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 8, 2023 | 59 Comments
It’s time to get stuck into the final few posts of this blog cycle about my book A Small Farm Future. At long last, we’ve now reached the fourth and final part of the book, ‘Towards a small farm future’.
Probably the most important idea that I try to develop in this part of the book is what I call ‘the supersedure state’. I don’t plan to go over the same ground here as in the book, but here’s a quick overview. Most mainstream positions across the political spectrum are invested in getting control of the modern, centralized, bureaucratic nation-state as the key vehicle for realizing their disparate visions. Anarchists of various kinds, on the other hand, are invested in building bottom-up visions of well-functioning societies without a centralized state.
I accept that modern centralized states sometimes take good actions and that some of their actors are well-intentioned, but for reasons much discussed in previous posts that I won’t rehearse here, I think such states are congenitally incapable of creating the low-energy, localist societies that will be needed in the future. And whether they’re capable or not, I also believe their controlling power is likely to wane.
I’m reasonably sympathetic to bottom-up anarchist alternatives to the centralized modern nation-state, but I don’t think it’s possible to wish it (or indeed to fight it) out of existence. Instead, I think such states will die a hundred protracted and messy deaths, while continuing to try to discharge their familiar functions in increasingly haphazard and dysfunctional ways. These zombie states will, given the chance, smother the grassroots localist renewals that are so badly needed like an impermeable mulch, denying light and moisture to the seedbeds of the world to come.
I don’t think it’s possible to say how this will play out. Possibly, the zombie states will take us all down with them in global total war, implacable authoritarian surveillance or ecological meltdown. But it seems to me more appealing outcomes are possible, at least in some places, where people find ways to escape or avoid the death throes of the zombie states and pioneer new ways of life, and this is what I want to help nurture and amplify.
States and civilizations have collapsed many times in the past. But we’re in an unprecedented situation globally today, with such a vast population so reliant on high-energy resource flows orchestrated by a tightly-organized global network of centralized states increasingly incapable of organizing those flows, whose citizenries are extraordinarily alienated from the material and mental resource base needed to generate local livelihoods.
So it’s a supremely challenging situation. But also, I think, a very different one structurally to previous collapses, which typically pitted military entrepreneurs against disenfranchised cultivators. A more typical present situation, in the Global North at least, is likely to pit a still sovereign but increasingly ineffective territorial bureaucratic state against a semi-enfranchised and practically incompetent but possibly quick-learning populace. The results could be interesting.
Supersedure situations in which the zombie state fails to deliver welfare locally and people have to start innovating their own local solutions can take many forms and by their nature are always going to be locally specific and deeply contextual. I don’t think you can write down in a book or in any general piece of writing how it could or should all play out according to some generalized blueprint – that way of thinking is precisely in the nature of the modernist centralized state, whose time is basically up. All you can do in generalist writing is point to the overall process and the need to get busy pioneering good local answers in supersedure situations.
As I see it, good local answers will most likely draw from elements of the politics and economics of the modernist world out of which they’ll emerge – liberals and leftists and conservatives and anarchists all have useful things to say. But none of them have a complete solution to the unprecedented situation of the supersedure state. Indeed, there is no complete solution, and the very idea that one might exist is part of the damaged legacy of modernism that requires supersedure.
The way to go in general, I’d suggest, is an inclusive local populism, and it’s hard to be more specific than that. The risk of taking this position – and this is a charge that others have levelled at me – is that it doesn’t amount to much more than vague liberal hand-waving along the lines of ‘as things fall apart, wouldn’t it be lovely if we could all just play nicely with one another’, which doesn’t get very far. Maybe it’s a fair charge, but I’d respond to it in three ways.
First, thinking about the people who’ve levelled it (and I won’t mention names here), they seem either to subscribe to a strongly tech-cornucopian line or to radically left-wing or right-wing positions. In relation to the first, well, I just think tech’s not gonna save us – we’re not all going to increase our wealth and happiness while reducing our environmental footprints. This points to the need for radically social ways of dealing with constraint and conflict, rather than complacent assumptions about fully etiolated luxury consumerism. So I come back to populism – however difficult, we need to find ways to play nice.
As to the ideologues of left and right, they seem to be really convinced that they’re on the right side of history and once all the infidels have come onside, or been forced onside, the inherent correctness of their position means there’s no need for wishy-washy compromise. Whereas as I see it the chances of creating universal concord around correct politics are zero. So, again, we come back around to the need for radically social ways of dealing with constraint and conflict.
Ultimately, I think these are all modernist affectations of ‘one true path’ thinking that are destined to die with the zombie states that will be their final repository as supersedure situations slowly overwhelm them.
Second response: ‘wouldn’t it be lovely if we could all just play nicely with one another’ may be less vague, wishy-washy or unattainable than it sounds. Framed through different words, it can be pretty specific, hard-edged, radical and semi-achievable. I won’t expound on this at length here, but the kinds of things I have in mind that have influenced me include (1) populist land reform movements, where access to farmland for ordinary people is a precondition of playing nicely; (2) resilient and adaptive ethical universalisms of the kind associated with world religions and churches; (3) perhaps conversely, resilient and adaptive particularisms of the kind associated with indigenous livelihood communities; and, (4) the powerful peace and community development work done in violent, divided societies, drawing on thinking such Marshall Rosenberg’s non-violent communication framework.
Third response: from a populist point of view, the only way of creating social concord is in practice, by working to create it somehow in actual, living communities. Writers and political thinkers have a role to play in that, maybe in helping scope the terrain and clarify some of the available choices, but I’m not convinced that they – we – have a more important role than anyone else who’s doing what they’re doing to create congenial lifeways for their households and communities. So to those who tell me I haven’t explained how to create a congenial and renewable society, I guess I’d reply that my book helpfully demonstrated how existing centralized political structures can’t do that, whereas localized agrarian structures might just be able to, if they can steer a path through the wreckage of the former. And I found that work plenty hard enough – only one small piece in the mosaic, along with all the other hard-hewn pieces that other people’s work has furnished, but a piece nonetheless. And now it’s time for me to get busy doing some practical local steering. Then I’d ask them what part of the mosaic they’re working on themselves.
At least I probably would say all that if I hadn’t just written another darned book that goes through all this again, albeit in a slightly different way. OK, this time I really am gonna get busy with some steering.
