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Posted on August 17, 2023 | 116 Comments
I’m going to continue my present mini-theme concerning emerging class conflicts around agrarian localism with a few words about current antipathies between farmers and ‘experts’. This suggested itself to me during some sessions at the Groundswell Festival, where my new book was launched.
One of those sessions was called ‘There Is No Planet B: the Implications for Food and Farming’ by Professor Mike Berners-Lee of Lancaster University, who’s written a book with that main title. The session is available to view here.
It was an interesting talk, backed up with lots of data. Prof Berners-Lee began with the honest admission that he wasn’t a farmer and there was much he didn’t understand. I thought he said a lot of sensible things. But at around 35 minutes he spent some time enthusing about lab-based macronutrient production as an emerging technique which, he said, is promising because it’s 10-100 times more efficient than anything you can produce via photosynthesis.
Then at around 43 minutes he said that all land needs to be optimised for soil improvement, biodiversity, food production and climate impact. He argued on those grounds that even seemingly benign livestock systems can’t be seen as sustainable because of the opportunity cost of increased productivity from plant-based alternatives, and the marginal (displaced) demand for meat products from high-impact systems such as Brazilian rainforest beef caused by the low-productivity, low-impact approach.
He went on to caution against the dangers of the newer GWP* accounting method for comparing greenhouse gas climate impacts in shifting the burden away from methane reduction to carbon dioxide reduction which, he said, isn’t helpful when “we’ve already got our foot to the floor trying to do what we can with CO2”.
I’ll come back to Prof Berners-Lee’s remarks in a moment, after mentioning a couple of other sessions at the conference. One of them, picking up on that methane point, was a panel of slightly downhearted livestock farmers and agronomists bemoaning (rightly, in my opinion) the superficiality of the anti-livestock climate narrative, and arguing for better metrics to show the true extent of greenhouse gas sources and sinks across the food supply chain, so that they could make their case to the government. Glumly pointing skywards, one panellist remarked there were a million people flying at that moment, yet it was farmers who were mostly in the firing line of public opinion for their climate crimes.
The other session I want to mention was this panel, in which I was involved along with Mallika Basu, Sue Pritchard and Catherine Tubb. I mentioned in my remarks that I’d looked into the lab-based methods of macronutrient production of the kind mentioned by Prof Berners-Lee (specifically, microbial biomass – MB – derived from hydrogen-oxidising bacteria) and I didn’t believe it stacked up energetically as a viable way for producing food at scale. Dr Tubb demurred, stating that the facts were against me, that MB technologies were already here, and that we could expect to see MB production facilities atop grocery shops in the future.
So, what to make of all this? For starters, when it comes to the prospects for MB I want to state a blunt opinion: Prof Berners-Lee and Dr Tubb have simply got this wrong. We’re not going to be seeing MB replacing farmed food at scale in the coming decades because its production is a massively energy-intensive process that uses scarce low-carbon electricity rather than free sunlight (but we probably will see lots of cheerleading for it, and public money being tossed into the corporate begging bowl). The issue isn’t the relative efficiency of PV panels over plants at capturing photons, but the total cost (energetic and financial) of producing food by the respective methods, which is much greater in the case of MB. I’ve written a short paper explaining the basis of this here. I spoke with Prof Berners-Lee and Dr Tubb about this issue at the conference and sent them both a copy of my paper about a month ago inviting their comments, but I’ve had no response from either of them to date.
Prof Berners-Lee said in his presentation that “it takes a bit of getting your head around” manufactured food, which is true enough. I spent a month reading papers about it and bouncing ideas off other people. But I’m just a random guy on the internet – or, to give me my full honorific so as to match as best I can the illustrious people I’m discussing here, that’d be Doctor random guy on the internet. Or Doctor random guy on the internet who happened to write a book about it, to go the whole hog.
Anyway, point is what I’m not is a senior professor at a university with a reputation as an expert in carbon counting with numerous high-profile public and private platforms to amplify whatever it is I want to say … whereas what I am is someone with a modicum of education and knowledge who was able to figure out with a little bit of digging the weakness of the case for manufactured food as a saviour technology. So it bugs me that what Prof Berners-Lee is saying on some of these influential platforms is wrong, or at least misleading. He’s boosting another flawed technology of prevarication which is vainly attempting to preserve the non-preservable status quo of the consumer-focused global food system. In the long run this kind of thing merely drains another drop or two from the half-empty glass of downhearted farmers, who we shall soon be needing to step into the role of keeping us fed rather than worrying about how they’re going to stay in business.
Them, and a cast of thousands. For as I’ve long argued on this blog, I believe that soon enough people are going to have to turn to predominantly rural lives oriented to furnishing a material livelihood for themselves and their local communities. Which brings me to Prof Berners-Lee’s point about the need to optimise land for soil improvement, biodiversity, food production and climate impact. I agree, with the partial exception of climate impact (where I think the importance of land use gets rather too much emphasis over the importance of fossil fuel non-use), but I believe the key here is the need to optimise land locally to deliver those benefits to achieve renewable local livelihoods and wellbeing.
Prof Berners-Lee’s remarks and his opportunity cost framework operate from a more top-down, ‘expert’ perspective geared to renewably meeting the demands of generic global consumers by managing landscapes worldwide to balance food and wildlife needs via centralised diktat. I’d prefer to see experts putting themselves in service to local agrarian communities to assist them in determining the optimum answers for their own needs and livelihoods in their own landscapes. It may, for example, be true that high-cost low-impact meat displaces marginal consumer demand onto low-cost high-impact meat. But if so, I’d argue it should draw our attention to problems with marginal consumer demand in the present economy, which is going to have to change radically anyway, not so much to problems with low-impact meat production.
During the Brexit imbroglio, government minister Michael Gove notoriously said that ‘people in this country have had enough of experts’. No doubt it was a bad faith appeal to his base and its dislike of the so-called ‘liberal elite’ but … well, here’s a thing … I’m finding myself increasingly in agreement with Gove on this.
I don’t dispute that there are certain facts and expert knowledges that can’t and shouldn’t be thoughtlessly swept aside by appeals to the ‘people in this country’. Nevertheless, I think we need to build up new kinds of society from the specifics of place, and the kind of expertise deployed by the likes of Prof Berners-Lee, with its fatal attraction to things like MB, may not be up to that job. In the words of the late David Fleming, “Experts can drive the car, but they don’t know the way. The future is safer in the dirty hands of harmless lunatics”, whereas experts can “generally be relied on to endorse established institutions, to defend the paradigm of the day and to advocate large-scale technologies and standard procedures” (Lean Logic, p.153).
I don’t mean to particularly single out Prof Berners-Lee here. He’s written some good stuff that I’ve drawn on in my own writing in the past. However – note to self – the fact that a carbon counting expert so casually embraces such a flawed technology that’s driven by corporate agendas has somewhat dented my inclination to take on trust expert knowledges or statistics concerning the food and energy systems. I’d say the same about much of the discussion around MB and other technologies like renewable electricity in the academic literature, which in my opinion errs too little towards scholarly scepticism and too much towards breathless boosterism.
But talking of singling out, a group that I believe really mustn’t be singled out for climate blame is farmers – peasant farmers particularly, but also jobbing UK livestock farmers, and farmers in general. There are several reasons why. On the grounds of fairness, we – that is, wider society – have asked farmers to produce abundant food to meet often luxury demand at low cost with minimum labour inputs. Responsibility for the resulting ecocidal landscapes of contemporary agriculture falls to us, wider society, just as much as to them. And on the grounds of self-interest, we’re going to need all the accumulated agricultural expertise at our disposal – which is hard won and easily lost, even if it has to be adapted to new circumstances – in order to weather the present crisis. Most importantly, the tendency of ‘reboot food’ ecomodernism to dismiss farming as an intrinsically problematic and ecocidal method of food production and to favour high-energy technologies like MB is leading us astray. Instead of refocusing our efforts around renewable farming as the necessary base to an ongoing civilization, we’re wasting time with improbable techno-fixes that hold out a promise to ‘save’ existing modern urban civilization by largely or wholly substituting agriculture. We don’t need substitutes for agriculture. We need more of the real thing – and less of the compromises foisted upon it by the modernising drive for overproduction and low price.
So when it comes to something like methane accounting, for sure it may be a good thing at the margin if farmers cut ruminant numbers (depending on the wider ecological and economic consequences). But we do not, as Prof Berners-Lee claims, have our ‘foot to the floor’ trying to do what we can about CO2. I can buy a litre of petrol for about as much as a loaf of bread, and do more or less whatever I please with its 34.5 million joules of energy. Or for the price of about twenty loaves of bread I can buy an air ticket to the furthest corner of Europe, no questions asked.
When farmers complain about such frivolities in the face of the public narrative for them to put their house in order, they’re typically dismissed for their special pleading, whataboutery or parroting corporate meat industry narratives. Prof Berners-Lee’s remarks about GWP* somewhat exemplify this, albeit mercifully more sotto voce than many. Yet as I’ve argued for example in this short series of essays, all these ‘special pleading’ or ‘foot to the floor’ arguments are basically diversions from the need to cut fossil fuels and build low energy agrarian localisms instead.
So I’m with the downhearted farmers who are trying to change the narrative, but I’m not sure how much traction they’ll get in their calls for wiser governmental approaches to agriculture in the face of the experts advocating ‘large-scale technologies and standard procedures’. Meanwhile, I really feel for those farmers – especially, in the UK, upland livestock farmers – whose thoughtful attempts to juggle local livelihoods with wildlife needs are met with so much ignorant disdain concerning the inherent destructiveness of farming.
Maybe Monbiot’s ‘sheepwrecked’ narrative from the days of Feral started a worthwhile debate about land management – nobody and no farmer is above criticism – but it seems to have devolved into a concerted effort to dispossess farmers and advance the corporate enclosure involved in manufactured food, carbon offsets and all the rest. This could be another arena where the dialogue is almost over and we’re heading into the terrain of class conflict – doubtless an uneven one that’s prefigured by centuries of expert and top-down government-corporate efforts to ‘improve’ agriculture at the expense of rural people and local ecologies, pitting the remnants of rural agrarianism and culture against the modernist machine and its modes of value extraction. If so, it’s a class conflict we could really do without right now as we head into an uncertain future where agrarian localism is going to be so critical.
However that conflict pans out, one thing seems pretty certain: individual shops won’t have their own local MB manufacturing facilities. Devolved local replication of production systems is how small farm societies work, but it’s not how modern manufacturing systems work.
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I like this, Chris. The singling out of experts is important. Too often that claimed authority has simply been a ruse to usurp local culture and control. If there are lessons, and there are, to be drawn from these past two-hundred years, it is that the rural class did not create the industrial system that the current experts are trying so hard to solve with a new enclosure.
Re: ‘This could be another arena where the dialogue is almost over and we’re heading into the terrain of class conflict…’
Dialogue? There is essentially no dialogue. The inconvenient facts pointed out by ‘Doctor random guy on the internet who happened to write a book about it’ are being ignored by the ‘expert’ pretenders (and media) who support the top-down scientism narratives and serve the corporate interests.
Upton Sinclair famously wrote ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.’ This can be updated to include more than one gender, with ‘salary’ expanded to include research funding, investments, and social standing.
Right on, Chris! Thank you for sharing these continued insights, and advocating for farmers everywhere.
These are the same specialists who already sold the world on faulty global supply chains, cheap inorganic fertilizers, endless glyphosate, and an intensive commodification of soil at the direct expense of real communities and livelihoods.
It’s like they’ve turned the energy pyramid on its head, expecting natural laws to somehow work in reverse.
The only real “petal to the metal” is an urban consumer society driving itself towards extinction – flailing at IP grabs and enclosure, scapegoating it’s own victims, desperately cleaning to not having to perform an honest day’s work.
As a small agrarian farmer in a multigenerational agrarian ranching community in the rural US, I know who will pull through, who will remember how to foster mutual aid and creatively problem solve ourselves back to livable, decent communities. And all while industrial markets collapse under their own weight.
Tellingly perhaps, the handful of comments under the Berners-Lee talk all identify similar concerns to those presented here – refreshing to see Walter Jehne mentioned there too.
Tangential to your point, but how many litres of petrol (or diesel or whatever) go into making that loaf of bread, and shipping it to the consumer?
I have seen rough claims of 8 to 10 joules of fossil energy being used to produce every joule of food energy we harvest, but “how many litres of petrol to produce a loaf of bread” might make a snappier soundbite, and a zero-fossil loaf is indeed something to aim for. (I have a sinking feeling that any energy efficiency from baking bread in huge commercial ovens is lost by then loading it onto lorries for delivery to supermarkets where people turn up in two-tonne vehicles to drive 8kgs of groceries home.)
My problem with “experts” is that people don’t appear to listen to those who are actually experts, and do listen readily to those who are expert at attaining certain types of social standing or authority. I would be hard pressed to articulate exactly how I discern who is an expert and who is not but this was a huge problem in the early years of COVID-19, with “experts” coming out of the woodwork to make all kinds of unfounded statements. During that period one of the things I watched for was blanket statements that I knew to be technically untrue: things like “asymptomatic transmission of viruses doesn’t exist, that’s just not how viruses work” (really? That’s not what they told us about HIV) or “airborne transmission of illness is so rare as to be unheard of” (…but we know it happens with TB, measles, and chicken pox, and that’s just stuff I’ve heard of) were all over the place. I am most definitely *not* an expert in epidemiology, just a moderately smart person with an eclectic reading habit who can spot these inconsistencies enough of the time to want more convincing data.
I guess “microbial biomass production of food is far more efficient than farming” is another of those statements. I’m willing to entertain the idea that there might be edge cases where this is true, but for the most part it sets off my bullshit detector.
Questions that interest me include “What has my bullshit detector missed?” and “How do other people get working bullshit detectors?” — mine comes partly from some adverse circumstances that I wouldn’t wish on others — and “just how much due diligence do I need to do every time someone makes a claim?”
technology of prevarication
Wanted to draw attention to that! An eminently useful and repeatable soundbite. (Not that I approve of soundbite culture, you understand, but we have to live in the world as it actually is)
… and also , when you desribe yourself as:
Doctor random guy on the internet. Or Doctor random guy on the internet who happened to write a book about it, to go the whole hog.
I think you meant to say:
doctor random guy on the internet, with extensive academic training, research and reading in the areas of the legitimate social sciences, (which we ignore at our peril in discussion of “wicked” system problems); but who combines this with a numerate engaement with the quantative and scientific aspects of sustainability
This is why I think you are worth listening to – and nice to hear you quote David Fleming!
Yeah. How on Earth (in Earth, actually, since we’re in the damned atmosphere) does this man find time to do farming! Good grief!
I recently watched a video sent to me by a friend who is a midwife , it was the CEO of one of the largest milk replacements / baby formula for human breast milk , she stated ” we will never be able to replicate all the constituents found in human breast milk , in the past five years we have added two more ingredients that are naturaly found in breast milk , ” this is from a company that has been making baby formula for over fifty years, and they are still finding things that are in natural human milk . Question , what’s missing in goop that they don’t even know is there !
“Maybe Monbiot’s ‘sheepwrecked’ narrative”
Well he got that one wrong , in the high peak area of Buxton it was not sheep that changed the environment it was Sheffield , all the forests were burned for charcoal and sent to make steel , sheep moved in after the land was cleared of trees .
Diogenese, they say this is the reality of the Brazilian rainforest as well. First the timber is sold, then soy is grown, and when the soil can produce nothing else, cows are grazed.
Thanks Chris.
I hear your frustration.
My small dealings with experts has been similar to yours. They are very good at explaining the current paradigm, but usually seem to have too much invested in the system to be able to think outside of it.
So, while I applaud your ongoing efforts to change some minds of the people ‘driving the car’ as David Fleming said, I wonder if there might be other ways forward.
Jumping out of the car when it slows for a turn seems a possibility.
It seems much more likely that farmers can do without industrial society than industrial society can do without farmers.
Of course, almost no farmers of any scale actually do without industrial society. And I understand there are good reasons for this, but if even a small minority of food producers began weaning themselves from the petrol and finance economy, they would be freer to raise their prices or otherwise take control of the market they are currently enslaved to.
It’s a harsh solution, and doubtless more work than anyone wants to do, but seems to me an effective strategy maybe.
if even a small minority of food producers began weaning themselves from the petrol and finance economy, they would be freer to raise their prices or otherwise take control of the market they are currently enslaved to.
This is the thing about self-provisioning, really: if you are growing some of your sustenance rather than only cash crops, your need for the cash crops goes down.
As an allotment tenant I am not allowed to sell my produce: it is supposed to be vegetables, fruit and flowers for my own household’s use. It is still a substantial contribution to our household economics, though, and as I go along I am learning how to make my production more resilient too.
Governments control farming thru subsidies , going your own way automatically puts you at a financial disadvantage , it’s set up that way for maximum control with minimum coercion , a simple choice ,..
take the subsidy or face bancrupsy .
Western farming is a communistic set up the only thing the government’s don’t control is the weather .
I think of it as more of a colonial system of extraction. Give them just enough to survive, never enough to get ahead.
agreed, colonialist leading on to fascist, which I suppose can also be communistic. Government controlled by businesses or government in servitude to business aka capitalists.
This is a brilliant, insightful and important article! Thanks. (May I republish it at The R-Word?)
I’m reminded in this reading of the book “Trust Us, We’re Experts!: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future” by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, the
authors of Toxic Sludge Is Good for You! —
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/438716
“Prof Berners-Lee’s remarks and his opportunity cost framework operate from a more top-down, ‘expert’ perspective geared to renewably meeting the demands of generic global consumers by managing landscapes worldwide to balance food and wildlife needs via centralised diktat. I’d prefer to see experts putting themselves in service to local agrarian communities to assist them in determining the optimum answers for their own needs and livelihoods in their own landscapes.”
I often find myself saying “Money bends light” these days. Light here is, of course, a metaphor for knowledge and understanding. Sometimes light is bent deliberately for disinformational purposes. And sometimes it is bent unwittingly by indirect purveyors of “bent” information, or information meant to serve a propagandistic purpose of the disinformational kind.
Popular (mainstream, corporate) media often serves as a distributor of information and narratives which serve capital accumulation, rather than human needs. This is a Marxian observation, I suppose, and it’s one of my points of convergence with the Marxians (not to be confused with Martians). Politicians (also not to be conflated with Martians, despite the strong resemblance) tend to repeat the well bent narratives and disinformational tid-bits of mainstream media, as they all attend the same parties. So to speak.
Now I’m revealing my primary political critique. It leaks out even when I don’t intend it to! I leave it behind me when I walk like a snail leaves its slimy trail behind. I think 97.34% of what’s forked up about politics today is to be found in how corporate media bends light, and how skools and universities distribute bent lighting systems. In other words, it comes down to a particular take on the reproduction of culture. But I use cultural reproduction a little differently than the coiner of that term, Pierre Bourdieu.
