Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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Posted on January 27, 2026 | 16 Comments
Part of me thinks I should be writing about the US government and its current dramas. Venezuela. Greenland. Minneapolis. But instead I’ll hold off from the hot takes and go to the other end of the spectrum with a post about long-range human history.
As previously trailed on this blog, I’ve recently been having some interesting discussions on this topic with physicist Tom Murphy, author of the informative Do the Math blog. Here, I’ll try to give a flavour.
So… whereas those of an ecomodernist bent tend to locate the source of human happiness in recent times – all humanity was sunk in utter misery until the invention of cookie dough ice cream or whatever – anti-modernists tend to find the source of current woes in ancient history. It all went wrong with the invention of writing, farming, money or what have you. In a recent comment, Joe Clarkson goes back to the source with this thinking: “No other animals have fire, why should we?”
I’m firmly in the anti-modernist camp, but here I’m going to dig a little into this narrative of humanity’s allegedly ancient mistakes and our blundering invention of early prototypes for modernism and the Machine.
As mentioned, my comments have been prompted by Tom Murphy, initially via an interesting online presentation he gave to the Planetary Limits Academic Network last year. I tuned into the seminar late in the evening, somewhat ironically after a hard day’s work on the farm (in fact a hard day of building – one of the many things I naively hadn’t anticipated before switching to a more land-based lifestyle is that farming involves a lot of building … you know, sedentism and all that). So I was starting to nod off at the end of the seminar when the chair invited me to comment on Tom’s remarks about the role of agriculture in our present planetary predicament. This post represents a slightly more considered, and awake, reprise of that discussion. I sent a draft of it to Tom and he generously responded with comments. We then had an interesting email back and forth about it. I’ve redrafted my remarks slightly in the light of his responses, without fully addressing them, and this slight redraft is what you’re reading here. If Tom, or anyone else, is interested, I’d be happy to continue the debate.
Tom has written two blog posts relevant to this discussion. One is called Our Time on the River, in which he uses the metaphor of a river for human civilizational ‘progress’, gradually turning from a gentle upstream brook that people could easily exit if they wished into a downstream torrent heading for the waterfall of collapse on the rocks below, where escape from the flow is difficult or impossible. The other is a review of David Graeber and David Wengrow’s big history book, The Dawn of Everything. Funnily enough, I independently wrote a post employing the river metaphor, as well as a rather more positive review of The Dawn of Everything than Tom’s, albeit touching on some similar points.
I largely agree with Tom’s river metaphor for civilizational ‘progress’ and ultimate collapse, although I question his historical positioning of things like possessions, property rights, surplus, hierarchy and patriarchy as arising after and as a result of agriculture. I’d argue:
To build on some of these points, it strikes me that if there’s some fateful human tendency that’s hustling us downstream to oblivion, it lies in our human ability to abstract a world-as-it-might-be beyond immediate sensory experience. Hence, the problem is not writing but language, not science but science-and-religiosity, not farming but habitat manipulation, not money but abstract human connection, and so on. There’s nothing much we can do about this world-as-it-might-be symbolic capacity we have, simultaneously humanity’s blessing or genius and also our curse. Writing, farming and so on were not the cause of our malaise but the result of it.
In a sense, that chimes with one of Tom’s wider points in his writings and in his presentation, in which he focuses on the evolutionary long haul. Biological evolution came up with humanity. It worked for a short while (a longer one if we include the whole genus Homo and not just H. sapiens) but it looks like our symbolic genius will ultimately prove our undoing, and once we’ve extinguished ourselves and the other species we’re taking down with us, evolution will spawn something else. This is not up to us – we need to get over ourselves.
I can go along with that up to a point. Certainly, people have little agency over the long evolutionary haul. But I’m interested in addressing what we may be able to do in the short term to try as best we can to avoid obliterating ourselves and other species and to make the transition to what comes next as congenial as possible. I’ve long argued that our best option right now is low-impact and low-input local agrarianism with a distributed, bottom-up politics. Not that this will necessarily work even if it were easily implemented, but I don’t see any other game in town. In the longer term even this might not prove sustainable, and may at best be part of a trajectory toward a world that ends up with a much lower human population involved mostly in foraging once again. I don’t have a problem with that – I’m not committed to defending agrarianism for the sake of it, although I do baulk at overdrawn ‘foraging good-farming bad’ dualisms. And of course whether I have a problem with it or not is irrelevant to what happens in the long run. In the short run, I think we’ll cause much less suffering for ourselves and other creatures if we embrace agrarian localism.
On this long run/short run issue, I think Tom’s emphasis on the long run is potentially misleading in its causal inferences about farming. The idea is that a few thousand years between farming and cookie-dough ice cream, nuclear missiles and other modern scourges is an eye-blink in deep evolutionary time, buttressing the causal case that farming represents the fateful step into modernism and thence annihilation. But I’m not convinced deep evolutionary time is to the point in this example. People lived substantially local agrarian lives for many, many generations without their societies devolving to a growth-oriented, world-eating, predatory system of states (while many others continued to do so in the interstices of predatory state power). That, I believe, is the relevant time frame to understanding that agrarianism needn’t intrinsically involve or lead to predatory, growth-oriented states. Also, there’s evidence of agrarian type toolkits in Ohalo from 23,000 years before the present, and I doubt that’s the earliest case. Even at that date, we’re starting to have a livelihood strategy that’s been around for a substantial part of Homo sapiens history. Not really a historical eye-blink, whereas world-eating modernity is much more so.
