Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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Posted on March 26, 2023 | 81 Comments
Continuing the final descent of this blog cycle to finishing its discussion of A Small Farm Future, Chapter 18 of my bookis called ‘From nations to republics’. I hope to say more on this theme in the future, but for now just a few words here on this chapter.
Nationalism has been much the most successful of political projects worldwide over the last couple of centuries, and a major employer of politicians, writers, historians, cartographers, soldiers, bureaucrats, priests, academics, architects, policy wonks and others whose work has helped build the story that the modern political power emanating territorially to the boundaries of the world’s existing nation-states from hallowed ground at the heart of their capital cities is justifiable, natural and uncontestable.
I think that story will come to an end, and we’ve now entered the beginning of it. In my book, and probably in the tenor of my comments so far in this post, I convey a view that its end is overdue, and welcome. And that pretty much is how I see it, although perhaps I should concede there’s a more positive case that can be made about nationalism – something along the lines of bringing people together around a shared project to use centralized politics to move positively into the future to the benefit of all. Maybe one indicator of how seriously to take that is the shape of the hallowed ground I mentioned at the centre of the nation’s capital – more seriously, perhaps, if it’s a public square, less seriously if it’s a walled fortress. Though some pretty nasty things can happen in public squares. Anyway, I believe that positive shared project has had its day. It’s hard to see nationalist rejuvenation of existing centralized states as a viable project for the future.
The terrain of the nation is now pretty much entirely the ground of the self-consciously ‘reactionary’ right, along with a few ‘progressive’ politicians riding on its coat tails in the hope of getting more votes. These right-wing nationalists like to insist that their version of the national story is the only authentic one, with others dismissed as the bad faith product of wokeism or other enemies from within. But, as I argue in Chapter 18, for every nationalist narrative that tries to create some singularity around national history and destiny there are always several counter-narratives that bring a different account of history to the fore. Attempts to forge singular nationalisms are doomed to fail, often bloodily.
Attempts to re-enchant local landscapes with social meaning are a different kettle of fish, as – for example – with environmentalist movements like bioregionalism that I broadly endorse. But I think it’s important not to connect these movements with statist nationalism, an approach long favoured by the far right that seems to be gaining force again. Love and soil over blood and soil. In my chapter, I criticized a somewhat notorious essay by Paul Kingsnorth for making such connections – a criticism I stand by, though I’ve recently come to re-appreciate much of Paul’s project.
In the context of supersedure state situations, I believe the more promising political form of the local state is republican (but not, I’d stress, Republican), and I talk about this a bit in Chapter 18, pretty much along the lines of earlier essays I’ve written here (eg. this one). I won’t go over that ground again just now. A key aspect of republics is that they usually emerge out of some political crisis in which citizens break decisively with a preceding polity and define a new common basis for collective political life. Typically, this requires a founder or a law giver to reset the basis of the political community.
As with all political forms, republics are beset with problems and tend to degenerate over time into oligopolies or other more problematic forms. The problem with the founder or the law giver is that they’re just some guy. The problem with forms of political authority that base themselves around some more naturalized or divine source of sovereignty is that ultimately the interpreters and custodians of these forms are ultimately just some guys. I’m basically a believer in the self-sovereignty of small farm proprietors as the foundation of the republic, because a small farm proprietor is just some guy too, which makes it easier to tolerate the ministrations of the larger republican state – you have your own domain of sovereignty, and the larger state becomes tolerable in that context, especially in view of the alternatives. Its very artificiality underlines its importance.
I don’t think a political vision of that sort need be wholly incompatible with ones grounded in a more organic sense of tradition, but that’s something I hope to write more about in the future. One thing I stressed in my book chapter and that I do want to stress here is the danger of what I called ‘front parlour’ republicanism. What I had in mind with this metaphor is the kind of domestic culture where people keep one room in the house clean and tidy with all their best possessions on display specifically to host distinguished visitors with whom they behave with utmost decorum, while the dirt, hard work, power games and dispute is kept hidden in the other rooms round the back. I wanted to highlight by analogy the dangers of creating little bubbles of self-congratulatory civic republicanism that deliberately or unwittingly keep hidden the toil of other people in maintaining the façade of republican freedom and autonomy.
An obvious modern example of that would be the Southern Agrarians in the US, who I believe had genuinely interesting things to say about small-scale farming societies, but in keeping slavery largely out of their front parlour vision fatally undermined their analysis. I consider a lot of small town or small farm republicanism today likewise as front parlour efforts overly concerned with who doesn’t qualify for membership in ways that limit its potential for building plausible post-global and post-capitalist societies.
When I wrote about ‘front parlour’ republicanism I hadn’t come across the Front Porch Republic initiative in the US, as laid out here by Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen. From parlour to porch, another architectural metaphor. I like the idea of the front porch as an outward-looking liminal space between private and public, between local households and local community.
Deneen’s book Why Liberalism Failed is also worth a read. It’s grounded in a more conservative worldview than my own, but aside from the odd passage of gammon I found myself largely in accord with its criticisms of why both left/progressive and conservative forms of liberal politics have delivered us into the present parlous state of politics. After liberalism, then, I believe the task is to steer our societies towards a small farm civic republicanism of the front porch and not the front parlour variety. I don’t think that’s going to be easy.
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I was listening to a podcast the other day with Yuval Harari, who pointed out that small-c conservative parties essentially no longer exist because the right wing has been taken over by non-conservative politicians (who don’t respect e.g. traditions or institutions, even if they say they do); this leaves the liberal or left-wing parties in the position of having to be both liberal and conservative, which isn’t a coherent position. I’m not sure I totally agree, but it explains some of why I personally feel so politically unrepresented: I’m a fairly liberal progressive (though not as liberal or progressive as some people think I am) who dislikes capitalism but still thinks traditions and institutions are (or at least can be) valuable, important and even grounding.
I think most people have an impulse to behave better in public. Certainly my experience of family life growing up matched what you call a front parlour: no matter how bad things were, we pretended to others that my stepdad wasn’t abusive. This protected him and harmed us (ultimately harming him). I won’t pin all of that on the sovereignty our society gives to white dudes over their household units, because in a larger household with extended family things might have been different, and in a setting where we moved less often things might have been different, and so on. But those “might have been different” conditions are essentially contexts of greater interconnectedness and the accountability to a wider community that comes with it.
I like the front porch idea, but I also wonder what the equivalent might be in a climate where, historically, there hasn’t been as much need for the covered porches of the American south. It is certainly an effort to get to know my neighbours in a London terrace with front “gardens” scarcely big enough to keep the wheelie bins in; when we moved to this (rented) home a decade ago we did get to know one set of neighbours sooner than the others, though. The reason? Whoever installed the fence on that side was cheap about it, so it’s three feet high rather than the five or six foot fences that are more standard. Otherwise, most encounters with neighbours are in the street; I suspect that they happen more here (where nobody has a garage and several households don’t have cars at all) than they would in a less densely-populated suburb.
I wonder whether the local pub once served some of the functions of the porch, here.
In Ray Oldenburg’s book “The Great Good Place” (1989), he discusses the importance of a public “third place” (apart from home and work).
“Oldenburg argues that third places are important for civil society, democracy, civic engagement, and establishing feelings of a sense of place.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place
The front porch or parlour wouldn’t qualify as a “third place”, since they are not neutral ground in a public place. However, a chapter of Oldenburg’s book is devoted to the English pub.
‘Forty-some years ago, a survey revealed that “90 percent of pub regulars don’t walk more than 300 yards to get to their usual pubs.” It was that generous distribution of little pubs that led to calling them locals, and it was their neighborhood flavor that found them filled with familiar faces rather than those of strangers. The pubs built in recent years are larger, fewer, and farther between, with the result that people have to use their cars to get to them. Pubs are becoming “houses of call.” where most of the customers don’t know one another.’
(page 139, 1999 edition)
At £5+ a pint, pubs are in steep decline.
Not that drinking lots of ale is a particularly good pastime anyway.
I can see people opening up
a room in their houses to offer food, drink and somewhere to keep warm in a SFF. How Public Houses first came into being.
Is the difference between a pub and an Inn, that an Inn offered accomodation as well as good/drink?
At £5+ a pint, pubs are in steep decline.
My goodness… and no wonder.
Among our local watering holes only the most elite are close to that level. All things in moderation I guess.
Here on our road we get together from time to time… most often at JB’s house (back yard fire pit) – but other houses/yards have hosted as well. Just beyond JB’s the road ends so only locals use this stub, which allows us to meet on the road as well – just catching up. Sometimes it’s a BYOB affair, and sometimes so spontaneous as “hey, the Hernan’s kids are in the street, I’ll go down and see if Bill is out”. The only fences around here are to keep the dogs in the yard.
This has been a pretty nice and convivial situation – though politics in the US being what they are these last several years there are moments when opinions of a political nature stress the ambiance. To an SFF motif though the political nastiness rarely comes from some local matter… county issues might stir a bit – but nothing compares the discord generated by matters at play on the national or international front.
And I find this interesting… where we have the least potential influence we seem to have the most invested and sharply held opinions. The vast majority of folk on this road have western European ancestry. And most of these ancestors emigrated more than 4 generations ago… so while there is some empathy for European matters – most of us are descended from folks who fought in both of the world wars as Americans. Europe then is a history subject in ways that matter to much daily life. But let some gaggle of Brits decide they want out of the EU and everyone here has an opinion (and one to be careful of sharing on our road).
JB started some tomatoes for the Hernan kids. I think I’ll take some of our pepper starts down to them as well.
@Clem.
I kid you not!!!!
The prices are crazy.
Can really see it now. Pubs very quiet. The ones local to me start stacking chairs on tables at about 9.00pm. Never get to “last orders”.
I’m not sure what young people are doing? Back in the day, Friday Saturday nights down the pub were “heaving”. Now they are dead spaces.
Pubs are in a death spiral.
Their running costs are constantly rising but they can’t keep passing it onto the customers. People just won’t go. Can’t afford to go.
You can get 12 cans for £10 in the supermarket. People are just staying home and drinking.
John
I think a lot of people are also staying home and *not* drinking.
@kathryn
I’m not sure what the score is post COVID but prior to lockdown, pub numbers were down but breweries were still selling the same volumes, just not through pubs. Breweries were selling off pubs because they no longer needed them as a point of sale. Supermarkets were the main outlet.
Nomad Century by Gaia Vince and Build Bridges Bridges, Not Walls by Todd Miller are both good books on this very pertinent issue.