Wikipedia: “Cultural reproduction, a concept first developed by French sociologist and cultural theorist Pierre Bourdieu, is the mechanisms by which existing cultural forms, values, practices, and shared understandings (i.e., norms) are transmitted from generation to generation, thereby sustaining the continuity of cultural experience across time.”
In my view, Bourdieu’s version of “cultural reproduction” should include not just the temporal dimension of transmission, but also the spatial one. This allows us to observe precisely how culture is reproduced through various institutions, from media systems to skools and universities, etc.
Remember: Money bends light. That’s the Super Decoder Ring for understanding how Capital shapes how we think and talk amongst one another, which is to say our politics.
All practical politics now amounts mainly to finding strategies to address the problem of money bending light.
The kind of expertise you are wanting to see in our world, Chris, is precisely the kind I want to see operative in our world. It aims at truth, unbent in service to Capital.
We’re going to need a miracle, my brother.
Kathryn wrote, “I have seen rough claims of 8 to 10 joules of fossil energy being used to produce every joule of food energy we harvest… What has my bullshit detector missed?”
Here’s some data to help debunk sweeping claims like that one. First of all, a number of crops actually require less than 1 calorie of energy costs to produce 1 calorie of food energy. Soybeans require far less energy costs than the food energy content of the soybeans. There’s less than 0.1 calorie of energy costs for each food calorie of soybeans at the farm gate, or conversely around 12 calories of food calories contained in soybeans for every calorie of energy costs to produce the crop.
In ‘Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future’, Chris wrote this about the energy cost of soybeans, with a focus on protein:
“By comparison, I estimate the energy inputs for large-scale soybean agriculture in the US, including the human labour that’s involved, as around 1,090 kWh/ha on the basis of relevant studies.8 Applying that to the national average yield suggests a figure of about 1.0 kWh/kg protein – about 65 times less than the minimum ballpark figure for manufactured protein.”
That’s 1.0 kWh of energy costs for each kg of soybean protein at the farm gate, which translates to around 1/12 of a calorie for the energy costs to produce 1 calorie of soybeans (considering the calories from the carbohydrate and fat content of soybeans, in addition to the protein content), based on data from USDA studies. Thus, the energy costs to produce soybeans are repaid more than tenfold as food calories at the farm gate.
Moving on to other crops besides soybeans, USDA data for all crops combined shows this breakdown for the ‘US Food System Energy Use in 2002’:
CALORIES OF ENERGY INPUTS TO PRODUCE 1 CALORIE OF FOOD
Agriculture (Agricultural production): 1.6 Calories
Processing (Food processing and packaging): 2.7 Calories
Distribution (Wholesale, retail, freight, and food services): 4.3 Calories
Consumption (Personal food-related travel, household energy use): 3.4 Calories
TOTAL = 12 Calories of energy inputs to produce 1 Calorie of food
Thus, according to the USDA Economic Research Service, only 1.6 calories (out of those 12 total calories) were the averaged energy inputs for agricultural production of 1 calorie of food.
So, the USDA numbers show that if you’re only counting production costs (without including transport away from the farm, meal preparation, etc.), then agricultural crops in the US (in total, including low-calorie crops like lettuces, and high-energy-input crops like greenhouse tomatoes) require only 1.6 calories of energy costs on average, for each calorie of farmed food produced, after accounting for waste. (This average would be lower than 1.6 calories if low-calorie crops like lettuces were excluded.)
The average of 1.6 calories is for 2002 data, and the linked article says the average has increased since then.
(See the chart ‘US Food System Energy Use in 2002’ to find these numbers at the page linked below.)
https://learn.uvm.edu/foodsystemsblog/2013/07/18/counting-calories-the-energy-cost-of-food/
Thanks for this, Steve.
I think the “8 to 10 joules of fossil energy” included transport, processing, packaging and so on, so probably isn’t quite as far off as the 1.6:1 ratio for actual production from the USDA numbers as it would be if it were only the farm portion of production.
I have thought about trying to run the numbers for my own allotment growing, but it’s difficult: how much of the manure that gets delivered to the site was “from” pasture and how much from crops farmed with a tractor, for example? And how far away did it come from? And then there are the spent coffee grounds; as they would otherwise be a waste product do I count them as free? Or do I assume that their alternative value as coffee logs (if the local coffee chain got involved with the coffee logs people) that would be used for heating instead of other types of fuel is a “cost”? And what about the way the coffee was grown and shipped?
Even the woodchips are difficult, I don’t really know how efficient the (petrol? Diesel?) woodchipper used by the tree surgeons is.
I could, at least, calculate very roughly the energy that I use raking leaves, bagging them up and cycling them to the plot.
Then there is the issue that the compost I make does not only benefit the soil for one growing season. The first year, I grow squashes in it; after they’re harvested I ttt5t5ttt it on various beds. This year my garlic did brilliantly on that compost. Carrots were more mixed: the ones in a bed with a deep layer of the ex-squash compost were much healthier, with lower pest pressure, than the ones that only had a thin layer over piled up clay. And while the compost will likely need topping up again, the longer-term productivity gains from the improvement in soil health are especially difficult to assess, because I don’t know how much is from the woodchips, how much is from not using poisons, and so on.
So I settle for “I don’t directly employ fossil fuels for the energy used in growing my own food” and leave it at that. Of course some (most?) of my tools will have been made and transported using fossil energy, and I do have some electric power tools (and charge their batteries with solar panels), but these are probably very small energy inputs compared to a tractor.
Kathryn, it seems to me that relative numbers are more important than the precise enumeration of your energy costs. Since your lettuce plants (for example) will have a higher energy cost per calorie of food, compared to your potato crop, I think this will intuitively influence your garden planning during times of scarce energy inputs and shortages of calorie sources.
And I like the fact that the initial energy costs of producing hand tools can be effectively spread very thinly over multiple crops per season for many seasons during multiple lifetimes, if the tools are passed down to the next generations. (This is obviously not the case for power tools requiring continual energy inputs and replacement of moving parts which wear out.) So I’m a big fan of hand tools.
One of my experiments at one allotment is basically “low-labour calorie crops for storage”. We get decent manure delivered to that plot, and I have put it in two 100x100x50 cm raised beds (actually gabion cages lines with coffee sacks because I am trying to keep things tidy for the committee, but… a heap would do), and direct-sowed squashes into it. I have eight 35L buckets set into a 2m square area of woodchips (for water retention) which I am using for (blight-resistant) spuds. The bean tunnel, made of hazel poles I cut from the site, is covered in five kinds of drying beans (of which two stand out as doing well enough to repeat, and I am hoping that the ‘Black Knight’ runner beans will perennialise), and the roots patch… well, this year the roots patch is full of weeds, and several sowings have been dug up, but next year I will move the squashes to a new spot, put woodchips down where the squashes were and stick the potatoes there, and put my beets and parsnips and carrots etc in the 2m patch that had the potatoes on top this year. And my friend wombled some discarded wire shopping baskets which should help with the digging. The idea is to minimise the number of sowing (March, May, maybe July) and harvest (July, September, October, and some of the roots will stay in the ground over winter) dates, and mostly focus on crops I can store. That allotment (just a half plot) is further from home than my other one and it is a push to get there as often as I’d like.
So far, the maintenance required has been watering, and cutting the grass on uncultivated areas of the plot. It’s going well. The plot does already have several perennials that are fairly low maintenance, including a big old apple tree and a decent pear tree, as well as some plums which are probably not gonna make it. (I’ll put in an apricot and a quince or medlar, I have decent access to wild plums in parks here which seem to have much better disease resistance). The two hazels are pretty easy to care for, though the squirrels got the entire nut crop this year, the rhubarb and lovage are not yet well-established but will get there. But the idea with the perennials is that if I get there when they’re in season, great, and if I don’t, well, the plants will be okay. I do have friends who live nearby and can help with the watering in exchange for some of the produce; if I didn’t, then growing both the squashes and spuds in the ground instead of raised beds/pots would make sense, and then covering the roots bed for a year before sowing, to help reduce weed pressure. As things stand, though, one of us can usually get there to water in dry weeks.
Part of why I am doing this experiment is that there are some possible changes in my life in the next few years that could reduce the time I have to spend at any allotment. If that’s the case then I will want to decrease the number of weeks where I have to turn up every two or three days to pick peas and beans and tomatoes. I do already grow my squashes on compost heaps, so largely what this change would look like is a reduction in other types of crop.
That said, calories are not the only thing I want from my food. I am prone to folate deficiency (despite above average dietary intake) for unknown reasons, so leafy greens are a must for me even when I am eating squashes and legumes — I am aiming for at least double the RDA but triple is better. Some of this is easier to achieve throughout winter with windowsill microgreens, but that in turn requires quite a lot of seed, so one of my long beds at the main allotment this summer is full of radishes that I have allowed to go into riotous disarray in order to hopefully collect plenty of seeds. Similarly, I let my field bean cover crop go to seed so I could collect the seeds to use for microgreens over the winter. I am also interested in collecting wild seeds for these purposes — there is a big patch of alexanders not too far away which should have seed to collect real soon now. I’m also experimenting with dehydrating the fat hen and tree spinach that self-seed everywhere; I daresay that will have less in terms of B vitamins as they aren’t so stable, but will still be a decent source of minerals. And I try to let some of my lamb’s lettuce and some of my horn of plenty (a lamb’s lettuce relative,but larger and much more heat tolerant) go to seed every year, because having a self-maintaining patch of those two is a good way to keep myself in salad leaves with minimal effort. And while salad leaves contain very little energy, I would be spending rather a lot of money and using far more fossil fuel if I tried to purchase the equivalent of what I eat.
When talking to MB folks, I’d ask to see their numbers. If they are science people, they should have the data to back up their thesis. Without that, it is just some guy on stage’s opinion. You could even be nice about it – ‘ Oh that’s interesting. I came to a different conclusion. Help me understand…’
I like Jame’s metaphor of ‘money bending light’. It brought to mind something Derrick Jensen has said about the unspoken assumptions underpinning any argument. He uses the example of the Nazi regime in Germany asking ‘how to solve the Jewish problem’ – the unspoken assumption being that there was a problem with Jews. In our culture the hidden premise is always that our current lifestyle is sacrosanct – think George W Bush declaring the “American way of life is non negotiable’ – once that is accepted then solutions to all other problems can only be framed in ways that don’t contradict the hidden premise – so solutions to problems of over consumption inevitably involve consuming more just differently – think the promotion of electric cars rather than reducing the need for cars.
I take your point about society bearing some responsibility for the wrecking of the countryside in pursuit of cheap food, but I also think that farmers should more openly recognise the part they’ve played in the process (drives me mad when I hear Minette Batters on the radio talking about farmers as custodians of the countryside – I always think if the custodian of your pension scheme had depleted it in such a way….. I digress). I think were they to do that they might get more of a hearing for their arguments. As an example I was for many years a second hand book seller. When Amazon came along it the book business colletively embraced it, even those of us with some misgivings went along because it sold books for us. In fact it sold more books for us than anywhere else and very rapidly it became the ‘market’ for many types of books. At that point working with Amazon started to become harder, they demanded more, while the prices or books began to erode (there were wider reasons for that as well). At that point many booksellers started to complain but the truth is that we had collectively given Amazon the power it had – once upon a time it was small enough that it could have been starved in the cradle. The parallel isn’t exact – much of what happened to farming happened in the aftermath of the second world war when much of Europe had recent experience of hunger and that experience shaped the demands placed on agriculture.
But I would say that in our society for most farmers farming is a business and the product is money – and just like water companies discharging sewage into rivers because short terms that’s more profitable so I think farmers often maximise short term profit at the expense of long term viability – poultry farms along the river Wye spring to my mind. Example: There was a farm across the road from my fathers house – this had been a county farm (for those that don’t know these were farms owned by the local authority and available for rent – the idea being to provide a route into farming for those without the means to buy in). The tenants were able to buy the farm (the council sold its farms due to financial constraints) – they had sold for a massive profit the milk quota they’d been given in the 80s – they now run a little beef herd and do some contract work and what was the farm yard is now a development of luxury, millon £ houses. What was once a resource to make farming accessible will never be that again – but the current owners sure have made a mint.
I think the rise of things like the ‘Real Farming Conference’ are a wonderful development I think much agriculture is just business as usual – as such maybe it shouldn’t be singled out for blame in the climate game, nor should it have any rights to special pleading – business as usual is going to have to change whether we like it or not – climate change, oil depletion are going to see to that.
Apologies for the typos and bad editing – I was writing on a phone.
I guess what I really wanted to say is that in claiming to be guardians of the countryside farmers place themselves in the ‘trust us we’re the experts ‘ box. Outsiders look at the depleted state of the countryside and decide the experts are shills and to not to trust farmers with the care of the countryside anymore. The fact that there may be some farmers with real solutions to some of the problems facing us going forward is completely lost.
There are language difficulties here – to speak of ‘farmers’ as some homogeneous entity is entirely misleading – although I think farmers also fall foul of this. I think this happens in all walks of life and bad actors often rely on appeals to group solidarity as a defence against scrutiny.
Outsiders look at the depleted state of the countryside and decide the experts are shills and to not to trust farmers with the care of the countryside anymore.
Who says the countryside is depleted ?
The Experts that make their livelihood saying it’s depleted .
I can see its depleted – when I was a kid there were flocks of yellowhammers in the hedges, starlings were a pest, as were rabbits – these things I hardly see now. In the summer if you left a window open and a light on you’d have moths and daddy longlegs in the house in fair numbers – not any more. There were trout in the small river in the bottom of the valley here but there aren’t now. The local reservior used to have huge hatches of black buzzers over the summer – the fishermen loved them – those hatches are small and infrequent now. And mayfly hatches seem completely a thing of the past. Hedgerow trees have got fewer and farther between because hedges are cut with flail mowers and speed is everything so as large trees are removed/die they’re not replaced (i.e. a man in a tractor can’t pick something growing in the hedge to promote as a replacement). As a child I can remember picking primroses to decorate the local church at easter – I can’t think where one might find fields with any primroses in now. This was a cider producing area but nearly all the orchards have gone – off the top of my head I can think of just a couple of places where there are still large standard fruit trees growing.
I could go on.
This report frightens and horrifies me, Bruce. It also breaks my heart.
I’m hearing these same kinds of stories from all over the world, which suggests that we’re in one big gigantic world of trouble, along with all the other creatures which remain.
Thanks for this interesting post. It reminded me of some work I did 15 years ago for the UK Foresight programme’s Future of Land Use project, where we contrasted four framings of the future. As you say, we found that the ‘new industrial methods’ framing was closest to the existing dominant models of food production, and most likely to be embraced by the actors who did well out of the system.
The report is here: https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20140108144412mp_/http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/foresight/docs/land-use/luf_report/dis04_horizon_scan.pdf
Pp 11-20.
Expert .
Ex , something that has been .
Spurt , a drip under pressure .
A lot of blah-blah-blah here.
These experts supply numbers – why are they wrong?
https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.2015025118
Yes. Where do the solar panels and the rest of the infrastructure come from ?
Not considering the ‘externalities’ and unintended consequences is what got us into this predicament. If you open your fridge or look in your cupboards you will see that there is a functioning food system in place. All the costs of building a new food system will have to be paid. If they are not counted, and they are so large that the new system can never be built, the authors are engaging in an academic exercise that has no bearing on the real world.
Questions for PS Baker –
What are the energetic and material costs of building the required solar panels ? The fermentation and filtering infrastructure ?
Are there enough materials on hand or will they have to be mined and refined ?
Do these costs get added to the amount of energy already being consumed and CO2 produced ?
BBC interview with Pres candidate Kennedy ,
BBC
” Over 300 experts say vaccines are safe ”
Kennedy ,
” Then why has the U.S. paid out over $ three billion in compensation to victims of vaccines “
My understanding is that the rules for compensation after vaccination in the US are quite lax, to the point that you don’t have to prove that the harm is due to the vaccine. So I don’t think the compensation claims are a good guide to vaccination risks.
Absolutely the reverse getting compensation is near impossible , it took five years a hat full of money for the lawyers and a huge amount of frustration to get compensation for my grandson who is now blind in one eye and partially deaf caused by brain swelling from the MMR vaccine , A kid that read stories out loud in kindergarten to one now at 14 can’t read .
That sounds really distressing, Diogenes, I’m sorry to hear about your grandson.
Of course, there are many possible causes of brain swelling, including both measles and mumps.
Kathryn ,
It was 6 hours after the shot he Woke up screaming ,2 hours later he was in ER on life support , he was in hospital just under two months , without the fantastic care from Dallas children’s hospital he would have died .
P S Baker, they are wrong because they are running scenarios on a fantasy.
“If humans could sprout wings and fly, how would that impact the clothing industry? What opportunity for architecture lies in the new landing pads needed for every home? What is the cost of running all power lines underground to reduce entanglement with flying humans?”
I mean that is fun, but the reality remains that humans are not going to sprout wings and fly.
So, this scenario assumes the continued good health and growth of mining, refining, shipping, and manufacturing. All of those industries are fossil fuelled and there are no real hopes to make them solar powered (there are one or two examples of solar powered heavy industry).
Then, assuming that humans can sprout wings and fly, they show that MB uses one-tenth the land.
Who cares! The vast majority of grazeland is grazeland because it won’t support any other agriculture! It has been grazed by large ruminants since the ice sheets retreated and hosts rich and wonderful biodiversity.
What else would we use it for? Put more cities on top? Grazeland is often grazeland because it does not have enough water for farming, so it can’t support cities. Maybe we should cover it in solar panels?
Let me fly over to my calculator…. let’s see…
Using fossil fueled mining and refining, fossil fuelled manufacturing and shipping, we can make solar panels from depleting natural resources to harvest energy which will suffer great transmission losses on its way to the factory where we will replace all of the sun and rain and nutrients of nature with industrial inputs.
Or in the real world, animals just eat the grass and we eat the animals.
We are certainly in agreement when it comes to MB. Also on the role of livestock. Coincidentally, I am currently doing a quite elaborate study on the feed use for livestock in Sweden (commissioned by the WWF). The report is in English and hopefully it will be published. One of the things I look into is the edible protein conversion ratio, and there is a quite good match between high feed intake (i.e. ruminants, and in particular grassfed or roughage fed ruminants) and high edible protein conversion ratio and vice versa. Taking into account the much higher value of animal protein it is apparent that roughage fed milk or meat is a huge net protein gain, while chicken or pork is so-so, depending on how you value the protein bioavailability and amino acid composition. There is already a French study published with a similar methodology and similar (but not exaclty the same as maize plays a much bigger role in France than in Sweden, where wheat is the dominating feed grain these days). Laisse, S., Baumont, R., Dusart, L., Gaudré, D., Rouillé, B., BeNOIT, M., … & PeYRAUD, J. L. (2019). L’efficience nette de conversion des aliments par les animaux d’élevage: une nouvelle approche pour évaluer la contribution de l’élevage à l’alimentation humaine. INRA Productions animales, 31(3), 269-288.