Relatedly, I think Tom overstates the difference between farming and foraging societies, or to the subset of foraging societies he calls immediate-return ones. An argument for another time, perhaps, but while I like a good Hadza story as much as anyone, I’m not convinced ‘immediate-return’ societies really exist. I could get behind ‘usually shorter-return than a full agricultural season’ but then we’re talking about differences of degree and not kind. Doubtless there are differences between foraging and farming societies worth highlighting, but in both cases people have used their big-brained capacities to make symbolic representations of the-world-as-it-might-be to instrumental ends. How different in their cognitive fundamentals are the complex technologies and representations of the world of an Arctic whale-hunter and a New Guinea swiddener?
Anyway, long story short is that I’m interested in historical examples of low-impact, distributed local agrarianisms (and foragings) in case there are things to be learned from them as we – well, currently a tiny minority of us, in the teeth of much ridicule – try to chart a path away from world-eating modernity. There are many such examples, even among people who were nominally under the thumb of the modern depredations Tom lists like armies, property rights, classes and ‘states’.
I got the sense that Tom doesn’t greatly share this interest because he views such local agrarianisms as minor back eddies of little consequence to the larger story of the river’s gathering downstream flow. If I remember rightly, he said in the seminar that he didn’t have much use for counterfactuals of this kind. But I think this dismissal may be too hasty.
For one thing, I don’t think they are counterfactuals. Seen from state centres, the way that ordinary people get on with their lives and generate material welfare locally and relatively sustainably has usually been considered less important than the fact that these people are subjects of the state who need to pay their taxes and their respects, and to bend to the larger designs of state power. It’s easy to approach history through this lens, because most history and most other kinds of writing and intellectual output are state-centred. But there’s no reason to see the world through the looking-glass of the state’s own self-importance. So I’ll say it again: it’s worth looking at how ordinary people have generated their livelihoods locally and relatively sustainably in the face of state power.
There are various metaphors from biological evolution at play in the idea of our time on the river and related ones like ratchets, points of no return, branches, dead ends, natural selection and so on that, while informative, ultimately are metaphors and not real-world processes with the force of biological evolution. I believe it’s important to appreciate this, and so to appreciate the ways in which these metaphors don’t fully work.
On the matter of counterfactuals, for example, Stephen Jay Gould elaborated the point in Wonderful Life that the outcome of biological evolution was a matter of contingency. If you could spool through the history of life on the planet on repeat play over and over again the outcome would be different every time, in the manner of a complex system. Now, looking backwards from the present over deep biological time you can respond to this point with a shrugged ‘so what?’ Life could have played out differently, but it didn’t and here we are. No doubt you can say the same of events in human history, but it’s shakier ground unless you establish that there are larger – evolutionary? – forces at play such that these events were always going to happen.
This is precisely what a lot of people try to argue, but usually not very successfully. For example, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond suggested that the rise of European countries as globally dominant powers in recent centuries was pretty much baked in from the time that discernible farming societies emerged in southwest Asia around ten millennia ago. His argument doesn’t withstand much scrutiny, but it’s a commonplace to argue that because some historical event happened it was always bound to happen. This is basically the opposite of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy – the ‘before and therefore causing’ fallacy (ante hoc ergo hoc causans perhaps? I don’t know – my Latin’s rusty). The effect of such arguments can easily be to justify existing power structures and to underestimate their capacity to change or collapse.
Indeed, talking of ‘structures’, there’s a danger of importing biological concepts of structure inappropriately into human history and society. A vertebra is a biological structure. We can say without any shadow of a doubt that a new species evolving from a mouse, a whale or a human will be a vertebrate. We might say that money, or the banking system, or the executive arm of government are ‘structures’ of contemporary global society. It’s impossible to imagine a government coming to power anywhere in the world right now that could or would dispense with them. But it’s not impossible to imagine new kinds of human societies emerging in the relatively near term that did dispense with them. Social structures aren’t the same as biological structures.
In that sense, there’s a danger of talking at cross purposes. Tom emphasizes materialism and monism in his writing rather than dualism (or idealism), the idea that mind is separate from matter, with associated ideas like free will. I’m fine with that as a matter of natural philosophy, although as argued by the aforementioned Harvey Whitehouse, it seems that due to biological evolution human societies do in fact tend to think dualistically. But when social scientists talk about materialism versus idealism they mean something different: materialism being the idea that the ‘structure’ of society is determined by underlying facts about how people make a living in the world, idealism being the idea that it’s determined by the ideas people have about what society ought to be like (with various possible intermediate positions). So it’s possible to be materialist in Tom’s sense of natural philosophy, but somewhat idealist in terms of one’s theories of social change.
For this reason, I’m less convinced than Tom that the river has an unstoppable force that just ‘is’, and I’m more in tune with Graeber and Wengrow’s openness toward radical social transformation. Nevertheless, I do think human social structures can have enduring historical force and I agree with Tom that Graeber and Wengrow’s perplexity about why oppressive political centralism endures is perplexing in itself. Graeber and Wengrow themselves say somewhere that once status differentiation and monopolies of power get going they’re hard to overturn and that basically answers their perplexity. Once you have a centralized bureaucratic state or an emperor in post, it’s a devil of a job to get rid of them. But it’s not impossible to do so in the way that, for example, it’s impossible for a vertebrate to evolve rapidly into an invertebrate.
In his critique of Graeber and Wengrow, Tom invokes the interesting metaphor of a menagerie:
We might compare the book’s dizzying array of archeological examples to a menagerie of exotic animals. Each is fascinating to study, and offers lessons on what’s possible in isolation. Now open all the cages, let the animals interact (play?) together and see what happens. Graeber and Wengrow never do this—instead pointing to each animal, safe in its archeological cage, and emphasizing how different it is from today’s arrangement. In my view, the ubiquity of today’s systems marks the outcome after all the animals are “played” out, leaving one dominant beast.