From the post’s title alone, I had planned to link to FPR, and then saw that you’d already found it. I’ve been following it for years, and while it generally leans to more a Conservative perspective than me (labels have become so inadequate lately) I still find much to agree with, and even when I don’t, the tone and level of discourse is such that I am forced to do the good work of reevaluating my opinion on things.
Nature doesn’t care who wins, as individuals or as species. The random and varied expression of genes and behaviors maximize the odds that some will survive and carry on.
But, what was a winning combination for the last set of challenges is no guarantee that it will work for the next. Ask the dinosuars. If humans are to hang around for very long, the more different societal arrangements that evolve, the better. ( Though I’d rather be a small holder than a serf).
In theory, ( and we tell ourselves) we are the only species that can consciously plan and select a future path. I certainly hope it turns out to be the case, and that a small farm civic republican mode is able to establish itself and get through the upcoming bottleneck.
“Love and soil over blood and soil.” A great phrase! Recalls Wendell Berry.
But rule by “just some guy”? That, I’ll pass on. “Small farm sovereignty” sounds romantic enough until you have a wife-beater or a cattle thief, a freeloader on the commmons or a preacher of racial ideology, an adulterer or a usurer. And that doesn’t even touch the ‘positive’ politics of when the feasts and fasts are to be held, where the bridge gets built, and what the festival prize will be. There is simply no way around law, politics, and justice administered (however locally or in line with subsidiarity) according to something more than “artificiality.”
One must acknowledge that the only true Sovereign is not a mortal, time-bound, finite being, nor the creation of such creatures.
Interestingly, Aristotle distinguishes between a “polity” (a concept to which modern republicanism owes a great deal) and a “democracy.” The key difference is that former is ordered towards the common good, in which we all enjoy the “good life” together, and the latter is ordered towards the protection of individual(ist) rights, in which we all pursue our private advantage. Rejecting the sovereignty of the Creator and placing it in the hands of any mortal man (be he a god-king or a petty-tyrant smallholder) sounds like a great recipe for “little bubbles of self-congratulatory [insert form of government] that deliberately or unwittingly keep hidden the toil of other people…”
One difficulty with explicitly ordering human affairs according to the sovereignty of the Creator is that you frequently get “just some guy” claiming Divine authority. There is a reason that we’ve largely overturned ideas like the divine right of kings. Another is that if Some Guy claims Divine authority but doesn’t have the power (military, social, financial, whatever) to back up their claims, Some Other Guy who doesn’t recognise such a basis for reality can and will turn around and say “well that’s fine, but I don’t believe in that sky fairy nonsense, so I don’t have to listen to you.” Basically, Divine authority is all well and good until humans get involved. We are made in God’s image, but we also really like apples and we tend to listen to snakes.
That said, of course my religious beliefs inform what I consider to be the common good. I imagine yours do also. I imagine further that we have some disagreements over the practical outworking of that, and also that we might share some ideals of what is for the common good with people who don’t acknowledge the sovereignty, or even the existence, of any Creator. Should any of us put aside such beliefs in negotiating what steps we take toward a common good? Probably not. But I think working toward a common good is probably going to be messy and iterative, regardless of the faith of the people involved.
I don’t think Chris is advocating for total authority of Just Some Guy over his own piece of land. Correct me if I’m wrong, Chris, but I suspect you would want to see some kind of community intervention or political accountability if a particular smallholder were stealing cattle, beating family members, or pouring lead into streams. I’d personally like to see more accountability around the use of aminopyralid pesticides, as well as all these other things.
The challenge, as I see it, is around how to have that accountability — how to have some minimum safeguards around the common good — without limiting autonomy unnecessarily. That’s going to be messy and iterative to work out too. But it feels like under the current system we have neither: we don’t adequately safeguard the common good and we also limit people’s autonomy considerably more than is conducive to a common good, based largely on the “discernment” of markets.
Would a smallholder civic republicanism as envisioned by Chris Smaje be perfect? Probably not. Would it be better than what we have now? Well, the bar is set very low. We don’t prevent domestic abuse all that well, and the poorest in this world are routinely stolen from by the richest. Corporations routinely freeload on the commons, racism is rampant, adultery still common enough, usury is rife. If smallholder civic republicanism would help with the problems of wage theft and corporation’s freeloading on the commons, and not touch the other problems, it would still be substantially worthwhile.
I wonder how does Eleanor Ostrom’s work fit into this? My understanding of SSF is that we are talking about a time when the carrying capacity of the land reasserts itself as a primary authority and the people are realising they are land animals who share the territory. Or in other words, a commons. The stewardship of this successfully is pretty well mapped out by Ostrom. David Sloane Wilson worked with Ostrom and the 8 principles that underpin a functioning commons for groups and organisations more generally in his organisation Pro Social. There is a whole science of evolutionary biology and cultural evolution that uncovers the pro social reality of the human animal, we literally wouldn’t be here without it, the individualist turn is a blip.
I guess I’m asking, why choose one way of organising over another? If there is a successful model, well documented to be working, with good evidence and research more widely in human behaviour – why not use that?
I’m not atheist and having the land as an overarching authority can be a good place for spiritual realities to emerge. Most peoples experience has been, that even within social
structures based in spiritual cohesion, power plays emerge, and coercion becomes normalised. The 8 principles of the commons work specifically to keep governance horizontal, and not allow hierarchies to emerge. I would also add that the commons were traditionally a framework which allowed private property to be held, but with the recognition that no man is an island.
Interesting post Chris. I’ve not been able to engage here for a while, but it’s been fun catching up on all the stuff I’ve missed – congratulations on the new book.
I’m a little reluctant to comment on this (although that won’t stop me!) because I feel like I’m just dredging up points I’ve made here before. In this case, I’m not really clear how Front Porch Republicanism differs from Front Parlour Republicanism, in that both seem to involve dressing up a liminal space between public and private as a place in which little social rituals can be enacted, which in both cases might well involve papering over the toil or abuse of people hidden round the back. I’m also not sure what to make of the author’s focus on monitoring the courtship of young adults in the article you linked to.
The crux here, as so often in my past comments, seems to me to be a tension between the notion of each household having their own ‘domain of sovereignty’ as well as a commitment to a larger communal sovereignty of some kind. What interests should one have in the other? We usually end up acknowledging the dangers of both a closed domestic contexts and interfering states.
But what would it actually mean to get passed this somehow? I don’t know. Personally, I’m more on favour of some form of ‘open door’ republicanism, in which sovereignty exists at the personal level and at the communal level, and not at some intermediate level, but I don’t think that would allow for your sovereign households.
In any event, rather than pine for the golden age of pubs (which were often masculine bastions) it might be better to ask which practices we currently understand as domestic might be opened outwards – for example, the cooking of a meal. What examples might we draw on of everyday cooking (as opposed to more ceremonial dinner parties or functions) in which domestic barriers were broken down and a realm of what might be called everyday politics emerged?
Sean, I think you’re misunderstanding what I meant by small farm sovereignty and rule by ‘just some guy’, but to be fair I didn’t make myself very clear and these were somewhat throwaway lines on my part because I want to come back to it in more detail in the future. Essentially this is the same debate about sovereignty that you, me, Andrew & others were having a while back. Indeed as Kathryn says, I’m not arguing for the totalitarian rule of the farmstead by its owner, or like rule at any other level. Hence we quickly get into complexities about the nature of the person and the nature of sovereignty that require much longer exploration.
And, just as I wrote that, Andrew’s comment has popped up in my inbox – welcome back Andrew! Good points as ever in which I think you put your finger exactly on some of the tensions that must be explored (the cooking point is an interesting one – I was once part of a neighbourhood group where we tried to share cooking regularly between households, the idea being that it operated like an unshowy canteen that could help free people’s time. But it turned more into dinner party mode, and then folded).
Anyway, there’s much to be learned from Aristotle here, I believe, but from the point of view of a usable modern republicanism his ‘Politics’ doesn’t get off to a great start when it excludes women, slaves and foreigners from the purview of the polity. I think Kathryn’s interpretation of my ‘just some guy’ remark is to the point here in understanding some of the difficulties around naturalistic sovereignty.
To Joel’s point, yes agreed private property is a particular twist on the commons. I wrote several posts about this a while back, starting here – https://chrissmaje.com/?p=1873. And I’ve written quite a bit about Ostrom over the years. My reading of her seems to differ from that of many – I think she shows how difficult it is to organise economic activities fully as a specific commons and she explains the circumstances in which they work well, which aren’t many (hence I agree with your question, why choose one way of organising over another? Choose commons or private property when they respectively make sense). I do agree though that all these considerations are set within a wider sense of the pro social – or, as Aristotle put it, humans are political animals.
By the way Joel, your point under my last post about producing ‘surplus’ versus embodied loving care was a very good one, and relevant I believe to the case for distributed private property as the main day-to-day form of economic organisation. But the precise collective form of private/household property can be quite varied.
Thanks for the other points about pubs, parlours and porches. Perhaps there’s a kind of chicken and egg dimension to questions concerning the architecture of collective interaction. Is it the architecture that generates the interaction, or does the thirst for the interaction generate the architecture, or relevant uses of it? Probably a bit of both, in different circumstances.
Yes, architecture is very much a chicken-or-egg loop. I think a lot of technology is like that. But sometimes technology in combination with human nature tips us into a positive feedback loop or system; fossil fuel energy in combination with market capitalism is one of these, I think, each feeding into the other.
I am rusty on the details here — I learned about positive feedback loops in a biology class over two decades ago — but my understanding is that positive feedback loops generally change when the rest of the system within which they exist is either destabilised by the positive feedback loop to the point that it cannot be sustained (hello ketoacidosis; hello climate catastrophe, hello economic collapse) or a new equilibrium is found (…I can’t think of any examples of this offhand, but maybe someone else can).
I wonder if we could identify pro-social positive feedback loops: interventions that would not only improve and deepen our relationships with one another (and indeed with all creation), but form beneficial loops that intensify with time until we reach a new equilibrium of sorts. At the moment a lot of behaviours that I would identify as pro-social are frankly quite hard work; they are things I manage to do despite capitalism, despite popular opinion, or despite my own (learned?) resistance. They are negative feedback loops. I push a rock halfway up the hill, let go, reflect on what worked and what didn’t work and why, decide on a course of action, and get up the next day and push the same rock up the same hill and see whether I manage a few more inches or not.
I want to say that narratives are one of the levers that give us the possibility of pro-social positive feedback loops, but I also suspect narratives alone will not help much; the narratives must be related to material conditions in some way, or they won’t produce lasting change. But attempts at changing material conditions without examining and pushing back against the narratives that got us here in the first place are also unlikely to result in systemic change — as anyone who has spent enough time volunteering in a soup kitchen or night shelter can confirm. The current system is absolutely rigged.