Apologies if the above sounds overly defensive. I’ve probably spent a little too much time lately mired in the narrative of the writer as prophet bringing magic solutions, an odd affliction of our present age that’s supposedly abandoned such fancies. Anyway, in the next couple of posts I’ll try to ground what I’ve said here in some more specific examples.
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“And now it’s time for me to get busy doing some practical local steering.”
You are leading by example. This could be a subtle nudge for all of us.
While it may be impossible to describe the exact social structure of supersedure communities, it’s pretty easy to describe their material economies. All we need to know are the basics: where is the food coming from and where does the energy to cook the food come from?
If we assume that our current energy supply from fossil fuels is gone, then it’s pretty easy to say that heat energy for cooking and space heating is coming from wood. If there is no diesel powered machinery to support industrial agriculture, food will be grown using human and animal muscle.
If we know those two things, we also know from past experience that there won’t be a lot of surplus energy available to support non-food-growing people, so the vast majority of people will be growing food, storing, processing and cooking food themselves. It’s not too hard to visualize what that looks like.
Two potentially interesting case studies come to mind — both of which I’ve only really heard about recently and rather incompletely, so please forgive me if they are nonsense.
One is that the Byzantine Empire, with the fall of Rome, radically re-structured and simplified its administration, and so continued in some form or other for another thousand years (-ish). Annoyingly I don’t remember which podcast I heard this on, and it was only mentioned in passing. Was this a zombie state as described above, a supersedure situation of some kind, or more of a decentralisation which only met ultimate defeat in the early inklings of the modern period? And was it really such a radical re-organisation, or was it possible that the more culturally Hellenistic, eastern parts of the Roman Empire had never fully embraced Latinization in the first place and so were more resilient to the defeat of that system? I am not a historian and wouldn’t know where to start looking for the answers to these questions, but they seem potentially instructive.
The other example is much more recent, and it’s the “Digital Democracy” model being put into place in Taiwan, which I heard about on the “Your Undivided Attention” podcast by the Center for Humane Technology. You can listen or read a transcript: https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/23-digital-democracy-is-within-reach
This seems to me to be, potentially, an example of the sort of populism we may need. A brief look at the Wikipedia entry for the “Sunflower Student Movement” suggests that it is not entirely straightforward, though, and doesn’t mention digital democracy at all; while a google search for “digital democracy Taiwan” brings loads of results (which I haven’t read). Of course, I don’t know how to make this work on any scale without the energy and material inputs that give us internet access (Audrey Tang’s story of bringing ethernet cable to protesters made me smile) — but then, it also takes much, much less energy for me to type this comment and post it than it would for me to put it on a postcard and send it to Chris (and other readers of this blog). Electrons are easier to move than paper, at least with our current infrastructure.
And so I fall back to “we haven’t been through a collapse on this scale before, but we also haven’t faced one with the kinds of tools we do now have” — particularly in the field of communications. And even if computers are off the cards, moveable type and the printing press aren’t going away, and mimeograph and spirit duplicator technology are moderately low-tech as these things go; various forms of semaphore were overtaken by the electric telegraph, but represented substantial communication speed improvements over post riders, and some can be implemented fairly trivially without electricity. Few people know Morse code now but it’s not that hard to learn, and so a heliograph or similar could work pretty well. And in reading about semaphore I discovered that the Byzantine empire used a fire beacon system stretching 450 miles in the ninth century, and now I wonder how much that helped.
I’m not trying to be overly optimistic, here: all the duplication and communication methods I detail above require substantial investment of time, human energy and materials if you’re going to start from scratch, and some also require substantial coordination to ensure anyone is on the other end of the signal when you’re trying to send. Mobile messengers — post riders or bicycle couriers or runners or whatever — are more resilient, though slower, and small press printing is a giant pain in the neck. And even if we somehow manage to put up a network of semaphore towers while doing everything else we’ll need to while the world as we know it falls apart, they’re a very far cry from being able to send an email or make a telephone or video call. I am not suggesting for a moment that our communication technology (or that from the last few centuries) will magically save us from climate catastrophe, or that climate catastrophe won’t mean a serious dent in what we now think of as “normal” communications.
But I do believe a lot of communication technology we tend to think of as modern or early modern is at least potentially compatible with a lower energy future, and I would be very surprised if this didn’t play a role in questions of governance and state politics, as the control of information and its flows always has. To me this is an important wild card, probably only one of many, but still too important to ignore or dismiss, and possibly important enough that those of us doing some local steering and community building ought to pay it some attention. That probably won’t look like building a local network of semaphore towers, or learning to use wax myrtle berries to make the waxed paper sheets needed for mimeograph duplication, but it should be something we think about.
I got interested in CB radios, as you can make them your self with fairly basic materials and you can get a range of 7 miles for smaller handsets ,up wards the bigger the kit. Then the problem is power and that brings to mind the wind up radio (and those old war movies with pack back field phones), and even pedal power. I’m into the semaphore and jelly printing it sounds brilliant and little bit Studio Ghibli
I suppose one question is how widespread and how basic those basic materials actually are. Can you forage them from your back garden? Scavenge them from a landfill site? How widespread do CB radios need to be to be useful? What’s the expected working life on one?
I think synchronous communication technology like radio is a lot harder to do in a lower-tech, lower-energy society than asynchronous broadcasting like printing 40 or 400 copies of a leaflet and shoving them through doorways.
Samizdat during the Soviet era would be an interesting study in that regard.
Communications in a supersedure state might rely heavily on 19th-century technology. The telephone was invented and put into widespread use around the same time as barbed wire. Farmers used their barbed wire fences as telephone lines.
“Barbed Wire Telephone Lines Brought Isolated Homesteaders Together”
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/barbed-wire-telephone-lines-homesteaders-prairie-america-history
“American patent clerks in the 1870s could scarcely have imagined how two inventions, filed two years apart, would together change the lonely lives of frontier Americans. In 1874, there was barbed wire, and in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell’s revolutionary telephone. Together, in an amazing display of rural ingenuity, they connected isolated homesteads to their rural neighbors and the rest of the world…
“By the 1880s, thousands of miles of barbed wire snaked their way up and down the country. To turn the steel fence wires into telephone lines, they simply had to be connected to a telephone in a house or barn with a piece of smooth wire. The signal then passed through the smooth wire, and along the length of the barbed wire, either to a switchboard or to other houses down the line…
“The barbed wire telephone also helped homesteaders escape the scrutiny of the government land inspector, who made frequent trips through Hidalgo to make sure homesteaders were obeying the letter of the law. “There was only one road to travel,” remembered Marble. As the inspector reached Lordsburg, friends quickly flashed the news over the barbed wire telephone to update one another on his progress as he went.”