About experts: I agree wholeheartedly and I would add that conservation, biodiversity and nature restauration also suffer from this technocratic approach. Through science and top down biodiversity regulations local communities are disempowered. That the local people don’t want a mine/road/wind mill/steel plant etc. has no traction. But if one biodiversity expert can find an endangered bug and another environmental lawyer know which paragraf to refer to you have a case. But of course, the big guys will “solve” the problem by “ecological compensation” where they take possession of another eco system to compensate for the damages. In that way huge economic interest can still co-exist with tough environmental legislation – while local residents may not, unless they are also “compensated” by relocation…..
Finally, a blog technicality. When I make comments, I tick the box saying: “Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.” but I still have to fill in the same every time. Not a major problem, but if you can fix it…
Thanks for mentioning the box-ticking problem Gunnar. @Chris — me too.
Me 3. although, it looks like it is either working now or it remembers my name and email as long as I don’t leave the website.
Left and came back. It didn’t remember me.
Thanks for these comments. Much to agree with in most of them, so I’ll just pick up on a few challenges and points of clarification.
Well, let’s start with PS Baker. I’ll address the PNAS paper you linked in a moment. As to the blah-blah-blah point, I think I’ve set out clearly above the issues I have with ‘expert’ biotech narratives in the food system. If you have any points of substance to raise about them – seriously, anything with any actual content to it – I’ll try to find the time to respond. But this isn’t the first time you’ve engaged me with nebulous ad hominem. I wonder what you’re trying to achieve. If you find my writing uninformative, read something else. I’m not going to spend more of my time responding to content-free jibes.
Regarding the paper you linked, I’ve discussed this particular study in detail on pp.36-49 of my new book and in various other reports published on this site. You ask me why it’s wrong. Well, there are various important costs of MB production that the study omits (discussed in my book), but on the whole I’d say it’s not wrong. I used data from it to show that the energetic cost of microbial protein production is around 65 kWhkg-1 (this was confirmed as a lowish ballpark figure in personal correspondence with one of the study authors). What this shows is that in ‘Regenesis’ Monbiot understates the energetic costs of MP production by well over 300%, minimum. To meet the world’s protein needs with MB on this basis would require more than 9 times the world’s solar electricity. You tweeted to me a while back that Monbiot presents falsifiable solutions. Well, I think I’ve falsified them. The flaw with MB as a food system technofix lies not in what’s wrong with the study you linked, but in what’s right with it.
Just finally on your point about what’s wrong with the study, a few caveats aside it’s broadly true that PV driven MP can use land and sunlight more efficiently than conventional crops. The point, however, is that its efficiency is irrelevant to the food system problems we face. What matters is its cost, energetic and monetary. Hence my critique of expert knowledges, channelling David Fleming’s one – experts can drive the car, but they don’t know the way. Like Prof Berners-Lee, the study answers a set of questions very expertly. However, they’re the wrong questions.
Moving on to Bruce’s points – yes, I agree it’s important to avoid over-generalised representations of ‘farmers’ writ large. This is one of my criticisms of Monbiot and the food rebooters, and inasmuch as I might be guilty of it myself here, apologies. My remarks here are mostly focused around relatively small-scale upland sheep and beef farmers who are being singled out in the livestock climate narrative, I believe often for quite nefarious reasons, whereas arable farmers are getting an easy ride, but a lot of the agricultural ecocide you discuss relates to arable agrochemicals and scaling. I do take your very good point on the need for caution about farmers’ own ‘expert’ self-presentation, and also that there are dodgy and uncaring practices within agriculture. On this latter point, though, I feel the emphasis has to be structural forces rather than a ‘bad actors’ narrative. A parallel might be something like the illicit drugs trade. If you make trade in a lucrative product heavily illegal, it’s a given that people will move into the sector who will do seriously nasty stuff. But it wouldn’t make much sense to say that the problem with the drugs trade is the bad people it attracts. So I’m basically sticking to my original claim – we need to own bad farming practices as a society.
Hat tip to James for mentioning Pierre Bourdieu – a thinker who influenced me in my days as an innocent young sociologist. For those who think my writing is dense and heavy-going, I prescribe a beach holiday with only Bourdieu’s ‘Outline of a Theory of Practice’ for reading matter. Also, fine if you want to replicate my post, with the usual acknowledgements. And yes, we’re going to need a miracle…
Thanks Andrew Curry for your comment and link. That’s interesting. I think I looked at that report when it came out, but I’ll be interested to have a re-read.
Thanks Kathryn for your reports from the allotment – I believe spreading out this kind of local growing has to be the basis of the miracle we need. I’ve found Dave Goulson’s writing on the insect apocalypse and local amateur food production as a necessary response to it very informative, and a much more persuasive style of expert knowledge-mongering than the ones I’ve discussed above…
Thanks Gunnar – I’ll be very interested to follow up on your protein findings. And I’ll see what I can do about the comment glitch. If there are any other glitches with the new site do let me know (or let me know again…) and I’ll pass it on to the, er, experts.
And thanks to everyone else for interesting comments, praise and constructive engagement.
@ Chris –
“If there are any other glitches with the new site do let me know….”
It’s not a glitch, per se, but if it can be arranged so folks who comment can repair typos after posting, or delete f-d up postings, that’s be a real improvement in my opinion.
There are ” farmers ” and there are ” farming corporations , there should be a split between the two .
Family farmers intent to hand on their farm to their children somehow , corporations tend to milk the system for everything it’s got ( subsidies / tax breaks) then as around here walk away after gutting the land , destroying its fertility then selling it as a tax loss , farmers think long term , corporations look at the
next profit / loss report .
Has anyone worked out the cost of running goop factories on un subsidised fossil free energy , subsidies have to come from somewhere something has to be profitable to tax and pay them .
I am actually really pleased with just how well the low-maintenance allotment is doing. I didn’t expect the direct-sown beans would make it (so many slugs and snails! I did oversow some to compensate though), and while I know better than to count them before they’ve ripened and made it home, it looks like there are eight winter squashes from those two beds, with one of the plants still producing plenty of female flowers (I often find winter squashes will make a second lot around this time of year, so, we’ll see). I did cheat a bit — I was using fairly old squash seed, and when one variety didn’t germinate at all I cadged some spare plants off a friend who has a plot on the same site in exchange for some lovage seedlings, so I have Queensland Blue instead of the Galeuse d’Eysines I had hoped for, but it’s still a good squash. The spuds are less healthy than I’d like, but the reduced yield from unhealthy plants in less-than-ideal growing material is balanced by the very low pest damage to tubers, compared to potatoes I’ve previously grown in the ground. Next year will probably be better: this year I was literally scraping up dead leaves from the pathways and topping it up with fresh woodchips and chopped green alkanet leaves, because that’s what I had access to at the time, and I don’t think I got enough greens in there to address the nitrogen requirements of woodchip decomposition.
It is too bad about the beetroot, carrots etc, but my July sowing does look a little more promising on the carrot front, at least. And if taproots just won’t survive on that site I can always put in a Jerusalem artichoke patch instead. At the other plot I have four varieties, one of which is a lovely dwarf one which is slightly lower-yielding (though it’s sharing the bed with a taller, quite vigorous variety, so the yield might be a competition problem) but has fairly smooth pink tubers and doesn’t cast so much shade. I’ve had decent results from oca elsewhere, too, so that would be another contender; but neither of these store quite as well as beets and carrots can.
I agree Chris that this is yet another enclosure. The ‘experts’ being a manifestation as well as tools of it. I agree with Bruce, in as much as it is time for farmers to stand and be counted – are you conservative bastions of the establishment, or custodians of the land? Because now you cannot be both.
The idea that we will have studge makers above the ‘grocery store’ is hilarious – the best thing I’ve heard. Then I suddenly thought – they mean those enormous Tesco, Sainsbury etc. Now that looks more plausible, each super store cooking up its own studge that you get to self pour like a Mr Whippy!
Honestly, this is where the farmers have to be part of the restoration (renaissance in Colin Tudge’s language), of a self provisioning, intersufficient local agrariansim – to exist outside of the monetary system. Its that or loose your land and eat studge (or live on rewilded mega ranch for the rich and aristocracy) .
Hi Chris – I quite agree with your argument about structural forces – my point really is that often rational short term interests make us all willing participants in things that lead long term to outcomes we’d claim we didn’t favour. I don’t see that makes anyone a ‘bad actor’ (farmer or drug dealer 😉 ) but that being open about what has happened is the first step to change.
As to the attacks on upland farming from the likes of Monbiot I think farming needs a smarter response to those attacks. Much of that critique seems to be that such farming is a poor use of that land in that it degrades it (in terms of biodiversity, water run off etc (you’re probably far more familiar with the arguements than I am)) while producing little food energy per acre with that food having a relatively high co2 emissions per unit of food.
My guess is that there’s some truths in there somewhere – for instance temperate rainforest is a habitat that has virtually disappeared from our western uplands. Everything I’ve read suggests the Scottish Highlands were a much more diverse ecosystem prior to the clearances. Accepting those truths might be a better place to start arguing back from and offer a better way forward for those farmers and communities.
Yesterday I came across this – a free range chicken farm creating wetlands to capture nutrient run off that would otherwise make its way into the river Wye https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmmy23rrvgdo and also this where the NFU is claiming farmers are being unfairly blamed for pollution of the Wye https://www.shropshirestar.com/news/farming/2023/08/19/farmers-being-unfairly-blamed–after-river-wyes-status-is-downgraded/.
I know which seems like the stronger response to me – whether you think intensive poultry is the right way to farm or not the former response is far more disarming of its critics than the latter. I don’t know what the equivalent would be for say upland sheep farmers – rewilding and eco tourism is probably not it because I doubt there will be much tourism 50 years hence. Maybe traditional forest management may offer some routes forward – the steep Exmoor valleys once produced large amounts of tanning bark and charcoal.
I also read this https://amp.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/aug/19/reforesting-scotland-private-funding-land-reform yesterday so I’m not blind to how nature restoration/ climate mitigation is being used by monied interests to further interests at the expense of locals – been happening in the third world for years and now it’s coming here
Citation in comments of Naked Capitalism, 20 Aug, 2023:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/08/links-8-20-2023.html#comment-3922991
Chris,
I share your frustration with “experts” as well as irritation for their condescension towards “Doctor random guy on the internet” . Sadly, few people realize how academic research is increasingly funded by industry. The days of basic research for the sake of humanity, funded by the government, are long gone. In the US I’ve witnessed the “experts” become the mouthpiece for corporate interests. Most academics are so ‘silo minded’ I no longer find their view point relevant, IMO. Not all, but far too many. They don’t really care to listen to the generalists. I have degrees in science and engineering and I started and began operating a soil making business 25 years ago. But still I don’t have anything to offer the academics at Purdue.
Regarding small pasture raised meat and dairy production and methane emissions, I have never found a research paper that actually measured methane released from grassland. Their conclusions are based on measurements from stock yards or calculations based on diet and digestion studies. My problem with this is the fate of methane on pasture. I found Walter Jehne’s description of the fate of methane in a pasture setting compelling. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nC6j80sLZo I was not able to confirm the chemistry he is describing….but I still found it compelling. Sometimes the absence of proof isn’t because the idea is wrong, but because no one has funded the research.
Small farmers raising livestock on pasture and using the manure from a barn to fertilize other cropland is a proven farming technology. I agree with you that our future will require this technology for food production. The problem I see in my youngest children (20 something millennials) is that they view farm work as the last thing they ever want to do. I think many people their age think similarly. Or at the other end of the age spectrum is the 65 plus year old people who fed their family from a large garden….and never want to do that again. People seem to think hard work is a curse.
I’ve been slowly changing my youngest son’s mind after he decided to adopt a vegan diet, while going back to school. He is slowly realizing the difference in taste between a store bought tomato and one fresh from the garden. Higher food prices have also convinced him that it might be a good idea to plant more in a garden. He really enjoyed digging potatoes, surprised by how many potatoes each plant produced.
Some day we’ll have the opportunity to say “I told you so.” but I doubt it will give us much pleasure.
Cheers
Hi Jody
As an “older millennial” (born in late 1980) I certainly enjoy the hard work of horticulture, but I’m also aware I probably can’t do hard physical labour for the rest of my life. I don’t have a farm but with my allotments and foraging I am getting as close as I currently can.
The better taste of food was certainly part of the way in for me; that and the very wide variety available compared to what is in the shops. (Of the winter squashes I’m growing this year, I think I’ve only seen Uchiki Kuri for sale commercially; the majority of the fungi I forage are similarly not readily available; if I want summer savory for my cooking I cannot buy it locally at all without ordering online — and I live in London where we have access to a very broad range of foods.) I think the nutrient density can be higher too, especially with things like foraged greens.
When I took on my first allotment half-plot I thought I would be the only person my age or younger there, but some of my direct neighbours are in their late 20s, and there are various other plots on the site rented by young couples. At the second site where I have a plot there are also several younger couples. Both sites have extensive waiting lists. I also have friends who aren’t allotmenters who nevertheless are growing at least some of their own food, and every gardener I know is at least thinking about creating wildlife habitat too. This is despite quite a bit of housing precarity and moving frequently — one of our allotment neighbours has moved four times since taking on the plot in 2020.
But it’s hard to see how I will ever own a house with a garden, never mind a smallholding with enough land to feed my household and produce enough for sale besides. Most of my peers are in a similar position. I think maybe it’s easier to discount the possibility of farming when it doesn’t look attainable in the first place; but the unattainability of it is more about wealth concentration and land access than about personal preference. So I see everyone who gets into making sourdough or kefir or kombucha or jam as someone who might potentially get into tomatoes, potatoes, beans or squashes.
Meanwhile, two summers ago our next door neighbours gave us a fig tree (which they got from neighbours a few doors down who I somehow haven’t managed to get to know even though they also have an allotment, and a back garden full of fruit trees — I should really knock on their door at some stage), in return for some of the help we’d given them getting groceries during lockdown. Last summer was more “keeping plants alive” than “gardening” in the back garden here on account of drought and some life events, but this summer I have been gradually clawing it back, and last night we ate our first fig from that tree, big and juicy and soft and ripe and so lovely. In winter it looked like a dead stick in a pot, but surface appearances are deceptive.
Thank you Kathryn for your lovely reply. I’ve often heard reference to ‘allotments’ in England. In the US we call them ‘community gardens’. Most people where I live have large enough back yards for a ‘kitchen’ garden. In general our land is more ample than in England, but it too is becoming increasingly expensive. My life in the Midwestern US, particularly in a small to midsize city, is so different from what you describe in London. Our home sits on 5 acres of land with 4 being wooded. Our business also owns 7 acres with at least 5 being tillable for planting. The woods have a variety of fungi and wild edibles. We have a green house and garden at home and a large garden at our business. We made part of the barn into a summer kitchen for canning tomatoes.
Our sons will inherit our land, home, and business. They are more fortunate than many of their peers. They had college paid for because we started saving when they were babies. Many millennials have college debt to repay and can’t afford to buy a first home. Ever since the pandemic home prices in Indiana have risen, and now we see higher interest rates and higher costs of living. The future must look very bleak to many people, young and old. We tried to prepare our sons from an early age. We taught them about climate change and peak resources and how the future might be very different from the past. We began moving towards an energy efficient home powered by solar energy, supplemented with a wood stove for heating. We put in a large vegetable garden, and along with a flock of chickens raised a lot of the food we ate. This began in the early 2000’s when they were only 4 and 6. I must admit as they grew to become teenagers they didn’t appreciate our sustainable lifestyle, particularly since none of their friends families did anything similar. I suppose to them we were just odd. I think they are more thankful now.
Good luck with your gardening. Your figs sound wonderful.
Jody, this sounds wonderful, both for being able to provide so much of your sustenance now and for the resilience it brings to your family. Last time I worked it out, I came to a tenth of an acre as the total area of my allotments plus (rented) back garden. I do also grow some vegetables in the churchyard, but those are not for my own consumption.
I grew up in Canada, and when I think about it, almost all the houses I lived in there had bigger yards than a standard allotment plot here — though frequently that included quite a lot of front lawn.
There are some nice points here, but I’m wary of recycling a Govism, especially as there is much of value coming out of academia that can be easily dismissed with such empty soundbites (but then I would say that!).
But there is an important critique of the university as an institution here – especially the extent to which public funding is driven by short-term cycles in which academics are lauded if they can secure private funding, the more the better, doesn’t really matter what it’s for as long as people want to throw money at it, and then to prove their ‘impact’ in things like government policy. The conditions are there for the academic validation of corporate friendly projects.
But, as is recognised in the comments re farmers, this is a problem of structure rather than individual ‘bad actors’. Nevertheless, as decades of academic debate will tell you, the structure-agency problem is not a simple one. Specifically, it’s important not to subsume agency entirely in structure (as vice versa), and structures have to reproduced by people working within them, which can certainly mean ‘bad acting’. So I agree with Joel that, as far as anyone’s options are structured by prevailing social conditions, it’s still valid to ask them to stand and be counted, whether academic or farmer. Transforming structures can be difficult, but we all agree it needs to be done.
I think it’s also important not to get caught up in a polarised analysis. I think Chris is right that peasant farmers shouldn’t be blamed for inaction on climate change, and this probably includes many upland farmers on Britain’s poorest soils. But such people can’t only be contrasted with evil corporate farmers. There is a particular species of local small capital that is equally capable of leveraging purchasing power rooted in land ownership and ‘local family farmer’ status to act in an irresponsible and bullying fashion.
Where I live we’re currently dealing with a farmer who runs a local animal feed business, expanding his operations into an old farm on edge of town, which had become a haven for wild flora and fauna, and threatening to build an industrial beef unit for 800+ cattle. Clearly the declining subsidy climate and consumer demand for beef create welcoming structural conditions for him to feather his own family nest here, but at the expense of a bit of local ecocide.
It’s people like this who benefit from the ‘don’t blame the farmers’ narrative while choosing also to actively benefit from the prevailing harmful structures. The ‘system’ may encourage such behaviour, but the opportunities still have to be grasped – its persistence requires local ‘bad acting’ even if it’s pointless blaming the aggregate situation on local ‘bad actors’.
At a more general level, if we argue that society should be structured around people looking after their own local sufficiency from the land, then the implicit claim is that everyone has a right to sufficiency from the land. That means that those who currently farm more of it than is necessary for their own household sufficiency without local agreement are depriving others. They should not be able to hide behind their local ‘expertise’ in farming to justify it.
“At a more general level, if we argue that society should be structured around people looking after their own local sufficiency from the land, then the implicit claim is that everyone has a right to sufficiency from the land. That means that those who currently farm more of it than is necessary for their own household sufficiency without local agreement are depriving others. They should not be able to hide behind their local ‘expertise’ in farming to justify it.”
I think this is really important in this debate, or the debate about agrarian futures generally. It seems to me that as energy becomes more constrained, supply chains contract and collectively we look more toward national self-sufficiency in food its very possible that the farming ‘industry’ will use this to bolster its own position, to drive down environmental protections, to support ‘consolidation’ within the industry – I think you can already see this in the language and arguments used by the NFU. I actually think that this is the most likely way things will play out over time leading to a situation in which large landowners are able to exploit the power that ownership bestows upon them in a way reminiscent of 19th century England.