My instinct is that from within the Christian tradition, liberation theology has something of value to offer, but I’m not sure how to get from there to subsidiarity and a congenial small farm future.
I think that a SFF will need to start with some form of private property.
We will be transitioning from our world today of private property and the ascendency of the individual, to a SFF.
Any kind of collective or commons will be beyond most people’s experiences and very alien.
This doesn’t mean that over time, things can’t change. As people’s worlds become much more “localised” people will become much more invested in each others lives. Marriage between families and children born onto a community. As the saying goes, “it takes a village to raise a child”
In fact, I think a SFF will be an ever changing thing. Constantly evolving. For good and bad.
Private small holdings may not be ideal but they may be the best start. Allotments are individual ventures but in a communal setup of sorts.
Chris suggested “Choose commons or private property when they respectively make sense” and brought up “questions concerning the architecture of collective interaction.” Andrew asked “What examples might we draw on of everyday cooking…”
Cohousing communities can already have significant experience with these types of issues. The layout and architecture is created to facilitate collective interaction, with owned-in-common spaces in addition to the private households. A large ‘common house’ is typically designed to accommodate community meetings and meals.
I lived in a cohousing community where weeknight suppers were available at the common house (Monday-Thursday), cooked by volunteers who got additional meal credits for their efforts. Participation was optional, but the common meals were popular and lively.
At this cohousing community, we owned our private home (on quarter-acre lots) and collectively owned the common facilities and common areas (which covered about three times the area the home lots covered in total). The owned-in-common spaces included the common house, vegetable gardens, playgrounds, forest, and the roads and other infrastructure.
@Steve L.
That sounds like a great setup.
You were talking in the past tense.
Are you no longer there? If not, it’s not too personal, why not?
I think that a lot of these kinds of arrangements may fail because there is always modernity to come back to.
It’s easy to walk away.
It’s just too easy to get the wallet out and pay a complete stranger for the goods and services we need than to invest time/energy and emotions into building relationships of interdependency.
But in a SFF there won’t be modernity to run back to if things get challenging.
John, it was indeed a great ‘intentional community’ (of about 90 people who knew and socialized with each other, including around 30 children) and my entire family loved it. After about seven years there, my wife and I ideally wanted to move the entire community to somewhere which didn’t involve so much driving; to an area where we could get rid of our cars entirely. The community, of course, wasn’t going anywhere, and my family moved to another state, to a different type of local community.
About being “easy to walk away” instead of “building relationships of interdependency”, I think that’s generally true of highly mobile societies. I recall reading a journal article contrasting two small-farming communities in Brazil, where one community had a higher turnover of people moving away to look for better prospects (outside of farming, such as mining), and the community organization and cohesion was weak. The other farming community was in a different area with less prospects, and people there literally had nowhere else to go, and their community organization and cohesiveness was very strong.
Regarding sharing cooking, I think various formal arrangements can work, but (like all other commons) they need substantial administrative labour and extensive dialogue over expectations and boundaries.
But I think less formal arrangements can also work. When I first moved to the UK I was involved with an orthodox Jewish community. That turned out not to be the right path for me for a number of reasons, but I recall fondly that for the first couple of years I was here I only rarely went a Saturday without enjoying the hospitality of being invited for a meal. As I was also somewhat under-employed at the time (and for the first year and a half had very limited kitchen access) this was actually a huge help to me. I am (and was) not Jewish myself, so for reasons of kashruth I was unable to reciprocate, but nobody ever made me feel bad about this. I also couldn’t bring anything (a salad, a bottle of wine) to such meals because of the prohibitions on carrying on the Sabbath. As far as I know there was no rota or anything like that: people would just see me at shul and ask if I wanted to come to lunch the next week, and I would always accept unless I already had a conflicting invitation.
More recently, pre-pandemic I did get into a habit of bi-monthly spaghetti nights on a Friday night. Our kitchen table can seat six and there are three of us, so these were never huge affairs. We haven’t yet resumed, for various reasons (including not wanting to break our household’s covid-free status — and not having had any colds since February 2020 is also nice), but I’m hoping for some outdoor dining this summer under the back garden bean cave. I chose spaghetti because it’s easy for me to make and serve, and relatively easy to adapt to various dietary requirements, and still fairly unpretentious, and because I read an article about it on the internet… but of course I did find myself getting elaborate with it after a while, simply because I enjoy cooking as a creative outlet. Perhaps in late summer and autumn I’ll opt for potato nights instead, if I have a decent harvest this year. It’s hard to beat a good baked spud.
I think people sometimes get caught up in trying to organise a perfect and perfectly fair structure for communal meals, but I suspect it’s often easier for one household to say “OK on Friday nights (or whatever) we’ll invite people around for a meal” and then just… do that. Of course, this is easy to arrange in a city where I know lots of people, but I’m sure doing something similar in a village wouldn’t be that hard, except in cases of fairly severe financial duress — in which case I hope someone else would extend an invitation.
I also love the metaphor of liminal space between the pursuit of private goods on private property, and the pursuit of collective or public goods on common ground, and I agree this comes very close to identifying the ground of republican politics, in the overlap between public and private purposes and goods. Or maybe more accurately in the overlap between our purposes and those of our neighbours. Ideally, we stand on our front porch to be held accountable for how our pursuits impact the community, and to participate in the communal pursuits that impact us.
In addition to your concerns about the front parlour as dress-up though, the metaphor almost seems too static to me, when its also the flows and interests across the public and private boundary that create the overlap and inter-dependency, not just property boundary as spatial spheres of sovereignty. Those flows can be utilitarian goods, as energy and material inputs/ wastes. But also moral, with people who both the individual/household and the community have rights and obligations towards, regardless of which side of the property line they’re on. And maybe also aesthetic and religious. Is there a point where the community can say the building behind your porch is simply too damn ugly? Or even too blasphemous?
I’m not sure what a better metaphor is and I certainly can’t think of anything more poetic, so front porch is probably still best. But’s not fully or even mostly about the porch as space, it’s about the porch as a passageway, which is maybe to Andrew’s point. Irrigation canal or drainage ditch politics comes closer to what I’m thinking but doesn’t exactly have the same bucolic feel to it! Or maybe it does for the real country folk 😉
Irrigation canal or drainage ditch politics comes closer to what I’m thinking but doesn’t exactly have the same bucolic feel to it! Or maybe it does for the real country folk
I think you’re right on both counts! Where an irrigation canal or drainage ditch impacts neighbors and other members of the community along their reach there are matters of maintenance and stewardship that must be dealt with. Everyone has some skin in the game (though the extant of each may vary). And I think you’re also right that as these tend to be country infrastructures, those who appreciate the reference are country folk.
Chris wrote “I like the idea of the front porch as an outward-looking liminal space between private and public, between local households and local community.”
The front porch is typically private property, so I don’t believe it’s a liminal space between private and public. A front porch is usually still under the control of an individual household (if you weren’t invited, you can be forced to leave).
However, the front porch is one of the least private parts of the private property, on a gradient (or perhaps concentric circles or spheres) extending from bedrooms and bathrooms to dining room to front parlour to front porch to front lawn by the sidewalk/road.
A managed commons seems to be a better example of a liminal space between private and public. It’s not quite privately owned, but it’s not quite open to everybody to use.
We all agree about the Small Farm Future broadly, but my concern is that such a vision is as coherent as possible. We stand together for the liberation (and restoration) of the peasantry, but slogans about sovereignty aren’t to be thrown around haphazardly. It’s the same argument as always, but I’ll restate my contentions:
Unless you locate sovereignty in the ultimate invisible reality (call it the Absolute, the Creator, God, etc), you will always (n.b. always) locate sovereignty somewhere it shouldn’t be: the State, the People, the Individual, the Market, the Clergy, the Vanguard, yes, even the Peasantry!
When you deny the Creator, you worship the creature. Precisely because man is a political animal, he is also a worshipping animal. There’s no “neutral zone” where one can escape this; every such claim has a hidden first principle (both ethical and ontological) which it is preaching.
Without settling these points, I propose there will always arise problems with formulations of the right “balance” or “harmony” between the individual and the community, the person and the collective, the part and whole. These realities cannot be harmonized without acknowledging the (objective, real, ontologically prior) common good.
Precisely what makes the logic of the common good “work” is that humans can simultaneously fulfill their purpose in necessarily nested common goods (the life of virtue, of the family, of the political community, and even of the whole human race).
I look forward to more discussion on all that!
(Also, my reference was to Aristotle’s specific argument, not to him as an absolute authority. In my view, Aristotle, like any pagan, has to be scrutinized through the lens of Scripture: his arguments on the primacy of the common good hold true, his errors against the dignity of women, the preferential option for the poor, and other Christian concepts are rejected. Babies, bathwater, etc.)
I certainly agree that a commitment to and belief in the common good, and balancing it with less ‘extensive’ goods (like family, individual) is the key to harmonizing community and maintaining viability.
But I do also worry this argument still puts too much emphasis on that harmony. I simply disagree that, outside of a collective decision to have faith in particular religious doctrines or revelations, we can know much as a community about that ultimate invisible reality. Consequently, it’s very difficult to rely on that reality to shed much specific light on local disputes (say ‘how are water rights allocated?’ ‘how high should taxes be to pay for the new school?’). Although I will certainly grant that a shared sense of the divine and ultimate faith/hope can go along way to keeping those disputes in perspective!
Maybe where I’m landing is to say, whether it comes from the divine or from the people, sovereignty ends up fractured, especially by dilemmas between individual rights and public goods, but also just by the normal pursuit of divergent ends. A harmonious society where everyone can rely on an obvious, rational relation between personal goods, common goods, and the highest good seems rather utopian. Maybe like something from the pre-Fall world, to use the terms from here a while back!
To me this sounds very close to “once we all agree to acknowledge the same ontological reality and worship the same Creator, everything else will fall into place”. I think that isn’t actually quite what you’re saying — rather, I think you’re saying that common acknowledgement of ontological reality and worship of the Creator rather than idols are the necessary pre-conditions for us attaining some meaningful measure of success at the long work of sorting out everything else.
I’m not sure that’s true, but even if it were, I find it hard to imagine everyone being willing to agree on the ontology in the next, say, three hundred years, let alone what remains of my own lifetime. But I do feel we can and should make progress toward the common good, even if we don’t agree, even if it’s imperfect.
I wonder if autonomy might be a more useful term than sovereignty, here. I can acknowledge that Just Some Guy has autonomy and choices without implying that he has any right to make those choices; I can acknowledge my own lack of control over the material constraints of the market, or over the political power of the state, without ascribing righteousness to either the market or the state.