Fair points, but I’d like to press the metaphor further. When the cages are opened, a lot of the littler animals will find nooks and crannies where they can easily evade the one dominant beast (the lion, perhaps?) The lion is still dominant – the smaller creatures can’t afford to forget it’s lurking – but they’re nonetheless able to get on with their little-animal lives in substantial autonomy from it. Metaphorically, that’s one possibility for local agrarian societies I’m interested in.
The larger prey animals – antelopes, let’s say – probably won’t be so lucky once the cages are opened, and sooner or later will get hunted down by the lions. Assuming an impermeable outer perimeter to the zoo, the lions will die of starvation shortly afterwards. Metaphorically, that’s the global polycrisis we now face, with the zoo’s perimeter representing the Earth’s boundaries.
In some ways, the ‘one dominant beast’ metaphor isn’t a great one for the polycrisis. Our present situation would be more akin to one where the lions turn the prey animals into subordinate lions and get them to prey in turn on still more subordinate beasts which they bring as tribute and are allowed to feed on the scraps, all the while being told that they’ve never had it so good and no other kind of life is preferable or even possible. Obviously, lions don’t turn other beasts into subordinate lions in real life. Maybe other biological examples work better. Social insects? Viruses? Cancers? Anyway, hopefully the larger point is clear.
But suppose the perimeter to the zoo isn’t impermeable and the lions and antelopes escape from it into something like their natural savanna home (here the perimeter isn’t the Earth’s boundaries but the boundaries of modernism and the modern economy’s growth parameters). The playing field is now more level. The lions will get some of the antelopes, but not all of them – often enough, the antelopes will outrun them. Between them, they’ll find an equilibrium that prevents either species dying out, at least for the time being. This is another dimension of agrarian society I’m interested in.
Will the antelopes of modernity succeed in escaping its perimeter and get to play with the lions on the savanna where they stand a chance? I don’t know, but I don’t think it’s written in the stars by any kind of materialist monism that they won’t be able to. I’m therefore ‘idealist’ enough in the social science sense of the term to think it’s worth searching for weaknesses in the fence. As I see it, the fence has a lot of weaknesses, but the lions have got pretty good at convincing people not to bother even looking for them – you’ve never had it so good, you too can be a full member of the lion community someday and so can everyone else, it’s a jungle out there, and so on. The first task is to stop believing this deceitful story and start looking at the fence.
Though I’m not persuaded by everything in Harvey Whitehouse’s book Inheritance, his triad of conformism-religiosity-tribalism (and Boehm’s status versus equality dualism) as our basic human evolutionary package holds out some hope that people might take on this task, as well as the possibility they might not. If the package comprised selfishness-accumulativeness-treachery I’d be more inclined to think that modernism’s fiery route to extinction was locked in.
Despite what I’ve said, I broadly agree with Tom’s river metaphor inasmuch as humanity has gone all in with a fossil-fuelled growth economy involving a massive and unsustainable throughput. I agree that grain agriculture and the early grain states were an early foray into the river, but not necessarily a decisive one. As I see it, the flow really got going much later with an unfortunate confluence of a capitalism grounded in semi-porous frontiers between South and East Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas, and then with fossil fuels – neither of these foreordained by earlier agrarian states. It’s this capitalism plus fossil fuels duality that’s really shoved us down the torrent.
It’s not that hard to see alternatives to where we now are in the torrent and to appreciate their benefits. But it’s devilishly difficult to find any simple way of exiting and reaching those calm banks. We have no plausible mass politics, economics or technologies for exiting it that look capable of diverting us from the rocks without a challenging plunge into the torrent.
Here, we come back to my ‘ante hoc ergo hoc causans’ principle and to some different conceptions of what ‘evolution’ means, where I believe Tom’s river and menagerie metaphors can align with my case for agrarian localism.
There’s a tendency to attach notions of progress to the concept of evolution, both biological and social. And there’s a tendency to attach notions of betterment to the concept of progress that blights both kinds of evolutionary thought, but particularly the social kind. Perhaps ‘progress’ can work as a neutral biological descriptor. First there are unicellular organisms and then there are multicellular ones that emerge out of them and in a sense progress beyond them. But multicellular organisms aren’t ‘better’ organisms than unicellular ones.
Concepts of social evolution are rife with progress and betterment thinking. Much of the intellectual fanfare around the emergence of centralized polities, writing, farming, science and so on amounts to one long self-congratulatory love letter to ourselves about our betterment which is likely to burn soon in a fire of our own making. This is even more true in respect of the self-conscious humanism and modernism that’s emerged in recent centuries, The hubris-nemesis stories of ancient times – Adam and Eve, Prometheus and so on – will need a heavy post-modern update.
Ultimately, then, I think my position is pretty close to Tom’s with his river metaphor and his idea of where that river is going. It’s just that I’m not so convinced it was long written in the stars, and I’m sceptical of maximum power or ecological overshoot notions when they’re applied to present predicaments in over-mechanistic ways (more on that another time, I hope). Therefore, while I’m inclined to treat the deep-time counterfactual of what might have happened if biological evolution had turned out differently with an indifferent shrug, I’m intensely interested in the shallow-time counterfactual of what might have happened if human history had turned out differently, because I think such counterfactuals might help us to steer wisely – if not, at this late stage, out of the waterfall altogether, at least out of the most catastrophic parts of it.