The digital democracy ?
Without electricity there is no digital at all !
What is certain is those in power who got us into this mess ain’t the ones to get us out of it .
Case in point , in the UK they are thinking that every backyard chicken will have to be registered because of bird flu , what about the millions of wild birds , are they going to poison them to lower the outbreak ? Typical centrist wrong think .
Sorry, slow to respond to comments…
I agree with Joe that it’s not hard to visualise what the daily practice of a low-energy agrarian society looks like, but (I think we’ve maybe had this discussion previously) I think it’s harder to visualise what the politics of future such societies might look like, and this is quite important – not least because it affects whether the daily practice feels pleasant or miserable.
To Kathryn’s examples – I only have a passing familiarity with Byzantine history (which is quite … byzantine), but my sense is that the eastern empire never really collapsed palpably in the way that the western one did, so it wasn’t really a supersedure situation as such. Still, as time wore on the empire got hollowed out and eventually swallowed up by the Ottoman empire, so there are probably lessons from it about living through times of imperial decline that might be relevant today. I know even less about the Sunflower Movement, but I’m a little sceptical about the digital democracy idea – not that I necessarily doubt that certain communication technologies will persist, but that digital communication as such actually solves any political problems. If anything, the contrary.
As to backyard chickens, agreed. I listened to the government’s chief vet on Farming Today trying and failing to come up with any convincing reasons why registration of backyard keepers would help. I wonder if pushing back against this kind of state heavy-handedness might be one way in which local political alternative identities might start to form.
The whole premise of the Center for Humane Technology is that digital communications technology as it currently exists is often divisive and polarising, but that this problem *could* be tractable.
I think a lot of backyard chickens are functionally closer to pets than livestock in terms of bureaucracy, so I wonder how things like registration of cats and dogs, making sure they get their vaccinations, and so on are going. We have no pets and no livestock so haven’t looked into it at all. Of course, most cats and dogs can hold their own against a fox a bit better, and most love inside the house. But that just means most people who keep half a dozen ex-battery hens are already investing more at the outset than people who get a kitten or take in a stray cat. I’m not sure how registration is going to work, because once you have a rooster you have the option of making more chickens fairly quickly… but I also have very little understanding of how these things work with e.g..horses or pigs. (Bureaucratic things like registration, I mean. I know horses and pigs are mammals that give birth to live young!)
IMHO they are thrashing about trying to find something to tax , ANYTHING to tax , a little like Rome adding more and more tin ? copper ? to their coinage to make it look like it goes further , untill it was worthless , taxation is the same increase the amount of revenue but not it’s value .
Far simpler and more efficient in that case just to raise income taxes, especially for higher earners. I can’t see a chicken registration fee being enough to pay for the cost of administration of the scheme: too high and people simply won’t pay it, too low and it won’t cover the cost.
So I think there is something else going on here — though I’m not sure how much is simply not having a good comprehension of how food production works, and how much is about further centralisation and control at any cost. Or perhaps both.
I tend to shrug and get on with what I can actually do something about. The powerful trying to protect and further consolidate power is not news, if that’s what’s going on here; and people not understanding how food production works is also a very widespread problem. If Chris is right (and I think he largely is), details like which paperwork I would need to keep chickens will eventually sort themselves out or become irrelevant. I’m sorry for the people (and chickens) affected along the way, though, and will certainly e.g. sign an appropriate petition should one exist. I’m open to suggestions from people who know more of hen-keeping than I do of what other actions I might take that could be helpful but as I am not allowed livestock anyway I’m not sure what those might be.
Byzantine history –
I believe using ancient civilizations as motifs in evaluating presumably probable trajectories of collapse or transformation in the present world is of very limited utility. Our current globalized techno-industrial megamachine civilization is just too different from all past civilizations, including those which have collapsed, to be of very much utility in pondering what’s happening now and what’s likely to come.
That is, no past civilization much resembles our own in crucial and fundamental ways. So when I hear folks make generalizations about collapse and transformation of civilizations which harken way back to millennia ago, I just feel lost.
I think ancient civilisations do resemble our own in crucial ways: they existed, like ours does, to organise labour and resources in order to meet people’s needs. They were largely bad at doing this equitably, as are we (though there is a sampling problem here, where white western scholars deem any people who have more equitable norms “savages” and get on with pretending that civilisation must be oppressive to work; sigh. I’m grateful to see signs of that tide turning).
Our needs and desires are largely the same, too: water, food, shelter, security of same, companionship, trade for certain items that cannot be produced locally, communication.
So there’s a lot that we can learn, I think, from looking at historical examples. That doesn’t mean our current collapse will match any past one, though. I think on the whole it probably won’t.
I think the two really big differences are that there are far more people alive now than there were in ancient times, and that we are facing a global (not only local) reduction in access to exogenous (i.e. non-food) energy sources, and a sharp and permanent one at that.
More people means more knowledge, and I do think many factors that limited the size of cities previously (like the death rate from cholera) can be managed differently now — but only if we put in a great deal more effort than we’re currently accustomed to, because knowledge of germ theory and of how cholera spreads, without the energy available to implement separate sewage and drinking water systems, isn’t much use. And other factors will be much harder to mitigate: if we aren’t using several calories of oil to farm each calorie of grain, the demand for agricultural labour could substantially reduce urban populations all by itself, before we get to the whole “cities as we currently know them are unlivable without fossil fuels” problem.
We’ve never had an energy source as dense and convenient for centralisation and transport as oil is, and we probably never will again. The sooner we turn the rest of our resources to living with that reality, the better. This is, of course, another similarity with ancient civilisations, which also didn’t have access to fossil energy.
I was interested by your phrase “resilient and adaptive ethical universalisms of the kind associated with world religions and churches” and I’m hoping you can draw that out in a little more detail in coming posts. It certainly dovetails with a book review I was also reading today, on a new-ish Ivan Illich biography (https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/05/the-corruption-of-the-best-on-ivan-illich/).