Very much like the idea of nested common goods – and also the idea of recognising some authority greater than ourselves even though I find that idea problematic seems like a good basis for humanity – a small brake on our hubris
I know I sound like a broken record (records being another thing that, like pubs, seem to be on their way out, though I actually I sense something of a revival…) but anyway, the final copyedit of my book is in my in tray, and then I’m supposed to be plumbing a shower (for our community…), so forgive me if I stay silent for a couple of days. But thanks as ever for a highly informative set of comments.
Sean, I’ll just add that if I didn’t throw slogans around haphazardly this blog would never get written 🙂 However, I appreciate it when people challenge my haphazardness, which helps me improve my thinking. Though actually I might defend what I wrote above as less haphazard than you imply, though certainly not articulated in any detail. More than some, I’d genuinely like to embrace your conception of ultimate reality, but I might find it too much of a stretch, or at least too much of a stretch in relation to its existing articulations – though maybe I won’t. Anyway, I’m also looking forward to discussing this. I suppose one route to explore might be along the lines of “unless you locate sovereignty in the ultimate invisible reality you will always locate it somewhere it shouldn’t be, but since there is no plausible access currently to ultimate reality I must for the time being accept that sovereignty is going to be in places it shouldn’t be and figure out how I should act accordingly”.
Anyway, cheerio for now.
…”but since there is no plausible access currently to ultimate reality”
I hope Sean will weigh in with his own thought(s) here, but I’m not sure I can completely agree with this particular thinking.
Perhaps ‘plausible’ is what catches me up. It does seem plausible to me that one can actually access a ‘Creator’ or other ultimate reality. Faith is something natural to human beings. Faith is often laden in a religious framing, but even scientists who strive as fervently as possible to deny anything is super-natural still have some faith. They might have faith in the scientific method. They might have faith that eventually mankind will be able to explain everything without an ultimate reality (Ricky Gervais… looking at you).
Aside from that however – to make my point – let me box ‘faith’ up so that it ONLY refers to faith in an ultimate reality. It seems specious to me to deny that such faith exists among many of us. Further, I think there are those for whom a very strong faith of this sort is fundamental in their life way. How do we respond to their conception that they can be led by God, or that they can feel God’s presence?
If one has a certain faith that there is no plausible access to an ultimate reality, that is what they choose to believe. Should the other have less right to their belief?
Where ‘plausible’ creates the swimming space – what for one believer is considered plausible to the other. Wishing I knew a sociologist to help me out with this one.
Just to clarify, though not to answer, I don’t mean ‘plausible’ at an individual level of faith or otherwise in God, or any kind of more or less intellectual argument about whose beliefs are right or wrong. I mean plausible in the culture-historical sense of whether there’s an account of ultimate reality in the present historical moment in this place that sufficiently mobilises enough people to organise long-term politics.
So, culture, collectivity and history. I hope that’s sociological enough!
As an illustration of this point: even within denominations of Christianity in which people apparently share beliefs about the nature of the Divine or that nature of ultimate reality, there is substantial disagreement about what that nature means for how we live our communal and private lives. Two people who can recite, say, the Nicene Creed without doing mental gymnastics might still have very different ideas about what it means for the allocation of resources. Two people who believe in the inerrancy of scripture might still have different priorities for how they interpret that scripture. Two people with personal experience of some kind of spiritual communion with Christ may still feel led in very different directions by that experience.
Some of this I would put down to diversity of tactics: we need people who will feed the hungry and we also need people who ask hard political questions about why they are hungry; these actions are not necessarily in conflict, and if different people feel called to different approaches that isn’t necessarily a problem. But there are other areas where these differences do lead to conflict. I have seen congregations split by arguments over the ordination of women, for example, without everyone necessarily being aware that this was a political as well as a theological stance (especially in the CofE, which has a pretty weird relationship to the state in modern terms.)
And I have seen people’s valid concerns papered over or silenced with some version of “if you agree with me on the nature of God then it logically follows that I’m right about X” where there is no actual logical following. That behaviour in particular leads to pretty bad feelings. I don’t think that’s what Sean is trying to do here at all, but it does make me skeptical of the idea that we must agree on first causes in order to attain the common good. My experience is that we don’t agree, and even when we do agree we disagree on what that means for our actions.
Meanwhile, the actions we do agree on still need to be done, and “people who go to church regularly” are pretty much a minority in this country. Our food bank and soup kitchen wouldn’t exist without the labour of people who don’t, on the whole, come to church. Their conception of ultimate reality is so different from mine that for them, structured communal Christian worship just doesn’t seem relevant, but they still show up and do the work in front of them.
Thanks Chris.
I often try to keep an open mind about it, but given the smallness of the human organism and the heavy filtering we do on our incredibly narrow sensory bandwidth – compared to the size of the universe, I have a feeling that our chances of apprehending any kind of ‘ultimate reality’ are essentially zero.
I know there are those among us who have claimed to see it. And we have no way to prove their claims one way or another.
Also, as Clem says above, all of us have faith in something (such is my faith).
Anyone who truly has no faith will not live long. Why would they?
And those scientists…
Any scientist who claims to not have any faith, but to only rely on the facts is not only lying, but not a scientist.
Logic is not possible without a set of givens. And the bottom level of those givens cannot be arrived at by a logical process.
When you get to the bottom, you just have to believe.
That belief is usually what the fighting is about.
I think we are starting to realise that sovereignty is based in the land and perhaps that can be aligned to the Christian God. We need starting points that don’t immediately magnetise to a unipolar perspective.
Carrying capacity and shared resources seems a good place to start, the land as authority and ultimate guarantor of sovereignty. I think any other set up abstracts the natural place of things and creates gate keepers. I’m up for farmer philosophers and maker priests. The beauty of SSF is there is no time for abstractions, you work the land, it furnishes your needs. It is the giver.
We look after children and the disabled and ill. I’m not up for furnishing the offices of professionals, spiritual or political but I will work to support my fellow commoners.
https://unherd.com/2023/03/the-great-food-reset-has-begun/
EU policy , exactly opposite of a small farm future . Compulsory purchase / bankrupt via legislation of small family farms then sold to mega farms .
That’s an interesting read – the fact that the Netherlands, a small country, is second only to the USA in agricultural exports suggests a highly intensive agriculture sector but I don’t know so …. the trouble I have with things like this is the lines are just blurred all over the place with lots of people dressing themselves with attributes of others for political/financial reasons. Bill Gates promotion of GM crops as the answer to hunger when he happens to own the companies doing the research/owning the patents on said crops springs to mind.
An example from the UK was the use of the fishing industry in the Brexit debates – small boats run by small firms who were struggling and weren’t getting a fair share of quota as far as I could tell were paraded as being representative of the fishing industry – and those small boats play to all sorts of ideas the British have about themselves. The reality of the fishing industry is that just a few very large companies owned most British quota – I believe quota is freely tradable – and not all of those companies are British. Brexit has been a problem for small British fishermen but not for large fishing companies who own UK quota but operate from EU ports. So a genuine issue got taken and used by people who found it useful to do so but who had no real interest in said issue or its resolution or the people struggling with it.
Just by me there are family farms but they keep large dairy herds inside and plant large acreages of maize using “sustainable” no till methods i.e. glyphosate and massive machinery. Does the fact that these are ‘family farms’ align them with peasant agriculture – I don’t doubt they’d argue it did if they thought it would serve them well. Just as they’ll argue that because they don’t plough they’re conserving the soil (while planting maize on the top of the hills.)
I’m not saying that there aren’t small farmers threatened by the legislation the article talks about or that the motivations behind the legislation aren’t larger than those advertised. It’s more that I’m suspicious of the narrative line. Everyone is spinning one and if I’m honest I’ve little way of assessing their veracity.
Earlier in this thread someone said something about people getting more exercised about issues in proportion to how little they could affect them – I think that’s true and it’s why focussing on the (very) local, on where we might have agency and some nuanced knowledge seems wise to me.
I agree Bruce, there is tricky path to pick through all this – I think Chris’s book will be a bit of a guide. Whilst we work within these Global economic paradigms it’s hard to see the wood for the trees on who and what is right and wrong – beyond the obvious corporate monopoly and techno farming is not the way. Alice and I are working on an ‘intersufficient’ model where the farm homes the people and businesses needed to decouple from the economic paradigm.
Kathryn, you’re entirely right to summarize my point as “the common acknowledgment of ontological reality and worship of the Creator rather than idols are the necessary pre-conditions for us attaining some meaningful measure of success at the long work of sorting out everything else.” The discussion and debate about what reason, virtue, and natural law call for in any given situation will be messy (and it also relies on the goodwill and sincerity of all those involved). I should also clarify that goodwill (which is genuinely searching for the Truth) is often better than “dead faith” (which confesses the Creed, but denies Christ by its works)–the unbelievers who help run your local soup kitchen may be an example.
Eric F. rightly notes that “Logic is not possible without a set of givens.” But I don’t agree with him that the “bottom level of those givens cannot be arrived at by a logical process.” Rather (as I’ve argued at length in other posts), the philosophy of natural law and virtue ethics arises from objective empirical observations about invisible realities.
Chris proposes that “unless you locate sovereignty in the ultimate invisible reality you will always locate it somewhere it shouldn’t be, but since there is no plausible access currently to ultimate reality I must for the time being accept that sovereignty is going to be in places it shouldn’t be and figure out how I should act accordingly.”
Clem notes (and I agree) that access to the Creator does seem quite possible. Chris clarifies that he means /collectively/ plausible. But I think that ignores precisely the question we are asking: is the Truth true because it is True? Or is “truth” true because it is effective, popular, or useful?
The answer makes all difference and determines whether (as Bruce puts it) we lean into humanity’s “hubris” or reach out for the “brake” on our self-destructive pride.
If the philosophy of the common good/virtue ethic/natural law is only worthy of being lived out when enough people are convinced, then it is pointless and false. If such philosophy is false, then humanity has no hope to seek common, rational peace and justice. If that’s the case, sure, some people might place their faith in whatever Peasant Sovereignty (Neo-Narodism with more private property?) can offer them, others will place their trust in Ecomodernist Techno-Sovereignty, still others in Nationalism, etc. But in a worldview bereft of invisible unrealities, all that is left is ideological thinking which lacks moral judgement.
