Chapter 5: Living in the future: The "Modern" Agricultural Ideal
When people do not live where they work, they do not feel the effects of what they do. The people who make wars do not fight them. ... The people responsible for the various depredations of "agribusiness" do not live on farms. They-- like many others of less wealth and power-- live in ghettos of their own kind in homes full of "conveniences" which signify that all is well.
The most characteristically modern behavior, or misbehavior, was made possible by a redefinition of humanity which allowed it to claim, not the sovereignty of its place, neither godly nor beastly, in the order of things, but rather an absolute sovereignty, placing the human will in charge of itself and of the universe.
Politicians understand very well the power of the promise to build a better or more prosperous or more secure future. Parents characteristically strive and sacrifice to make a better or more secure future for their children. Workers work toward a secure future in which they will retire and enjoy themselves. Our obsession with security is a measure of the power we have granted the future to hold over us.
The future, so full of material blessings, is nevertheless threatened with dire shortages of food, energy, and security unless we exploit the earth even more "freely," with greater speed and less caution. The obvious paradoxes involved in this-- that we are using up future necessities in order to make a more abundant future; that final loss has been made a calculated strategy of annual gain-- have so far been understood to no great effect.
farming has been harder to industrialize than manufacturing, and when industrialization has come, it has not brought shorter hours or greater ease or less worry. ... In the practical circumstances of the modern farm, the popular yearning for the future is directly felt as a yearning for relief from weariness and worry.
In addition to the ethical questions involved, the use of animals as machines-- penning them in feed lots and cages-- creates an enormous pollution problem. ... Mr Billard forgot, or he never knew, that once plants and animals were raised together on the same farms-- which therefore neither produced unmanageable surpluses of manure, to be wasted and to pollute the water supply, nor depended on such quantities of commercial fertilizer.
This is the favorite law of the exploiter. It holds that for every loss there is a gain that is opposite and at least equal. This law is good fortune itself, for it means that you can do no wrong.
Recycling human, animal and crop wastes will be a key to the operation of the farm.
Confronted with the living substance of farming-- the complexity, even mysteriously interrelated lives on which it depends, from the microorganisms in the soil to the human consumers-- the agriculture specialist can think only of subjecting it to total control, of turning it into a machine.
In the modern city unprecedented organization and unprecedented disorder exist side by side; one could argue that they have a symbiotic relationship, that they feed and thrive upon each other.
The specialist puts himself in charge of one possibility. By leaving out all other possibilities, he enfranchises his little fiction of total control. Leaving out all the "non-functional" or otherwise undesirable possibilities, he makes a rigid, exclusive boundary within the absolute control becomes, if not possible, at least conceivable.
having chosen the possibility of total control within a small and highly simplified enclosure, he simply abandons the rest, leaves it totally out of control; that is, he forsakes or even repudiates the complex partly mysterious patterns of interdependence and cooperation, controllable only within limits, by which human culture joins itself to its sources in the natural world.
The control by which a tomato plant lives through January is much more problematic than the natural order by which an oak tree or a titmouse lives through January. The patterns of cooperation are safer than the mechanisms of exclusion, even thought they lack the illusory safety of "control."
Therefore, if one is going to make a "model farm," one must give it a boundary, if possible a roof, that will keep out whatever does not "work." Weeds, insects, diseases do not work; leave them out. The weather works only sometimes, or on the average; leave the weather out. The work can be done by machines; leave the people out. But chemicals and drugs, no matter how dangerous; do work; they are part of the boundary, so they can be let in.
People are not going to be free or dignified or even well fed just because some specialist says that they will be. Or says that whey will be allowed to be, in certain areas-- for that is what these "agribusiness" visionaries are in fact saying. People will be allowed to be free to do certain things in certain places prescribed by other people. They will be free to work in the places set aside for work, free to play or relax in places set aside for recreation, free to live (whatever that may mean) in places set aside for living.
They will not live where they work or work where they live. They will not work where they play. And they will not, above all, play where they work.
They will have nothing to say about how the land is used or the kind or quality of its produce. ... The people will eat what the corporations decide for them to eat. They will be detached and remote from the sources of their life, joined to them only by corporate tolerance.
as a society we have abandoned any interest in the survival of anything small.
The crucial concept here is that of "limitless" or "infinite" quantity. ... Mr. Esfandiary's unlimited, if theoretical, gluttony is licensed and given an illusory respectability because of its claim to be "scientific" -- godly appetite may be within the competence of a computer-- and because, as a "long-range planner," he does his theorizing in the future, where it cannot very handily be called into account.
It is nevertheless clear that Mr. Esfandiary's "future" calls for unprecedented violence. It would require the secrifice of every value that is not quantitative. ... The machine would become an anti-god-- if not infinite, at least absolute.
To propose to blend such a farm with human values is simply to acknowledge that it has no human values, that human values have been removed from it.
If we do not live where we work, and when we work, we are wasting our lives, and our work too.
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