Over recent years I’ve been quite focused on getting a small bit of land (I’d like a little bit more) more for my kids than for me – my feeling is that in such a future having a little bit of land may give some freedom from/within what I suspect will be a fairly exploitative social organisation.
In all this I’m also minded of the Brexit debate in which ‘small fishermen’ were used as a public face for changes from which they were never going to benefit (I realise that with your original post Chris you were pointing to a very different dynamic). For instance this debate https://www.fwi.co.uk/farm-life/dartmoor-farmer-launches-campaign-against-subsidy-cuts see also here https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/apr/24/fears-natural-england-may-lose-powers-amid-row-with-dartmoor-farmers
My understanding is that farmers were paid to manage SSSIs on their land and when they didn’t manage in alignment with the agreement they’d made in order to get the subsidy payments then that part of the subsidy was removed. It seems that this has then been used to push for the management of SSSIs to be taken out of the hands of Natural England and placed in those of politicians. I have to admit I haven’t followed this closely and may not have the ins and outs of it all correct but I can well imagine organisations like the CLA would see this as a real win for their members.
I think (correct me if I:m wrong, Chris) that part of the issue here with “farmers” is that corporations, backed by bought-in “expert opinion”, can and will do much more damage (locally and globally) than one expansionist beef herder; and indeed financialised markets and the incentives they provide are part of what drives said expansion.
That means that those who currently farm more of it than is necessary for their own household sufficiency without local agreement are depriving others.
I would argue that this is true, but not only in the realm of farming.
If I have two coats and my neighbour has none and is cold, what right do I have to both coats? I can only wear one at a time. (Confession: I do have more than two coats, because weather conditions call for different apparel at different times and it is worth it to me to be somewhat comfortable in a range of outdoor situations as I spend a lot of my time working outdoors; but I consider that this makes me very wealthy compared to many in the world.)
So then we get into: who decides what is “enough” land for “sufficient” livelihood? Some types of land are more immediately productive than others; some (e.g. wetlands) provide wider “ecosystem services” (I hate the term but bear with me) but aren’t great for feeding someone locally. I get more calories from potatoes than I would from the same area set to grains, but the grains keep better. Significant nut harvests (…or squirrel harvests I guess) require a completely different approach again. Land is not fungible.
And local decision-making around what is “enough” is commendable, but in global markets we get situations where, say, Irish farmers have “enough” land to grow spuds to feed themselves and grain to sell to pay their rent and it’s a poverty trap that works well enough until potato blight comes along, at which point the bottom falls out and people starve. So at some point we also have to decide what is “local”.
Thankfully I don’t think we have to have all of the answers to these tensions worked out in advance; but it’s certainly worth thinking about them in terms of the structures that we do encourage, because I suspect that no matter what those structures are, some people will fall through the cracks. A medieval historian might have a better grasp than I do of what agrarian societies of the past did about people unable, for lack of access or lack of ability, to support themselves sufficiently. I imagine different strategies were tried in different places, and that some worked better than others. I also imagine that a local energy surplus was often the deciding factor between strategies that worked and strategies that didn’t, though relying only on an energy lens risks oversimplification (as with my need for leafy greens).
I’m trying to remember which papal encyclical essentially said that the right to use of produce is conditional on need. I haven’t read it (yet) but it’s an important (if largely ignored) piece of moral philosophy, in this case I think deriving from liberation theology.
I think the subsidy regime has always favoured larger farmers simply because of the amount of bureaucracy involved and the ‘top-down’ approach that makes it easier to deal with the whole thing by hiring consultants to do it for you.
Kathryn, I’m sure you (and Chris) are right about the corporate drivers of the current ‘system’, but when the local expansionist beef herder is the immediate face of that, and buys into it wholesale while using ‘local farmer’ rhetoric to disguise it, that can’t simply be ignored, and arguably it’s the coal face at which many of us work. It would be wrong, I think, to consider the situation analogous to the classic corporate telephone enquiry experience, where you really want to speak to someone at the top but all you ever have access to is the poor sop employed to manage the phone.
I’m with you on the importance of defining ‘local’ and ‘sufficient’, and I’m painfully aware of the scope for going down some academic rabbit hole with it that has very little pragmatic use. But I suppose the main point is that in a small farm future people will need to see those definitions demonstrated and ‘performed’ on some way in order to maintain trust in their neighbours. We can seek to cultivate an ethics of sufficiency, for sure, but it will always require that kind of visibility or accountability to work I think.
Medieval approaches to lack of access or ability to support oneself? A huge subject! Ethics of charity administered through churches and monasteries would be one place to start I suppose, but much no doubt ‘passes under the radar’ in terms of how people supported each other on an everyday basis in agrarian communities. Settlement (often termed ‘squatter’, a word that predisposes illegality) on common land became an important subsistence strategy for poor people in later medieval and early modern centuries. Migration for work also became increasingly important. Overall though you’re right to point to local contingency I think. Sorry, bit of a cop out as answers go!
Thanks for further comments, a few thoughts.
@Bruce. Your points on upland stock farming – well yes, I’d agree that ‘there’s some truths in there somewhere’ but not that all those statements are entirely true and should be accepted as a starting place. There’s definitely interest within farming communities in agroecology and conservation, but if that’s what we as a society want then to a considerable extent we’re going to need to pay farmers a lot more than we currently do to deliver it … or (better) we’re going to need to assume more responsibility as citizens for producing our food and fibre and juggling it with wildlife.
At the same time, I’d suggest there also needs to be a smarter public narrative about farming as well as a smarter response from farmers. For example, it seems to have taken hold in the public imagination that sheep are ‘bad for nature’, period (somebody commenting on my PoliticsJOE interview even dismissed me on the grounds that I kept sheep … 3 breeding ewes on an 18 acre lowland holding with much greater biodiversity value than before I started farming it! … smdh, as they say). This is where the conversation, as I said above, has broken down – and I do believe Monbiot has to shoulder some of the blame for it in the UK upland farming debate.
I agree that it would be good if all parties could engage in dialogue with each other. I’d just say that farmers are not the only guilty party as to why it’s broken down. A big generic issue here is overproduction of monocrops driven by global commodity markets. As I mentioned in the OP, it really bothers me that a figure like Prof Berners-Lee homes in on agroecological meat production systems as the problem to be sorted rather than the nature of those markets.
The Dartmoor debate you linked is pretty interesting – note the complaints of stock farmers that conservation organisations want their stock for ‘conservation grazing’ of fragile habitats in the summer, but then banish the stock to private farms in the winter which then get blamed for ‘overstocking’. I don’t know whether it’s better for SSSI management to be conducted by the Government or Natural England, but I don’t think it’s ‘outrageous’ for decisions about SSSIs to be ‘determined by politics rather than science’. Such decisions are intrinsically political.
The question of expertise is very interesting in all this. I agree with you (and Andrew) about not taking farmer claims to expertise at face value. But I think the same has to be said about conservation professionals, rewilding advocates and local communities that don’t know much about farming. One of the numerous problems we face is the need to create new kinds of expertise about the food system as we move towards agrarian localism, which nobody really has at present.
@Andrew … and also Kathryn’s, Joel’s and Bruce’s points here. First, regarding the dodgy beef farmer, well some people always do try to game the system, often in modern societies in financial ways, but in other ways in other types of society. Yes, it requires (bad) actors to do so, and it’s fine to judge individuals for their actions – but it requires structural and/or cultural change beyond the individual level to remedy it, and it’s probably impossible to remedy it perfectly.
I agree with Andrew though that there’s an important category of local small capital and landowner that easily goes under the radar. It brings us back to our debates from a while back about the petit bourgeoisie and my discussions in ‘A Small Farm Future’. Like others here, I think this is going to be an absolutely critical class issue in the future, as per Joel’s ‘stand up and be counted’ remark. It’s possible that this kind of power will align in an exclusionary way with bigger non-local forms of capital or power, or it may come onside with local community-based forms of self-determination. It can be pushed in either direction. The NFU and the CLA represent one direction. It’s important to try to push in the other one. I don’t think Monbiot-style ‘Regenesis’ narratives are helping at all in that respect.
Andrew writes “if we argue that society should be structured around people looking after their own local sufficiency from the land, then the implicit claim is that everyone has a right to sufficiency from the land.”
Yes, totally agree.
He goes on,
“That means that those who currently farm more of it than is necessary for their own household sufficiency without local agreement are depriving others. They should not be able to hide behind their local ‘expertise’ in farming to justify it.”
Almost totally agree – one difficulty, as others have said, is the need to get behind what ‘local agreement’ really means, as per recent discussions here about community and collectivity. Another difficulty, as I mentioned above, is the uncertain nature of expertise going forward. I agree that farmers shouldn’t be able to hide behind claims of ‘expertise’ in bad faith. But nor do I think their expertise should be entirely dismissed with reference to farmer complicity with ecological degradation or economic self-interest. Maybe the beef farmer you mention does have expertise that could usefully serve the local community’s food needs if it could be put in service in the right way. Meanwhile a lot of people in the local community are probably quite clueless about food and farming – if they’re empowered to make decisions about it, they’ll need to trust *somebody* other than themselves. That’s the measure of the difficulties we face.
Also, I agree with Kathryn’s take – the entire economic system is geared towards people making personal gains at the expense of other people and organisms. But it’s often a bit more visible in the case of farming. I don’t think that should mislead us as to the economic agents that are really driving the destructiveness. I’m not saying that the beef farmer shouldn’t be opposed … just that the ‘immediate face’ we perceive to be the destroyer may be less problematic than the underlying face.
@Jody – thanks, very interesting. How people traded homegrown tomatoes for commercial varieties and decided that that was progress is one of the many mysteries of the food system that defeats me.
Chris,
Heirloom and open pollinated tomatoes were replaced by hybrid commercial varieties that had tougher skin, more uniform shape, and less sugars. They could be picked unripe, stored longer, and lasted longer in shipping containers. It was all about durability getting the fruit from farm to market. The fact that they have less nutrition density and flavor didn’t seem to matter to retail stores because people and restaurants still purchased them.
cheers
Love it! I’m no expert but I can read. Yes, experts are a problem for those of us advocating monetary reform as well. But we know the problem stems, for us, the farmers and everyone else, from the privately owned banking system that creates all our money as debt creating over three times the amount of debt than there is ever money to pay it off. World debt is 305 trillion and the world money supply is 82 trillion. The US money supply is also less than a third of the debt.
Banks create money when they lend it and destroy money as the principal is paid off and the interest, that bank profit portion of the debt, must come from the principal of another loan. See the problem? When loan payments (money destroyed) exceed loans being made (money created) the system crashes, about every 10 years. Or since it is not profitable the banks stop lending, people default on their loans and they pick up the collateral for pennies on the dollar.
Farmers have been getting screwed by this centralizing system for over a century. The solution has been proposed numerous times, it was at the top of every progressive populist party in the late 19th century, it was proposed in 1933 to end the Great Depression, it was proposed in 2011 in response to the crash to end the boom bust cycle of the debt-money system. The “experts” deny this and get handed phony Nobel prizes for lies. I am with you Chris, we need the centralized population, millions of farmers restored back on the land to grow soil, food, and trees. Bankers will never do that but they now control the money. This must change.
I think our current problems have origins that are deeper and more complex than the debt-backed nature of the current monetary system.
But in any case, as you say, the bankers hold the money. Finding and investing our time and energy in more resilient means to meet our basic needs is urgent.
This discussion provides so much inspiration and a feeling of camaraderie. From years of vegetable farming, and selling, the only model I found that made any sense was giving the food to local schoolkids and connecting that to grants and volunteers etc… Well now I am formulating an idea to share what worked for me, a jaded farmer tired of the commodification of his labor and the impossible competition with subsidized produce. The idea is have the village(school/old folk home, etc..) hire the farmer to make them food. Skip the guessing and courting the market., a CSA 2.0 so to speak. What would you want to be a sure thing(as I learned during COVID, the only time people actually remembered and were glad to have a local farm) Thanks again for the discussion, and what would a model like that need to succeed?
As someone who grows vegetables on a voluntary basis for a soup kitchen, I would suggest maybe teaming up with a chef or catering team on this. There are a number of vegetables I don’t grow in the Soup Garden because the kitchen volunteers don’t really know what to do with them, but would be ideal if we had more expansive ideas around food — things like Jerusalem artichokes and lovage, for example, are certainly part of my growing for my own consumption. We’re short enough of volunteers that I’m unlikely to shift the prevailing culture on that on my own, but ultimately I think a shift to local provisioning does also mean a shift to more diverse, more seasonal diets.
I agree that the main thing is to get out of commodification. Giving food away is of course excellent. CSA 2.0 is also a good thing. In Sweden there is growth of something called Marvärn, which is a bit hard to translate, but it is people producing food together outside of the commodity framework and with a special focus on resilience and self-reliance. Perhaps Google can translate this: https://landetsfria.nu/2022/nummer-287/matvarn-odling-och-samverkan-infor-en-kris/
Hi Chris- Yes you’re almost certainly right that ‘such decisions are inherently political’ and my problem with the situation is the hue of the politicians that have jumped on this. And I’m always suspicious when something like this is suddenly taken up by politicians – perhaps I’m a cynic but I can’t help asking why this and why now? Its also interesting to me that the actions of Mr Darwall on Dartmoor didn’t seem to generate as much heat among our political class. I’d also hazard a guess is that should that dispute be resolved in a way that suited Dartmoor farmers it wouldn’t change the economics of upland farming for the structural reasons you’ve outlined. In fact I’d argue it may well hasten the demise of that sort of farming, because the big players will be able to take greater advantage of dilutions in regulations governing their operations than smaller players. In all this I’m not suggesting that there aren’t genuine difficulties facing upland farmers, nor that many of those weighing in in these debates (myself included) lack knowledge and understanding of those challenges or are offering viable solutions. I’m certainly not in the rewilding camp, nor do I have an aversion to sheep – I’m more thinking we need a bit more wild and a bit less sheep and we need to find a way for that to be viable for those involved – safely sitting on the fence there!
I recently watched a large ash tree being taken down behind where I live – took the tree surgeons maybe 3 days. The tree was taken out in order to create an access road to a small piece of land which has planning for a few houses but it might have had to have come down due to dieback anyway. But watching this it occurred to me that if I planted a replacement this year my great grandchildren or perhaps their children, should they live to a very ripe old age, might see it grow to be a tree of similar stature to that which was taken down in 3 days. Given that our destructive capacity so outstrips our creative one in both time and space it seems to me that the ‘right’ to destroy something of the natural world needs far greater collective oversight than we have ever managed and I’m not sure those who currently have that sort of control over ‘their’ land are particularly keen to submit to such oversight, nor that we have a culture capable of providing it. Perhaps this is the place where we all need new forms of expertise. Joanna Macy’s ‘Council of All Beings’ comes to mind (I’m a hopeless idealist ;-)).
I feel that in much of my response to this thread I’ve taken a somewhat anti-farmer position – that wasn’t exactly my intent. I’m absolutely convinced that our future will be more agrarian than our present and I see your work as presenting a hopeful vision of how that could play out. What I’m not convinced of is that the majority of farmers are particularly interested in that vision. More than many people you seem to have put your money where your mouth is and as far as I can tell, to farm in a manner consistent with that vision – farming to furnish the needs of the farmer and local community and my hat’s off to you for that. But most of the farmers I know produce little more of their own food than I produce on my allotments (plus perhaps some meat and milk). They may have firewood from the farm but mostly that’s from trees being removed and I see little (no) replanting of these trees. And over the years I’ve probably met more non farmers than farmers who would be interested in following the path you’ve trod.
There is a farm here that was the sort of farm I think we’d both agree we need – mixed farm with a large component of market gardening – they even had a shop in Bristol through which they sold a good % of their produce (diverse products and diverse markets probably offers financial resilience at the expense of financial optimisation and most farming seems to have optimised for profit rather than resilience.) These day, as the owner has become elderly, much of the land seems underused or unused and much of the income appears to come from camping and hosting weddings etc. But the owner is still actively buying land despite not really using much of what he already has. So here is a farmer perhaps more inclined toward the sort of farming you espouse actively rejecting the ‘small’ part of your prescription – I had a conversation about this with him and it was a purely financial thing – land being a better place to park money than the bank. In one way or another capital accumulation seems to trump most other things in this debate
I wholeheartedly agree that Monbiot’s fairly aggressive attacks on farming are unhelpful to say the least and were I writing on his blog (does he have one?) I’d be making that point there. I’ve been reading Daniel Kahneman’s ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’ and there’s some really interesting stuff in there that’s got me thinking about how these debates go and how the positions get formed. For instance our minds favour coherence over completeness – so we tend to accept and believe to be true a coherent story about something even if we know we don’t have all the facts. I suspect both sides of this debate are to some degree or another falling prey to this – I’m trying to understand how that’s at play in myself but its very hard to see in oneself I think.
He also explains that what we perceive as fact is strongly correlated with what we believe to be normal – and our mind might create ‘normal’ from just one or two instances of an event – Kahneman relates seeing a car on fire on the same stretch of road twice in the space of just a couple of weeks and then how for years he’d involuntarily find himself anticipating a burning car along that stretch of road. The mental process seems to be evolutionary – normal = safe = good (true). I was thinking about this in the context of you saying farmers have knowledge that we may soon have great need of and which is easily lost. I think I mostly agree with that but I’d also say that that knowledge is far more partial than the knowledge we need going forward. It seems to me that much of that knowledge is practical at the farm scale but breaks down within the context of wider systems – and most of the trouble we face is routed in the breakdown of wider systems due to optimisation at a smaller scale. You can see this sort of problem playing out very clearly whenever fisherman and fisheries experts discuss quota – as you say these things are political but political solutions that don’t reflect the underlying ecological dynamics are pretty worthless – which may explain why we really haven’t got our foot to the floor in terms of Co2 emission reductions.
Sorry for the rambling responses – I’ve avoided commenting on your blog for quite some while because its too engaging.
BTW I have a vaugue memory of you writing about your sheep – am I right in thinking they were a breed that could be run among youg trees? If so could you tell us what the breed is – We have a lot of young trees with too much grass.
I don’t remember anything about the trees but I am pretty sure the sheep are Wiltshire Horns, a hair sheep breed, less prone to fly strike than sheep that require shearing.
Once again I am late to the party!
In a different area, I have written about how we allow experts too much—expertise is usually a very narrow thing, and when we do not respect the expertise that some people have and give to much respect to other people who do not actually have expertise we get bad results.
One constant example is Michael Mann, who is an expert on climate change, but who is an absolute train wreck on human behaviour. We have been following the behavioural game plan that Mann prescribes, and have failed to advance, decade after decade. (to be fair to Mann, he is just parroting the mainstream position on behaviour change, which is not the work of experts)
Anyhow, here is an essay on that.
Most Public Engagement Is Worse Than Worthless
Yet more further comments – thank you.