Anyway, my thanks to Tom for helping me clarify my thinking on these issues, and – if you’ve got this far – my thanks to other readers of this essay for indulging me as I torture various metaphors to death in it.
Harvey Whitehouse Inheritance: The Evolutionary Origins of the Modern World (I’m still working my way through this fascinating, if IMO, somewhat flawed book, as mentioned above. Report to follow).
John Tutino The Mexican Heartland: How Communities Shaped Capitalism, A Nation and World History, 1500-2000 (I took a deeper second dive into this book and finally finished it – also fascinating, if heavy going. TLDR: capitalism started in Peru and Mexico, and if you want to be an anti-capitalist you have to be a farmer. More to follow.)
Zeinab Badawi An African History of Africa (Not the first one but refreshing even so).
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“There’s a tendency to attach notions of progress to the concept of evolution”.
From a species point of view, the summum bonum (why can’t we use italics?) is survival of enough breeding pairs for the species to continue. Of course, other species can always take its place in its niche, so any species going extinct means little to the biosphere.
Having a planetary biosphere at all is neither good nor bad, lots of planets don’t and probably lots of planets do, but since every species needs one for its survival, it’s wise not to trash it too much.
As to why we’re so good at trashing the biosphere, I lay the blame squarely on fossil fuels. The world could have survived agriculture and even capitalism just fine, but fossil fuels allow the scale of human activities to grow so large that the damage is global instead of being limited to the areas of relatively small, low energy empires.
Anyway, if humans do avoid extinction, I’m pretty sure a lot of the survivors will be small farmers, so small farming and foraging are the wave of the future. To paraphrase Greer, “Become a small farmer now and avoid the rush”.
You can use italics! But you need to type a less than sign, then I, then a greater than sign. To end the italics you type less than, then a slash, then I, then greater than.
see? Italics.
Thank you! I thought I had previously tried that HTML code and that it didn’t work on this site. I stand corrected.
Okay so… we’re a menagerie of different animals on some kind of a prison boat? Who built this ark? Only I’m not sure it’s fit for purpose… perhaps it is more of a handcart situation, given where we are going.
You reference psalm 137 in your title. Have you read all of it? Many renditions leave out the last verse.
As a forager and gardener I strongly agree that the line between foraging and gardening is blurry at best.
That could be put down to me being a bit of a weirdo and extrapolating my own experience onto whole societies, but I don’t think that’s entirely what’s going on. I recently read Taras Grescoe’s book “The Lost Supper” and while there were some areas in which I would have liked a little more depth or development of ideas, one thing that did come through clearly is that the Neolithic “farmers” of e.g. Çatalhöyük were still very much foragers, and the “foraging” societies of Turtle Island were very much managing the landscape for food production (chiefly using fire). Not news to readers of comments here (and I think I’ve had some idea about the latter example for a comparatively long time — I can remember my uncle, who lives in Nunavut, telling me that it made more sense to think about the caribou hunt as a form of ranching, that the caribou herds are managed herds even if there are no fences), but not an idea well understood in mainstream discourse, I think.
I think part of the issue is that while farming doesn’t have to be overly extractive, it always can be, and the impact of industrial modernity on farming and especially grains and pulses is stark. Foraging, on the other hand, is still relatively low tech. There’s a problem of market demand and over-harvesting in foraging, for sure, but you can’t really go out and get more linden flowers (or alexanders or whatever) by using machinery; the best you can do is just throw more labour at it. The difference between me going out and collecting walnuts from a street tree and my forager/farmer ancestors doing the same in a forest somewhere is mostly that they were probably better at it and I have easier ways to keep the squirrels away from my harvest. (Nut trees are an example against foraging being mostly immediate or moderate-time return, I think: the hazelnuts and almonds I gathered this autumn are still fine and so are the walnuts I gathered in 2024, they really keep much longer in the shell than in stupid plastic bags from the supermarket). I have a fruit picking pole but I’m pretty sure any neolithic forager or orchard-keeper could have and would have made something similar. I think it was Ursula K Le Guin who posited the bag, not the wheel, as a defining human invention.
There are a lot of ways to get off a boat hurtling down a rushing river towards a waterfall. There is a film by the National Film Board of Canada called “The Log-Driver’s Waltz” which opens with footage of log-drivers, walking nimbly on the logs on the water. It’s worth a watch. Maybe some of us can steer into the shallows and get a pole into the soggy bank to pivot around. Maybe some of us will survive the trip over the edge, like stunt men in barrels of old. Maybe some are even strong enough to swim diagonal to the current and buy some time that way. None of these strategies are safe or guaranteed but neither is doing nothing.
There is a tendency among people who have never really known anything but the comforts of modernity in the West (and I would count myself in this category) to try to imagine what survival would be like without plastics or diesel or cheap steel or vaccines or whatever and conclude that going over the waterfall isn’t survivable. That may be the case, of course — human bodies just aren’t well-adapted to much warmer conditions. I want to grant that the way we are going, we aren’t all going to make it.
But I don’t want to be too certain about exactly who will and won’t survive, or which traits will be best for adapting to new and vastly different environmental conditions. Eugenics is not something I am willing to apply to humans, firstly because I consider it a sin, and secondly because it is such ridiculous hubris. In a changing and chaotic environment the actual best fitness for survival is about maximising diversity, not imposing ideological genetic bottlenecks, as any landrace seed saver can tell you. And the vast diversity in the conditions human beings already survive is a source of some hope to me, as is the historical evidence that we got nearly this far without plastics or diesel or cheap steel or vaccines or whatever. We aren’t all going to make it but some of us always have, and so it seems likely that a few of us will.