The whole thing is sharply relevant to a Small Farm Future, but I was specifically struck by a theme summed in this quote: “The ‘new dimension of love”’ introduced to the world by Christ, Illich believed, had rendered “community boundaries . . . permeable and therefore vulnerable.’ The result was a “temptation to try to manage and, eventually, legislate this new love, to create an institution that will guarantee it. . . . ”
Not to put words in your mouth, but I’d interpret your ‘resilient and adaptive universalisms’ as something like the Catholic or Buddhist syncretisms that lightly integrate the local community into supraregional or even global networks and provide an ‘international’ identity to be adopted when needed, but also leave ample room for local traditions and identities. Illich apparently believed early Christianity provided this adaptability but that the Church was gradually overtaken by its homogenizing tendencies. He was also apparently worried this tendency was somehow inherent to Christianity, and I agree it (and probably Abrahamic monotheism in general) has a theologically volatile relationship with localism that is somewhat less obvious in the major Eastern religions. Catholicism is perhaps on the adaptive end to begin with, certainly compared to caliphate-style Islam or Calvinist fundamentalism! Free church Protestants may disagree though…
For a super-sedure state context, I think religious universalisms would present two risks to a local community : 1) In the political economic realm, these extensive symbolic and material networks would always be a potential path for centralizing entrepreneurs, whether from the zombie state or otherwise, and 2) Emotionally and spiritually, I think universalism tends to disenchantment, in the sense that there’s always an urge to push the location of the divine from the local spaces of everyday life towards Rome, Mecca, heaven, nirvana, etc. This seems like a subtle but also poignant problem when there’s such a need to restore deeper meaning to concrete practicalties and realities. Even though I think you can overstate how much pure religion is always needed to give that deeper meaning.
Of course, religous and ethical particularism presents its own risks. It seems like the challenge is then learning to recognize and nuture the adaptive and resilient varieties of both. On the universal side, I guess I’d note tendencies towards both renunciation/detachment and local saints/bodhisattvas in high church Christianity and Mahayana Buddhism as common threads in successful syncretism.
Fascinating comment. It touches on things I want to address in future writing that I’m only just beginning to think about, so my response may be slow in coming. But I might try a short interim reply if I get a chance over the weekend. Meanwhile, if Sean Domencic is reading I’d be interested in his thoughts.
Is “ethical universalism” something necessary because it is politically/practically useful to managing inter-local tensions? Or is it necessary because it is actually true that there is objective justice, truth, etc, towards which human life is orientated?
I think the latter is a higher order question than the first.
I think it’s a false comparison to place any, much less all, “great religions” on the same playing field. “As I’ve argued at length before–here (https://chrissmaje.com/?p=1996#comment-252676) and here (https://chrissmaje.com/?p=1996#comment-252513)–Christianity is truly unique amoung all world religions, and the life and message of the historical Jesus need to be considered in light of His place in world-history.”
The mention of local Saints and local rituals as a part of the subsidiarity natural to the Church is important. One key theme of Vatican II was to restore the early church emphasis on the full, local authority of the Bishop. The decline of the imperial papacy has been a great blessing, as several recent Popes have stated.
I’ll grant that Christianity has always been at war with ‘superstition’, but I think the orientation of things towards heaven is by no means “disenchanting.” The theology of the Incarnation means that every temporal act—from ploughing a field to scrubbing the floor—is meant to be a means of communion with Love Himself. Meanwhile, the aim of the Christian worldview is to open our eyes, in faith, to the spiritual, unseen realities which swirl about us. (Though this has much more to do with seeing Christ in the poor and in the Eucharist, than it does with avoiding “hexes” or “bad luck”)
Broadly, I’d say it’s ideal to keep distinct the questions about: 1) the sociological effects of various religions/beliefs through history; 2) predictions about how the effects might continue to play out in the future; 3) ‘practical’ questions within a community (however defined) about how those effects might factor into realizing or denying various ethical ends or goods for the community; and 4) how to actually respond to or act with piety towards the divine.
In practice, this is very hard, not the least because these questions might give us contradictory answers. Also because people often don’t choose their religions for purely practical ends, or at least don’t exactly admit to it. Anyway, I was mainly driving at questions of types 1 and 2, with a bit of 3, as my honest answer to 4 is that I don’t really know (yet). At the risk of being cheeky, I really, really hope we don’t everyone agreeing on God before we can get on with some other issues too.
I don’t want to come across as hostile to natural law ethics, as I also in existence of objective ethical truths and I’m not a pragmatist or utilitarian. But my take on this probably differs significantly from a Catholic/Thomist approach and I don’t think the gap would be easily bridged in a few comments!
I’ll say I was being a bit undiplomatic by saying universalism tends to disenchantment. It’s more I think that religious fundamentalism tends to disenchantment, given that fundamentalism is broadly analogous to standardization, and standardization reduces diversity and richness for the sake of easy legibility and translation. So the question is perhaps the extent to which religious universalism is not religious fundamentalism.
Well, we definitely agree that reactionary fundamentalist is springs from and contributes to disenchantment! This goes as much for Wahhabism to Right-Wing Evangelicalism to Catholic “Integralism.”
I appreciate the cheekiness! As to whether we have to have (at least some) agreement about God before getting anything else done, I would suggest that even our good-faith communicating in this conversation is premised on certain theo-ontological claims. As Chesterton said, “I only discuss religion and politics. There is nothing else to discuss.”
Regarding the existence of religions, should it be a contest? I took “resilient and adaptive ethical universalisms” to include what’s common among religions, but can be practiced without an official religion. Resilient, adaptive, and local when practiced via volition, not imposition.
To clarify, I meant ‘I don’t think it should be a contest.’
Re it not being contest, it makes me think of the small towns in western Canada where my grand-parents homesteaded in the early 20th century and subsequent generations farmed (although not so much anymore…). Most everyone was part of a church, and Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox churches co-existed fairly happily. Denominational lines were certainly crossed regularly (even Catholic to Protestant), usually for marriage, but the grumbling seems to have been minimal. Some families were maybe stricter about this though. And I’m not sure how easily mosques, Sikh temples, even Mormon temples would have fit into this mix. And certainly religious life was no bulwark against the global market forces that have rendered many of these communities near ghost-towns.