I proposed above that “When you deny the Creator, you worship the creature. Precisely because man is a political animal, he is also a worshipping animal. There’s no “neutral zone” where one can escape this; every such claim has a hidden first principle (both ethical and ontological) which it is preaching.” This is true both individually and socially. It’s impossible for any society to exist which is not ordered by some (perhaps competing) principles. It’s also impossible for any one human being to exist without obeying the sovereignty of some (perhaps competing) principles. (I know that I struggle and fail to live out virtue every day, but I am always repenting and striving to return to the Truth.) Either our lives are lived in service to Virtue, God, Goodness, Truth, Beauty, or they are lived in service to Money, Power, Utility, Ego, Pleasure, Fame, or some other worldly thing.
The fact that this choice is impossible to escape means that “figuring out how I should act accordingly” to the misplaced sovereignty of this wicked world is always a choice between living as a witness to eternal truths (things as they ought to be), or, living as a slave to temporal delusions (things as they are now). That’s a harder sell than ideological politics offers (more of “a stretch,” as you say), but it’s certainly more rationally coherent, which is also to say, more fulfilling to the human soul, i.e. (objectively) good.
I truly respect your thoughts and feelings on this. I could only make an agreement if we were to enter into action in the world together, to live and work and witness each others thoughts become deeds, and experience the love of what these words might mean.
I agree Bruce, there is tricky path to pick through all this – I think Chris’s book will be a bit of a guide. Whilst we work within these Global economic paradigms it’s hard to see the wood for the trees on who and what is right and wrong – beyond the obvious corporate monopoly and techno farming is not the way. The green of the green revolution is very different to the green of regenerative/organic models, which is different again to permaculture and SSF. Alice and I are working on an ‘intersufficient’ model where the farm homes the people and businesses needed to decouple from the economic paradigm. Like Steve L was describing earlier but to the point that we don’t have to work ‘off farm’.
Thinking about all this I’m starting to wonder if characterising what we all seem to be reaching towards as a ‘Small Farm Future’ isn’t problematic (sorry Chris 😉 ).
Whether intentional or not thinking about the future in that way implies that farming has some higher status within a future agrarian society than other roles. To me this is like saying mitochondria is the most important part of a cell – they’re certainly necessary but aren’t all that without the rest of the cell. As Sean says man is a political animal and will seek to leverage such status into power and advantage. It’s why I also agree with Sean that however problematic it might be, ‘sovereignty’ should be located outside/beyond the body politic.
My own stumblings in that direction have centred on Mahayana Buddhism – its relevance here is the idea that none of us have a separate existence, we exist only in relationship to/dependent upon a whole range of causes and conditions that are greater than we can grasp (not sure I’m explaining that very well) but its the sense of reciprocity that’s important – no part is less because all are necessary for the whole – to use familiar language you might say it makes all things sacred – or to quote Dogen “all things have Buddha nature”.
In the context of moving toward some sort of SFF I think focusing on trying to build reciprocal relationships within ones locale that build interdependence might be where the work is. I appreciate that this is hard in a globalised society that pulls us in the opposite direction – I just had a quote from a local printer that was twice the price of an online printer – I can’t afford the local guy now but have set myself a “when I have x customers a week” point at which I’ll switch to using him. But its work that’s accessible to all, whether they’ve access to land or not. I think any future society, and I think the word society is important here because it conjures something other than self sufficient individuals wrestling a living from the world, will grow organically from such relationships and they might be the only thing over which we have much control.
PS – It is nice to be back here on SFF having not been here for quite a while
Thanks for that Bruce. It’s good to see you from the small farm future porch again.
I don’t fundamentally disagree, but I’d emphasize things differently such that I continue to think the small farm future or small farm society epithets are valuable.
I think energy economics and human ecology mean that in the future many more people are going to have devote much more of their time to food and fibre production than is currently the case. Without getting too hung up on the quantification, this could involve most people spending a lot of time on it on their own account, or slightly fewer (but still most) people spending almost all of their time on it on the account of the non-producers.
I prefer the former, which is why I emphasize small farm societies. I don’t think farmers have higher status than other people, although I do think everyday ecological implication is an important basis for a good society. But nor do I think farmers and other practical livelihood-makers have lower status – yet this is deeply ingrained in many past and present cultures.
I agree with you on the importance of building local interdependence. But there’s a problem inasmuch as local interdependence has to rest to a large extent on the material realities of food, clothes, shelter etc. which few people currently have the skills or means to furnish locally. That’s where the emphasis on farming comes in (though I accept I should cast the net more widely to blacksmiths, tailors, builders etc.)
Of course there are other ways of building interdependence that are important and I don’t mean to disparage them. But if I’m honest I think there are also ways that people (probably genuinely) think they’re building interdependence but are largely just fiddling around within the existing system. There are ‘sustainability experts’ earning the kind of money that only an unsustainable modern society can generate, while people growing food locally with low impact methods struggle to stay afloat. So I do want to elevate the efforts of the latter unapologetically over those of the former. But that said, yes I agree that there are many ways beyond farming to build a better future. All the same, I suspect that the best realistic future in store will involve a lot of people tending small plots of land for themselves – a small farm future. The more quickly and thoroughly modern society can embrace that, the less likely it is that worse futures than a small farm future will arise.
Hi Chris – my knocking “Small Farm Future” was slightly tongue in cheek so I hope I haven’t offended. And I agree with most of what you say above. My partner works in a charity that deals with sustainability/energy issues and some of the tech people are on big salaries – we talk about such things alot (and I try not to be too bleak or caustic) – these are professional people with a sincere belief in the need fo change but for who don’t seem to really challenge the underlying logic of the current system – and why would they, they’ve done very well working within it – which is the reason why I expect no meaningful change to come from anyone within a position of power. But the expectation that we can make the current situation sustainable seems unrealistic and the attempt to do so unwise.
I also think the future is already here – I still like John Michael Greer’s exhortation to collapse early and avoid the rush – so I think building as much social capital as possible now while we still have our current extravagences is important – these connections may not be based on the underlying ecological realities and may be fiddling within the existing system but as that system unravels those connections will be where something new could be grafted on.
Sometimes I think in our discussions here we somehow frame things as going from one state (extravagent modernity) to a different state (a wonderful agrarian utopia 😉 ) and perhaps I see that because it’s thinking I fall into. I think I fall into it because it’s easier than contemplating the messy bit in the middle, which is where I suspect we’re likely to be for at least a few generations (assuming we avoid one of a range of possible catastrophes on the brink of which we seem to be dancing) – and its how we deal with the messy bit in the middle that will shape what follows. Perhaps what I’m starting to think is that its not even possible to aim at a particular shape for a future society – the best laid plans go astray, unintended consequences are inevitable etc. Rather the shape of a future society will be determined by how well we surf the forces that are starting to dismantle our current society.
What I like about being here is it makes me think harder about our collective predicament and then allows me to think out loud – so sometimes I think I’m slightly talking past what others are saying – my apologies for that.
No offence taken. And, like you, no doubt in my mind either that turbulent times are upon us. One response and one that probably should demand more of our attention is, as you say, to figure out how to surf the immediate forces of disintegration. But I do think that another important consideration is the longer view of a landing place – and that, for various reasons, is becoming a larger focus for me. Hopefully it adds something.
I am also very interested in the messy but in the middle! But I suspect that, like the final landing place, it is very contingent on local conditions, both in terms of available resources and in terms of politics.
For my part, I am trying to normalise the idea, among friends and family, that growing some of your own food is a good thing to do. At the same time I am building my own skills as a grower of food. This entails allotment plots on two different sites, the back garden of our rented terraced house in an East London suburb, and growing vegetables in the churchyard for our soup kitchen; excluding either the churchyard or the back garden it adds up to about a tenth of an acre, so a very small scale indeed, but it’s enough to keep me busy, and indeed to give me enough experience with different microclimates to have some idea how I would garden somewhere else.
I do use a lot of what I think of as “shortcuts of modernity” in all of this. I try to avoid single-use plastic, but do still use plastics for more durable purposes. I try to repurpose and re-use waste where I can (the greenhouse — another shortcut — at the biggest allotment has five discarded loft water tanks which I use as worm bins over the winter and then plant into in spring; I do want to do more winter growing, but didn’t this year due to health issues in the autumn). I rely fairly heavily on spent coffee grounds from a local chain. But quite a lot of these shortcuts are just that: shortcuts. A metal watering can when the plastics run out will certainly be more expensive but the watering technique is roughly the same; digging drainage ditches and filling them with woodchips to use as pathways (which eventually compost down and get heaped onto the beds, then refilled with the next lot) is easier if you have a shovel and a regular delivery of woodchips, but in the absence of the latter, chopping or breaking coppice prunings into six inch twigs is more labour but not exactly impossible to do in a low-tech way — though I would probably make biochar instead. I have access to other nitrogen sources than coffee, they just take longer to gather and/or process. And on one plot I’m having great fun making a tunnel for my climbing beans out of coppiced hazel poles from the same plot — and learning a lot about how that works. I think I’ve now used all the flexible poles and will need to scavenge some willow for the top of the arch, which isn’t ideal, but is also a strategy that is available to me. And I’m learning seed-saving and various food preservation techniques as I go along, and foraging a decent amount too, and there are seasons where our grocery shopping is mostly “products from livestock” (which we don’t have) and “staples we don’t have enough land to grow at scale”. I am always sorry when we switch over to shop potatoes, the sad grey things. (In fairness it doesn’t help much that by the time we switch over to shop potatoes, the best of the season is truly over.)
I don’t think the amount of work I do convinces many people who aren’t already interested that growing food is a good thing, if I’m honest. Being the sort of person who really would find a book about barbed wire interesting, I’m not nearly cool enough to make gardening “cool”. But the spare tomato seedlings have led to various neighbours growing more of their own, as have the occasional jars of jam or chutney or bottles of wine. The soup garden alternates between being mostly me and attracting volunteers who are learning some skills despite not having access to any land of their own, and it means that at least some of what we serve in the soup kitchen is fresh, nutritious and hyper local.
The thing about cultural changes is that you don’t always get to see the longer-term effects. Did the soup garden volunteer from 2020/21 who moved back to Australia start a garden there? I don’t know, but there’s a good chance. Does the fresh parsley for the soup kitchen make the kitchen volunteers think about starting a herb patch on a balcony? I don’t know. Will any of this topple crapitalism or change the economic reality that has people coming to the soup kitchen to begin with? No; on one level, this is as much dabbling within the existing system as a high-paid tech worker in a sustainability advice company. But on another level, if the future holds a need for many more hours of agricultural labour, the more people who have experience of keeping a potato plant alive or sowing kale seeds, the better.
My decision process for using shortcuts of modernity in my own horticultural efforts is largely about whether said shortcut increases or decreases my future resilience, or that of the communities I’m involved in, or that of whoever tends my plots next. Without knowing for sure where I’ll be in ten years or what tools I’ll be able to carry with me, some of the best investments I can make are in my own skills and in building soil health, so those are the areas I focus on.