@Bruce, I didn’t mean to push back too strongly against your comments, which I broadly agree with. No doubt you’re right that a lot of farmers aren’t particularly interested in a local ecological vision. My fear is that anti-farmer narratives like Monbiot’s will become self-fulfilling prophecies in this respect, and the need is to try to bring farmers onside wherever possible for numerous reasons. Many already are.
Your points about the ash tree ring true. I’d simply add that in a financialized and short-termist society, putting decisions into community rather than individual hands doesn’t necessarily circumvent the short termism and financial self-interest. The issue isn’t individual vs collective but short-termism vs long-termism, and financialized vs ethical.
Also, I agree that putting conservation decisions directly into governmental hands often isn’t a great idea – the risks of political football are too great, so you need distancing mechanisms. All the same, as per my OP I’m wary of claims that distinguish between ‘politics’ and ‘the science’.
Regarding the skills of farmers and fishermen, giving them control over their productivity or quotas isn’t really what I meant – Steve’s comment above about understanding things when your salary (or, more to the point, your self-employed livelihood, a very different thing) depends on not understanding it holds good. But farmers and fishers still often know things about how to farm and fish that might be useful.
@FarmerMike. Welcome. Yes I think any way of decommodifying farming and making it a direct relationship between the farmer and local customers is always a good way to go, especially local customers willing and able to insulate themselves from market forces. But it’s still hard in terms of the siren song of global food commodification, and the way that that conditions the playing field for all farmers and customers.
@Howard. Welcome also. The economics of finance tend to make my head hurt, but thanks for that clear overview. It does seem to me that the vast excess of liquidity modern societies have created (what I call symbolic capital in ‘A Small Farm Future’) underlies many problems with land, housing and the food system … though there are questions about whether that’s the cause of the malaise or just a means of delivering it.
@Jody. Indeed – the puzzle to me is why the consumers and restaurants still bought them … and accepted the li(n)e that it counted for progress.
@Ruben. Thanks for that, will take a look. Always nice to hear your voice on here. Indeed, Michael Mann … goodness gracious. Being blocked by him has become a badge of honour.
While I agree that short term vs long term is one of the conundrums we face, and in general I am not keen on financialisation and the concentration of wealth that usually accompanies it, I wonder whether financialised Vs ethical is clear enough as a dichotomy…
…extractive Vs productive, perhaps? I was listening to a podcast the other day where one party kept talking about fossil fuel production and I couldn’t help thinking that this is rather a misnomer. But even so, I would want to frame “productive” very broadly, including producing or at least encouraging improvements in biodiversity, carbon sequestration, water management and so on, as well as obtaining a more direct yield of goods and/or services for human use. I think this is what the “regenerative” label tries to get at, I can’t remember whether that term has been co-opted yet.
I think the problem with “experts” is that they are trying to find ways to maintain the status quo.
Not many wish to contemplate a SFF. I don’t think they would have jobs in universities, if they did.
A few additional things. First, apologies that I’m not addressing all the comments appearing here. There are a lot of good comments that I haven’t engaged with, mostly because I agree and don’t have much to add and/or because other demands on my time assert their priority, which is increasingly happening. A request for forgiveness in this respect – I do greatly value the comments I receive here. I read all of them and always learn something – do please keep them coming. They’re the lifeblood of this site.
Also, I meant to remark upon the example Bruce raised of the otherwise praiseworthy mixed farm that was going down the route of diversification and financialisation (this is also relevant to Andrew’s beef farmer example). I can’t speak to the individual cases (and, again, no implied criticism of Bruce or Andrew!), but I do want to remark that the economics of food and farming are such that most owner-occupier farmers earn a pittance from actual food production while the capital asset of their land is quite lucrative in view of the over-liquid economy discussed above – diversifying into non-farming uses is hard to resist, and is often actively incentivized.
Meanwhile, people who’ve spent their working lives in food production often don’t have much to show for it financially as they reach retirement age. But they might have landholdings that could be usefully monetized. I think this is another case of the visibility of farmers’ financial dealings which can lead to unfair judgments. People who’ve done a salaried job throughout their career can usually draw a generous occupational pension from schemes often financed in murky ways, whereas farmers monetizing their land locally are more visible and subject to local censure. That censure is reasonable in relation to the part it plays in the reproduction of global poverty and inequality … but not so much when it’s voiced from other privileged parts of the same unfair economic system.
Just saying for a friend.
Regarding the sheep – yes my previous flock were Shropshires which have the reputation of being less inclined to eat trees. A not entirely undeserved reputation, but I wouldn’t bet the farm (or, more to the point, the orchard) on it. My current little flock are, as Kathryn says, Wiltshire horns.
Finally, to Kathryn’s point, new words for new times are always difficult but yes financialised vs productive might be a better framing, subject to your wise caveats about the nature of production. Generally over the years I’ve favoured an emphasis on producerism instead of consumerism, so the suggestion is consonant with that. When you hear pundits talking about ‘the consumer’ in the media, it’s often a good exercise to replace it with ‘the producer’ and think about the implications.
I know fewer and fewer people who have drawn a salary throughout their career. I never have, myself, and I don’t expect the state pension to be up to much if I ever retire — and also don’t own any land, or expect to inherit any. I certainly don’t begrudge anyone trying to find their way to some source of support in retirement, but it is yet another reminder of just how uneven the distribution of wealth is. Similarly, I don’t think buy-to-let landlords are particularly horrible people for attempting to have some kind of income (though the mortgage lenders are another matter), but I do see them as acting in ways that perpetuate systems that are ultimately harmful. I don’t know what an alternative to that might look like, because I am certain it would be different in every case. Our own landlord has enough moral qualms about being a landlord that he keeps the rent very low for the area (though this is also to his benefit as we are very long-term tenants), but at the end of the the day (or at the end of our tenancy) he will own a home that we have spent over a decade paying for.
I left a bag on the Tube today. It had a mending kit and a waterproof and a couple of skirts and some other small items I was planning on mending. Oh, and a large marrow for the soup kitchen.
For me this is irksome and inconvenient. My other waterproof is far too warm for this time of year and I had just replaced all the specialty needles in the mending kit, after the previous kit (including darning looms) was stolen, and that part is upsetting. I will probably buy replacements for the waterproof and the mending needles (neither of which are anything I can reasonably fashion for myself), though I’m tempted to wait the three months just in case the bag does turn up… by then it will b cool enough that I might be able to get a good deal on the summer weight waterproof. The lost property department doesn’t keep “perishable foods” for obvious reasons, but I don’t know if they’ll throw the marrow away and keep the rest of the bag or what.
I know far too many people who would lose a lot more than that if they left their bag somewhere, though, and who certainly couldn’t afford to replace a waterproof. So if it doesn’t turn up in lost property, I hope whoever gets my waterproof appreciates it.
Yes, it’s always good to be reminded of degrees of privilege, and the property wheeler-dealing farmer is definitely a thing – a thing I don’t wish to defend. I’d guess most of us here would prefer to see a world in which farmers and growers could earn a modest living from producing food, while the possibilities of earning income from property ownership were curtailed. In such a world, the social composition and values in the farming sector would probably be somewhat different to the present. As I see it, a country basically gets the farmers its policies deserve.
My main point – which I’m sticking to! – is that it’s easy to notice the local wheeler-dealing that lines the pockets of certain farmers while failing to notice the more hidden and historical unearned forms of privilege that hold the wider economy aloft, particularly in the richer countries. However, I do agree with the commenters here – you, Joel, Bruce, Andrew – variously making the point that owner-occupier farmers can’t expect just to be left to farm their land as they see fit. But to build alliances with farmers around that it may be useful to focus more on the numerous agrarians who aren’t especially well off than on the few who are. I fear my hackles get too easily raised as a result of spending too much time around complacently consumerist farmer-blaming narratives. But there are definitely cases where blame can rightly be apportioned.
My farming career has demonstrated to me the enormous difficulties involved in giving proper recognition to (1) inter-generational and other forms of inequality (2) unearned privilege and (3) fair reward for work and responsibilities undertaken. I hope to write something about that in due course.
Sorry you lost your bag – indeed, let’s hope it’s gone to a good home.
I suppose the difference between buy-to-let landlords and landowning farmers is that buy-to-let landlords are, almost by definition, in the market to derive an income from other people’s labour, and landowning farmers are generally trying to create a livelihood from their own labour first with their landholdings as a fallback.
There are always exceptions — the best landlords do actually provide an important service to tenants (and so to wider society), even if I still think free markets are generally a terrible way to distribute housing. And the worst landowning farmers… well, I don’t personally know any I would categorise as such, but I’ll say the worst are probably corporations rather than individuals and it makes sense to find common cause with as many individuals as possible. (I am reminded, once again, of the destruction of the wheat pools in the Canadian prairies. Cargill has done very well out of it.)
Free markets are also a terrible way to distribute food, especially in this modern globalised world, but what we have now in food and agriculture is not a free market by any stretch of the imagination. We do indeed get the farmers (or farming corporations) our policies deserve, and even the most exceptional bad actors are not operating in a vacuum.
I am mindful of the sudden transition away from industrial chemicals in farming in Sri Lanka, too. If we were to suddenly end agricultural subsidies for all extractive (or financialised or short-term or whatever we want to call it) farming practices in the UK, I wouldn’t be surprised if we had a similar shock, though as we are already net importers of food perhaps the effects would likely be less detrimental.
Carrot root fly has found my carrots in the “high” bed (allegedly too tall for them, and it has only had garlic in it previously) at the main allotment, sigh. I saw some the other day, living their best life under the netting. So I’m trying to decide whether to spend a small fortune on parasitic nematodes (making these some of the most expensive carrots I’ll ever eat) or just hope the damage isn’t too bad (making for a potentially miserable Christmas dinner). I’m not convinced the nematodes are that much more sustainable in the longer-term than chemical measures would be, but at least I could theoretically breed them at home (though I don’t really fancy it, there are instructions online from one of the US agricultural extensions, but it involves live bait from a bait and tackle shop and I think I might face household mutiny if I tried to do that in the kitchen alongside the wine and the sourdough and the pickles…) and I am more confident that they won’t poison me. On a site with ~150 plots we do get every pest going and there is only so much I can do to balance the wider ecology; two of my direct neighbours actually use glyphosate. (I don’t think that has much effect either way on carrot root fly, but it’s not exactly a good route to a healthy and diverse soil biome.) I am also thinking about homemade sticky traps but it’s clearly too late for that this year, and anyway I don’t want to catch every other flying thing as well so I would still need netting. Maybe I’ll do some trials next year, identical carrot beds side by side, one with nematodes and one with sticky traps.
– Born Naked –
Let me take a moment to share my “Born Naked” framing for the ethics of access to livelihood (which some call ‘economics’, and often at our peril).
We’re all born naked, and as such have need of fundamentals like food, shelter and clothing, etc. These come from land, so accessing these directly and locally has — until very recently — been the principal way of attending to fundamental local needs vis-a-vis land.
Therefore (!) truly. If anything at all can be said to be a basic human right, access to land for the purpose of meeting our basic needs must be the most basic of all basic human rights, and this right — in a sane and reasonable society — would be attended to in solidarity, for everyone without exception — outside of a Market system for real estate.
That this is not so is the root of nearly every imaginable injustice.
That most or all of our food comes from grocery stores, not from the work of our own hands — and circulating freely as gift — has to be at the root of all that is broken in this world. Some things just ought not to be distributed on the basis of Markets. And this food is the archetype of this sort of thing.
I’m not saying some sort of brutal, thugish, murderous “dictatorship of the proletariat” should take it upon itself to forcefully re-distribute land at gunpoint. I’m saying something far more radical than that. I’m saying that we’re born naked, and we need one another in solidarity, and that it is morally repugnant that anyone with a capacity to work land to feed herself should be without land access for doing so. And I’m saying that real estate is a form of theft, per Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.
One man, bearing an authority granted by a king, glances at mountains and rivers and valleys … and declares this land belonging to the King, then divides the land for sale in the Market. This enriches this man and his King. And that’s how we got in this mess to begin with. It was done as a sort of magical spell, as black or dark magic. And it’s for us to figure out how to undo this dark magic without yet more violence and oppression.
Thanks for enabling time-limited editing of our posts, Chris!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=556&v=sP_19aj4-3A&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fdamnthematrix.wordpress.com%2F&source_ve_path=Mjg2NjY&feature=emb_logo
Interesting video n grazing versus row crop once you get past meat is good for you
Interesting topics, though we’re straying into other arenas of debate here so I’ll keep it brief.
One question I want to pursue in future is what might forms of landlordism that do provide a service to tenants and wider society look like, if they’re conceivable? And also how should we distribute land…
Another question I want to pursue further is if we don’t distribute food via markets, what other distribution mechanisms would we use and what might their drawbacks be?
The main non-market mechanism I’ve proposed in my writing is intra-household distribution, but a society can’t rely on that alone. Another one raised here recently has been gift economies – but I’d like to see the details of such economies laid out. The example Gunnar linked above is interesting, but it doesn’t seem like they’ve yet determined such details. I’ll be interested to see how it pans out longer term if and when they do.
Referencing Gunnar’s wider point too, I think there’s a place for giving food away, essentially because no growing system is so tight it never has a surfeit, no economic system is so tight it never produces want and there can be a value to unrequited giving. However, I’m not convinced a food production system based to a significant extent on unsystematized giving would last for long. In present circumstances, I’m somewhat opposed to giving food away except as an occasional friendly gesture or when it’s specifically geared around charitable giving as in some of Kathryn’s work (or indeed the solidarity veg boxes that our business sells at below-market prices), because I think it too easily supports the narrative that food is worthless. If lawyers and dentists were also giving their services away freely to all comers I might reconsider. In the absence of a political economy in which everybody is always paying it forward – which I believe is hard to sustain – then I think it’s better to recognise people’s time inputs, albeit to recognise them more evenly than in societies of monopoly capital.
As per earlier discussions, I think it’s important to distinguish between markets and capitalism – the latter is more intrinsically problematic than the former IMO. I like Amory Lovins’ point that markets make good servants, bad masters and terrible religions.
Anyway, this is all good stuff to come back to!
@ Chris –
“One question I want to pursue in future is what might forms of landlordism that do provide a service to tenants and wider society look like, if they’re conceivable? And also how should we distribute land…
Another question I want to pursue further is if we don’t distribute food via markets, what other distribution mechanisms would we use and what might their drawbacks be?”
And here we are in the future!
I sincerely believe we who grew up utterly embedded in Market economies have an almost impossible time of it trying to imagine a functioning and functional gift-oriented local economy, even when only some things are distributed on the basis of gift. We tend, therefore, to immediately find ourselves wondering about how a gift-oriented local food economy would sit in relation to dentistry and the like. And that’s perfectly understandable. I get it.
But….
But….
I’m thinking way outside the box, and drawing from human cultural traditions which preceded the Market economy, capitalism, industrialism, financialization, and even real estate as we now know it.
I don’t believe “returning” to some of these traditions can occur in the same way as they once occurred. There is no route to “going back” to how it was when we were all “primitive” “indigenous” people. There is only going forward. The future will not be a return to the past, but it will be a return to some of what was in the past, but in a novel context which the world hasn’t yet seen. And so we’ll be doing the old things in a new sort of way, inevitably.
As I said, above, we were all born naked, and so we’re all creatures of the same kind, ultimately. We eat, breathe, poop… and if we are lucky we grow old before we die. These are among the ten thousand facts of our existence which enable us to come to a certain sense of “the sacred” which is universal for breathing animals like ourselves. Without this embodied, Earthy, fleshy, enworlded sense of “the sacred” we tend to imagine ourselves as separate from one another. And then we enact our sense of being utterly separate from one another, and so what I mean when I say “neighborhood” and “village” is lost to us. Our imagination has gone astray from what almost all people in world history, prior to relatively recent times, have experienced (not believed!) as sacredness. Sacredness — the experience, not the thought — was underlying the soul / psyche / self’s relation to the natural world. If we were to intellectualize it, and speak of it in rational, analytical, cognitive terms we’d probably relate it to relation — to all our relations, to our all being here having been born naked together.
I no longer see it as necessary to explain the sacred. It’s like a joke. If it has to be explained, you might as well forget about it. It’s like the experience of swimming in a wild river among wildlife, or one’s first kiss (mine was literally underwater!). It’s like riding a bicycle. It’s known and learned (mainly) by doing and living, and some folks have been so badly robbed in life that they were not permitted an opportunity to get a sense of “the sacred” as a web of interwoven giving and caring for one another.
That is, to understand gift culture and gift economy (and gift ecology) one has first to understand “the sacred” as being interwoven with all which surrounds us, rather than being a discrete thing, self or object apart. A certain kind of generosity spontaneously emerges from this experiential “sacred”. It has nothing much to do with religious belief, or whether one has a secular, scientific or ‘religious’ worldview. It’s much deeper a sensibility than all of that. The sacred — or radical relationality (“interbeing”) is known directly as having been one among those born naked and breathing. It has to be almost beaten out of us for this reason, but it HAS been almost beaten out of almost all modern people. This being apart from the born naked and breathing is now “normal,” where once it was as rare as tomatoes in the Arctic winter.
The only way modern people can learn how to embody gift economy (beginning with food, say) within a neighborhood scaled community (such as a small village) is to transform what local community even means, as an idea and experience (!). We no longer have functioning and functional local neighborhood-scaled communities in the modern world — except in the rarest of instances. So the thought of food being circulated freely as gift puzzles us to no end. How can that possibly work?
Well, it can’t. Not without establishing real neighborliness in real neighborhoods or villages. And by “real” I mean neighborhoods where the fact of our sacred born naked condition is a living, breathing part of the local culture — or where empathy, kindness and compassion are UNDERSTOOD to be sacred and necessary. When we see the world through such eyes, ears and hearts (and skins), the sacredness of food, and the fact that we can celebrate and enliven its sacredness through gift distribution, has a felt sensibility which strikes those who feel it as obvious and necessary. That it ever became anything else becomes a startling, strange phenomenon which fails to make sense at all.
We who are born naked need one another. Meeting some of our needs in gift is one of our most fundamental needs. And we moderns have lost our sense of this orientation on the sacred, on relationship. We imagine the world as a Market. We expect to be paid for our labor… and to be hungry when the money isn’t flowing for us. It’s strange as hell. It bewilders me!
Call me a holy fool. I don’t care. Call me a monk in a preposterous church. I belong to no church other than the church of those born naked.
@ Chris –
“And also how should we distribute land…”
I’m taking “should” as a “normative” term, naturally. That is, it’s a question about ethics, morality, “the good”…. It’s that kind of political and economic question, isn’t it?
My answer is that we should distribute land so that no one, under any conditions, is ever without land access as a means to access to basic self-provisioning livelihood. (Community self-provisioning, or self-provisioning within a community context, and not merely in a nuclear family homesteading context, or a merely kin-based framing.)
This has NEVER been more the case than it is now, even though, for the moment, almost everyone in any of the relatively well-off countries gets their food and other basic needs from grocery stores, etc. This means of access to livelihood will not, and cannot, last. It has an expiration date, as does the entire mode of economy now dominant in the relatively rich countries.
