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Title: Agriculture Author: John Zerzan Language: en Topics: agriculture, alienation, anti-civ, Fredy Perlman, marijuana, technology Source: Retrieved on July 20, 2009 from http://www.insurgentdesire.org.uk/agriculture.htm
Agriculture, the indispensable basis of civilization, was originally
encountered as time, language, number and art won out. As the
materialization of alienation, agriculture is the triumph of
estrangement and the definite divide between culture and nature and
humans from each other.
Agriculture is the birth of production, complete with its essential
features and deformation of life and consciousness. The land itself
becomes an instrument of production and the planet’s species its
objects. Wild or tame, weeds or crops speak of that duality that
cripples the soul of our being, ushering in, relatively quickly, the
despotism, war and impoverishment of high civilization over the great
length of that earlier oneness with nature. The forced march of
civilization, which Adorno recognized in the “assumption of an
irrational catastrophe at the beginning of history,” which Freud felt as
“something imposed on a resisting majority,” of which Stanley Diamond
found only “conscripts, not volunteers,” was dictated by agriculture.
And Mircea Eliade was correct to assess its coming as having “provoked
upheavals and spiritual breakdowns” whose magnitude the modern mind
cannot imagine. “To level off, to standardize the human landscape, to
efface its irregularities and banish its surprises,” these words of E.M.
Cioran apply perfectly to the logic of agriculture, the end of life as
mainly sensuous activity, the embodiment and generator of separated
life. Artificiality and work have steadily increased since its inception
and are known as culture: in domesticating animals and plants man
necessarily domesticated himself. Historical time, like agriculture, is
not inherent in social reality but an imposition on it. The dimension of
time or history is a function of repression, whose foundation is
production or agriculture. Hunter-gatherer life was anti-time in its
simultaneous and spontaneous openness; farming life generates a sense of
time by its successive-task narrowness, its directed routine. As the
non-closure and variety of Paleolithic living gave way to the literal
enclosure of agriculture, time assumed power and came to take on the
character of an enclosed space. Formalized temporal reference points —
ceremonies with fixed dates, the naming of days, etc. — are crucial to
the ordering of the world of production; as a schedule of production,
the calendar is integral to civilization. Conversely, not only would
industrial society be impossible without time schedules, the end of
agriculture (basis of all production) would be the end of historical
time.
Representation begins with language, a means of reining in desire. By
displacing autonomous images with verbal symbols, life is reduced and
brought under strict control; all direct, unmediated experience is
subsumed by that supreme mode of symbolic expression, language. Language
cuts up and organizes reality, as Benjamin Whorf put it, and this
segmentation of nature, an aspect of grammar, sets the stage for
agriculture. Julian Jaynes, in fact, concluded that the new linguistic
mentality led very directly to agriculture. Unquestionably, the
crystallization of language into writing, called forth mainly by the
need for record-keeping of agricultural transactions, is the signal that
civilization has begun. In the non-commodified, egalitarian
hunter-gatherer ethos, the basis of which (as has so often been
remarked) was sharing, number was not wanted. There was no ground for
the urge to quantify, no reason to divide what was whole. Not until the
domestication of animals and plants did this cultural concept fully
emerge. Two of number’s seminal figures testify clearly to its alliance
with separateness and property: Pythagoras, center of a highly
influential religious cult of number, and Euclid, father of mathematics
and science, whose geometry originated to measure fields for reasons of
ownership, taxation and slave labor. One of civilization’s early forms,
chieftainship, entails a linear rank order in which each member is
assigned an exact numerical place. Soon, following the anti-natural
linearity of plow culture, the inflexible 90-degree gridiron plan of
even earliest cities appeared. Their insistent regularity constitutes in
itself a repressive ideology. Culture, now numberized, becomes more
firmly bounded and lifeless. Art, too, in its relationship to
agriculture, highlights both institutions. It begins as a means to
interpret and subdue reality, to rationalize nature, and conforms to the
great turning point which is agriculture in its basic features. The
pre-Neolithic cave paintings, for example, are vivid and bold, a dynamic
exaltation of animal grace and freedom. The neolithic art of farmers and
pastoralists, however, stiffens into stylized forms; Franz Borkenau
typified its pottery as a “narrow, timid botching of materials and
forms.” With agriculture, art lost its variety and became standardized
into geometric designs that tended to degenerate into dull, repetitive
patterns, a perfect reflection of standardized, confined, rule-patterned
life. And where there had been no representation in Paleolithic art of
men killing men, an obsession with depicting confrontation between
people advanced with the Neolithic period, scenes of battles becoming
common. Time, language, number, art and all the rest of culture, which
predates and leads to agriculture, rests on symbolization. Just as
autonomy preceded domestication and self-domestication, the rational and
the social precede the symbolic. Food production, it is eternally and
gratefully acknowledged, “permitted the cultural potentiality of the
human species to develop.” But what is this tendency toward the
symbolic, toward the elaboration and imposition of arbitrary forms? It
is a growing capacity for objectification, by which what is living
becomes reified, thing-like. Symbols are more than the basic units of
culture; they are screening devices to distance us from our experiences.
