In Distrust of Movements
I have been pondering about the necessity of getting
out of movements even movements that have seemed necessary and dear - when they
have lapsed into self-righteousness and self-betrayal, as movements seem almost
invariably to do. People in movements so readily learn to deny to others the
rights and privileges they demand for themselves. They too easily become unable
to mean their own language, as when a “Peace Movement” becomes violent. They
often become too specialized. They almost always fail to be radical enough,
dealing finally in effects rather than causes. Or they deal with single issues
or single solutions, as if to assure themselves that they will not be radical
enough. The movements, which deal with single issues or single solutions, are
bound to fail because they cannot control effects while leaving causes in
place.
And so I must declare my dissatisfaction with movements to promote soil
conservation or clean water or clean air or wilderness preservation or sustainable
agriculture or community health or the welfare of children. Worthy as these and
other goals may be, they can not be achieved alone. I am dissatisfied with such efforts because they are too
specialized, they are not comprehensive enough, they are not radical enough,
they virtually predict their own failure by implying that we can remedy or
control effects while leaving causes in place. Ultimately, I think, they are
insincere; they propose that the trouble is caused by other people; they would
like to change policy but not behavior.
Let us suppose that we have a Movement for Better Land Use.
What we must do above all, I think, is try to see the problem in its fuIl size and difficulty. If we are concerned about land abuse, then we must see that this is an economic problem. Every economy is by definition, a land using economy. If we are using our land wrongly, then something is wrong with our economy. If we are concerned about land above, we have begun a profound work of economic criticism. Study of the history of land use (and any local history will do) informs us that we have had for a long time an economy that thrives by undermining its own foundations. Industrialism, which is the name of our economy, and which is now virtually the only economy of the world, has been from its beginnings in a state of riot. It is based squarely upon the principle of violence toward everything-on which it depends, and it has not mattered whether the form of industrialism was communist or capitalist or whatever; the violence toward nature, human communities, traditional agriculture and local economies has been constant. The bad new is coming in, literally, from all over the world. Can such an economy be fixed without being radically changed? I don’t think it can.
The Captains of Industry have always counseled the rest of us to be
“realistic”. Let us, therefore, be realistic. Is it realistic to assume that
the present economy would be just fine if only it would stop poisoning the air
and water, or if only it would stop soil erosion, or if only it would stop
degrading watersheds and forest ecosystems, or if only it would stop seducing
children, or if only it would quit buying politicians. Realism, I think, is a
very limited programme.
We can show the hopelessness of single-issue causes and single-issue
movements by following a line of thought such as this: we need a continuous
supply of uncontaminated water. Therefore, we need (among other things)
soil-land-water conserving ways of agriculture and forestry that are not
dependent on monoculture, toxic chemicals, or the indifference and violence
that always accompany big-scale land economies that are dependent on people.
Therefore, we need people with knowledge, skills, motives attitudes required
by diversified small-scale land economies. But where are the people?
Well, all of us who live in the suffering rural landscapes of the United
States know that most people are available to those landscapes only
recreationally. We see them bicycling or boating or hiking or camping or
hunting or fishing or driving along and looking around. They do not, in Mary
Austin’s phrase, “summer and winter with the land”/ they are unacquainted with
the land’s human and natural economies. Though people have not progressed beyond
the need to eat food and drink water and wear clothes and live in houses, most
people have progressed beyond the domestic arts – the husbandry and wifery of
the world – by which those needful things are produced and conserved. In fact,
the comparative few who still practise that necessary husbaiidry and wifery
often are included to apologize for doing so, having been carefully taught in
our education system that those arts are degrading and unworthy of people’s
talents. Educated minds, in the modern era, are unlikely to know anything about
food and drink, clothing and shelter. In merely taking these things for
granted, the modern educated mind reveals itself also to be as superstitious a
mind as ever has existed in the world. What could be more superstitious than
the idea that money brings forth food?
I AM NOT SUGGESTING, of course, that everybody ought to be a farmer or a
forester. I am suggesting that most people now are living on the far side of a
broken connection, and that this is potentially catastrophic. Most people are
now fed, clothed and sheltered from sources toward which they feel no
gratitude and exercise no responsibility. There is no significant urban
constituency, no formidable consumer lobby, no noticeable political leadership,
for good land-use practices, for good farming and good forestry, for restoration
of abused land, or for halting the destruction of land by so-called
“development”.
We are involved now in a profound failure of imagination. Most of us can
not imagine the wheat beyond the bread, or the farmer beyond the wheat, or the
farm beyond the farmer, or the history beyond the farm. Most people can not
imagine the forest and the forest economy that produced their houses and
furniture and paper; or the landscapes, the streams and the weather that fill
their pitchers and bathtubs and swimming pools with water. Most people appear
to assume that when they have paid their money for these things they have
entirely met their obligations.
