Down with (parts of) the past!
I'm looking at the new issue of Chronicles, which features a happy kid using a plough pulled by some oxen, and behind him stands an old corner store but in the back of the supposedly idyllic scene is that dreadful menace Wal-Mart shown in black and white. Wal-Mart! Why, the store intends to take that kid from behind that plough and plunk him behind some counter pushing goods made in China, and thus does the world end.
You know, it just doesn’t do it for me. I would rather be in Wal-Mart than living on a farm pushing a plough, unless the setting were some fantasy vacation in which we live like our ancestors for a day or two before flying home. I would do this, so long as the farm had wireless.
That’s probably true for nearly everyone. In fact, we can pretty much know this is true for everyone. How? Because wherever and whenever people are given the choice, they leave the farm for the town and the city, and drop their ploughs and pick up machinery. Given enough time and progress, the heaviest thing they lift is a computer mouse and weights at the private gym.
Why? Well, it seems that God that gave us rationality has also implanted human beings with a desire to improve their lot. If we are permitted the freedom to make choices, we choose better ways of getting what we want and need rather than worse ways. We would rather do what we do best rather than do what we must, which is why the division of labor leads to relentless improvements in our lives and in human flourishing for everyone.
Look, I love the past, by which I mean the time before our lifetimes. The past has wonderful architecture, literature, thinkers, music, artisanship, cultural traditions, romances, religions, rituals, and events. How tedious are people who want to reinvent all ideas starting now? A new religion is a false one, and always means some weirdo lording it over dupes. Same goes for a brand-new philosophy of life, math, geometry, and morality. You want to start the calendar at day one? Feel free but leave the rest of us out of it.
But you know what’s not so great about the past? The technology was rotten. Lifespans were short. Food was hard to come by. Dentistry was dreadful. Getting from here to there was a pain in the neck; you had to find or horse or hoof it. Medicine was more likely to kill you than help you, and I say that as the great grandson of a medic with a camp of men who fought in the civil war. He was a blacksmith in real life. That’s why they gave him the job of sawing off arms and legs and when they had to go.
Also, not that many people were even around in the past. In the year 1000, there were only 250 million people on the whole planet—smaller then the US population today. Some 900 years later, it had increased to 1.5 billion, which isn’t actually that much compared to what has happened since. There are now 6.5 billion people alive, which is just great, or so it seems to me, because that means more writers, inventors, artists, workers, bloggers, and everything else.
More people also implies less infant mortality, early death, and human suffering generally. Of course there are more mouths to feed, so thanks goodness for capitalism, which makes it all possible. Take that away and you remove the cause of the viability of the human population and force mass death and other unthinkable results.
In 1900, 40% of Americans worked on farms. Today it is only 3%. This is progress. It really is. What’s more, it represents the results of choice. No one was ever forced to leave a farm. They choose to leave to undertake more socially useful and economically profitable endeavors.
But what about the loss of values, culture, that sense of independence that comes with the agricultural way of life? In his lead editorial Thomas Fleming cites Thomas Jefferson: "cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedding to its liberty and interests…"
Well, it was an empirical fact. Generally speaking, there were two parties in those days, North and South, manufacturing and agricultural. The former were hooked into big government, mercantilism and inflationary finance, while the latter were all the things Jefferson describe. They were also the aristocracy with the deepest roots, and greatest love of radical liberty.
Is the insight valid for all time and all conditions, a matter of natural law rather than a descriptive point about the times? Of course not. Jefferson was no dummy. He was well read in the highest economic theory of his time. A bust of Turgot stands in his doorway of his home in Charlottesville today just as it did when he was alive.
In any case, whether and to what extent Jefferson was an agrarian is neither here nor there. Lots of people romanticize the past, have plots in their backyards, keep a compost pile, and growing veggies in the spring and summer. Ah, the agrarian life—made possible and made charming by existence of a vast capitalist infrastructure that sells seeds and dirt and fertilizer and tools at Home Depot, Lowes, and a hundred other dealers. The agrarian life is a good we purchase like any other. You are free to buy (with money and time) or not.
One funny point about self-conscious anachronisms: they can’t really decide where history should have stopped. In the same issue that feature Fleming regretting the fact that you are not pushing a plough has another writer bemoaning the loss of manufacturing jobs in Rockford, Illinois. Why? Maybe if we lose enough manufacturing jobs, everyone will have to go back to farming. What neither contributor sees is that both the loss of agricultural and manufacturing jobs represents progress in the march of the division of labor. It means the material advance of the human population.
It’s fine and great to love the eternal verities, be in awe of baroque churches, listen to the music of Josquin, master ancient poetry, recite poetry in Middle English. But that doesn't mean you can’t use a cell phone, know Html, listen to a podcast, and spend your free time improving Wikipedia entries. We do not have to choose between modernism and antiquarian affections. Capitalism allows us to have it all.
Comments (18)
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
Music by Elton John
Lyrics by Bernie Taupin
Available on the album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
(No, I had to lookup the lyrics, I swear!)