As for lions… will they, as in the peaceable kingdom, lie down with the lamb? This remains to be seen. I suspect some of the lions of capitalism do actually know they cannot eat money, they just haven’t figured out that they can eat anything else. Maybe we’ll have to show them. I am as wary of admonitions to completely cut ourselves off from capitalism (impossible for most) as I am of the idea that through exponential economic growth and technological progress we can buy our way out of our current predicament. I’d like to hear more about Tutino’s claim that to be an anti-capitalist you have to be a farmer, not least because part of why I grow food is to reduce my reliance on capitalism (and the associated unjust exploitation) for meeting my daily needs.
To pick up a stray thread from comments on an earlier post, if you want more time in the snow it may be that all you have to do is wait for the AMOC to fail. I can confirm that -10°C in dry snowy conditions is quite a bit more comfortable than 5°C and raining, at least for me, and the first time I’ve felt really cold in the last month was on a train platform coming back home to East London. In fairness the insulation in my mother’s home is so good that when it was -25°C out and windy, I could touch an inside wall and an outside wall and couldn’t feel a temperature difference between them, which is not what my London home is like at all, and I sure wish I had the option of a woodstove here.
Thanks Kathryn.
Oof! Psalm 137:9! I had to look it up, but I remember seeing that before. Just like the current news…
I know one thing – whoever wrote that is not someone I want to hang out with.
You say “they cannot eat money”. True enough, but if you have enough cocaine, you don’t get hungry.
‘We have no plausible mass politics, economics or technologies for exiting it that look capable…’
While it is not yet a mass economics as you say, I think the book: Entropy Economics by Galbraith and Chen, is a part of this new economics that is emerging, compatible with many types of heterodox economics like doughnut and ecological economics. There are many people working on this, and in historical time it will look like a very swift revolution.
What it can bring is regulation to growth, and reducing or eliminating the perverse incentives that are currently doing the most damage. I agree with you that it is inevitable to go towards a low resource use and more agrarian future. In this future banking and finance will be boring again, and craving money for the sake of money will be, as JM Keynes said, ‘treated like a mental illness’.
Great discussion. It leaves me wondering about the matrix of understanding (John Gray wrote about this) that underlie cultures – the British (Anglo saxon?) being inherently sceptical of any absolutism and the American being rooted in a religious ‘manifest destiny’ which tends even data driven arguments towards these ends. Is it having had Kings and Parliamentary dictators?
And now America is having its hubris, perhaps it will temper the cultural matrices of unshakeable faith in absolutes?
What ever it may be, I tend to your reading of the shorter time frame of our predicament, and find the constant search for the grail of evil tiresome. Many eco feminists have covered this ground, from Shiva et al, and Fedirici more lucidly and clearly without recourse to grand metaphors whilst Tom and The Machine guy were still in nappies.
I’ve been reading The Green Ages by female professor of history – bringing together just the facts of working everyday people you rightly speak of – fascinating, astonishing and gently demolishing the deciepts of modernism. From women’s equal rights within the Guilds – in which they were represented across the disciplines, to insights into the workings of the European forest commons.
In this sense, these ideas of evolution, biological or otherwise become fragile. Just as Anastasia Makarieva’s brilliant work on the biotic pump shows us, there are rivers in the sky that we cannot see! And the land rivers themselves are fed from the sea, sucked in by the forests! What then with the metaphor as it curls back in on itself, a cycle rather than a line, unending. Lol, got carried away there.
Yeah, the metaphors could use a rest. 🙂
Expanding on your bullet #2 above, I don’t remember if I’ve mentioned “Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony” before, but Laland’s description of cultural transmission through human’s superpower of language, learning, and feedback loops help me understand how we got here. The book has its faults, but overall, I recommend it.
Think of culture as a next level evolution, or survival of the fittest. A culture that outcompetes others within the ecological context it inhabits will persist, and others will not. Especially as humans push up against each other and local carrying capacities.
Anyway, the current malignant machine is only fit for the partially self made environment of capitalism and mechanical resource extraction. As fossil fuels fade, that culture, that super organism will no longer be able to maintain its dominance or centralization of power.
Lots of “undomestication” will occur.
We will have a whole menagerie of cultures once again having less suppression, and vying for subsistence, and there will be plenty of room for distributist agrarian republics of all stripes, and plenty of others (though getting there will suck). Enough to make a sociologist dizzy. Heck, we still have a range now, just hanging on at the margins.
What the river or machine metaphor really represents is not so much “progress” but the most recent multi-generation trend line, which may have directionality that some might called progress, but only for a while, and is not at all inevitable ( or manifest). There will be other trends that persist for a while, and “progress” toward……………what?
Hello Chris!
Well, as an outside reader of both blogs, I can say that your arguments are also very “fuzzy”.
Perhaps Tom’s metaphors were a bit simplistic at the time, but the concept of the river clearly describes the path.
Materialistic monism does not deny the impossibility of social idealism. But in the end, it is difficult and contradictory to understand how something could have gone radically differently, after grain agriculture, private property, broad social stratification, the emergence of money, etc.
Many societies suppressed these tendencies at the level of clan-tribal structures and did not allow them to grow and take root. Others did not do this and as a result we are all in front of the waterfall. “What if?” or “What if” means little when we are already in a polycrisis.
The concept of ecological overshoot is quite simple and accurate, I do not understand why you reject it?
When talking about agrarian localism, the following considerations are interesting:
– what about population growth and as a consequence the need to do something about it? Gatherers, gatherers-gardeners in limited communities and territories clearly understand that neighbors will defend themselves and population growth is an increase in hostility, revenge and prolonged civil strife, which can lead to serious consequences for both tribes, so empirically there is a restraint on population growth and respect for unwritten borders.