A lot of the protestant churches didn’t survive as separate denominations — the United Church of Canada was formed in 1925 of Methodist and Presbyterian churches (and some other denominations too), partly because the cost of maintaining buildings, clergy etc separately was too high.
An episode of the Accidental Gods podcast from a couple of years ago, but that I listened to recently, touched on the idea that forming cooperative groups was an evolutionarily advantageous thing for humans to have done, but results in strong ingroup Vs outgroup dynamics, and that what we need to rise to the current challenges is to consciously develop (through what proponents call “conscious evolution”) larger and more connected systems that include the earth and all beings within it as a whole. This seems to me to be related to ideas around humanist universalism (which in turn developed out of Christian humanism and indeed universalism). But I think that evolution doesn’t happen all at once — the future, as William Gibson put it, is already here, it just isn’t distributed evenly… and so maybe some of the emergence of various iterations of the Golden Rule is, if you like, an early attempt at recognition that competition only gets us so far. I am not convinced conscious evolution is some new solution to our present predicament; I think people have been very aware of the evils of too much competition for a long time.
My experience on the ground in high church Anglican faith communities is that there is a very persistent human tendency toward explicitly or implicitly excluding people who aren’t “like us” in some or other key way, and that this is in a constant tension with the theological idea that salvation is available to all. In my observation, it gets worse when we perceive resource constraints. It gets better when we develop a spiritual practice of loving our neighbours — of seeing our food bank families as our own brothers and sisters, of seeing our soup kitchen guests as Christ. The resource constraints don’t go away, though.
Tangent alert! One of my favourite doctrines is that of the Harrowing of Hell: the idea that when Christ descended to the dead, He broke the gates of Hell for all eternity. Nobody is stuck there; people may remain, but only if they want to (because God does not take away our free will). This can be an almost complete destruction of the idea of out-groups: nobody has to stay in Hell based on how they lived their life, and we don’t know what any individual will choose once there. It’s all a very time-and-space way of speaking and thinking about concepts that are outside of linear space time, though, and in practice people can believe this and still be pretty thoughtless and exclusive.
I know I go on about it, but you can’t really talk about the different denominations of the Western church that emerged through the Reformation without talking about information and communication technology (moveable type, paper making, etc). I honestly think we are still adapting to this — or playing catch-up, at any rate.
I wonder if organisations (states or religious bodies or whatever) that embrace some amount of subsidiarity (that is, local decisions being made locally, while still belonging to a whole) are going to do better than organisations that are too top-down.
Interesting interview which complements the Illich article:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KF8wZmmksjw&ab_channel=TheGoldenThread
I listened to this short podcast last week. The state a Vermont apparently has maintained a fairly old tradition of having a “Town Meeting” day once a year to allow the whole town to discuss and vote on various issue for their town. I suspect this maybe sprung from Quaker tradition but I don’t know for sure.
https://rumblestripvermont.com/2023/03/its-town-meeting-again/
Places that still have some local governance “modelling” like this should be well positioned to supersede failing state and federal governments. Unfortunately I think this model is the exception and not the rule in the US. I know my current unincorporated town doesn’t even have any elected roles beyond a single county commissioner let alone a town meeting.
With our hyper individual, transactional culture we have been moving away from organization and engagement like this. Most people don’t engage in any type of community activity short of maybe voting and even that participation level is low. I know there are small organizations that might be seed beds for future governance models. We just have to seek them out and nurture them within our communities I suppose. Maybe groups like Rotary and Lions Clubs and such.
I think these things will grow organically – I think of them as systems of mutual support – My main business is in a small town that is dying but increasingly small businesses are working together far more to support each other because it’s the only way they’re going to survive -:the local council hasn’t the resource or the imagination to support the town – their ideas are along the lines of an out of town business park to be built on green fields with little planning restriction – 20 years ago their idea was out of town shopping – do they really think these large companies come wanting to put money into the area? A non profit community organisation has taken over the old town hall reinstated the market hall and then facilitated local people in organising markets – the more this sort of thing happens the stronger those community connections become.
The British Labour party grew out of these sort of community based support systems – a past it seems to have forgotten. But these things will regrow because there won’t be a practical alternative
No 15 minute cities there then !
I am reading John Michael Greer’s book ” the echotechnic future ” written a couple of decades ago but very pertinent to today’s problems .
I really don’t understand this whole 15 minute city faux controversy. Maybe because it’s because I live in a village where everything is within a 15 minute walk – just as well really cos the buses have all been cut. But having everything one needs (shop, school, doctor etc) within a short walk or bicycle ride surely makes sense in an energy constrained future.
As far as I can tell the controversy over 15 minute cities comes from people who want to drive everywhere for everything even if it means nobody else can get what they need in anything like 15 minutes; or rather, the controversy is driven by media outlets that get advertising money from the attention and outrage of such people. Painting environmental measures as some kind of infringement of personal freedom is a profitable move if you’re in the business of selling fossil fuels.
I figure it’s really another example of “collapse now and avoid the rush”: we can phase out fossil fuel transport now while it’s a choice, or later when we have no option; the sooner we get on with it, the more pleasant the transition will be.
It’s also worth noting that the term “cities” in “15 minute cities” is perhaps better understood as “towns” or “neighbourhoods”.
Above Bruce said: I think these things will grow organically – I think of them as systems of mutual support
…and I agree with that sentiment. I don’t imagine it will have to follow any formula – I don’t imagine it will have to be convivial (though I would prefer that). There will be pain and suffering (there is plenty of that now, was so yesterday, and the day before….) I think we’ll figure it out.
One’s senses sharpen quickly under stress (or duress). I seldom think about my distant family members when a major storm threatens life and limb. Once peace returns we can get in touch. As the ‘storm’ we now anticipate is still a ways off the tendency is wait to see just how ugly things may get. Human nature. I taken consolation (or hinge my sense of hope) on human nature under crisis. Those prepared will fare better than those who are not.
If you don’t own a scythe, go out and get one. 🙂
If you don’t own a scythe, go out and get one.
If you don’t know your neighbours, go out and meet them.
PS giving away spare tomato seedlings is a great way to start.