Money does not bring forth food. Neither does the technology of the food
system. Food comes from nature and from the work of people. If the supply of
food is to be continuous for a long time, then people must work in harmony with
nature. That means the people must find the right answers to a lot of hard
practical questions. The same applies to forestry and the possibility of a
continuous supply of timber.
One way we could describe the task ahead of us is by saying that we need
to enlarge the consciousness and the conscience of the economy. Our economy
needs to know – and care – what it is doing. This is revolutionary, of course,
if you have a taste for revolution, but it is also a matter of common sense.
Undoubtedly some people will want to start a movement to bring this
about. I will agree to this, but on three conditions.
My first condition is that this movement should begin by giving up all
hope and belief in piecemeal, one-shot solutions. The present scientific quest
for odourless hog nature should give us sufficient proof that the specialist
is no longer with us. Even now, after centuries of reductionist propaganda,
the world is still intricate and vast, as dark as it is light, a place of
mystery, where we can not do one thing without doing many thing, or put two
things together without putting many things together. Water quality, for
example, can not be improved without improving farming and forestry, but
farming and forestry can not be improved without improving the education of
consumers – and so on.
The proper business of a human economy is to make one whole thing of
ourselves and this world. To make in to a practical wholeness with the land
under our feet is may be not altogether possible – how would we know? – But, as
a goal, it at least carries us beyond hubris, beyond the utterly groundless
assumption that we can subdivide our present great failure into a thousand
separate problems that can be fixed by a thousand task forces of academic and
bureaucratic specialists. That programme has been given more than a fair
chance to prove itself, and we ought to know by now that it won’t work.
My second condition is that the people in this movement should take full
responsibility for themselves as members of the economy. If we are going to
teach the economy what it is doing, then we need to learn what we are doing.
This is going to have to be a private movement as well as a public one. If it
is unrealistic to expect wasteful industries to be conserves, then obviously
we must lead in part the public life of complainers, petitioners, protesters,
advocates and supporters of stricter regulations and sneer policies. But that
is not enough.
If it is unreasonable to expect a bad economy to try to become a good
one, then we must go to work to build a good economy. It is appropriate that
this duty should fall to us, for good economic behaviour is more possible for
us than it is for the great corporations with their miseducated managers and
their greedy and oblivious stockholders. Because it is possible for us, we
must try in every way we can to make good economic sense in our own lives, in
our households, and in our communities. We must do more for our neighbours and
ourselves. We must learn to spend our money with our friends and not with our
enemies. But to do this it is necessary to renew local economies and revive the
domestic. arts,
In seeking to change our economic use of the world, we are seeking
inescapably to change our lives. The outward harmony that we desire between our
economy and the world depends finally upon an inward harmony between our own
hearts and the originating spirit that is the life of all creatures, a spirit
as near us as our flesh and yet forever beyond the measures of this obsessively
measuring age. We can grow good wheat and make good bread only if we understand
that we do not live by bread alone.
My third condition is that this movement should content itself to be
poor. We need to find cheap solutions, solutions within the reach of everybody,
and the availability of a lot of money prevents the discovery of cheap
solutions. The solutions of modern medicine and modern agriculture are all
staggeringly expensive, and this is caused in part, and may be altogether,
because of the availability of huge sums of money for medical and agricultural
research.
Too much money, moreover, attracts administrators
and experts as sugar attracts ants – look at what is happening in our
universities. We should not envy rich movements that are organized and led by
an alternative bureaucracy living on the problems it is supposed to solve. We
want a movement that is a movement because it is advanced by all its members in
their daily lives.
NOW HAVING COMPLETED this very formidable list of the problems and difflculties, fears and fearful hopes that lie ahead of us. I am relieved to see that I have been preparing myself all along to end by saying something cheerful. What I have been talking about is the possibility of renewing human respect from it. I have made it clear, I hope, that I don’t think this respect can be adequately enacted or conveyed by tipping our hats to nature or by representing natural loveliness in art or by prayers of thanks giving or by preserving tracts of wilderness – although I recommend all those things. The respect I mean can be given only by using well the world’s goods that are given to us. This good use, which renews respect – which is the only currency, so to speak, of respect – also renews our pleasure. The callings and disciplines that I have spoken of as the domestic arts are stationed all along the way from the farm to the prepared dinner, from the forest to the dinner table, from stewardship of the land to hospitality to friends and strangers. These arts areas demanding and gratifying, as instructive and as pleasing, as the so-called “fine arts”. To learn them is, I believe, the work that is our profoundest calling. Our rewardship is that they will enrich our lives and make us glad.