They classify and reduce, “to do away with,” in Leakey and Lewin’s
remarkable phrase, “the otherwise almost intolerable burden of relating
one experience to another.” Thus culture is governed by the imperative
of reforming and subordinating nature. The artificial environment which
is agriculture accomplished this pivotal mediation, with the symbolism
of objects manipulated in the construction of relations of dominance.
For it is not only external nature that is subjugated: the face-to-face
quality of pre-agricultural life in itself severely limited domination,
while culture extends and legitimizes it.
It is likely that already during the Paleolithic era certain forms or
names were attached to objects or ideas, in a symbolizing manner but in
a shifting, impermanent, perhaps playful sense. The will to sameness and
security found in agriculture means that the symbols became as static
and constant as farming life. Regularization, rule patterning, and
technological differentiation, under the sign of division of labor,
interact to ground and advance symbolization. Agriculture completes the
symbolic shift and the virus of alienation has overcome authentic, free
life. It is the victory of cultural control; as anthropologist Marshall
Sahlins puts it, “The amount of work per capita increases with the
evolution of culture and the amount of leisure per capita decreases.”
Today, the few surviving hunter-gatherers occupy the least “economically
interesting” areas of the world where agriculture has not penetrated,
such as the snows of the Inuit or desert of the Australian aborigines.
And yet the refusal of farming drudgery, even in adverse settings, bears
its own rewards. The Hazda of Tanzania, Filipino Tasaday, !Kung of
Botswana, or the Kalahari Desert !Kung San-who were seen by Richard Lee
as easily surviving a serious, several years’ drought while neighboring
farmers starved-also testify to Hole and Flannery’s summary that “No
group on earth has more leisure time than hunters and gatherers, who
spend it primarily on games, conversation and relaxing.” Service rightly
attributed this condition to “the very simplicity of the technology and
lack of control over the environment” of such groups. And yet simple
Paleolithic methods were, in their own way, “advanced.” Consider a basic
cooking technique like steaming foods by heating stones in a covered
pit; this is immemorially older than any pottery, kettles or baskets (in
fact, is anti-container in its non-surplus, non-exchange orientation)
and is the most nutritionally sound way to cook, far healthier than
boiling food in water, for example. Or consider the fashioning of such
stone tools as the long and exceptionally thin “laurel leaf” knives,
delicately chipped but strong, which modern industrial techniques cannot
duplicate. The hunting and gathering lifestyle represents the most
successful and enduring adaptation ever achieved by humankind. In
occasional pre-agriculture phenomena like the intensive collection of
food or the systematic hunting of a single species can be seen signs of
impending breakdown of a pleasurable mode that remained so static for so
long precisely because it was pleasurable. The “penury and day-long
grind” of agriculture, in Clark’s words, is the vehicle of culture,
“rational” only in its perpetual disequilibrium and its logical
progression toward ever-greater destruction, as will be outlined below.