If you don’t own a scythe, go out and get one. !
And learn how to sharpen it , a dull scythe is one of the hardest tools to use you can get !
I’m planning on getting one this month – I have some grass to cut.
…speaking of petitions, here’s one on aminopyralid and clopyralid herbicides:
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/622535
Hi folks,
Thanks for keeping the comments flowing. I’d been meaning to reply, but various other things are getting on top of me just at the moment – not least some problems with the web hosting of this site. If it disappears, rest assured that I’m working on it and will try to bring it back to a computer screen near you asap!
In case of major interruptions, you can contact me at smallfarmfuture.private [at] protonmail.com
I want to come back to the question of religion and politics (i.e. everything) later in the year, but in the meantime thanks to Evan and Sean for your explorations there. If I get a chance, I’ll say something sooner about chickens and 15 minute cities, but so long for now.
It is going to be tough going getting to the supersedure state for several reasons.
People can’t think about hard existential problems. It is just too scary.
People are evolutionarily conditioned to be short sighted and greedy.
Dropping out of the current system is a path to economic poverty. Having some money is necessary for taxes, tools, electricity, supplies, etc. Not having those things means that you will be worse off when the wheels do come off the existing system.
The really hard part is not knowing when the wheels come off. Even now, simple things are breaking down. We haven’t been able to get a newspaper reliably delivered for the past three months.
People are evolutionarily conditioned to be short sighted and greedy.
I dunno – some perhaps, but not all. Altruism is a real thing. And the ability to look beyond the immediate is also a real thing. Evolution hasn’t favored short shortsightedness at the expense of being thoughtful and looking ahead. Indeed it might be one of the reasons our species has been SO successful (perhaps TOO successful) – that we can cooperate, share, plan, and execute. Other animals have some of these characters as well… it’s just that we seem to have an incredible knack for applying them.
A small little virus comes along and within less than a couple years 7 or more million of us are killed off. But several million, while grisly at a personal level, is not even a tenth of a per cent.
At some point I feel the better angels of our nature will prevail. Until then though it would be nice if the lesser angels would wake up and lend a hand.
Humans were successful because they could work together with others that they knew. Now people hardly know the people who have lived next door for years. They are the ‘other’.
Obviously, infinite growth on a finite planet is absurd. It does not take a lot of foresight to see where resource depletion and climate change lead.
No practical solution is being proposed by any institution that could make a difference. If they can imagine it, they sure aren’t talking about it. The plan seems to be pie (today is pi day) in the sky, business as usual.
“People can’t think about hard existential problems. It is just too scary. People are evolutionarily conditioned to be short sighted and greedy.”
This sort of thing gets repeated all of the time. But the problem is that while it may apply to some–even a lot–of people, it doesn’t apply to everyone. It certainly doesn’t apply to me … and most of the people who I count as friends. There are apparently very many millions of people it doesn’t apply to. Therefore, as a generalization about “human nature” it is not a fact. It isn’t true. And we should ask why some folks are not subject to this ostensible biological programming.
The handful of people you know does not prove that statement right or wrong. If it is not a true statement, why aren’t we living in a society on a vastly different trajectory right now ?
James, Are you writing from the city or the country ?
“If it is not a true statement, why aren’t we living in a society on a vastly different trajectory right now ?”
I know it is not commonplace to fuss over particular words very much, but your statement used the word “can’t,” and it generalized to “people”. So I naturally assumed you were generalizing to all people. If it’s all people, then no one at all can think about
“hard existential problems”. But I say there are exceptions, and so your statement is simply false in my view.
The next question which opens from three is, what percentage of the population actually can think about “hard existential problems”. And I’ll say it is not a negligible proportion.
Now, if you had said “most people,” I may have agreed with you. But then I think most people living in certain parts of the so-called developed world are very nearly illiterate, and largely ignorant — and uninterested in learning. But this is not due to some common biological predisposition on the part of our species, as I see it. Rather, it’s a result of a cultural-historical process. Most things are. Few explanations come down simply to biological predispositions of all of humanity.
Hi Chris –
It’s a little embarrassing to admit that I’ve yet to read A Small Farm Future, the book. I’ve read a lot about the book here and elsewhere, but haven’t gotten to the book yet — as I have a teetering pile of “to read” books teetering — all as part of the research for my own writing projects.
Anyway, over in the forum which is called Deep Transformation Network, I keep having folks explain to me that if lots of folks fled cities to live in rural areas there would be a catastrophe to wildlife, biodiversity, etc. They explain this to me, because I explain why there will be a near term partial exodus of urban areas for more rural places — merely to meet basic human needs, which will not be feasible in near term future cities.
Here’s something I wrote on that in this forum this morning. I thought to share it with you in case you’d like to chime in on what I said. Perhaps you can help me say it better? Or perhaps I got some important parts wrong?
I’m not sure how long a post like this can be, so I’ll post it separately below.
“Our ecosystems cannot afford the onslaught of mass exodus from cities.”
This is a popular belief, but it doesn’t really hold up to careful examination.
1. People often very wrongly assume that by amassing our human populations in cities, more rural places are “left alone”, unharmed. But cities have always extracted massive amounts of ‘resources’ from rural and wild areas — with trucks, trains and ships carrying in gargantuan amounts of cargo from wild and rural lands. So the image of cities as “leaving wild (and rural) places alone” is just plain false.
2. While it’s true that current rural dwellers drive their cars more, on average, than urbanites (to commute to distant towns or cities for work, shopping and recreation), a post luxury economy of rooted, mostly self-sufficient rural villages could be created — and would have to be anyway in a post-carbon future.
3. Future cities will simply not be able to sustain the population densities they currently do, as this is all an economic artifact of a luxury-based, luxury-dependent economy which cannot be sustained in a low carbon economy. So, really, many millions of people will not have the option of remaining in cities as there will be no means of access to livelihood in a post-carbon economy.
4. A future mostly post-carbon economy will be focused on the provision of basic needs rather than luxury products and services. Food, clothing and shelter will be the primary needs of those living in such economies. There is simply not enough land in cities which can support food growing for the population densities of cities. Only in rural agrarian areas is there enough land for small scaled communities to form local economies of basic subsistence through community self-provisioning of food, shelter, clothing, and other basic needs. Land is the basis of livelihood.