A brief response to Sean…
First, my point about lack of plausible access currently to ultimate reality isn’t my final gambit in this discussion but just, as I said, a ‘route to explore’ – which you did!
As I see it, you started out critiquing my framing, but ended up in a position pretty close to my intentions in raising it.
Maybe it might help to suggest that there are positive and normative components to sovereignty, and they both matter in ways that don’t apply to other facts about the world, like gravity or evolution.
If I say that political sovereignty is invested in the absolute and suggests certain earthly courses of action, but other people scorn my claims, then that, positively, is consequential to the nature of political sovereignty within the culture-history that I and these others inhabit. But it could still be perfectly reasonable for me to claim that the political ideas of these other people and of this particular place and time are disorderly and are going to lead to trouble. It’s not, however, of much use just to say ‘well, I’m right and they’re wrong’ or to expect that people will see the error of their thinking with a snap of the fingers. If I want to make my normative account of political sovereignty tell, I have to build communities, institutions, narrative frameworks and suchlike around it, and this is long-term cultural work.
The point I was trying to raise is basically that I think we (and of course the ‘we’ who are discussing this on this blog might wish to discuss who this ‘we’ is) are currently at an early stage in this long-term cultural work, and the resources we have for doing it are in a poor state. I can look back with admiration to the Western European High Middle Ages as a time and place with a more finished cultural achievement and where political frameworks were in better shape. But what I can’t do is just import that achievement into the present.
So I’m not suggesting that what is true is what is popular or useful, and I agree that living as a witness to eternal truths rather than as a slave to temporal delusions is the right path to tread. The difficulty is in creating rich cultural frameworks around what that means now and in the future that motivate people en masse to tread it, and to find it possible to tread it.
Beyond the off-putting presumption and hints of hubris, the “I’m right and they’re wrong” path denies the benefits of pluralism, which enables peaceful ways for different communities and beliefs to coexist, and provides opportunities for individuals to find ways to the truth which resonate within them (instead of being dictated one interpretation of the truth by another imperfect human having their own blind spots regarding the ‘ultimate reality’.)
Central to my argument is that natural law and virtue ethics (based on philosophical reason) is the only possible foundation for pluralism.
Behind every iteration of liberalism lurks the worship of ‘pure power’, the human will utterly unbounded, absolutely free… from Reality.
Central to my argument is that if there is only one possible “foundation” (or underlying “truth”), there is more than one path to discovering and learning and embracing the “truth” (with our limited understandings as humans).
Decrying “the worship of pure power” and “absolutely free from reality” are straw man arguments here.
I don’t disagree that there is more than one path towards Truth; I’m mainly pointing out that they lead to same place. Think of how many experiences the scientist must draw from to deduce physical laws. The ethicist needs to draw from a similar breadth of experience to understand the virtues. But in both cases, there is one and same Reality which is being observed.
It’s not so much a straw man as it is a summary of arguments I’ve laid out (often citing those much wiser than I) in much greater length before in these blog comments. For example, here: https://chrissmaje.com/?p=1906#comment-245020 (“Freedom from Reality” is a reference to an entire book on the topic by D.C. Schindler)
Those are indeed straw man arguments *here*.
Pluralism allows multiple contemporary paths for the *individuals* in societies to discover and learn and embrace the “truth”.
Trying to impose the “truth” and then expecting obedience can result in discovery and learning (in a rote fashion) without the embracing.
I prefer living with those who have intrinsic motivations to love their neighbors, instead of those who are demonstrating “obedience” because of external rewards and punishments.
On that we agree. Intrinsic motivations towards the good are far superior to extrinsic motivations (rewards and punishments). That’s an important thesis of virtue ethics.
But what do we when we disobey our desire to Love? Within our capacity to choose love is freedom, and the capacity to choose hatred and violence, which is why we need an inherent /obedience/ to the truth of love. There’s no escaping that concept without escaping reality (though liberalism tries to find ways to have love without obedience, freedom without truth.)
Framing it that way is stretching the meaning of /obedience/ beyond recognition.
Disobey our desire?
Love requires obedience?
Horsefeathers! : )
Trying to impose the “truth” and then expecting obedience, with assistance from threats of punishment and the promise of rewards (even in the afterlife) is not conducive to intrinsic motivation.
I can look back with admiration to the Western European High Middle Ages as a time and place with a more finished cultural achievement and where political frameworks were in better shape. ”
That time was dominated by city states , yes the renaissance happened , it jumped from city state to city state , small communities who had a real say in what happened around them , all went well untill one city state had dominance over the others, then the fighting for brutal .
I feel this discussion between Sean and Chris goes back to a point I tried to at least imply above, which is distinguishing ultimate realities (or ultimate goods) from the more temporal, practical and instrumental goods that constitute the day-to-day realities and dilemmas of a community. I maintain that it’s perfectly possible to come up a rational account of a community’s group problems, and the good ends that would resolve those problems, without a religious account of the ultimate good,or the divine. Chris’ book would be a good example of this! This doesn’t mean those solutions end up persuading a great many people, but they may still be true. And fundamentally, the ability of people to come up with these rational accounts is part of why I would agree with Chris in locating sovereignty, at least provisionally, in those individuals.
On the flip side, I certainly sympathize with Sean that not accounting for the ultimate good can be a dangerous loose end. Some of the most durable contemporary farming communities I can think of here in North America are Anabaptist colonies (Amish, Hutterite, etc) that imbibe everyday life with the kinds of rich cultural frameworks that Chris refers to. In short, they imbibe life with hope and meaning in a way that something more narrowly instrumental (like sensible small farm land use laws) just wouldn’t. And in the absence of broader hope, the ‘good’ in those sensible instrumentalities may start to lose its luster, in the face of deceitful alternatives like convenient suburban subdivisions
It seems to me that Sean’s concern is fundamentally this danger of the allowing instrumental ends to lead to people astray, to become objects of worship in themselves. I don’t disagree with this per se, although the problem often might just be those people are ignorant and mistaken about what the instrumental good is. Either way, I’m often skeptical one can live a full life ir-religiously, or that communities without a shared sense of ultimate hope and meaning can endure.
But my concern is maintaining the separate grounds of religion and politics, of Church and State (or church and local council, in the small farm future). After all, I think even those Amish colonies need the release valve of a broader society to maintain their internal coherence. And as the High Middle Ages rolled on, the price of the finished cultural achievement was increasing numbers of dead heretics….
We don’t need religion to tell us how to organize much of communal life in a sensible and orderly way. But we probably do need it, in the long run, to tell us why it all matters or what it’s ultimately for. Political sovereignty may be with the people, but the ultimate arbiter is something more.
Evan,
I would say that “organizing communal life in a sensible and orderly way” requires natural law, virtue ethics, and the acknowledgment of the Creator. Whether that’s called “religion” is up for debate; it certainly doesn’t need to be a particular tradition that claims a special Revelation from God.
You yourself say that we probably do need religion “to tell us why it all matters or what it’s ultimately for.” That’s precisely my point: a small farm community can come up with a way of allocating their resources in a way that keeps everyone healthy and happy, but they always have to do so within the context of higher-order question: “Why should I care if my neighbors are healthy or happy? Especially the ones I don’t like! Why should I obey this community rule? Especially when nobody is looking! Why should I deny myself this pleasure or convenience for the sake of others? Especially when I really really want it!”
Examples abound. One can’t discuss communal subsistence without discussing morality, and one can’t discuss morality without discussing ontology, i.e., what is true and false about Creation and the Creator.
This discussion thread around sovereignty is interesting, especially on the question of where we should ‘place’ it and whether it can be ‘misplaced’. At a basic level sovereignty is an answer to the question ‘who or what is ultimately in charge?’, and as Sean says, we can’t escape it – we must answer it in our daily lives again and again and again, whenever we act, even if we do with only a partial comprehension of that answer.
There are several elements to the discussion above. One is what could be called the theology of sovereignty – enquiry into why it matters, or what it means, to answer the question in a particular way. Sean distinguishes between meaning found in invisible realities and eternal Truths on the one side, and the delusional promptings of worldly politics on the other. Another element could be styled the metaphysics of sovereignty – concern with how it works, what forces and influences shape our answers to the question. Sean invokes a natural law that is inherent in the structure of the universe, while others point to personal belief or faith – basically individual will – as to what constitutes the authority to which they submit.
The history of sovereignty – the stories we can tell ourselves about how people have answered that question, ‘who or what is ultimately in charge?’, in the past – demonstrates that, however we understand the theology or metaphysics of sovereignty, it is always profoundly bound up with the fact that personhood can only be experienced through some relation to community, and vice versa, each constantly creating the other. Indeed, I think it’s that existential relation that means we have to keep answering the sovereignty question. Discussions like this can clarify where we each think our answer should place it, and where we would like to work towards it being placed, but the truth is it can be and is located in many places.
One way forward is, I think, to ask whether our answers to the sovereignty question, whatever they might be, should have to be constant and immutable, or whether we wish to promote a broader range of answers and highlight solidarities between them. In the former camp, do we wish our roles in society to be established and set, our obligations constant? That to me seems to be the implication of Sean’s sovereignty, in which its source is placed outside humanity, natural law maps out the bounds of obligations we owe to one another in a series of nested hierarchies, and society only really ‘works’ when people accept and fulfil these obligations. Alternatively, some might invoke intra-humanity versions of an immutable sovereignty – the racial superiority of one group over others; the essential role of a Hobbesian sovereign ruler; the libertarian insistence on the sovereignty of the atomised individual.
The alternative to all of this is to recognise that sovereignty looks different depending on where distinctions between person and community are made, and to embrace the inherent negotiability of sovereignty – a view that has the advantage of describing the world both historically and today! This does not mean that sovereignty has to be viewed as either nihilistically relative – in a theological sense, that it can mean many things and therefore ultimately means nothing – nor does it have to imply the metaphysical superiority of a kind of ‘will to power’, enabling sovereignty to be hoarded and monopolised by those most committed to and successful at doing so. Instead, cultivating the freedom of all to negotiate the workings and meanings of sovereignty seems key to me.
So I’m far more sympathetic to the importance of Chris’s ‘cultural work’ or the benefits of Steve L’s ‘pluralism’. Equally, I don’t see the need to advocate for a particular extra-human eternal Truth that justifies a particular view of sovereignty, or to be concerned with some kind of final arbiter. From a ‘front porch’ perspective, it’s worth recognising that the sovereignty question applies to both public and private realms – I would argue that societies that keep these realms more interleaved, transparent and negotiable will be better able to negotiate and manipulate sovereignty, while those that harden the boundaries between them will also find it necessary to be more monolithic about the source and immutability of sovereignty.