Those who are willing to live materially simple subsistence ways of life like that of our ancestors should be able to choose that from among their options, regardless as to whether they can scrap together enough money or financial credit to purchase land — as most who would choose this way of life do not (myself included).
Industrial modernity once seemed to have solved this problem, and so our politics reflects our mistaken notion that the problem had been solved. It hasn’t been. Access to livelihood for millions now requires access to land as a means of access to subsistence livelihood. And this will be more and more the case as we wend our way down to the energy diet (belt tightening) which will inevitably become greater over time.
Societies seldom have made great transformations of any kind unless it was necessary, and the land distribution ethos I’m speaking of will be obviously necessary to a great many more of us as time unfolds. I think we must be proactive, if ethics has anything to do with such discussions. Does politics have anything to do with ethics in the so-called “developed world” though? I think not. Not anymore. Those days seem to be behind us, insofar as the politics of “the state” would have it.
All sensible politics of the future, then, will emerge mostly from outside of the politics of the state, as an embodied critique of the criminal class relations embodied in “state politics”.
The most astonishing thing is the degree to which our current “developed nation” politics are actually without reference to ethics! It truly blows my mind. If ethics are not rooted in compassion, empathy and care, is it ethics at all? And if it is not ethics, in what sense is it political?
I know, I’m blathering on and on and on.
Here’s a little more.:
“In present circumstances, I’m somewhat opposed to giving food away….”
The phrase and concept of “giving away” emerged mostly in the context of industrial modernity and capitalism. “Away” means essentially, not circulating. It means “I am not included in this community.I’m not a part of the circulation.” It’s the imagination of exchange, not of gift. Gift is always in circulation and always includes all who are born naked.
Even people who I admire for their soulful intelligence about — and enactment of — giving into community sometimes fall into calling what they do “giving away”. But if we understand the philosophy of aptness, giving away is clearly not apt. It’s NEVER apt!
I’ve only ever been able to simply IMAGINE (with my heart) what gift meant to other-than-modern people, since I’ve never been able to live it — because no one where I live has half a clue.
Most moderns do give (in a narrow sense) within our tight kinship groups, although even that habit is rapidly declining in the fierce heat of industrial capitalism. Now we speak of “return on investment” even within kinship. Everything has become an exchange. And a gift can never be an exchange.
After long years of thinking, reading, study, soulful inquiry (soul searching) on “gift” I realized that “giving away” is a very telling phrase, which tells a story of lack. What is lacking is *community*. In community, one gives *into* community. It is this very giving into it which is the essence of community. It then become possible to understand stealing from community, which is not to circulate one’s gifts while taking the gifts of others, or witholding from giving by transforming all relationship into Market relations.
The circulation of gifts is a fundamental basis of real community. Where this is not happening much, there is little community. Where it is happening a lot, there is much community. It’s not the only apt definition of what a community is, but it’s a crucial start!
When our blood is not circulating, and when the water cycle is not circulating, either we or the land is dead — or certainly dying. So why do we imagine living cultures that have been utterly absorbed into a Market economy, sans an appropriate amount of gift circulation?
The nature of gift in a functioning local community (emphasis on the immediate scale of “neighborhood” which I define as “walkable scale” — though no one would say you couldn’t’ ride a bicycle) is inclusion in the flow of gifts. Does a mother charge a son for a sandwich? No. Why should I charge you for a bundle of carrots if you are a neighbor? Can I not trust you? Can you not trust me? And why are we neighbors without trust?
A valuable discussion of “gift”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEZkQv25uEs&t=115s
Really enjoying your ramblings James and am entirely sympathetic with them – your conception of the spiritual and what flows from that echo my own thoughts. I also have to say that as one of Thatchers children (I was 8 or 9 when she came to power) and possibly a little autistic I’ve never been very good at being in community. And yet as I get older I feel attempts in that direction are ever more urgent
I realise that embedded in a market economy it’s hard to move in a different direction. Last year I went to visit a community acupuncture clinic on Dartmoor – people pay what they can afford on a sliding scale – no one asks how much you want to pay or checks that you have paid – you can drop cash in a box as you leave. I was chatting to the guy who set the clinic up – he said the whole thing is set up so people can take the piss but mostly they don’t.
I’m not necessarily against markets per se; I do think free markets (i.e. those with no protections against the tendency toward concentration of wealth, monopolies, and over-financialisation) are a poor tool to distribute goods and services that everyone needs. But many of what we think of as free markets are in fact markets with legal controls or incentives favouring corporations and even monopolists.
There are other forms of market control or market limitation. Tenancy rights are a good example. (We get the landlords our policies deserve…) Centrally planned economies are another, and (I think) usually a very bad idea because of the complexity involved.
One difficulty is how to organise any sort of protection for individuals or households or villages from the worst excesses of free markets in a supersedure state context. Perhaps the unwillingness of the current government to maintain or extend this protection by providing basic services such as housing, legal aid and dental care is even a sort of ideological supersedure? I don’t know; the state is, as ever, happy to actually exercise power, rightly or wrongly, if someone blocks a road or attempts to claim asylum. (The club is all their law…)
I do know lawyers who donate at least some of their time; I’m sure there must be at least some dentists who do. But I think feeding people who need it is best done in community for all sorts of reasons, and while often that might happen within the micro-community of a household (generally, parents do expect to have to provide for their children for a decade or two), wider need in the form of households experiencing destitution demands a wider response.
A lot of the veg that gets donated to the soup kitchen is stuff that would “otherwise go to waste”. Supermarkets bought it at too-low prices, can’t sell it, and it’s easier for them to donate it to us (via some kind of redistribution supply chain company) than to pay to dispose of it; some of what is donated really is unusable, so we have to pay for disposal instead, sigh. (I would still prefer to compost it, but the space and personnel limitations are a problem.) But it seems to me like overproduction/underpricing of cash crops is also partly tied to agricultural policy (i.e. market controls, or at least market incentives beyond those that exist in a truly free market) — you would know this better than I would, Chris. But I certainly agree that even without such policies, or even in an imaginary world without any markets, excess and lack will turn up. On an allotment scale it just makes sense to sow a few extra tomatoes in case some are hit by a late frost, for example, and there will always be bad years for some crops.
I don’t have a coherent and guaranteed-to-work model of what a replacement for markets (free or otherwise) would look like. I think trade in goods and services will continue to exist, and it is largely a matter of choosing what protections are in place against their worst disadvantages.
But I do have personal experience of the way that access to land (and time and skill to cultivate it) can act as a local protection against some of the negative aspects of markets as a distribution tool — I simply don’t purchase some of the more expensive fruit and veg anymore because the ones I grow are so much tastier, and only found out about some kind of tomato shortage recently because a friend mentioned it — and I can extrapolate a bit from that to a future situation where a lot more people are involved in some form of self-provisioning in addition to the other labour of their household, or even as a first priority, ahead of other labour. I am reminded, too, of the gleaning laws (see Leviticus, I don’t have the exact verses to hand), essentially a limitation of usufruct rights designed to protect the landless from starvation.
Yes, agree with all that. Regarding the supersedure state, I think we’re beginning to arrive there with the situation in which states offer less and less basic services while continuing to exact their dues and to try to police populations. A lot of people are still quite caught up in wanting to solve the problem with a better government (Starmer over Sunak…?) whereas I think a large part of the problem lies within the basic apparatus of the state itself. What happens if and when more people start to think in that way as services continue to decline is an interesting, if scary, prospect.
Your concept of supersedure states was on my mind as I read this recent article at The Nation:
https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/civilization-collapse-climate-change/
A few relevant snippets:
“…Canada has abandoned any hope of controlling a significant percentage of the fires raging in remote areas of the country and is simply allowing them to burn themselves out. Such areas are relatively unpopulated, but they do house numerous indigenous communities whose lands have been destroyed and who have been forced to flee, perhaps permanently.”
“When flooding threatened Beijing, officials sought to spare the capital from its worst effects by diverting floodwaters to surrounding areas…While that might have spared the capital from severe damage, the diverted water poured into Hebei, causing extensive harm to infrastructure and forcing those 1.2 million people to be relocated. The decision to turn Hebei into a “moat” for the capital suggests a leadership under siege by forces beyond its control.”
“…the Iranian government’s decision to declare an unprecedented two-day national holiday on August 2nd, involving the closure of all schools, factories, and public offices, in response to record heat and drought. For many Iranians, that “holiday” was nothing but a desperate ploy to disguise the regime’s inability to provide sufficient water and electricity – a failure that’s bound to prove ever more destabilizing in the years to come.”
For the moment, these states no doubt have the resources to provide after-the-fact relief to the affected populations. Nonetheless, the decision to sacrifice people’s homes and to risk their lives as a result of a cost-benefit calculation will almost certainly lead to an (entirely justifiable) erosion of trust that can’t be repaired.
I’ve been noticing a very broadly dispersed (worldwide) trend, in which flood and fire insurance, as examples, are rapidly becoming far too expensive for most residents of a given locality (e.g., part of Florida, or all of it), or they are simply no longer available in these areas. This is, of course, due to major recent changes in climate. I suppose crop insurance is also involved, though I’ve not investigated this in any detail. But it certainly does all seem to add up to a major economic and political stressor to the larger systems! And it would seem that it’s adding to the phenomenon being discussed here (supercedure state).
In 2006 or 2007 I was considering applying for UK citizenship (I became eligible to apply in 2005). Then I started seeing adverts on bus stops, sponsored by the DWP, along the lines of encouraging people to rat out others for benefits fraud in the form of casual, cash-in-hand work.
It put me off so much that I didn’t apply. Possibly unwise on my part, as it is now around ten times as expensive and difficult, but… sigh.
I can’t say much has improved since then. The way many people relate to the government seems to be similar to the way they relate to the royal family and other celebrities: more as entertainment than as public servants. This seems to be accompanied by a lack of feeling or exercising any agency with regard to (in fairness, intractable and wicked) political problems.
Circuses and no bread will only be tenable for so long, though. We’ve seen that before.
On the other hand, I wonder about the role of energy in many of the most oppressive regimes of the past — slavery, Italian and German fascism, etc. Is it fair to say these have only been possible due to the state having a monopoly not only on violence but on the technological advances and energy to enforce servitude? I am not sure what happens when that falls apart. Traditionally, labour shortages have been pretty good for improving the rights of the working class, and an energy shortage is at least partly a labour shortage, but that too has been in a context of economic expansion (such as post-Black Death mercantilism, and post-WW2 colonialism-fuelled rebuilding in Western Europe). It is hard to say what comes next without falling back on what has happened before… but just because we have always previously been able to phase-shift to a newer, cheaper, more abundant source of energy does not mean we will be able to pull that off this time.
(More on energy in your next post, I see.)
Value .
In this western world of near zero want the value of a Cartier watch is valued higher than a tomato , in this crazy world value of the basics of life are taken for granted unlike the rest of the world that spends half their income on food , those that provide western food are not valued ,complaints against the patriarchy completely ignore the gulf between farmers incomes and merchant bankers , just another smoke and mirrors job .
Kathryn ‘s allotments would be sold in a heartbeat if someone wants to build on it , huge amounts of Britain the best land is under housing yet some blather about re wilding hill land , how about rebuilding the water meadows .
Land distribution is a ” problem ” removing the value of land by removing subsidies and all the tax breaks / write offs it has plus removing taxes from land making politicos of all colours live within the means of a local sales tax that every body sees in every purchase and vote accordingly .
Perhaps the homestead act could work as a base point , working the land for five years yourself before it becomes yours would be a incentive , yes there would be massive problems but it could be a start especially if hunger was barking at the door .
I remember Russia inviting UK farmers in to sort out the collective farms when communism collapsed , listening to the whining about the loss of black sea grain exports it must have worked .
I don’t think the allotments would be a very good place to build housing: they’re on a floodplain! It actually used to be used as a water meadow.
@Kathryn –
I looked up the term “water meadow”….
I was advised not to confuse water meadows with flood-meadows.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water-meadow
I have seen both, of course, but did not know their names. The four acre hay field I worked as a youngster was irrigated using movable pipes and sprinklers.
And yes — if I could get a smallholding with a four-figure deposit and it would be mine after working it for five years I would be very, very keen. But that happened in North America as a technique to colonise the West. The land was not paid for by the governments who were offering it.
I doubt that large landowners, here or in America, would be very happy if the current government said “right, we’re taking half your land and giving it to whoever will move onto it and build a life there.” And I don’t think there’s really enough wild or common land left to do it any other way. Perhaps some kind of voluntary scheme for the landowners?
Removing the incentives ( again tax breaks , subsidies )to hold large land holdings would make a considerable amount of land available ,removing the LLC / PLC label would alter things considerably, land prices should become what they used to be , what the land will produce , not what the land can milk out of the tax payer , ( round here that would be around $ 7000 an acre ) . Land prices are crazy , Pecan orchards are selling for $14000 an acre , your expected income is $750 an acre per year , it is seen as an investment ( expecting land prices to go forever higher )not an income by the financial community . The income can never pay back the loan .
I’ll respond briefly to some of James’s points – maybe at greater length in the future (we’ve already discussed property, economies and gifts at some length in the past).
Taking your born naked starting point, where I agree with you is that that prompts acknowledgment of a certain natal equality (which is relevant to property, and I agree on the right to land) and a dependence upon others that gainsays any notion of final autonomy – were it not for others, we’d all be dead within a few hours of birth.
But thereafter I think I have an earthier agrarian take on how things play out that only partly connects with yours.
Out of infant dependence there is a path of learning which aims to arrive at adult competence. Figuratively, I might expect my mother to give me a sandwich at the age of five, whereas at the age of thirty-five I’d generally expect to be providing sandwiches for myself. At the age of (more than) fifty-five I’m giving sandwiches to my mother. I might give a sandwich to my neighbour, and it would probably be a good thing that would build connection between us. But if my neighbour came by every day wanting a sandwich, I might start to wonder what had gone wrong with their capacity to provide sandwiches for themselves. Iterate that, and you tend to generate the dependencies of patron-client relationships. An emphasis on wider community dependence and gifting isn’t always innocent of power and status relations, even in non-capitalist or pre-capitalist societies.
The fact that I don’t routinely give sandwiches to my neighbour doesn’t mean I don’t trust them. But they are my neighbour, not my mother. Societies create functional differentiations of roles. There are many roles. If I ask who today is going to feed the baby, earth up the potatoes, sharpen the hoes and make offerings to the gods, I’m not satisfied with the answer “don’t worry – somebody in the community will do it”. They might not, and that would be a problem, which is recognised in all societies by allocating roles. Often unfairly, so there is a case for reallocation. But not for no allocation, which also tends to be unfair in the rare cases it’s attempted.
My reading of history around what we might call gift vs contract societies is different to yours. In fact, I believe that the logic of your analysis draws some of its energy from modern capitalist society and is in danger of becoming a kind of idealised version of it. People are good at creating symbolic systems (money is one) that generate connectedness and action in the world of one kind or another, often beyond the capacity of local ecosystems and communities to sustain them, so they become expansionary and potentially predatory. Expecting an abstracted human community to give me, without strings attached, what I believe I need is a core dimension of modernity and its crises.
On the other hand, while ‘gift’ societies rarely place as much emphasis on penny-counting as contemporary capitalist ones, and while gifting within them usually does reference the sacred, and every other aspect of society, (a ‘total prestation’ in Mauss’s classic analysis), I disagree with your implication that there is/was a kind of pre-capitalist or non-capitalist state of grace in which gifting is always motivated by sacred kindness and empathy. I’ve mentioned caste relations in India, which stretch back in one form or another into antiquity, several times recently as but one of numerous counter-examples – Gloria Raheja’s book ‘The Poison in the Gift’ is one exploration of this theme.
People do, however, seek higher meaning than sandwiches, potatoes and hoes, and I believe you’re right to suggest that this manifests in a search for connection, oneness, sacredness (albeit that to some degree these inevitably imply their contraries – separation, individuation, profanity are also part of human experience, and not only in modern capitalist societies).
So if I’m a peasant cultivator going about my humdrum daily business, full of concerns about feeding the baby or earthing up the potatoes and you come to me as a monk in your church (which is not necessarily preposterous) and tell me a story about sacred connectedness, I might start to follow you if your story is good enough. As I related in my last post, there’s a long history of peasant millenarianism, from medieval Christianity to modern Marxism. However, in my view it often ends badly and I’m a little concerned about the tone in some parts of your comments which suggest access to a higher truth that ordinary folk don’t see. This is where millenarianisms of both the medieval and modern sort can get repressive when they connect to social power. I don’t think one should make too much of a fetish of community or sacredness for this reason – it can have unintended negative consequences.
Chris wrote, “Expecting an abstracted human community to give me, without strings attached, what I believe I need is a core dimension of modernity and its crises.”
You might get some pushback about the no-strings-attached clause. Perhaps the other side of the coin is that the abstracted modern human community, via its governance, tends to expect (and forcibly demand) us to give tax payments with few to no strings really attached. The benefits of this taxation are somewhat abstracted. In the US, at least the Social Security and Medicare taxes are taxed separately, unlike the large chunk of taxes used for the defense budget.
It seems that in a true gift economy, the giving cannot be imposed by force (like taxation), instead the giving is voluntary. A step towards that would be for some specific tax payments to be voluntary, where we could opt-out of certain taxes (and the benefits they supposedly provide us).
In the US, if a religious group (like the Amish) makes provisions to take care of their dependent members, they can opt out of paying federal taxes for Social Security and Medicare. This is permitted as long as they waive any rights to Social Security or Medicare benefits.
The Amish evidently don’t have their own taxes or tithes, but they do seem to expect their members to give donations (when they are able) to community members as needs arise.
“The Amish encourage members to give generously to others in their communities as each need arises. They believe that this kind of giving is reminiscent of how early Christians helped each other. Amish giving often exceeds the [typical Christian] 10 percent tithe. It also provides a reprieve from giving for families experiencing financial difficulties. As needed, Amish communities pool resources to provide for healthcare, sustenance and other needs for individual families.”
https://classroom.synonym.com/what-are-tithes-offerings-for-12083147.html
@ Chris –
This posting is a bit long, and it didn’t post on my earlier try, so I’ll try breaking it into two sections to see if the system will accept it.
________
Well, I certainly do not hope to set myself up as a religious cult leader! LOL. I’m not a millennarian — for all kinds of reasons. But I *am* interested in subjecting the political philosophy of the dominant culture around me to critical reappraisal of a somewhat radical kind.
Do I know some things that others generally do not know? Yes, of course, and so do you. And so to most all of us. Some of what I know about I came to know about because I was very curious about “what went wrong”. So I spent many years wondering about and asking questions and reading about what may have gone wrong, and why, and how. And I do think something went wrong in our political history and culture. And so I suppose we can do better than we’ve been doing.
Much of what I know from this protracted inquiry remains largely tacit (and perpetually on a horizon of incipience), and some of my studies recently have revealed that much of what any of us know is more tacit than explicit. So it’s difficult to explain some of it (!) — and difficult not to be at least slightly misunderstood when trying to do so.