Although the term hunter-gatherer should be reversed (and has been by
not a few current anthropologists) because it is recognized that
gathering constitutes by far the larger survival component, the nature
of hunting provides salient contrast to domestication. The relationship
of the hunter to the hunted animal, which is sovereign, free and even
considered equal, is obviously qualitatively different from that of the
farmer or herdsman to the enslaved chattels over which he rules
absolutely. Evidence of the urge to impose order or subjugate is found
in the coercive rites and uncleanness taboos of incipient religion. The
eventual subduing of the world that is agriculture has at least some of
its basis where ambiguous behavior is ruled out, purity and defilement
defined and enforced. LĂ©vi-Strauss defined religion as the
anthropomorphism of nature; earlier spirituality was participatory with
nature, not imposing cultural values or traits upon it. The sacred means
that which is separated, and ritual and formalization, increasingly
removed from the ongoing activities of daily life and in the control of
such specialists as shamans and priests, are closely linked with
hierarchy and institutionalized power. Religion emerges to ground and
legitimize culture, by means of a “higher” order of reality; it is
especially required, in this function of maintaining the solidarity of
society, by the unnatural demands of agriculture. In the Neolithic
village of Catal HĂĽyĂĽk in Turkish Anatolia, one of every three rooms was
used for ritual purposes. Plowing and sowing can be seen as ritual
renunciations, according to Burkert, a form of systematic repression
accompanied by a sacrificial element. Speaking of sacrifice, which is
the killing of domesticated animals (or even humans) for ritual
purposes, it is pervasive in agricultural societies and found only
there. Some of the major Neolithic religions often attempted a symbolic
healing of the agricultural rupture with nature through the mythology of
the earth mother, which needless to say does nothing to restore the lost
unity. Fertility myths are also central; the Egyptian Osiris, the Greek
Persephone, Baal of the Canaanites, and the New Testament Jesus, gods
whose death and resurrection testify to the perseverance of the soil,
not to mention the human soul. The first temples signified the rise of
cosmologies based on a model of the universe as an arena of
domestication or barnyard, which in turn serves to justify the
suppression of human autonomy. Whereas precivilized society was, as
Redfield put it, “held together by largely undeclared but continually
realized ethical conceptions,” religion developed as a way of creating
citizens, placing the moral order under public management.
Domestication involved the initiation of production, vastly increased
divisions of labor, and the completed foundations of social
stratification. This amounted to an epochal mutation both in the
character of human existence and its development, clouding the latter
with ever more violence and work. Contrary to the myth of
hunter-gatherers as violent and aggressive, by the way, recent evidence
shows that existing non-farmers, such as the Mbuti (“pygmies”) studied
by Turnbull, apparently do what killing they do without any aggressive
spirit, even with a sort of regret. Warfare and the formation of every
civilization or state, on the other hand, are inseparably linked.
Primal peoples did not fight over areas in which separate groups might
converge in their gathering and hunting. At least “territorial”
struggles are not part of the ethnographic literature and they would
seem even less likely to have occurred in pre-history when resources
were greater and contact with civilization non-existent. Indeed, these
peoples had no conception of private property, and Rousseau’s figurative
judgment, that divided society was founded by the man who first sowed a
piece of ground, saying “This land is mine,” and found others to believe
him, is essentially valid. “Mine and thine, the seeds of all mischief,
have no place with them,” reads Pietro’s 1511 account of the natives
encountered on Columbus’ second voyage. Centuries later, surviving
Native Americans asked, “Sell the Earth? Why not sell the air, the
clouds, the great sea?” Agriculture creates and elevates possessions;
consider the longing root of belongings, as if they ever make up for the
loss. Work, as a distinct category of life, likewise did not exist until
agriculture. The human capacity of being shackled to crops and herds
devolved rather quickly. Food production overcame the common absence or
paucity of ritual and hierarchy in society and introduced civilized
activities like the forced labor of temple-building. Here is the real
“Cartesian split” between inner and outer reality, the separation
whereby nature became merely something to be “worked.” On this capacity
for a sedentary and servile existence rests the entire superstructure of
civilization with its increasing weight of repression. Male violence
toward women originated with agriculture, which transmuted women into
beasts of burden and breeders of children. Before farming, the
egalitarianism of foraging life “applied as fully to women as to men,”
judged Eleanor Leacock, owing to the autonomy of tasks and the fact that
decisions were made by those who carried them out. In the absence of
production and with no drudge work suitable for child labor such as
weeding, women were not consigned to onerous chores or the constant
supply of babies. Along with the curse of perpetual work, via
agriculture, in the expulsion from Eden, God told woman, “I will greatly
multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth
children; and that desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule
over thee.” Similarly, the first known codified laws, those of the
Sumerian king Ur-Namu, prescribed death to any woman satisfying desires
outside of marriage. Thus Whyte referred to the ground women “lost
relative to men when humans first abandoned a simple hunting and
gathering way of life,” and Simone de Beauvoir saw in the cultural
equation of plow and phallus a fitting symbol of the oppression of
women.