5. Most of the lands which would accommodate those leaving cities — which they simply must! — would not be wild lands, per se, but would be farm land. Most farming areas are comprised of giant industrial affairs in which there is extremely sparse. human population. Changes to the land in these places would not amount to the invasion of wild places by hoards of destructive people, but would be a transformation of existing giant farm into tiny little farms, essentially, with the farming being mostly for meeting immediate local needs in the nearest proximity to the producer / dweller. Very little food produced in these places would be exported out of the immediate local village; and very little would be imported in. Communities would be human scaled (small) and food self-provisioning. The same would be the case with the provisioning of shelter — mostly very small homes, many of which would be built using locally available clay, stone and other relatively harmless materials.
6. People living in this way would have a vastly smaller ecological footprint than those now inhabiting cities, and there is no reason to assume that wildlife and biodiversity must be harmed in the process.
7. Once again…. There will not be adequate means of access to livelihood in near term future cities. The population of cities must and will shrink in a shrinking economy. So what I’m talking about here isn’t really a matter of our choosing. It will happen. Period. People will flee cities for livelihood outside of them, because it will become necessary as a matter of meeting one’s basic needs for survival.
*****
Here’s a book which explores some of the topics and themes of which I speak. A Small Farm Future – Chelsea Green Publishing
In this book, Chris Smaje seems to be imagining future small farms as largely independent family homesteads. So my vision seems to differ from his in some ways. I imagine future villages which are much like Smaje’s family homesteads, but organized into villages, and thus not a bunch of isolated homes and farms. I see villages as integrated, complex economies, not a mere collection of isolated homesteads. Before urbanization happened, most settled people (non-nomadic people) in world history were villagers, and that’s because village life is in so many ways superior to isolated living. It’s more functional — but also just much more pleasant!
*****
“I’ve long argued that the likeliest long-term future for humanity in the face of climate, energy, water, soil and political-economic realities will involve a turn to low-energy, small-scale agrarianism geared to local material needs. This future could be quite congenial or incredibly grim, depending on how it manifests. In my opinion, the sooner humanity takes active steps to manifest it positively rather than ignoring it so it happens by default the more congenial it’s likely to be. I’ve been writing about this in books, articles and – for more than 10 years now – on this blog, which is called Small Farm Future. I haven’t exactly been hiding the nature of my arguments.”
– Chris Smaje, excerpted from Beyond rescue ecomodernism: the case for agrarian localism restated – Resilience
Well said. My only quibble, a small one, is the emphasis on “luxury” consumption in cities. There is a great deal of it, of course, but providing just the necessities to cities will also be impossible in a post-carbon, post-industrial future.
For example, modern cities are in an “all or nothing” relationship with the electrical grid. Without it, they become unliveable in days. Since there is a basic threshold of industrialism that must be met to keep the electric grid going, sagging below that threshold is life threatening for urbanites. A dark city is a dead city
This is why Russia attacks Ukraine’s electrical infrastructure and why Ukraine frantically works to restore it, which they ususally do in a day or two. But Ukraine has access to the fully functioning industrial capacity of the EU for repair parts and equipment. In a post-industrial future, no one will come to the rescue.
I emphasize luxury consumption in cities in order to explain why the initial phase of demographic transition to rural areas is unavoidable. Economies are systems, obviously. And modern economies in the so-called “developed world” (a.k.a., “global North” and “rich world”) utterly depend upon the production and provision of luxury goods and services to avoid utter collapse.
The moment we in the rich world shift to a basically needs-based economy, as will be necessary for ten or so salient reasons (e.g., peak net energy [involuntary], voluntary phasing out of fossil fuels to avert worst case climate scenarios), the present mode of economy would receive a deadly systems shock. It would just cave in upon itself. This, of course, is why we need to begin immediately to prepare for a needs based future economy…, and why we must deliberately deurbanize (and re-ruralize) to a great extent. The economic system which enabled mass urbanization simply will not exist in X number of years. And it’s much nearer than most folks imagine!
Here’s the web forum in question. One has to join the ‘community’ to read or participate. https://deeptransformation.network/share/yE93kT5zhGQVbC6p?utm_source=manual
So, apologies for the service interruption earlier – hopefully now fixed.
A few brief points:
James, thanks for your thoughts on urban & rural futures. I pretty much agree with your analysis. There’s this strange notion around that urbanism lowers pressure on wildlife, whereas the opposite is truer – this paper coauthored by a friend of this site, Jahi Chappell, has an interesting tale to tell:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10531-022-02540-4
My forthcoming book has some additional material concerning farming, urbanism/ruralism & nature impact (Chapters 3 & 5) which you might find of interest. And shame on you by the way for not having read my previous one 🙂
For the record, I don’t suggest that living in isolated homes and farms is optimal – I’m supportive of villages and small towns – but I do suggest that making the household the main unit of both production and consumption is generally optimal, though not always. Not least in lowering the overall wildlife impact.
Regarding chicken keeping, currently in the UK if you own over 50 birds you have to register with the relevant authority (you don’t have to pay anything). The suggestion is that registration should be compulsory no matter the size of flock, in the same way it is for animals such as pigs and sheep. The way this is spun is that the powers that be can get relevant veterinary and biosecurity information out to flock keepers … whereas the widespread perception is that it’s another case of bureaucratic mission creep, Big Brother-ism etc.
Perhaps the wider issue, as with the 15 minute city thing, Covid and much else these days is that there’s been a widespread breakdown in public trust of governments. And while I don’t share in the wilder conspiracy theories around all this peddled by bad faith political actors, I’m on board with it to a considerable degree, even if it’s true I *might* learn something useful via chicken registration or whatever… Ultimately I think bottom-up farmer-to-farmer learning is probably a better way to go than formal top-down stuff which always smacks of coercive surveillance.
A propos of such things, in his book ‘Survival of the Richest’ Douglas Rushkoff discusses the Qanon conspiracy theory quite interestingly. I’ve always thought of it as completely bonkers but, as Rushkoff points out, when you view it as a *metaphor* for the way the elite political class is vampirizing people, particularly young people, it has a certain weird logic. The problem comes when you think Hilary Clinton actually is doing unspeakable things to babies in pizza restaurant basements or whatever in real life. And when you think that it’s only the ‘liberal’ elite that’s shafting you and not, say, Donald Trump or any number of other wealthy far-right gargoyles. But my rant alarm has started ringing, so I’ll stop there.