– on what grounds did you determine that local agrarianism is a sustainable method of doing business, we actually do not know. My ancestors lived on the farm that Chayanov described, starting with one family (4 people), in two hundred years the zutir grew four times in area, and the part with the buildings of the hut looks more like the slums of Mumbai, rather than spaces with huts and gardens. Sons and daughters were exported en masse to the city or other villages, because there was not enough land to feed everyone. This is local agrarianism.
– The fact that a way of life may seem sustainable over centuries or even millennia does not mean that eventually the basis that supports society will not degrade. Of course, on a local scale. Historically, many societies have abandoned such territories after some exploitation (in particular, Cucuteni-Trypilly).
– You are very idealistic when you say that simple societies can survive under the pressure of other, more complex ones. Perhaps if you run a farm on an island, away from the most productive regions, or even in the boreal forests, where it is difficult to grow anything, and such lands and societies are of no interest to anyone, except for this. But it will rather survive than enjoy life.
Many more interesting points can be added, but the comment will be too long anyway.
I think you are focusing too much on the details, and Tom is writing about very broad fundamentals, not recipes for how everything was or should be.
A lot is possible, but in my humble opinion it is worth evaluating something based on probability.
And based on the current trends, the near future will definitely not be localist agrarianism. Rather, centralized neo-feudalism. Can a coal thrown into water not go out, perhaps, but this is a matter of extremely low probability and great luck. Local agrarianism, for now, is at this end of the spectrum.
the near future will definitely not be localist agrarianism
Correct. But it’s not the near future we need to worry about. The near future is just more of the same, until negative feedbacks from overshoot or overcomplexity produce a collapse of industrial civilization and a massive dieoff of human population (or a nuclear war happens). Small farms might be a path through that horrific process and will certainly be one of the primary livelihoods after it is complete.
You are right that it might be hard to establish small farming communities in developed countries with complex market economies, but it should be kept in mind that there are already plenty of mostly self-sufficient agrarian communities in the Global South that have a good head start. Small farmers in rich countries are going to have to keep a foot in both worlds until modernity is gone, which will be more difficult, but not impossible.
The odds of small farming as a through-line to the post-industrial future might not be great, but they are certainly higher than an ember tossed into water. Besides, for those that don’t want to passively participate in the coming dieoff, what other choice is there? Banditry perhaps, but good people would rather die.
Thanks for that Yevhenii. I’ll respond briefly to some of your points:
“Materialistic monism does not deny the impossibility of social idealism.”
I just want to be clear that you understand I’m not using ‘idealism’ in the everyday ‘in an ideal world’ sense of the term? Because materialistic monism and idealist social theories are argumentative bedfellows at best.
“it is difficult and contradictory to understand how something could have gone radically differently, after grain agriculture, private property, broad social stratification, the emergence of money, etc.”
Well, that’s what’s up for debate in this post – and my argument is that yes at one level I agree, because of deeper human evolutionary tendencies out of which things like stratification and money emerge, but at another level one has to be careful with philosophies of history of the kind ‘it happened, therefore it was bound to happen’.
“The concept of ecological overshoot is quite simple and accurate, I do not understand why you reject it?”
I don’t reject it, and I didn’t say that I did. We’re currently clearly in overshoot. But overshoot isn’t so simple in the human case for two reasons: (1) it’s often possible for us to intensify production (2) a lot of stuff that we produce we don’t need. So explanations of current predicaments in terms of overshoot have to address those two points, and I don’t think that can be done all that simply.
“What about population growth?”
You’ll have to frame that question a bit more precisely before I can answer it. I agree that population growth can be a problem for human societies.
“on what grounds did you determine that local agrarianism is a sustainable method of doing business, we actually do not know.”
Well, I say pretty much the same thing in my post. However, at this present moment in world history it’s likely more sustainable than capitalist commercial agriculture or foraging.
“In two hundred years the zutir grew four times in area, and the part with the buildings of the hut looks more like the slums of Mumbai, rather than spaces with huts and gardens.”
One question there is whether that was a fundamentally endogenous development – if not, then it’s not very challenging to agrarian localist arguments. But of course farming does have that latent potential, which Chayanov was quite comfortable with. The question then is whether that potential must always intrinsically be realised – which takes us back to the philosophies of history point.
“The fact that a way of life may seem sustainable over centuries or even millennia does not mean that eventually the basis that supports society will not degrade.”
Yes, agreed. Although we seem overly predisposed nowadays to attribute the collapse of preceding societies or civilisations to that dynamic. The sustainability of contemporary global society seems to me more to the point.
“You are very idealistic when you say that simple societies can survive under the pressure of other, more complex ones. Perhaps if you run a farm on an island, away from the most productive regions, or even in the boreal forests, where it is difficult to grow anything, and such lands and societies are of no interest to anyone, except for this. But it will rather survive than enjoy life.”
Hmm, a lot to unpack there! I don’t accept your simple/complex or ‘no interest to anyone’ and ‘enjoy life’ points. But the fact is that local agrarianisms do coexist within larger centralising projects, while variously seeking greater autonomy or accommodation with them. Tutino’s book mentioned above illustrates that well. James Scott’s writings are another entry point into these ideas.
“I think you are focusing too much on the details, and Tom is writing about very broad fundamentals, not recipes for how everything was or should be.”
Details matter. I agree with many of Tom’s broad fundamentals, although perhaps not so much with his or your broad philosophy of history. Hence my arguments here.