As wild animals are converted into sluggish meat-making machines, the
concept of becoming “cultivated” is a virtue enforced on people, meaning
the weeding out of freedom from one’s nature, in the service of
domestication and exploitation. As Rice points out, in Sumer, the first
civilization, the earliest cities had factories with their
characteristic high organization and refraction of skills. Civilization
from this point exacts human labor and the mass production of food,
buildings, war and authority. To the Greeks, work was a curse and
nothing else. Their name for it-ponos-has the same root as the Latin
poena, sorrow. The famous Old Testament curse on agriculture as the
expulsion from Paradise (Genesis 3:17–18) reminds us of the origin of
work. As Mumford put it, “Conformity, repetition, patience were the keys
to this [Neolithic] culture...the patient capacity for work.” In this
monotony and passivity of tending and waiting is born, according to Paul
Shepard, the peasant’s “deep, latent resentments, crude mixtures of
rectitude and heaviness, and absence of humor.” One might also add a
stoic insensitivity and lack of imagination inseparable from religious
faith, sullenness, and suspicion among traits widely attributed to the
domesticated life of farming.
Although food production by its nature includes a latent readiness for
political domination and although civilizing culture was from the
beginning its own propaganda machine, the changeover involved a
monumental struggle. Fredy Perlman’s Against Leviathan! Against
His-Story! is unrivaled on this, vastly enriching Toynbee’s attention to
the “internal” and “external proletariats,” discontents within and
without civilization. Nonetheless, along the axis from digging stick
farming to plow agriculture to fully differentiated irrigation systems,
an almost total genocide of gatherers and hunters was necessarily
effected.
The formation and storage of surpluses are part of the domesticating
will to control and make static, an aspect of the tendency to symbolize.
A bulwark against the flow of nature, surplus takes the forms of herd
animals and granaries. Stored grain was the earliest medium of
equivalence, the oldest form of capital. Only with the appearance of
wealth in the shape of storable grains do the gradations of labor and
social classes proceed. While there were certainly wild grains before
all this (and wild wheat, by the way, is 24 percent protein compared to
12 percent for domesticated wheat), the bias of culture makes every
difference. Civilization and its cities rested as much on granaries as
on symbolization. The mystery of agriculture’s origin seems even more
impenetrable in light of the recent reversal of long-standing notions
that the previous era was one of hostility to nature and an absence of
leisure. “One could no longer assume,” wrote Arme, “that early man
domesticated plants and animals to escape drudgery and starvation. If
anything, the contrary appeared true, and the advent of farming saw the
end of innocence.” For a long time, the question was “Why wasn’t
agriculture adopted much earlier in human evolution?” More recently, we
know that agriculture, in Cohen’s words, “is not easier than hunting and
gathering and does not provide a higher quality, more palatable, or more
secure food base.” Thus the consensus question now is, “Why was it
adopted at all?”
Many theories have been advanced, none convincingly. Childe and others
argue that population increase pushed human societies into more intimate
contact with other species, leading to domestication and the need to
produce in order to feed the additional people. But it has been shown
rather conclusively that population increase did not precede agriculture
but was caused by it. “I don’t see any evidence anywhere in the world,”
concluded Flannery, “that suggests that population pressure was
responsible for the beginning of agriculture.” Another theory has it
that major climatic changes occurred at the end of the Pleistocene,
about 11,000 years ago, that upset the old hunter-gatherer life-world
and led directly to the cultivation of certain surviving staples. Recent
dating methods have helped demolish this approach; no such climatic
shift happened that could have forced the new mode into existence.