Recently, it’s becoming increasingly apparent to me that I think something went terribly wrong in how modernity shaped its conventions of political philosophy, perhaps especially in our appropriation of the ideas of the European Enlightenment. And I do think what went wrong has a great deal to do with property relations, especially with regard to land access and use.
There are not just a few, but many strands and themes involved in this something having gone wrong, thus giving modernity a weirdly stranded and misshaped conceptual schema in the form of political philosophy. And I suspect some of what went wrong in the emergence of modern political philosophy is deeply related to what went wrong in modernity’s ethical philosophy… and that these two are deeply intertwined. But, unfortunately, innovating a whole new conceptual schema is hampered by my mainly only having a mishaped political philosophy (its conceptual schemas) to draw upon. This is where the tacit diminsion of knowing and knowledge come into play in my philosophizing. If I take my tacit knowing seriously, and I do, then I unmistakably feel that what has gone awry in our Western philosophical tradition, regards ethics and (thus) politics, is the overwhelming emphasis we place on the notion of obligation, in contrast to the emphasis we place on what some simply call “care” as in feminist “care ethics”. But I don’t think feminist care ethics goes nearly far enough in innovating a liberating and illuminating alternative ethical (and thus political) stance.
Enlightenment (and thus modern) political philosophy leans heavily on contract theory, which seeks to provide a “rational” basis for conceiving what we owe to one another by way of obligations. (What we tend to mean by “justice” is defined by such obligations.) That is, at least, its normative arm, flowing out of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. But I *feel* something is deeply inadequate, at best, in centering ethics and politics on the notion of obligations — because (in part) doing so tends to obscure — and sometimes obviate — what I call the “opportunity ethics” orientation. I coined the term “opportunity ethics” (or maybe one or two others have used it before me?) to distinguish its orientation from “obligation ethics” — which emphasizes duty, or what we owe to one another, are obligated to do.
Almost everything about modern / Enlightenment ethics and political philosophy rubs me the wrong way, which is partly why I was reluctant to use the word “right”/”rights” concerning land access. It’s not that I think we ought to abandon the notion of “rights”. I think what we need to do is to set the notion of rights down in another conceptual schema, so that the term makes a whole new kind of sense than it generally does. Rights, in modern political discourse, are that which we are rationally obligated to provide one another in social contract terms. The social contract becomes law, and the state becomes the basis for ensuring that the state/law machine is well oiled, calibrated and maintained in smooth order. The modern Market is a key feature of this well-oiled machine.
But it seems to me that the state (the modern state, at least) is an impostor, has always been an impostor. Its claim to legitimacy and aptness rests on its ostensible purpose of rendering justice (a damed complicated word, that).
I’m speaking as an inhabitant of that portion of Turtle Island (North America) known as The United States of America. I put it this way, rather than simply to say I am an American, or USAian. I’m not. Not really. The America of the founders were bullies and dominators, not egalitarians. So there was no intention of justice in their hearts when they bullied their way into “power”.
Here’s a passage on this topic from my essay, On Commoning, which partly explains what I mean here.:
“Curiously, however, ostensible attempts to manifest the ethos of egalitarianism in the wake of this egalitarian “Enlightenment,” regarded at the time as revolutionary, resulted in examples of nation states such as the United States of America, in which the ‘revolutionaries’ were exclusively self-appointed property- owning white men who excluded women, indigenous people, and black slaves (kidnapped in Africa), etc. They also excluded ‘free’ white men when those men were not holders of property. In other words, they formed a pseudo-democratic, racist (white supremacist), oligarchical republic. They created a hierarchically tiered hegemonic state exclusively designed of, by and for rich white men just like themselves. In time, this republic became widely defined and described as a democracy and as a beacon of egalitarian ‘liberty’ for the rest of the world to emulate. These ‘revolutionaries’ and ‘founding fathers’ appointed themselves to gather together in what is called a “constitutional convention” in which not a single woman, slave, native American or poor white man was invited to participate. This, clearly, is precisely what a cultural shadow looks like. And we (or, rather, they) are continuing to repeat the general pattern to this day.”
So “America” was founded on a series of injustices.
I wonder, Chris, what you think about Weber’s definition of the state. I tend to lean on his definition, but the whole topic is controversial everywhere, I know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence
If perhaps the principal monopoly-holding power which the state appropriated for itself is that of “the legitimate use of violence,” clearly the state tends to make similar (at least) claims for itself … in the form of the making of laws, taxation, military conscription, etc.
… To be continued below …
… Continued from above …
But all that I’m saying in this and other recent posts from me centers less on the concept of justice than it does on “care” — which is a word I choose for its partial paradigmatic shifting efficacy emerging (only partly) in “care ethics”. The best of care ethics seeks to transcend a conceptual schema which is too narrowly focused on obligation, duty… and the sense of “justice” which grounds in social contract theory and its associated obligations.
At its best, care ethics emerges more from a sense of what I call *opportunity* than out of duty or obligation. So, the kind of care ethics I have in mind (in all I’ve been saying in my most recent posts) begins from within an established sense of belonging (belonging together), a term which can only really have its political and ethical sense from within another conceptual schema and paradigm than that of social contract theory and “obligation ethics”.
We who speak in favor of “opportunity ethics” do not assume that it is “unnatural” (opposed to ‘human nature’) to embody “care” (generosity, kindness, mutuality, solidarity, mutual aid, etc.) Rather, we suspect just the opposite is true — at least within those cultural milieux where this ethos is deliberately nurtured and has been so nurtured over generations. That is, we don’t regard human existence in a “state of nature” (Hobbes) as a “war of all against all”. Nor do we imagine that treating human existence as fundamentally about competition for “resources” (e.g., land, food, water, whatever) can possibly lead to either a happy or a dignified social environment. Indeed, we seek to cultivate cooperation, sharing, giving, etc., as the very basis of our political lives.
This is some of the background context for my thinking about how land and food can (and–sometimes–ought to be) distributed within local communities. Or, rather, as many of these conditions as can arise without being imposed by force … or even obligation.
But, as I read your response to me above, it was clear you only very partially understood what I was getting at. What I was getting at is that the essentially political “problems” you raised issues with have solutions which emerge within a very different set of assumptions, conceptual schemas (paradigm) than the angle of response you provided. You worry that these essentially political problems haven’t got solutions within a gift economy for food within local communities at scales larger than a household (e.g., village or neighborhood).
If politics is basically a matter of decision-making in groups, then how a group (a village, a neighborhood) works out a viable way of seeing to it that there are no freeloaders, or labor oppressors / exploiters can differ quite significantly. In cultures which manage such distribution through various kinds of exchange systems (such as markets), the solution/s arise from a different set of premises and social conditions than those found in some well-functioning communalistic cultures.
Likely, what is given into community, in the practice of such commoning, is more often labor rather than food, per se — though the labor may be toward growing, harvesting, preserving and preparing food. It works just fine where it works well, just as it does at the household scale within kinship groups. So I suppose my main economic point here is that just as a household (with kinship) requires no market to enact self-provisioning within the household, so can a neighborhood or village — provided the members of this local community actually care for one another as we’d expect the family to do. Thus, if food is locally produced, there is no reason most or all of it has to be within a market or other exchange system.
I’m thinking here of a potluck lunch, in which many people come together to share a meal. Y’know, the fella who repeatedly brings nothing to contribute and gobbles up more than his share will not be invited again, right? Neighborhoods can be like this. They have their own sort of immune systems.
Finally, it can be a joy to work with others toward a common goal or aim — such as feeding one another with wholesome, good food.
I’m thinking here of a potluck lunch, in which many people come together to share a meal. Y’know, the fella who repeatedly brings nothing to contribute and gobbles up more than his share will not be invited again, right? Neighborhoods can be like this. They have their own sort of immune systems.
Sometimes that immune system consists of making explicit the implicit social contract involved in a pot luck meal (in the UK, called a “bring-and-share”). I think even Food Not Bombs has some implicit social contracts.
But I think the primary purpose of most pot luck and other communal meals at scales larger than a household isn’t, in fact, to feed everyone in a community, but to build relationships via the labour and interaction involved in preparing and sharing food. It is true that in some of these situations, some people are fed who otherwise wouldn’t have been, but there are ways to achieve more equitable food distribution which give recipients more choice, autonomy, privacy and flexibility than are practical with communal meals at set times. This often will take the form of some kind of food bank, but not always (indeed, the purpose of allotments was to give the working poor access to land for growing food; that we have food poverty in the UK and neither a system of rationing nor a provision of land for growing vegetables on the scale of the WW2 victory gardens is, frankly, embarrassing and shameful, but here we are.)
Meanwhile: yes, sometimes humans are competitive, fearful, selfish or unkind. I certainly recognise all of those traits in myself. We could get into a chicken-or-egg argument about whether people are “like that” because of the toxic wider political context in which we live or whether we have created a toxic wider political context because we are competitive, fearful, selfish and unkind. I don’t think there’s a lot of point in it, though: people were also competitive, fearful, selfish and unkind long before (or well beyond the influence of) the Western European enlightenment period.
But people can also be creative, courageous, altruistic and loving (and I can recognise these tendencies in myself, too). Certainly cultivating such tendencies in our own character is worthwhile. Certainly it is worth attempting to construct households, communities and wider political contexts where such tendencies can be nurtured and increased. But actually doing so is non-trivial. Do you have a suggested methodology, or are you just sortof hoping enough people will come to feel that generosity is better to reach some kind of tipping point? That is a beautiful vision, but also quite hopeless in a way, because there isn’t a clear path on how to get there from here. “If I were going there, I wouldn’t start from here” is a fair reply, but… here is where we actually are in all our human glory and failure. We have to start where we are. That will involve deconstructing some of our existing mental and social and physical structures, and it will involve reconstructing others, and others still we will invent from whole cloth. It will, I think, involve sharing food and other resources. But “if only we didn’t have this dratted Enlightenment-era contractual attitude, everything would be better” strikes me both as historically incorrect and rather wishful thinking. If I were going to point to a one-time fork in human history that is to blame for the detrimental aspects of humanity, I would be reduced to allegory and myth.
Apologies if I am misunderstanding your points.
Finally, I think you might enjoy this poem by the Sufi mystic Hafiz:
https://www.poetseers.org/the-poetseers/hafiz/hafiz-poems-the-gift/hlove/1-2-2/
Just a heads up on this article, which mentions Chris Smaje’s most recent book.
George Monbiot on factory farming: a Simpler Way critique
By Ted Trainer, originally published by Resilence.org
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-08-26/george-monbiot-on-factory-farming-a-simpler-way-critique/
Thanks for the new comments. Briefly in response:
@James – I agree with a lot of what you say. Specifically, I agree broadly with your remarks about the bad turn taken by modernity & Enlightenment (the way you set this up is quite similar to Alasdair MacIntyre, who I’ve mentioned quite a bit of late, as well as Eugene McCarraher, whose book I reviewed here a while back, and the discussions here a year or so ago mostly with Andrew and Sean Domencic on natural law – something I hope to come back to).
Regarding property in land, the main problem with modernity as I see it is the emphasis on abstracted, fungible, aggregative property. Looking historically at a plethora of populous agrarian societies oriented to intensive sedentary cultivation, something like private property rights for the farm household is ubiquitous (Robert Netting – Smallholders, Householders) but perhaps, as per Andrew’s recent comment, there’s a case for not emphasizing the commonality with modern western notions of property. ‘Collectively agreed opportunities for exclusive household appropriation’ or some such mouthful might have to do.
I think it can be a good move to jettison the language of rights, duties and obligations and to emphasize an ethic of care. But then it’s important to attend to the question of care towards those who care. In your previous comment you invoked the example of a mother – the archetype of selfless care in many societies. This archetype has prompted a Marxist-feminist critique – care as work, a category of exploited labour like many others, women’s wombs as mechanisms enchained by capital towards accumulative ends and so forth. I think that kind of critique often gets pushed too far and empties care of the kind of organic and sui generis importance that I think you rightly insist on.
All the same, I do believe it’s important to acknowledge the burden of care – emotional labour, mental load etc. and societies do generally figure this into their structuring of relations, albeit often not very evenly. I’m not sure I fully understand your intentions in the final few paragraphs of your comment, but for example when you write “ the essentially political “problems” you raised issues with have solutions which emerge within a very different set of assumptions, conceptual schemas (paradigm) than the angle of response you provided” I think I disagree. I don’t think my comments are limited to some modernist schema of rights and contract, for example. Emotional load is more universal than that, and it needs attending to.
I hear it said very often that modern society is too individualistic, too contractual, too rights-oriented and we need something more collective and more oriented to care. I agree. But I think this kind of sentiment too often waves away the need to develop specific institutions that care for the carers and acknowledge their caring (in more familiar modern economic parlance, you could frame this in terms of defending against free riding, but it’s a wider point).
I’ve seen a lot of well-meaning initiatives founder because somebody was assuming too much burden of caring that went unacknowledged by others, until they burnt out (stopped being able to care so much). Sometimes people impute such failures to our modern inability to be more collective and caring. I don’t think that’s so, but even if it is, that’s the basis on which we need to build institutions in the here and now so we can’t just wave it away.
I agree that it can be a joy to work with others towards a common aim, but generally it also requires quite a lot of relationship work, depending to some extent on who the others are. I think the historical evidence on commoning shows how burdensome that relationship work can be and the limitations that societies therefore tend to put around it. It puzzles me how rarely people seeking an alternative to capitalist modernity also emphasize the joy of competently furnishing one’s livelihood needs alone, without overreliance on the vast collective architecture of modern society. Working with others and working alone (and developing personal skill-sets) are not mutually exclusive over the course of time, but I’m curious as to why the latter gets so little attention. It’s common enough in many non-modern societies. In ‘The Other Side of Eden’ Hugh Brody describes two Inuit hunters in a life-threatening situation far from home who disagreed about the best remedy for their situation, so they split up and each pursued their preferred option alone. I’m in awe of that kind of personal autonomy and agency, set within a wider collective context.
@Bruce. Regarding an ‘honesty box’ approach to work and care, I’m all in favour of such efforts, and more broadly of people trying to piece together collective alternatives to modern forms of work and organisation. In my experience, sometimes they work pretty well and sometimes they don’t, and it’s good to try to understand why as clearly as possible. Sometimes again because of a lack of care towards the carer – or, more to the point, the invisibility of the care given to those who receive it – though that’s probably not a danger at an acupuncture clinic.
Bottom line for me is that I think it’s great for people to experiment with different forms of work organisation, household structure and care giving. But also to appreciate that no system is perfect and to address their drawbacks. And not to insist that others follow it on the basis that it’s a higher truth (I’m not suggesting that anyone here is doing that!) By the way, I found Michael Sandel’s book ‘What Money Can’t Buy’ quite good in all its many examples of the surprising complexity of people’s motivations around economic relationships. Daniel Kahneman too, who somebody mentioned recently.
@Steve. Yes, you’re right that in reality there are firm strings attached … and they tend to run from the citizenry to the state. All the same, there’s a powerful narrative about the modern economy that evades that reality, along various lines – open source, free stuff, never had it so good, nudge economics, tech improvements to help the poor, economic efficiency, price signals and so on. Quite a lot of it carries over into ‘alternative’ thinking.
@Ernie. Thanks for those supersedure state examples. Very interesting.
And thanks James for alerting me to Ted Trainer’s piece. I like Ted, but he does have a bit of a habit of presenting my writing as being somehow more mainstream and less radical than his, to the point of full-on misrepresentation. Ultimately I think our prescriptions are pretty similar. It’s beyond me how he infers that I “proceed as if the task will be to supply the present kind of settlements via the more or less present delivery systems, that is getting food to gigantic and distant cities, via high-tech, infrastructure-elaborate, transport dependent, energy-intensive, soil damaging processes, and then dumping it.” I mean, where have I ever said anything like that??? Ah well, at least he’s not accusing me of ‘patriarchal disaster feudalism’!
@ Chris –
Thanks for the many mentions of Alasdair MacIntyre. I read maybe half of that book some years ago (probably at least a decade), and got distracted by other books, which I too often allow. I found it a remarkable read, though — but I think my intellectual development at the time wasn’t quite ready for this book. I just discovered through Wikipedia that MacIntyre is still alive, last anyone checked. But he was born in 1929, which makes him as old and the rolling hills. Anyway, I’ll see if I can find where I put his book. My bookshelves really need proper ordering! It’s embarrassing. I have far too many books in my little casita, and so many are just piled up the way Noam Chomsky piles his up in his office and desk. The Japanese have a word for people like me: tsundoku. In my case, it’s a matter of having a much larger appetite than a belly, or teeth for chewing. That, and my local library’s Friends of the Library volunteers run a tiny bookstore here where they sell donated books for one and two dollars! …. Anyway, I’m beginning to understand that MacIntyre was as much a political thinker as an ethical one, and that’s reason enough for going on a search for that book of his.
The complexities of some of the things we’re talking about are, as it seems to me, rather like balls of yarn strewn wildly all over the house by kittens, and so it’s hard to keep track of precisely the patterns and connections we’re exploring. So it isn’t always clear if you understand me well enough, or even if I understand me well enough — and vice versa regards my understanding you well enough. But I appreciate the engagement! Very much. I’d much rather dialogue about these things than to soliloquy.
I’m delighted to know you’re also interested in exploring a kind of political ethics rooted more in care than in obligation and social contract theory. And, actually, I’m becoming increasingly interested in going deep into political ethics (and aesthetics) as an inquiry. I have a very strong hunch that what’s broken in our (modern) politics is what is broken in our ethics and aesthetics, and if we’re going to evolve into a healthier political culture we’re going to have to begin from another starting place, and from within another paradigm, than the one we inherited from the Enlightenment.
In Myers-Briggs’ (and Keirsey’s) temperament sorter systems I’m an INFP, and no I don’t imagine these to be “pseudo-science” as some claim. We INFPs are real critters. We exist. But we’re a bit rare, or at least not common. This means I lean toward intuition and feeling a lot in my quest for understanding and knowing / knowledge. And as I get older, and learn more, I’m discovering something about intuition and its relation to tacit knowledge / knowing. (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge ) … (I like to point out that knowledge is a noun, and knowing is a verb, and one is a thing and the other a process … and so these are importantly different things … and knowing too often gets neglected in the bargain.) I’m learning to deeply respect tacit knowing as a guide to discovery and innovation. And I really know when some bit of tacit knowing is important, vital, potentially illuminating … when I feel it — as in really feel it, such as in the form of shimmering sensations in my body. It appears we all know things we don’t know how to put into words, and these knowings are often of vital importance, but we’re not sure how to shape them up into propositional statements (as cognitive scientists understand ‘propositional’). This ties into the whole domain of paradigms and conceptual schemas. Our understandings of things are always set within these. But when the paradigms or conceptual schemas of one thought or insight are a mismatch, we’re often left staring into a void and not having a clue how to say what we mean to say. That’s what’s been happening with me a lot lately, as I seem to be leaving behind many of the most basic conceptual schemas and paradigms operative in our contemporary world. The popular “social imaginary” just appears to me to be generating crises and problems which are irresolvable within their paradigms. Only leaping out of the paradigm offers potential routes to problem solving … or dilemma responses which make sense.
