury put in “all the living that she had”—and it counted more in God’s sight than all the gifts that the rich gave from their excess.
Most of us live somewhere between these two great heroes, but all of us are called to do the best we can with what we have. For us average Catholics, this usually means we schlep along, supporting charities, making sure that company is fed when they visit, perhaps working in our parish soup kitchen—trying to give a little bit extra. That’s not a thing to be sneezed at. Not all have the gift and calling to found some gigantic ministry that feeds the poor. But lots of us can (and do) give our tithe and then some to those who do have such a calling. Mercy Corps, Food for the Poor, Feed the Children, and a boatload of other organizations wouldn’t exist if everybody was a visionary inspired to create some multinational organization to help the starving masses. Such organizations require masses of ordinary folk like you and me to pour in our little copper coins faithfully according to our means so they can do their great work.
Result: American charitable giving in 2009 was $307.65 billion. That’s the second year in a row that charitable giving has exceeded 300 billion dollars—during the worst economic downturn since the Depression. This clearly shows how the ordinary, commonplace ethic of Christian charity is one of the most vital lubricants to the smooth running of our civilization. Getting rid of the faith while expecting its fruits to continue is but one of the many lunatic ideas the New Atheists advocate as they look forward to a culture running on reason alone. But anybody can see that charity is not according to reason. It is according to love, which is a higher thing than mere reason and addresses human beings as higher things than mere animals or ingredients in an economic formula. Lord alone knows how many social upheavals have been prevented because ordinary people took it upon themselves to buy a down-and-out guy a cup of coffee or help an unwed mother move into her apartment or just spend an hour on a park bench listening to a lonely bore. It is impossible to calculate the good that has been done by the works of charity the Christian tradition encourages. And in a certain sense, all of them could be seen as “feeding the hungry.”
For of course, “feeding the hungry” means more than feeding the belly. Man does not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. At this very hour, billions are starving for meaning as much as, indeed more than, they starve for bread. Whole societies and civilizations that have the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid covered are empty to the core because, as the sacred writer says, “Where there is no vision, the people perish” (Proverbs 29:18, KJV). Our McDonaldized culture has the problem of hunger largely licked (with a few exceptions). Indeed, the poor in our culture have much more to fear from obesity and diabetes than from dying in the snows like Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Match Girl.
We will talk of that more, particularly when we discuss the spiritual works of mercy. But before we rush off to spiritualize things safely into the realm of the non-economic, let’s stick, for the time being, to the subject of feeding the hungry with real, physical food. While the poor here in America may be struggling with obesity, abroad it is another story, as millions are still in literal danger of starving to death. Is this because (as Euro-American population planners continually tell us) we have just enough of us white people but way too many brown ones? No, it’s because the starving people live under evil, man-made socio-economic and political systems that prevent food, of which there is more than enough in the world, from reaching their hungry bellies. Instead, it gets bottled up somewhere or turned to an unjust profit for some despot who loves gold and grinds the face of the poor.
Of which more next time.
(For more information, see my book THE WORK OF MERCY: BEING THE HANDS AND HEART OF CHRIST (available here, signed by me, or in Kindle format here, or as an audiobook here).
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One Response
I heard about Borlaug from my immigrant colleagues, who were astonished to find out how little Americans know about him.
It’s from them that I learned about Ida Scudder, another remarkable American