Besides, there are scores of examples of agriculture being adopted-or
refused-in every type of climate. Another major hypothesis is that
agriculture was introduced via a chance discovery or invention as if it
had never occurred to the species before a certain moment that, for
example, food grows from sprouted seeds. It seems certain that
Paleolithic humanity had a virtually inexhaustible knowledge of flora
and fauna for many tens of thousands of years before the cultivation of
plants began, which renders this theory especially weak. Agreement with
Carl Sauer’s summation that, “Agriculture did not originate from a
growing or chronic shortage of food” is sufficient, in fact, to dismiss
virtually all originary theories that have been advanced. A remaining
idea, presented by Hahn, Isaac and others, holds that food production
began at base as a religious activity. This hypothesis comes closest to
plausibility.
Sheep and goats, the first animals to be domesticated, are known to have
been widely used in religious ceremonies, and to have been raised in
enclosed meadows for sacrificial purposes. Before they were
domesticated, moreover, sheep had no wool suitable for textile purposes.
The main use of the hen in southeastern Asia and the eastern
Mediterranean-the earliest centers of civilization-“seems to have been,”
according to Darby, “sacrificial or divinatory rather than alimentary.”
Sauer adds that the “egg laying and meat producing qualities” of tamed
fowl “are relatively late consequences of their domestication.” Wild
cattle were fierce and dangerous; neither the docility of oxen nor the
modified meat texture of such castrates could have been foreseen. Cattle
were not milked until centuries after their initial captivity, and
representations indicate that their first known harnessing was to wagons
in religious processions. Plants, next to be controlled, exhibit similar
backgrounds so far as is known. Consider the New World examples of
squash and pumpkin, used originally as ceremonial rattles. Johannessen
discussed the religious and mystical motives connected with the
domestication of maize, Mexico’s most important crop and center of its
native Neolithic religion. Likewise, Anderson investigated the selection
and development of distinctive types of various cultivated plants
because of their magical significance. The shamans, I should add, were
well-placed in positions of power to introduce agriculture via the
taming and planting involved in ritual and religion, sketchily referred
to above. Though the religious explanation of the origins of agriculture
has been somewhat overlooked, it brings us, in my opinion, to the very
doorstep of the real explanation of the birth of production: that
non-rational, cultural force of alienation which spread, in the forms of
time, language, number and art, to ultimately colonize material and
psychic life in agriculture. “Religion” is too narrow a
conceptualization of this infection and its growth. Domination is too
weighty, too all-encompassing to have been solely conveyed by the
pathology that is religion.
But the cultural values of control and uniformity that are part of
religion are certainly part of agriculture, and from the beginning.
Noting that strains of corn cross-pollinate very easily, Anderson
studied the very primitive agriculturalists of Assam, the Naga tribe,
and their variety of corn that exhibited no differences from plant to
plant. True to culture, showing that it is complete from the beginning
of production, the Naga kept their varieties so pure “only by a
fanatical adherence to an ideal type.” This exemplifies the marriage of
culture and production in domestication, and its inevitable progeny,
repression and work.
The scrupulous tending of strains of plants finds its parallel in the
domesticating of animals, which also defies natural selection and
re-establishes the controllable organic world at a debased, artificial
level. Like plants, animals are mere things to be manipulated; a dairy
cow, for instance, is seen as a kind of machine for converting grass to
milk. Transmuted from a state of freedom to that of helpless parasites,
these animals become completely dependent on man for survival. In
domestic mammals, as a rule, the size of the brain becomes relatively
smaller as specimens are produced that devote more energy to growth and
less to activity. Placid, infantilized, typified perhaps by the sheep,
most domesticated of herd animals; the remarkable intelligence of wild
sheep is completely lost in their tamed counterparts. The social
relationships among domestic animals are reduced to the crudest
essentials. Non-reproductive parts of the life cycle are minimized,
courtship is curtailed, and the animal’s very capacity to recognize its
own species is impaired. Farming also created the potential for rapid
environmental destruction and the domination over nature soon began to
turn the green mantle that covered the birthplaces of civilization into
barren and lifeless areas. “Vast regions have changed their aspect
completely,” estimates Zeuner, “always to quasi-drier condition, since
the beginnings of the Neolithic.” Deserts now occupy most of the areas
where the high civilizations once flourished, and there is much
historical evidence that these early formations inevitably ruined their
environments.