“based on the current trends, the near future will definitely not be localist agrarianism. Rather, centralized neo-feudalism. Can a coal thrown into water not go out, perhaps, but this is a matter of extremely low probability and great luck. Local agrarianism, for now, is at this end of the spectrum.”
‘Centralised neo-feudalism’ is arguably a contradiction in terms, and – as I’ve argued in ‘Finding Lights…’ I’m not convinced that neo-feudalism is all that likely (depending on what you mean by ‘feudalism’ – it’s a very baggy term). But I agree that centralised empire is a strong likelihood – even though, as per above, local agrarianism is likely to coexist with it in a variety of complex ways. The fact that it’s likely doesn’t mean I need to support it or refrain from making an agrarian case. However as per my piece above, I think you’re listening a bit too attentively to the lions and not looking carefully enough at the walls of the zoo.
Thanks for your answer!
I understand what you mean by this, you can call it whatever you want. The base is immutable, if something is possible and its probability does not go to zero, then doubts can be dispelled. No, I do not mean “it happened, so it was bound to happen”. I mean that as the factors of centralization, monopolization, appropriation, expropriation, displacement, non-realism, hierarchy, etc. accumulated, the probability that we will end up in a place without all this “less” is extremely low. (1) intensification of production is often undesirable or has other limitations due to political, security, demographic, etc. factors. (2) about 2.5 billion people live on less than $1 a month, how many resources, etc. do you think are needed to satisfy this hidden demand? And we are not talking about other people whose standard of living is a little higher. Even without “unnecessary” things, resources are not enough. The issue of population growth is that local communities will not be able to function everywhere according to a single grand plan or plot, there will definitely be significant deviations “somewhere” that will disrupt the entire system. How can a community be local if people grow crops with a reserve and this reserve is necessarily used either to create “new people” in the place of residence, or through trade, to create “new people” elsewhere. Which in time leads to the need for new productive lands, new people, more complex systems. So it is more stable than capitalist market industrial agriculture, but certainly less stable than gathering and hunting because the factors of negative feedback and evolution over time force individuals and collectives to accept limitations and build new mental constructs and myths on this basis. Yes, development was (was) endogenous. It was a remote sawmill on a water mill. It turned out that children were born, not all of whom died, and the family was forced to cultivate ever larger areas of land to feed itself. Later, each of the sons had the same family and it came to the point that the state forest was illegally cleared for vegetable gardens. There is no sustainable development with a dynamic population, only its growth. Regarding the Cucuteni-Trypilly, I did not mean their culture or “era” so to speak, as a way of life. And about the fact that a millennium of cultivation of the same soil within a certain territory greatly impoverished the soil, which was fertilized and fertilized, but this did not save it. The base that supported thousands of residents was disappearing, and the harvest was not so stable, which led to forced changes and disintegration of society, simplification of the decoration of buildings and utensils, settlements, clothing, etc. Locally, later, there was a collapse due to many factors, not only because of the land, but the land and climate became the basis of this process. I’m not saying that the whole world is degrading and there will be nothing to eat. I mean local examples: we don’t know what it’s like to cultivate the land for a million years, even in the most successful way. What a false basis. Again, Chris, regarding centralization and the existence of autonomies, I’m not saying a priori, I’m saying that it’s doubtful, based on my experience and the experience of the area where I live. NEVER were the “bottoms” free or autonomous, there was always the burden of serfdom, taxes, hunger, robbers, disease and a mixture of them. Even in the times of Stolypin, and private property, the existence of the khutur system, people were unhappy because of corruption, inequality, debt and the burden of self-sufficiency. There were so few trade relations that to buy or find something you had to go to the provincial city where, if you don’t catch some disease or get killed on the way, you can get what you need.
Local communities need relative freedom and a common vision, and this is already “casting a fishing rod” on their management and formation, which no state will allow (in my region, that’s for sure). The only free farms were with the Cossacks, the so-called “winterers”, around the Dnieper. But later they also came under the management of the Cossack elite and paid taxes.
Centralized means that there will be a center that will be the main force with its own internal violent system on the ground (like in Russia, Iran, etc.), but the places will be ruled by neo-feudals who will pay some share to the president or king), society will be sharply class-based with a predominance of serf farmers, who will create goods. I don’t see where there can be an interested, conscious happy farmer here…
I agree that the future will be local, that we will depend on the landscapes we have changed, that the population will be mostly rural, not sure whether it is low-mobility or sedentary.
But it’s hard for me not to listen to the “lions”, after all, the war has been going on for almost 5 years…
We are just on the frontier of changes and visions, you are still completely safe, so who am I to forbid dreaming and arguing for agrarian localism 🙂
Yes, development was (was) endogenous. It was a remote sawmill on a water mill. It turned out that children were born, not all of whom died, and the family was forced to cultivate ever larger areas of land to feed itself. Later, each of the sons had the same family and it came to the point that the state forest was illegally cleared for vegetable gardens.
I’m assuming both the sons and daughters took spouses who weren’t from the original family of four…!
Your point about some children dying is one reason I am not too worried about overpopulation on a global scale. Chronic starvation does reduce fertility. The lack of disease prevention and management tools that we currently enjoy in modern times is also likely to reduce birth rates and life expectancy. If I go back into my own family tree there were a lot of deaths from “blood poisoning” — usually sepsis from infections after minor agricultural injuries. I don’t particularly welcome a return to life before antibiotics and vaccinations, and I hope we can at least hang onto things like germ theory and the resulting effects on sanitation, but in my more cynical moments I am reminded that a lot of previously useful antibiotics are losing effectiveness even now, and a lot of people don’t believe in germ theory or vaccinations, to the point that there are some quite serious measles outbreaks going on in parts of the US and Canada (and probably elsewhere too but those are the ones I know about). So maybe even without energy and financial collapse we would be heading in that direction.