How is “embracing the inherent negotiability of sovereignty” different than the ‘social contract theory’ of classical liberalism?
It differs quite considerably I think. In my eperience ‘social contract theory’ is used to argue for an immutable form of sovereignty, not an inherently negotiable form.
Social contract theory presents us with a metaphysical story, a kind of thought experiment, beginning with the ‘state of nature’ (a place and time that never actually existed) and an understanding of all people as driven ultimately self-interest. The story then proceeds through reasoned argument to show that society requires us all to obey certain laws in order to live ‘freely’. The form of society is contractual in the sense that people agree to live with constraint so that all may be ‘free’, but that’s just metaphysical nicety to escape the need for divine dictat – the contract itself, once in place, is intended to be non-negotiable.
I’m suggesting that negotiability is more fundamentally part of how we have to relate to one another (negotiability is non-negotiable!). Moreover, there is no ‘state of nature’ (at least, not beyond the most basic level of human similarity and mutual comprehensibility) – we are always already bound up in mutually affecting relationships, and so it is not possible to take a universal view of the human ‘individual’. It follows that personal motivation cannot be rooted in an essentialised self-interest – in fact pure self-interest is inconceivable because interest is always bound up with concerns in our relationships with others.
‘Cultural work’ and ‘pluralism’ are therefore also essential aspects of how we relate together as humans. My point is that we don’t need to aim for one unversal Truth (whatever that actually means) in those relations. But if we aim for a kind of mutual preservation in our relations, and a willingness to allow each other scope to define the terms of our own lives, then we can still talk about forms of more harmonious society.
Chris,
I’m glad to hear we have more agreement than I think! I agree that understanding and deconstructing the false, ideological ideas of sovereignty is very important, especially so we don’t fall into the same errors.
Let me be clear that I’m not proposing the “importation” of old structures into the present. This is, as you note, impossible. And I don’t even think the High Middle Ages ought to be admired per se. The real metric is always the Absolute.
What I’d like to emphasize is that we need a more ecological sense of two related things: virtue (some would say “praxis”) and ‘theory of change.’ Belief in the ‘invisible realities’ means that what goes on in our “hearts,” that is, our deep interiority, actually changes the world far more than the external “results” that we can see in our organizing and efforts. On this view, “long-term cultural work” happens not because we’ve come up with the perfect, new system to motivate and organize action in the world (this is at the heart of ideological thinking), but because we’ve put ourselves in a posture of receptivity and obedience, trusting in timeless Truth (e.g. those ascertainable by philosophy, both moral and ontological) and seeking to put them into practice in our own particular times and places (which is the where the “revolutionary newness” comes in). The creation of “rich cultural frameworks” lies beyond our reach, in the hands of a Providence before which we must acknowledge our limits; this humility is crucial to the best and only way we can change the world.
In sum, I propose we need to prioritize conversion (to the life of virtue) over activism, obeying (true) authority over ‘building (worldly) power,’ and the life of contemplation over that of action. Each of the latter can (and often must) spring from the former, but to reverse or ignore that priority is the pitfall of all humanity, and perhaps of modern man in particular.
I’m feeling this Sean, like a Christian Marxism vibe. For us the ‘conversion’ is through making, reconnecting people to the product of their labour, a joyful, embodied practice founded in the land.
I’ve been reading Silvia Federici’s ‘Reenchanting the world’, a selection of essays from the 70s to the present, influenced by Maria Mies and Vandan Shiva, among others. She outlines a mistake by Marx to characterise the original enclosures (in Britain) as a necessary process to the eventual union and freedom of the ‘proletariat’. I agree. She is also talks about the ‘earth commons’ as the basis of life.
I am constantly in awe of this feminist perspective of the world and the astonishing insights it brings. Would this be a part of the revolutionary newness?
Frank Herbert, who was a political speech writer before he was a novelist, once said he thought all power structures tended toward aristicratic forms. It didn’t matter if those in power started as revolutionairy communists or with a hereditary title, once they had power they very quickly came to identify the ‘common good’ with their own interests and the interests of people like them. Acting from that belief they very quickly create a system that reinforces their power and priviledge – its why his advice on politics was to alway vote against incumbents.
I’ve just finished reading ‘Chums’ which is about how a small group of privately educated (mostly Eton) Oxford graduates captured British politics over the last 15 years. The author was at Oxford at the same time as many of the characters in the book. The author suggests that the nature of their education, the Oxford tutorial system and the Oxford Union gave these people a particular sense of self belief and an easy route into power. What that education gave them was a great ability with rhetoric, an ability to make a convincing arguement without any need to care about the proposition itself. What it didn’t give them was any sense of what to do with power or its consequences (coming from where they come from they are mostly insulated from consequences) – David Cameron famously said he wanted to be Prime Minister because he thought he’d be rather good at it. Politics as a game, debate as a game played within a group of people who’ve been playing that game among themselves on various stages since they were at school!
The author contrasts this generation with an earlier generation of Eton educated Oxford graduates who also became politicians. The difference with that earlier generation was that they had fought in the first and second world wars, an experience that had given them direct contact with people from outside their class, taught them that decisions have consequences and that those with less gilded lives often feel those consequences more. And as junior officers these people had a responsibility to those over whom they had command. Those experiences moulded very different politicians from those we have now.
My fear going forward is that as energy becomes scarcer and life becomes more land based those with land will simply become more powerful in our society and use their ownership of land as a lever to exploit others. That what will be created is another land based aristocracy (or maybe it will be our current one simply mutating). The High Middle Ages have been mentioned here but at that time there was still considerable amounts of common land that allowed people to gain at least some of their living outside of the structures of power. I fear we’re more likely to get a situation along the lines of the late 18th / early 19th century when agricultural workers weren’t paid enough to actually feed their families despite producing a surplus that would feed multiple families – that surplus being the landowner’s profit.
I think in some times and places religion has been a brake on that tendency toward an exploitative aristocracy and in other times and place its simply been another route into the artistocracy or formed an aristocratic structure itself. I suspect its worked best in somewhat isolated places (Ladakh?) where competition from outsde forces is lacking. Perhaps its hopelessly idealistic to think a solution to that tendency toward aristocracy can be found but without some mitigation I think its where we’re headed. Those with wealth and power today have gained those things in a system dominated by materialism and so seem the least likely to be interested in contemplation and their “deep interiority”.
I’m not feeling very hopeful this morning
I think this is a real danger, for what it’s worth.
Mitigating circumstances:
– without cheap energy, trade in commodities of all kinds will be much more expensive to transact, making power more expensive to maintain
– without cheap energy, human labourers have more power within local economies; I expect strike action and similar to be more effective than they are today (when outsourcing labour to a robot or a less autonomous workforce is often within reach)
– with more people directly involved in growing their own food, the process of quantification of economic activity gets harder; it is definitely more work for me to weigh my produce than just to eat it, though I am at least making a stab at quantification this year. And at the end of the day, even aristocrats need to eat, and if they kill too much of the local workforce they’ll starve along with everyone else. Rent-seeking behaviour is only any good if you can use that rent to purchase what you need.
Feudalism was not great on a number of counts, and feudalism without common land stands to be even worse, if that’s where we’re headed; but aristocrats arguably had less power than, say, Southern US plantation owners, or owners of some large corporations today. I think in the UK they do still own most of the land, though. I’m not sure how much the enclosures were a sort of reluctant collusion between aristocratic and capitalist forces — I feel like this may have been discussed here previously, but I can’t recall details.
An alternate theory to the Oxford one is that the system of public (private) schools in which young children are taken from their primary caregivers and put into a sort of gladiator’s ring of bullying, producing deep and lasting trauma, is a large part of the problem with British politics. As someone with considerable direct experience of childhood trauma myself I think this is plausible. I would also point to my usual hobbyhorse of communication technology, and more specifically advertising-funded algorithmic social media coopted by bad actors, to explain at least some of how we got here.
I’m not sure acting against incumbents is always the answer, though, even if on balance it is helpful much of the time. I think examining the political structure of groups and seeking to change it is probably more effective. I am also reminded of Jo Freeman’s essay on the Tyranny of Structurelessness and how elite groups are created and retained:
https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
One thing that does give me hope is that most periods of humans exploiting one another are transient and lead to some kind of emancipation if they go on too long. Humans don’t like being slaves, and we do eventually fight back against it. Feudalism in its steady state was stable only because the aristocracy had social and religious obligations toward the peasants, as well as the other way around. Chattel slavery on cotton and sugar plantations was much less stable, and the US Civil War was won as much by enslaved people going on strike or fighting back as it was by the Union army. So I find it hard to envision the boot stamping on the face of humanity forever, backed by violence and weapons; I would just vastly prefer that we choose a path to the future that includes more ploughshares and fewer swords to begin with.
(or whatever the low-till equivalent of a ploughshare might be, given soil erosion)
I think that as economies become more tied to their land base the opportunity for striking will be reduced – if you can be permanently excluded from the source of livelihood by the owner of the land your scope for resistance is greatly reduced. I think the outward forms that this sort of power have taken have mutated – think slavery to share cropping – but the power itself has been remarkably persistent and very rapidly found ways to circumvent constraints upon it – the globalisation of capital in the face of social democratic politics at the national level for instance.
I think the only way to mitigate this is shared experience and in the UK the only experience powerful enough to create the sort of taming of the powerful that we’re talking about was two world wars – that’s not to say that they haven’t been constrained by other forces at other times but the wartime experience seems to have induced – I want to say self restraint but that isn’t quite right – I’m replying on a phone which isn’t the best. Nor do I think the generalisations I’m making are anything but that.
I think this is an unfinished thought – work beckons
If the owner of the land permanently excludes enough labourers from the land, the owner of the land will go hungry. And it’s easier said than done; physically excluding someone requires a great deal of social influence or a great deal of human energy or both. Weapons are a handy shortcut, but are also not without costs.
More broadly, my thinking is that it takes a certain amount of energy (whether fossil fuels or human labour) to produce the food and other sundries needed to keep a person alive. There is some room for variability in this — strawberries have higher inputs per calorie extracted than potatoes, and pastoral herding requires less human labour than, say, tomato farming — but currently we are playing a foolish game of using non-renewable fossil energy to take the place of as much human labour as we can. When fossil energy is absent or uneconomical, we will need every bit of human labour we can muster just to get enough calories. Owning lots of land is no good if you don’t have help to turn it into food. The owners of land-as-capital are no more immune to starvation than the peasants are — and starving peasants don’t have a lot to lose.