Throughout the Mediterranean Basin and in the adjoining Near East and
Asia, agriculture turned lush and hospitable lands into depleted, dry,
and rocky terrain. In Critias, Plato described Attica as “a skeleton
wasted by disease,” referring to the deforestation of Greece and
contrasting it to its earlier richness. Grazing by goats and sheep, the
first domesticated ruminants, was a major factor in the denuding of
Greece, Lebanon, and North Africa, and the desertification of the Roman
and Mesopotamian empires. Another, more immediate impact of agriculture,
brought to light increasingly in recent years, involved the physical
well-being of its subjects. Lee and Devore’s researches show that “the
diet of gathering peoples was far better than that of cultivators, that
starvation is rare, that their health status was generally superior, and
that there is a lower incidence of chronic disease.” Conversely, Farb
summarized, “Production provides an inferior diet based on a limited
number of foods, is much less reliable because of blights and the
vagaries of weather, and is much more costly in terms of human labor
expended.”
The new field of paleopathology has reached even more emphatic
conclusions, stressing, as does Angel, the “sharp decline in growth and
nutrition caused by the changeover from food gathering to food
production.” Earlier conclusions about life span have also been revised.
Although eyewitness Spanish accounts of the sixteenth century tell of
Florida Indian fathers seeing their fifth generation before passing
away, it was long believed that primitive people died in their 30s and
40s. Robson, Boyden and others have dispelled the confusion of longevity
with life expectancy and discovered that current hunter-gatherers,
barring injury and severe infection, often outlive their civilized
contemporaries. During the industrial age only fairly recently did life
span lengthen for the species, and it is now widely recognized that in
Paleolithic times humans were long-lived animals, once certain risks
were passed. DeVries is correct in his judgment that duration of life
dropped sharply upon contact with civilization. “Tuberculosis and
diarrheal disease had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic
plague the appearance of large cities,” wrote Jared Diamond. Malaria,
probably the single greatest killer of humanity, and nearly all other
infectious diseases are the heritage of agriculture. Nutritional and
degenerative diseases in general appear with the reign of domestication
and culture. Cancer, coronary thrombosis, anemia, dental caries, and
mental disorders are but a few of the hallmarks of agriculture;
previously women gave birth with no difficulty and little or no pain.
People were far more alive in all their senses. !Kung San, reported R.H.
Post, have heard a single-engine plane while it was still 70 miles away,
and many of them can see four moons of Jupiter with the naked eye. The
summary judgment of Harris and Ross, as to “an overall decline in the
quality-and probably in the length-of human life among farmers as
compared with earlier hunter-gatherer groups,” is understated.
One of the most persistent and universal ideas is that there was once a
Golden Age of innocence before history began. Hesiod, for instance,
referred to the “life-sustaining soil, which yielded its copious fruits
unbribed by toil.” Eden was clearly the home of the hunter-gatherers and
the yearning expressed by the historical images of paradise must have
been that of disillusioned tillers of the soil for a lost life of
freedom and relative ease.
The history of civilization shows the increasing displacement of nature
from human experience, characterized in part by a narrowing of food
choices. According to Rooney, prehistoric peoples found sustenance in
over 1500 species of wild plants, whereas “All civilizations,” Wenke
reminds us,” have been based on the cultivation of one or more of just
six plant species: wheat, barley, millet, rice, maize, and potatoes.” It
is a striking truth that over the centuries “the number of different
edible foods which are actually eaten,” Pyke points out, “has steadily
dwindled.” The world’s population now depends for most of its
subsistence on only about 20 genera of plants while their natural
strains are replaced by artificial hybrids and the genetic pool of these
plants becomes far less varied.
The diversity of food tends to disappear or flatten out as the
proportion of manufactured foods increases. Today the very same articles
of diet are distributed worldwide, so that an Inuit Eskimo and an
African may soon be eating powdered milk manufactured in Wisconsin or
frozen fish sticks from a single factory in Sweden. A few big
multinationals such as Unilever, the world’s biggest food production
company, preside over a highly integrated service system in which the
object is not to nourish or even to feed, but to force an
ever-increasing consumption of fabricated, processed products upon the
world.