More on some of this in due course, especially the religion and politics thing…
“And shame on you by the way for not having read my previous one.”
Oh, but I really, really want to read it! Have wanted to for a long time now. But that’s also true of about twenty urgent other books, and fifty slightly less urgent ones … and then there is my writing … and my event organizing. Etc. So I’ll just have to give up sleeping, right? 🙂
Who can sleep, given the state of the world at the moment?
Thanks for the clarification on chicken bureaucracy. I can understand how, from the point of view of an organisation trying to ensure good health in poultry because they are trying to safeguard human public health (and much else besides), “look, just register your chickens so we can email you when you need to take steps to protect your flock from wild birds” seems like the most efficient way to do things. Farmer-to-farmer conversations won’t get that information out anywhere nearly as quickly — especially to people with tiny flocks of three or four birds who treat their animals more as beloved pets than commercial livestock. I don’t know how much those smaller flocks play into epidemiology, but I imagine they’re probably pretty high risk for avian influenza jumping to humans: lots of picking up the hens without wearing gloves, lots of hand-feeding treats, and so on.
I don’t think the rise of Qanon and their ilk is only because of mistrust of government and the rich and powerful, though. It’s true that when people (rightly!) don’t trust those in authority, they look for other sources to help them make decisions and to give their own lives context and meaning. I think in addition to the untrustworthiness of those who hold political power, there are other things going on. One is that a great many people have been cornered, under our current system, into a way of life where finding deep meaning and genuine connection with others and the rest of the world is generally difficult, or at least not very easy. This leaves people more susceptible to conspiracy theories. Another factor is that near-instant communication, especially of images, offers a very efficient testing ground for finding messages that “stick”: for every picture of Pepe the frog (or whatever) there are hundreds that just didn’t go anywhere except some backwater of the internet that the rest of us would rather pretend doesn’t exist. Still another factor is the advertising-funded nature of most social media (and much print media these days too, for that matter): Facebook or Twitter or YouTube get money from advertisers based on how much of user attention their “content” (often also generated by users) can command, not based on benefits to users (benefits like, oh, being able to read news that’s actually true rather than clickbait), so there is a strong financial incentive toward getting people angry or irritated enough to stick around and engage. That outrage and irritation feels quite similar to meaning and connection, on superficial levels. And governments aren’t going to legislate against that kind of power to shift narratives, because, well, how do you think they got where they are? They know that they don’t have to fool all of the people all of the time — just enough of them, enough of the time. This rightfully leads to further mistrust, just as surely as only finding meaning and connection online leads to, well, only looking online for meaning and connection.
I am a generalist, not a politician or a historian or philosopher or epistemologist or even a very good gardener, and in this comment, like most of my comments here, I am mainly thinking aloud. But to me, Qanon looks like a symptom of a few interlocking positive feedback systems which are running faster now than they used to and so aren’t running up against natural interrupts before they do real damage. If we don’t want the world to be run by people who benefit from such phenomena, we need to find a way to interrupt those feedback systems much earlier. I do think it’s possible to keep online communication while interrupting those systems, but I’m not sure it’s very plausible in any advertisement-supported platform, and of course the ad-supported stuff outcompetes anything else pretty quickly most of the time (and that’s before we get into network effects).
when you view it as a *metaphor*
yes, metaphor causes us a lot of trouble in many ways. It’s so absolutely central to the way we think* that we so often cannot see it as other then literally true.
* you can hardly get though a sentence without using metaphor. For example: “get through” and “the way we think” are, if you examine them spatial/movement metaphors.
If I remember correctly, Chris, you included “land reform” in your list of things folks might do — using the existing state apparatus and its mode of politics. I believe the time to build a movement for this — really, a planet-scaled movement — is now. A time is coming when urban economies will completely fail in systems terms. This is as near to certain as anything. But few people yet realize this — or how soon this breakdown may occur — or why it will inevitably happen. So educating people about this would also have to be key to our land reform movement/s.
We’re going to have to get very many millions of people living in rural villages if they are going to be able to feed and clothe themselves in low net energy economy. And that low net energy economy is coming fast! It cannot be avoided.
This article goes some distance in showing why it is so.:
Energy Transition & the Luxury Economy
https://rword.substack.com/p/energy-transition-and-the-luxury
As you have suggested in some of your writings, Chris, the time to prepare for the coming economic future is before the current mode of access to livelihood has collapsed sufficiently to force it upon us of a sudden. There’s a lot of “bridge building” work to do now, and there isn’t even enough time for it, but we must make use of the little time which we do have.
Yes, there’s no time for sleep in a small farm future! But maybe more time for partying. And land reform, within or without existing structures.
Thanks Steve BTW for that interesting historical background on barbed wire. Not something I was aware of. Talking of barbed wire, I’d recommend Reviel Netz’s weird and fascinating history – ‘Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity’. But, talking of partying, I also have to warn you that it’s not a great icebreaker when you meet someone new at a social gathering to say “I’ve just read a really fascinating book about the history of barbed wire”. More hard won worldly wisdom dispensed to you absolutely free of charge from us here at small farm future…
I love your sense of humor Chris!
With regard to religion and politics.
I have always seen a formulated, codefied, rules based religion as a form of social control by States/Kingdoms, on their subjects.
As George Orwell pointed out. You only truly have control over others, if you have control over what they think.
I think that early Christianity was a passive rebellion against Roman rule.
“You may have material control over me, but I don’t see you as my Lord/Master. My Lord is not of this world and is in a place where Roman power can’t get to him”.
This along with an ethos of being nice to eachother was a powerful concept, that spread throughout the Roman empire. No amount of feeding Christians to the lions could steam the flow.
Eventually Roman realised that it couldn’t stop the spread, so adopted Christianity as it’s religion. This brought Christians out of the shadows and into the public sphere. This gave Rome the opportunity to then start imposing rules onto the religion. Anyone who didn’t like the new rules could then be branded a heretic and eliminated.
Religion can unify a community, but this comes at the cost of excluding those that don’t agree with the rules. The act of unifying, is in itself authoritarian.
[…] the context of supersedure state situations, I believe the more promising political form of the local state is republican (but not, […]