Of course, wars also reduce population. I don’t like those either… it sounds like you have much closer knowledge than I do of how horrific war can be.
I suppose my point is not that overpopulation (either locally or globally) isn’t a concern, but rather that in the long term overpopulation is a problem that solves itself, and in the short and medium term there isn’t a whole lot we can do about it that we aren’t already doing. The thing that seems to lower birth rates the most is education for women and girls, and it’s true that we could probably do better on this, especially in the last few years.
Chris is probably better able to respond than I am about issues to do with agricultural reserve or surplus; I think Sahlins wrote about this but I am fuzzy on the details. I can say that some relatively simple tools have greatly increased my capacity for urban foraging, and also that there is a limit to how much fruit and veg I can process and store, to the point that at least a tenth (by weight) of my own production is donated to a soup kitchen. I am at a point where I have improved the soil on the land that I tend enough that the main limit on yield is not available land, but labour. I’m only growing on a tenth of an acre, so it’s clear that at some point I would hit some kind of maximum, and I do draw materials from other sites (waste streams of various types) to build my compost heaps, but I could still produce more food than I do if I had the time and energy to do it. The main reasons I don’t are that we can’t pay our rent or our taxes in potatoes, so my spouse has a day job, and I have varied interests and spend quite a bit of time in various forms of voluntary work as well as the odd bit of paid work.
Briefly in response to other comments –
Agree with Joe that the blame for the biosphere-trashing lies with fossil fuels. How we got there is more complex, but yes let’s not overthink the proximal agent.
In a world going increasingly crazy, I take comfort from the fact that commenters here now know how to do italics. And they say there’s no such thing as progress…
Kathryn, great comment, so much to agree with. I hadn’t actually read Psalm 137 for a long while – but I’ve got the Melodians on my playlist without that final verse. It’s a rough one. There’s a point there about ‘ethnic’ versus world religions – the world religions have done a lot of baby-killing too, but they do have another string to their bow, so to speak. Agree with your points on foraging & farming. Frontiers and economic connections are important in commodity exploitation in terms of organised extractiveness, but they probably do require a farming and transport/energy base. Agree with you also on collapse. And Amoc – ouch, yeah … careful what you wish for, I guess. I’ll tell my friend.
Chris – thanks, a ray of hope from you there. I guess the question is whether better economic analysis will bring down the power plays of predatory empire. It can’t hurt at least.
Joel – I like your style when you get carried away! Is ‘The Green Ages’ book you mention by Annette Kehnel? Sounds good, another one to add to the list. I’m interested in reading more books of big history at the moment, especially ones by and/or about women. So if anyone has further recommendations, please let me know.
Steve – hey, it wasn’t me that came up with those metaphors! Anyway, yes I agree with you about the likely future of undomestication. Kinda relevant to the discussion with Yevhenii.
Thanks Chris.
As per Kathryn above, and according to my reading, the “‘foraging good-farming bad’ dualism” is problematic because until recently, it seems that (after a certain human evolutionary stage) the majority of people who foraged also farmed at least a little, and vice versa. Even today, those giant tractor drivers still hunt deer and turkeys.
What if we regard farming as a tool – like steel blades or guns – which are value-neutral in themselves, but can be used in ways that amplify good or bad behavior? Remembering that bit about how the technology influences the user toward the things the technology does easily.
So (swidden) farming makes sedentary foraging somewhat easier. And large-field grain farming makes wealth inequality much more likely. Society must regulate how the tool is used.
We can’t blame the fact that “farming societies emerged in southwest Asia around ten millennia ago” for our current world-eating modernity. Those Natufians didn’t cause it.
There was some kind of social mutation that allowed a tyranny model to get established in only just a few of those farming societies. But those mutant societies ended up with out-sized leverage over their neighbors once they started eating the whole world. In this view, capitalism and fossil fuels are merely more leverage for the underlying sociopathic mutation to exploit.
And now,“the way that ordinary people get on with their lives” in world-eating modern societies often becomes a mirror to the world-eating elites that those societies actually serve. The world-eating values don’t serve the hoi polloi, but that’s the water we are swimming in, so we (media saturated moderns) have real trouble imagining a different way.
Which imagination is exactly “this world-as-it-might-be symbolic capacity we have”.
“[O]nce status differentiation and monopolies of power get going they’re hard to overturn…” Yes, but. Eventually Cahokia fell, large-scale grain agriculture and all. The main difference now is that there is nowhere for we disaffected to walk away to. But after our looming population crash…?
“searching for weaknesses in the fence” Exactly.
Side note: It could be argued that large-scale grain agriculture ‘caused’ writing. Grain agriculture certainly preceded writing, and the complexity of the ensuing elaborate society created a need for record-keeping.
Wow. Lots of interesting comments.
Bit late and I need to re-read it all again but just one comment.
On the idea that European world dominance was inevitable.
Hmmmmm. I’m not so sure.
It all kicked of for Europe with the domination of the Americas. This creating the “capital” to go on to conquer much of the rest of the globe.
This conquest was never inevitable.
It’s just that Europeans got the better “deal” from the “Columbian Exchange”
Smallpox was far more devastating for the Native Americans than syphilis was to Europeans.
Without smallpox wiping out 90% of the American population, colonisation and genocide was not inevitable.
Luck not destiny.