When Descartes enunciated the principle that the fullest exploitation of
matter to any use is the whole duty of man, our separation from nature
was virtually complete and the stage was set for the Industrial
Revolution. Three hundred and fifty years later this spirit lingered in
the person of Jean Vorst, Curator of France’s Museum of Natural History,
who pronounced that our species, “because of intellect,” can no longer
re-cross a certain threshold of civilization and once again become part
of a natural habitat. He further stated, expressing perfectly the
original and persevering imperialism of agriculture, “As the earth in
its primitive state is not adapted to our expansion, man must shackle it
to fulfill human destiny.” The early factories literally mimicked the
agricultural model, indicating again that at base all mass production is
farming. The natural world is to be broken and forced to work. One
thinks of the mid-American prairies where settlers had to yoke six oxen
to plows in order to cut through the soil for the first time. Or a scene
from the 1870s in The Octopus by Frank Norris, in which gang-plows were
driven like “a great column of field artillery” across the San Joaquin
Valley, cutting 175 furrows at once. Today the organic, what is left of
it, is fully mechanized under the aegis of a few petrochemical
corporations. Their artificial fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and
near-monopoly of the world’s seed stock define a total environment that
integrates food production from planting to consumption. Although
Lévi-Strauss is right that “Civilization manufactures monoculture like
sugar beets,” only since World War II has a completely synthetic
orientation begun to dominate.
Agriculture takes more organic matter out of the soil than it puts back,
and soil erosion is basic to the monoculture of annuals. Regarding the
latter, some are promoted with devastating results to the land; along
with cotton and soybeans, corn, which in its present domesticated state
is totally dependent on agriculture for its existence, is especially
bad. J.Russell Smith called it “the killer of continents...and one of
the worst enemies of the human future.” The erosion cost of one bushel
of Iowa corn is two bushels of topsoil, highlighting the more general
large-scale industrial destruction of farmland. The continuous tillage
of huge monocultures, with massive use of chemicals and no application
of manure or humus, obviously raises soil deterioration and soil loss to
much higher levels. The dominant agricultural mode has it that soil
needs massive infusions of chemicals, supervised by technicians whose
overriding goal is to maximize production. Artificial fertilizers and
all the rest from this outlook eliminate the need for the complex life
of the soil and indeed convert it into a mere instrument of production.
The promise of technology is total control, a completely contrived
environment that simply supersedes the natural balance of the biosphere.
But more and more energy is expended to purchase great monocultural
yields that are beginning to decline, never mind the toxic contamination
of the soil, ground water and food. The U.S. Department of Agriculture
says that cropland erosion is occurring in this country at a rate of two
billion tons of soil a year. The National Academy of Sciences estimates
that over one third of topsoil is already gone forever. The ecological
imbalance caused by monocropping and synthetic fertilizers causes
enormous increases in pests and crop diseases; since World War II, crop
loss due to insects has actually doubled. Technology responds, of
course, with spiraling applications of more synthetic fertilizers, and
“weed” and “pest” killers, accelerating the crime against nature.
Another post-war phenomenon was the Green Revolution, billed as the
salvation of the impoverished Third World by American capital and
technology. But rather than feeding the hungry, the Green Revolution
drove millions of poor people from farmlands in Asia, Latin America and
Africa as victims of the program that fosters large corporate farms. It
amounted to an enormous technological colonization creating dependency
on capital-intensive agribusiness, destroying older agrarian
communalism, requiring massive fossil fuel consumption and assaulting
nature on an unprecedented scale. Desertification, or loss of soil due
to agriculture, has been steadily increasing. Each year, a total area
equivalent to more than two Belgiums is being converted to desert
worldwide. The fate of the world’s tropical rainforests is a factor in
the acceleration of this desiccation: half of them have been erased in
the past thirty years. In Botswana, the last wilderness region of Africa
has disappeared like much of the Amazon jungle and almost half of the
rainforests of Central America, primarily to raise cattle for the
hamburger markets in the U.S. and Europe. The few areas safe from
deforestation are where agriculture doesn’t want to go. The destruction
of the land is proceeding in the U.S. over a greater land area than was
encompassed by the original thirteen colonies, just as it was at the
heart of the severe African famine of the mid-1980s, and the extinction
of one species of wild animal and plant after another.
