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.
Lévi-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
Hüyük 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.