To be honest, most ethics discourse just doesn’t make any real sense to me anymore, and especially when it comes to the intersection of ethics and politics. I think this is because, as a culture, we’re not truly acknowledging that our real problem with ethics is not an absence of knowing what to do, or how to do it, where ethics fits into the equation, but that we just don’t f**king care to do the “ethical” thing, and would prefer not to have to do that. We’d like to care, we suppose, but we just f**king don’t give a sh*t. We’d rather not bother. After all, there is this Giant Conveyor Belt running (modernity) and it’s a kind of well-oiled machine which makes widgets which make widgets (yes, widget-making widgets) and it’s just not part of my job description to challenge it on the ground that it is akin to a paperclip maximizer ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence#Paperclip_maximizer ) which externalizes all costs, social and ecological, etc. “I mean, I have to pay rent / mortgage … and I have medical insurance to pay and my kid needs a college fund! And what about retirement!? I haven’t time for ethics, or politics grounded in it. F**k you!” …. “Soul, losing my soul you say? Didn’t Darwin show that we don’t have souls? You can stick this soul thing where the sun don’t shine. I don’t believe in Heaven and Hell!”
But I digress.
I left something out of that I meant to include. Sorry to go on and on.
Remember Descartes in search of a “method” and not knowing where to begin — at least ostensibly?
I’m no Descartes (not by a long shot), but I feel as if I’m wanting to provide a whole new starting place for political philosophy (and thus political praxis). I suspect care ethics is at least a huge clue in search of a new start, but I also suspect that a lot of care ethics is stranded in academic eddies and whirlpools … or more stagnant ponds.
I want to dump most of political philosophy into the harbor, only I don’t want to poison the harbor. This shit isn’t tea, after all. It’s just dreck and untreated sewage sludge.
People don’t respond to “obligations”. It just doesn’t work! We respond to care … to love. And honestly, I don’t think Jesus ever walked on water. Nor was he born of a virgin. But if the guy even existed, he was right about one thing. It’s about love. The Beatles got it right, too, only it isn’t romantic love we’re talking about. And all of this love stuff starts to sound sappy, doesn’t it? I mean, can we generate a whole f**king political philosophy from it without it getting caught in a whirl about Jesus and Hallmark Cards?
I asked ChatGPT (sigh).
Me:
What are Alasdair MacIntyre’s ideas about politics?
ChatGPT:
Alasdair MacIntyre is a prominent philosopher known for his contributions to ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of virtue. His ideas about politics are deeply rooted in his broader moral and philosophical framework. One of his most significant works on politics is his book “After Virtue,” where he critiques modern moral and political theories and proposes a return to virtue ethics as a foundation for understanding and evaluating political systems.
Here are some key ideas that MacIntyre presents in relation to politics:
The Decline of Modern Ethics: MacIntyre argues that modern moral and political discourse is in a state of moral confusion because it lacks a coherent foundation. He criticizes both utilitarianism and deontological ethics for their inability to provide a comprehensive account of morality. According to MacIntyre, without a shared understanding of the virtues and the telos (purpose) of human life, ethical and political discussions become fragmented and lack meaningful substance.
Virtue Ethics and Tradition: MacIntyre advocates for a return to virtue ethics, a moral framework that focuses on cultivating virtuous character traits and pursuing human excellence. He draws on the Aristotelian notion that ethics is about flourishing and living a good life. MacIntyre emphasizes the importance of tradition and community in developing virtues, as they provide the necessary context for understanding what it means to live well.
Narrative Unity: In his later works, MacIntyre emphasizes the role of narratives in shaping our moral and political understanding. He argues that ethical principles and political institutions make sense within the context of larger narrative frameworks. Political life is seen as a shared story, where individuals contribute to the ongoing narrative and seek to embody virtues that align with the narrative’s goals.
Critique of Liberal Individualism: MacIntyre is critical of the modern liberal individualist framework that prioritizes individual rights and autonomy. He argues that this framework fails to provide a meaningful account of the common good and a shared conception of virtue. Instead, he suggests that individuals are deeply embedded in communities and traditions, and their identities are shaped by these larger contexts.
Political Fragmentation and the Common Good: MacIntyre laments the fragmentation of modern societies, where differing moral and political viewpoints often lead to an inability to find common ground. He calls for a recovery of the idea of the common good, which requires a shared understanding of the virtues and the pursuit of human flourishing. For MacIntyre, a just political system should be based on a moral framework that aims at the common good rather than individual self-interest.
Small-Scale Communities: MacIntyre suggests that the revival of virtue ethics and the pursuit of the common good are best achieved in small-scale communities where individuals can engage in meaningful moral and political discourse. These communities provide a context for the development of virtues, the transmission of tradition, and the pursuit of shared goals.
In summary, Alasdair MacIntyre’s ideas about politics emphasize the importance of virtue ethics, tradition, narrative unity, and the common good. He critiques modern moral and political theories for their lack of coherence and argues for a return to a more integrated moral framework grounded in human flourishing and virtuous character.
Me:
Is care ethics a variety of virtue ethics?
ChatGPT:
Yes, care ethics can be understood as a variety of virtue ethics, although it also has distinct characteristics that set it apart from other forms of virtue ethics. Care ethics is a moral theory that emphasizes the significance of caring relationships, empathy, and interconnectedness in ethical deliberation. It places particular emphasis on the moral significance of caring for others and attending to their needs and well-being.
Here’s how care ethics relates to virtue ethics:
Focus on Virtues: Both care ethics and virtue ethics are concerned with the cultivation of virtues or moral character traits. Virtue ethics, in general, emphasizes the development of virtues like courage, honesty, compassion, and justice. Care ethics similarly focuses on virtues, but with a specific emphasis on virtues related to caring, nurturing, and responding to the needs of others. These virtues might include empathy, compassion, attentiveness, and sensitivity.
Emphasis on Relationships: Both care ethics and virtue ethics highlight the importance of relationships in moral decision-making. Care ethics, however, places a stronger emphasis on the moral significance of relationships, particularly caring relationships, as the foundation for ethical considerations. It recognizes that our responsibilities and moral obligations arise from our interconnectedness with others.
Contextual Approach: Like virtue ethics, care ethics often takes a contextual approach to morality. It acknowledges that ethical judgments are influenced by the specific situations, relationships, and cultural contexts in which they occur. Care ethics recognizes that moral decisions might vary depending on the nature of the relationships and the needs of those involved.
Critique of Universal Rules: Both care ethics and virtue ethics can be critical of deontological ethics (rule-based ethics) and utilitarianism (consequentialist ethics) for their reliance on universal rules or principles. Instead, both care ethics and virtue ethics emphasize the importance of practical wisdom and discernment in making morally nuanced decisions.
While care ethics shares some common ground with virtue ethics, it also introduces unique perspectives and considerations. Care ethics places a special emphasis on the roles of empathy, vulnerability, and interdependence in ethical thinking, which might not be as prominently featured in other forms of virtue ethics. In essence, care ethics can be seen as a distinctive branch of virtue ethics that highlights the moral significance of caring relationships and the virtues that enable us to engage with those relationships in a morally sensitive and responsible manner.
Well yes, love is all (Tallest Man On Earth perhaps for a more sombre note than the Beatles?) … but it’s hard for the non-saintly to bear the weight of that, hence the limitations of kith and kin? Or you go with Nietzsche – the will to power is all (that’s probably a bit unfair to N). James asked me about pioneering sociologist Max Weber’s definition of the state as that which has the monopoly on legitimate violence – well, Weber was very much a Nietzschean… The question is what legitimates the violence? The answer often is recourse to the sacred, which ironically across a lot of European history meant Christianity. But as others have pointed out before on this site, there is an eternal openness within Christianity to the subversion of worldly power and the articulation of love. So it’s complicated.
@ Chris –
Romantic love may be one among a myriad of spaces to practice love, but neighborhood and village is where the rubber truly meets the road. And one needn’t be saintly to know it. One must only be brokenhearted and laid real low.
Did I just suggest that love (lovingkindness, I mean) is a practice? Ah, then I needn’t be a f**king saint then — whew!
I like what Cohen had to say about it.
“And Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him
He said all men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them
But he himself was broken, long before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human, he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone”
But all of this drama may be too much. What’s the use of thorny crowns?
The raven sits on the wire and squawks. I think he knows how silly we all are. He wants us to take a moment to laugh at ourselves. It’s because he loves us.
well, dangit! i meant to attach this link to explain why I said what I did about romantic love.
Here it is: https://genius.com/The-tallest-man-on-earth-love-is-all-lyrics
For me, love is the sacred. It’s not a symptom of the sacred, or a sign of it, or a symbol for it.
Love is one thing, put simple.: relationship, being in relationship. Being related. I could say “in right relationship” or “proper relationship”, etc., but that’s ultimately just so much bullshit. I’m a fierce lover. I mean to drink my love straight up. That doesn’t make me a saint! It makes me desperate and determined. Only drowning men learn how to swim. It’s a process. It takes time. We’re gonna resist. That’s how it goes.
The Christian mythos seems to me to be utterly saturated in what I want to call The Hero Story / or Mythos, where there is a lone Savior (almost always male, by the way) — a charismatic Savior (with a crown of thorns). It’s this story which has us wondering if a mere mortal, just a regular guy or gal, must be “saintly” to be worthy of it. Not just receiving it, but offering it.
Nietzsche … wasn’t even he caught in this morass? Was he not living within the shape of the Hero Myth / Complex?
Maybe the raven knows something about love which almost all of us have forgotten? That it’s much simpler and less dramatic than we imagine it to be?
I don’t know. I’m no saint.
The (deep context) culture I grew up within isn’t one of “footnotes to Plato,” but of Jesus. How will I set down my crown of thorns? I don’t want or need it anymore. I’m just a human animal. A raven, if you will.
What do you think the crown of thorns signifies, James?
Jesus, by the standards and expectations of his people and his time, was an utter failure. He did not lead the people of Israel in a military victory against the occupying Roman forces. Instead he went and got himself killed.
As the story is told, the crown of thorns was placed on Jesus’ head by Roman soldiers as a cruel and mocking gesture, ridiculing the notion that Jesus was “king of the Jews”.
As a pantheist (if I must state it in theist terms as a non-theist), I can’t take the story of Jesus in the Bible as literal historical fact, but I do draw from it as I would from a folk tale, myth (in a roughly Joseph Campbell orientation) or poetry — or mythopoetically, if you will. Some of what is in the Bible may be a record of historical events, but I assume it comes with plenty of embellishment. There may have been such an historical figure as Jesus, but if so I suspect we don’t actually know all that much about him, his life and teachings, etc., which wasn’t embellished and altered in various ways over time.
A principal feature of mainstream (mainline?) Christianity seems to me to be the theme of the scapegoat.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapegoat … But the motif of the scapegoat, in relation to the figure of Jesus, isn’t that of one who has the blame for something put upon him by others. Rather, the Jesus figure becomes a sacrifice of another, but similar kind. He endures great (unbearable) suffering in order to wash away the sins of others, provided they accept him as their Messiah. Or something to this effect.
I never understood why such suffering should be accepted as necessary, but then I never believed in a literal Garden of Eden, and the fall from grace (or whatever) which is said to have occurred there, with the eating of the forbidden fruit (of the knowledge of good and evil).
I grew up, after a certain age, in rural setting where a perhaps uniquely American form of fundamentalist Christianity was quite pervasive, and experienced many these “Christians” as people who were desperately afraid of the terrors of “secularism,” which they regarded as a Satanic cult, complete with demons from hell. I had one friend then whose parents belonged to this type of Christianity, and my friend was in as much rebellion as he could muster. He wasn’t allowed to watch television, go to the movies, read ‘secular’ literature, listen to the radio or any ‘secular’ music. Which is to say his parents were terrified of the Devil getting into him.
I was not raised in a religious home, and so this all seemed way over the top and abusive to me.
I became a nature mystic, and still am. So I’m very well acquainted with actual mystical experience, only I do not in any sense distinguish Divinity from Nature, or the whole of the natural world and Cosmos. (Kosmos?)
I do not have any religious beliefs now, at all, because belief is beside the point when it comes to mystical experience. Profound mystical experience, for me, has stripped me of almost every belief, such that I cannot settle into anything like “certain knowledge”. A curious phenomenon for one so drawn into philosophical inquiry!
Only in recent years have I come to understand that many Christians are truly and deeply wise souls who are in every way admirable and worthy of great respect and appreciation. I no longer assume I know anything (much) about Christianity, and often weirdly suspect I may be a nontheistic Christian mystic! I resonate with most mystical poetry and expression I’ve seen, but I cannot KNOW anything about Divinity. It’s not possible for me to know this, as I have been burned to a crisp and am nothing but ashes and charcoal now.
I wear my own crown uncomfortably. It’s a crown of ignorance without remedy. All I once thought I knew became so much vapor and ashes. And all I have now with any glimmering of truth is poetry.
See, I think the joke was on the Romans.
I’m sorry about your friend and his parents. I hope he found a more nurturing environment.
There is a tradition in some Christian denominations of what is called the “via negativa”– the idea that understanding God (or the divine or the sacred or whatever name we have to hand) is so ineffable, so far beyond human comprehension, that we can’t make any claims at all about what God is like. This is neither my tradition nor my entire stance (I think we can draw on scripture, as well as reason, tradition and experience, to talk about what God might be like, though we should always be aware that we could be wrong), but it is one I respect.
As for sin, it’s hard to really get to the bottom of it without also running into the problems of free will and theodicy as well. Christianity hasn’t arrived at a definitive answer to that in two thousand years of prayer and study and argument, so I’m not going to solve it in a comment.
But I will say that the forgiveness of sin (not the erasure of sins: what we do still matters and has consequences), the reconciliation of all the mess and confusion of our tiny human lives with the sacred divine, is intimately tied up with love.
The via negativa, apophatic theology, thing landed upon me like a ton of bricks when I had my first major mystical experience at age 17. But I would not have used this language about it then, and generally prefer not to use any theological language about it even now.
I had a simply overwhelming mystical experience that day. It was the first time I did sitting meditation. The main feature of the experience that can be spoken about was love — overwhelming love and love-associated bliss. But it wasn’t at all in association with religion, or theology, or belief. It was just overwhelming, utterly ecstatic love. It source was equally within my own essential being and the Cosmos itself — existence, or being, if you will. Nature. Or thisness (or suchness), as some of the Zen folk call it.
It was–and is–impossible to talk about what I experienced in this respect or in the other features of the experience, such as the feeling of having time utterly fall away… in which I entered into what anyone would call eternity, since time was replaced with a vast X of which no one could speak.
I’ve had several other major mystical experiences throughout my life, and I think they are called mystical because they are uterly mysterious, in that we can’t possibly “understand them” and may as well give up before trying. Nor can we describe them.
I was aware of the via negativia and apophatic theology discourse. But I looked it up anyway
“Via negativa is a Latin phrase that means “negative way” or “by way of denial”. It is a technical term in Christian theology that describes God by focusing on what he is not. The idea is that humans cannot apply qualities and attributes to God in the affirmative because God transcends all things.
Via negativa is a method used in apophatic theology, which is based on the assumption that it is impossible to know God. Apophatic theology refers to the divine being only by negative attributes, such as “atemporal” or “immutable”.”
It’s one thing to read these words, or hear them, as one who has not had a ton of bricks dropped on them, and it’s another if one has been hit by a gazillion volts of inconceivable cosmic love-bliss-eternity when one was age 17 … upon attempting sitting meditation for the first time. Let me tell you it was the best and worst thing that ever happened to me. In an instant I knew, in a manner of speaking, that love was “what it’s all about”. (Damn, those words are pale and empty! and less than apt, but there are no apt words for it.)
All of my overwhelming mystical experiences happened pretty spontaneously and without my seeking them. What they did was mostly not to provide knowing or knowledge but to strip me of these, utterly. Mystical experience, for me, has been like “wonder on steroids”. So theology seems to me to be a lot of mouth noises and pale, empty words.
Oh, if you’re wondering why I would say it was the best and worst thing that ever happened to me, well, you see, before it happened I really didn’t know much about love — experientially, that is. Then I got hit by a gazillion volts of it, and I “knew” (by not knowing, in a weird way) just what it was and how vast it is and can be. And I “knew,” but couldn’t know, that hardly anyone around me had ever experienced such a thing, and therefore could not make sense of this world as I must thenceforth attempt to do. That attempt has been as overwheling as the initial jolt of cosmic Love. It’s disorienting, strange and impossible to comprehend.
I do not believe in God. God is a pale image or idea, a faint hint or pointer at what cannot possibly be God and which no one can ever comprehend.
Some might argue that the Via Negativa approach is pessimistic because it leaves humanity with a sense of our utter inability to understand or say anything about God.
PS –
Sorry, the final paragraph was meant to be included in the text about via negativa which I quoted from another source. I posted it this way by error, and it was too late for me to edit (we have about three minutes or something for editing, and if we miss that window we’re sh*t out of luck.
I think mystical experience may be less rare than you assume. My own experiences have mostly been less dramatic than what you describe, but just as real and profound. Integrating their meaning with my actions is a life-long process. Language is indeed inadequate to convey the whole of it.
Maybe it’s because I spend time in and around churches that some people (not always churchgoers) tell me of their own mystical experiences. There are quite a few of them. I wouldn’t say a majority, but… I wouldn’t call it “hardly any” either. I’m in the UK and people here can be rather reserved about such things, too, especially some older generations; I have dear friends who I’ve known for years who, I think, wouldn’t attempt to describe such things to me or anyone else as it is too private, too intimate. So my assumption is that for every person who happens to tell me of their experiences, there’ll be another who never says a word of it to anyone.
Words are inadequate — and so “I can’t describe what happened” becomes “others don’t describe this” which then becomes “hardly anyone has these experiences” and the next thing you know, you’re feeling isolated and lonely in your mysticism, when really mystical experience is just part of the broad spectrum of human spiritual experience and not really all that uncommon.
That said, I can certainly believe there are people who have not had mystical experiences. Their lives are as valuable and voices are as important as mine or yours.
Hi Chris, I wonder if you have already heard Ian McGilchrist speaking or read his books? I heard you speaking with Shaun Chamberlain on the DO podcast, and in this blog post about sort of hitting a wall with so-called scientific debate. Ian speaks about wisdom, which includes facts but goes farther. He proposes that wisdom is made up of Reason, Science, Intuition, and Imagination. Here is an interview where he really digs in to this nicely. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dogVQDydRGQ
I think this could be why you are feeling so unable to reach these people. The scientific data you have put together and the helpful way you have laid it out in your books is very valuable. Having facts is not the problem, it is more of what Ian says so well in the above discussion. You’ll like it, because you are wise and you are frustrated by the same things.
sorry, I got that wrong. Knowledge, Reason, Intuition, Imagination. And also I think I meant to leave this comment on the post “my week in the science wars.”
Hi Clara, thanks for that. I know of McGilchrist’s work but have read very little of his writing. Another one to add to the pile!