Returning to animals, one is reminded of the words of Genesis in which
God said to Noah, “And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be
upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and
upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hands are they delivered.”
When newly discovered territory was first visited by the advance guard
of production, as a wide descriptive literature shows, the wild mammals
and birds showed no fear whatsoever of the explorers. The
agriculturalized mentality, however, so aptly foretold in the biblical
passage, projects an exaggerated belief in the fierceness of wild
creatures, which follows from progressive estrangement and loss of
contact with the animal world, plus the need to maintain dominance over
it.
The fate of domestic animals is defined by the fact that agricultural
technologists continually look to factories as models of how to refine
their own production systems. Nature is banished from these systems as,
increasingly, farm animals are kept largely immobile throughout their
deformed lives, maintained in high-density, wholly artificial
environments. Billions of chickens, pigs, and veal calves, for example,
no longer even see the light of day much less roam the fields, fields
growing more silent as more and more pastures are plowed up to grow feed
for these hideously confined beings.
The high-tech chickens, whose beak ends have been clipped off to reduce
death from stress-induced fighting, often exist four or even five to a
12” by 18” cage and are periodically deprived of food and water for up
to ten days to regulate their egg-laying cycles. Pigs live on concrete
floors with no bedding; foot-rot, tail-biting and cannibalism are
endemic because of physical conditions and stress. Sows nurse their
piglets separated by metal grates, mother and offspring barred from
natural contact. Veal calves are often raised in darkness, chained to
stalls so narrow as to disallow turning around or other normal posture
adjustment. These animals are generally under regimens of constant
medication due to the tortures involved and their heightened
susceptibility to diseases; automated animal production relies upon
hormones and antibiotics. Such systematic cruelty, not to mention the
kind of food that results, brings to mind the fact that captivity itself
and every form of enslavement has agriculture as its progenitor or
model. Food has been one of our most direct contacts with the natural
environment, but we are rendered increasingly dependent on a
technological production system in which finally even our senses have
become redundant; taste, once vital for judging a food’s value or
safety, is no longer experienced, but rather certified by a label.
Overall, the healthfulness of what we consume declines and land once
cultivated for food now produces coffee, tobacco, grains for alcohol,
marijuana, and other drugs, creating the context for famine. Even the
non-processed foods like fruits and vegetables are now grown to be
tasteless and uniform because the demands of handling, transport and
storage, not nutrition or pleasure, are the highest considerations.
Total war borrowed from agriculture to defoliate millions of acres in
Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, but the plundering of the
biosphere proceeds even more lethally in its daily, global forms. Food
as a function of production has also failed miserably on the most
obvious level: half of the world, as everyone knows, suffers from
malnourishment ranging to starvation itself.
Meanwhile, the “diseases of civilization,” as discussed by Eaton and
Konner in the January 31, 1985 New England Journal of Medicine and
contrasted with the healthful pre-farming diets, underline the joyless,
sickly world of chronic maladjustment we inhabit as prey of the
manufacturers of medicine, cosmetics, and fabricated food. Domestication
reaches new heights of the pathological in genetic food engineering,
with new types of animals in the offing as well as contrived
microorganisms and plants. Logically, humanity itself will also become a
domesticate of this order as the world of production processes us as
much as it degrades and deforms every other natural system.
The project of subduing nature, begun and carried through by
agriculture, has assumed gigantic proportions. The “success” of
civilization’s progress, a success earlier humanity never wanted, tastes
more and more like ashes. James Serpell summed it up this way: “In short
we appear to have reached the end of the line. We cannot expand; we seem
unable to intensify production without wreaking further havoc, and the
planet is fast becoming a wasteland.” Physiologist Jared Diamond termed
the initiation of agriculture “a catastrophe from which we have never
recovered.” Agriculture has been and remains a “catastrophe” at all
levels, the one which underpins the entire material and spiritual
culture of alienation now destroying us. Liberation is impossible
without its dissolution.