Even more broadly, a lot of the history of humanity, never mind modernity, is the story of people finding ever more dense or efficient sources of energy (and some other key resources), and using some of the excess provided by said energy sources to consolidate social power and exploit one another (and to discover or invent Mendelian genetics, movable type printing, corrective lenses, bicycles, germ theory, indoor plumbing, public libraries etc). But if we really are at the end of the road with increasing our sources of energy, the balance of social power changes. Owning a forest isn’t a source of social power if you clear cut it; owning pasture isn’t a source of social power if it is overgrazed until it becomes unproductive. And while you can renew some of the value of an ex-forest or an ex-pasture by planting trees or windbreaks or leguminous cover crops or whatever else, all of those activities also require energy. So there are limits on the amount of absolute power any landholder might have, and limits on what they can accomplish on their own; I think these translate into relative limits on their social power.
There might be some very bloody outcomes of this, of course. One doesn’t need an inexhaustible supply of guns and muscle to subdue a population — just enough to scare people into submission. But after centuries (millennia?) of trade, transport and material goods getting, on balance, cheaper for everyone (albeit with a lot of local variation), and those who are quickest to exploit new resources having a competitive advantage, we’re now facing the exhaustion of fossil energy producing the opposite effect. I don’t think it’s entirely possible to be certain how that will turn out, but I do think it means both that land-as-capital will become very important again, and also that labour (and by extension, everything else) will become quite a bit more expensive than it currently is. The cynic in me thinks that we’ll eventually settle out into something more sustainable whether we like it or not; any population that we cannot support via (more or less) democratic political structures will cease to be an issue after a couple of generations of starvation, violence, disease or some combination of them. But I am certainly interested in a congenial transition if one is available, and so it is worth trying to figure out a less tragic path from here to there.
As an aside, I’m mindful that in an earlier comment on this post I suggested that some things (particularly communal sharing of food) are easier to do with less formality, and then in my comment here I linked to the Tyranny of Structurelessness essay. I think scale and context have a lot to do with whether a formal or informal structure is best for any given situation.
Any structure will have some kick back , humans are very good at arguing
Here’s another called ‘Sad Little Men’, great interview with the author by Ash Sarkar
https://youtu.be/wXu0L7hzl3g
Thanks for the comments everyone, very interesting discussion. I might try to weigh in later in the week, but a bit up against it at the moment. As I previously mentioned, I want to look at these issues in more depth in the longer term, so I’ll definitely be coming back to it one way or another.
I’d certainly be interested in your thoughts on the prospects for creating a SFF in the UK given the concentration of land ownership and the unaffordability of land generally here. I’ve watched lots of auctions where prices for smallish plots of not brilliant land are 15k to 20k per acre – that’s not a recipe for lots of small farmers. A duchy farm got sold round here recently and even one of the big dairy farmers was complaining that it was hard to justify the price based on potential returns from actually farming – although he did buy a couple of big blocks
Fascinating Bruce… it takes me back to the price of beer you pointed to earlier here. And by comparison the premium for UK land appears much greater than the premium for beer [premium over a US price]. One can easily find small plots of relatively farm poor land available on this side of the pond for similar prices – but these parcels would be quite close to urban or peri-urban spaces (or perhaps mines). Farmland, and quite good farmland, at more than a dozen miles from a decent sized city will not command those prices here. There will be exceptions. A piece lying between two very wealthy (read long family ties to place) farmers may fetch those sorts of values if they get into a pissing match motivated by a need to outfit a second son. But in general a good piece, with access to a road, water, and electricity, will not cost nearly so much.
We should recruit someone from California though… I’d suppose Napa Valley land might be a very different matter.
And then once you buy the farmland, it’s almost impossible to build a house on it without going through several rounds of planning permission. Certainly cost of land is one of the big factors keeping me in the city.
I think Scotland is considerably cheaper, or was last time I looked seriously. It’s also considerably colder, and that much darker in the wintertime.
Yes Clem the picce of land here is incredible – my partner and I tried for years to buy some – we’d find some at auction, decide we’d go £x past the top end of the guide price and get nowhere close. Next auction we’d think well is went for £x last time so we’ll go £x + whatever and then get nowhere close – rinse repeat. There was a small piece we looked at – less than 4 acres with the ruins, I mean there were a few stones still lying where the walls had once been, of an old small cow shed (shed really is the word – a couple of cows would have filled it) and it went for something like 130K off a guide price of 35-50K. That ruin could be rebuilt without need for planing, once you’ve a building then planning for something bigger is easier and so other things start to look possible. I’d assummed land in the US would be much cheaper – you’ve got more of it – but I know Mr Gates has bought a great deal. I think the similarity is that land close to urban centres commands a premium but that’s most of the land here.
Ireland is cheap Kathryn – you buy a house somewhere remote and they seem to throw in some land to sweeten the deal – however the house may be miles and miles from anywhere so earning a living might be a problem and the house may be in some disrepair – I used to look on Zoopla every so often and dream – Brexit has made moving to Ireland more difficult though
Bruce — as a non-driver, “somewhere remote” is usually not fantastically attractive to me.
(I’m aware that it will get better later on as driving becomes more and more expensive, but… well, I have to live somewhere in the meantime.)
Back to the topic of front porches, it strikes me that the high-rise apartments and tower flats of an ecomodernist future would typically not have front porches.
“A front porch for every household” could be a future campaign slogan, and then “Chickens in every backyard”.
: )
You name-checked me, Chris, so I have to reply! And regardless of my comments, I’m glad to see your project continuing strongly. It is needed.
Regardless of any nonsense that was spoken about some of my writing some years back (all of it a deliberate misrepresentation, I should add, of the kind you will yourself be familiar with, having tussled so often with Monbiot), I think that the hoary question of belonging over time won’t go away. This is what nationalism appeals to. It is often a false or exaggerated or constructed appeal, but it’s an appeal to a real thing – a sense of community tied to place.
I think about it a lot. I’m an English man living in Ireland with a mixed race family, so blood and soil is never going to be for me. And since I don’t come from here, I can’t appeal to the past to sustain my own story on this land. And yet I can also see what a tragedy it would be – and is, because this is occurring – if the Irish became detached from their past, their land and their stories, and were lost in the global whirl.
The awkward reality – awkward for the modern story, anyway – is that being in a place over a long period of time is what creates deep cultures. Most people have no problem acknowledging this when talking about ‘indigneous’ people. So what are we moderns to do about this notion? Embrace it? Well, how could we? Abandon it? But that would just be the triumph of the globalist project. These questions are what I was trying to dig at in the essays which were accused of ‘blood and soil nationalism’ by the usual opportunists. What does it mean to belong in a place, over time, in a modern culture?
These days I tend to think that ‘hearth and home’ is not the same thing as ‘blood and soil’. Hearth and home is a good notion. ‘Soil and soul’ is the phrase that Satish Kumar and others use a lot. It’s a good one. But at the same time we need to respect the rights and cultures of the original people of a place. Not to do so is a form of abuse. It’s a tricky dance. Too much rootedness may be as damaging as too little. I don’t pretend to have the answer: certainly I don’t think it’s to be foudn in nationalism as such, which is an answer to a different question.
But it does seem obvious to me that any small farm future will depend on an organic culture, and I don’t see how it can embrace the liberal notion of ‘free movement’ of anything, be it agricultural goods or people. There have to be limits. Perhaps the question is what framework they operate in, and at what scale.
Incidentally, I’m speaking at the Front Porch Republic conference in October. I wish there was an equivalent in Britain or Ireland.
Anyway: keep going.
Paul
I like the distinctions you draw between different types of belonging. Belonging is a need and one that is certainly open to manipulation. I also agree that deep ties to a place over time are what creates culture and that is what we need going forward – cultures of place – the very word suggests these things are organic and can’t simply be wishes into existence. I slightly disagree with the free movement – I actually think it’s important – many parts of the UK once relied on travelling people’s to manage seasonal fluctuations in the need for workers.
As young man I travelled a bit with horse drawn travellers – I did a winter, it was bloody hard and I was cured of it. I think movement on that sort of scale should be free and would serve useful purposes – unfortunately that’s the sort of thing that’s being eradicated.
Thanks for the comments everyone, and thanks Paul for your thoughts and encouragement. I’m still short on time for a proper reply, so I’ll just make a few points in note form, and hope to come back to this in due course.
– Yes, to Paul’s ‘tricky dance’. Generally, I’ve argued that it’s a good idea for people to get busy producing an ecological local livelihood wherever they are, and where they are may not be where they’re from. But certainly agree the pace of movement must ultimately slow. Much to ponder
– I’m interested in Sean’s remarks on the life of contemplation over my somewhat more instrumental framing of cultural action. Therein lies a key tension animating a good deal of political-religious history – ‘World Conqueror and World Renouncer’ – to use the title of a famous anthropological book. More to come on that. I agree, of course, that nobody can just actively build a cultural framework. But cultural frameworks get built, and some people are active in their construction.
– on land prices, yes they’re absurdly high in the UK – especially small edge of town plots, for horseyculture and suchlike. There are more interesting things going on in Scotland, although also a lot of fairly spurious corporate ‘rewilding’ for carbon credits pushing up prices. Another topic requiring more attention. Meanwhile, I’m beginning to find carbon neutral claims on products actively disincentivizing my purchasing decisions. As to Bruce’s question about the prospects for a small farm future in the face of such prices, the short answer is nil. However, I believe that might change quickly in the face of wider forces. Whether the change leads to widespread access to small farms depends on many political factors – including, oddly it may seem, the tension between activists and renouncers as per Sean’s comment, something I discuss briefly in ‘A Small Farm Future’.
– it strikes me that remoteness is a function of the motor car. The harder it is to get to a place, the less remote it becomes.
– many other fascinating points about sovereignty, power and land access from Bruce, Andrew, Kathryn, Joel, Steve and others. Thanks – I’ll come back to this.
Thanks for the reply, Chris.
The question of movement is interesting. I find myself in favour of limits, but also against the current conception of borders. A world of eyeball scans and digital passports is a horrible one. And yet, if those things are removed, the scale of migration that would ensue would be overwhelming, anti-democratic and probably lead to massive conflict.
It seems to me that this is an unavoidable result of technological ‘progress.’ Before WW1 there were no passports at all. People could go where they pleased; but most were unable or unwilling to travel too far in vast numbers. Now almost everyone can. And smartphones make it easy to organise and plan, even illegally.
What can be done about that? I have no idea. The ‘right’ wants big walls, the ‘left’ wants no borders at all and most of us are probably in another place entirely. It just seems to emphasise how much tech is at the root of both economics and culture.
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