Published: November 11, 2005 12:31 PM
Jeff,
I don't think the Vanderbilt Agrarians were arguing for "self-conscious anachronism". No where in "I'll Take My Stand" does one find this argument, and, if one reads the sequel, so to speak,"Who Owns America", the writers flesh out their so-called non-anachronistic ideas a little better.
I met several of the Agrarians and many, many of their children and students, and I can say that to a man not one of them was arguing against choices, or conveniences, or the much-used term Freedom. They were reacting to the Scopes Trial, FDR's remaking of the South - particularly seen in the TVA - and the detrimental effects of modernity on Southern Literature and its Arts.
What the Agrarians understood was that a man's connection to nature, primarily in his tilling of the soil or husbandry of animals, etc. is a spiritual one and fosters the "eternal verities" you mention. This may not be enticing to you, but it has certainly been the bedrock of many, many fine men of belle lettres. The opposite could hardly be said.
Published: November 11, 2005 12:49 PM
Some people, the Amish for example, do prefer that life. & people are often forced to leave their family farms when they have to sell them to pay the inheritance tax. Otherwise, great artical.
Published: November 11, 2005 1:16 PM
"What neither contributor sees is that both the loss of agricultural and manufacturing jobs represents progress in the march of the division of labor. It means the material advance of the human population."
The problem is that as our manufacturing sector sheds jobs --either through increased productivity, or increasingly, offshoring -- we are generally replacing them with low-wage service sector jobs and then borrowing from offshore to pay for our consumption.
We are rapidly moving from a save-and-produce economy to a borrow-and-spend economy. And as the dollar continues to decline in value (and just wait to see what happens when Ben "Printing Press" Bernanke takes over at the Fed), the rug will eventually be pulled out from under the house of cards that our economy in fact is.
Thus, while true capitalism would indeed allow us to "have it all," our phony capitalism only assures that we're going to have to give it all back -- soon.
Published: November 11, 2005 1:51 PM
Jeff, you could not be more right. I know that some of these agrarians own their own ranches and farms (I wonder how many have actually been low-level laborers in agriculture), and think its all very charming, but the reality has never been such for the majority of those who have worked in agriculture throughout history.
For those of us who have worked in agriculture (I cleared fields of rocks and did other mind numbing work) such work hardly seemed idyllic. It's especially unpleasant when the temperature dips below zero. And the wages stink.
The worship of the past for its own sake is a big problem for paleocon types.
Published: November 11, 2005 1:55 PM
The implication that the Agrarians were arguing for subsistence level farming, menial labour, and a general "head-in-the-sand" approach to life is not only silly, it displays a willful ignorance of the writings and lives of these twelve fine men.
This page is not the first to offer pedantic, "head-in-the-sand" arguments against the Agrarians. There are plethora volumes of criticism. None, of them, however, are still in print. Somehow, without any backing organisation, grant, or trust, the marketplace has decided that I'll Take My Stand remain in continuous printing since 1930. Imagine.
Published: November 11, 2005 2:41 PM
I agree with David's comment, "our phony capitalism only assures that we're going to have to give it all back -- soon." Eventually we're going to have to get back to more agriculture particularly when foreigners stop financing our debt. While increased technology and standards of living are contributing factors in driving our agricultural force from 40% to a current 3%, I also think that capital consumption, inflation exportation, and distortions in the structure of production are major influences as well.
Energy has made a big bang to the upside with the hinderances by the state on productive capacity. Agricultural commodities will make a similar move eventually, particularly because the Fed induced housing boom is further incentivizing the sale of agricultural land for retail home building. In Arizona we are seeing this with dairy and crop land. Sooner or later soft commodities are going to blow up big in the US.
Published: November 11, 2005 4:08 PM
Casey,
That's why commodities are back, and will continue to be, as a century of central banking, fiat currencies -- and the welfare socialism that couldn't otherwise exist -- comes crashing down.
In other words, the "Wal-Mart economy" is doomed to collapse under the weight of its inherent fraudulence, and the real economy of saving first, THEN producing, is about to make its return -- however painfully for the American masses, who have no idea what's happening to them or what's to come.
Published: November 11, 2005 6:02 PM
Sadly, most of what this post states explicitly, and some of what it implies, is simply wrong. Let me enumerate:-
(1) The reference for comparison isn't agricultural life but hunter gathering without endemic warfare. That's why before the Russians moved in the Aleuts had pretty much the same life expectancy as we do. Of course, they did this by reserving certain low effort activities for elders, and they knew quite well that people who deliberately chose the strong man exercise regime lost a decade of life expectancy - but they were given these benefits by culture, not industrialisation. The preference for pre-agricultural pursuits shows through in aristocratic "hunting, shooting and fishing".
(2) It is not true that wherever and whenever people were given the choice they chose urban life over agriculture. The Highland Clearances and Irish Evictions forced people into the cities. One natural experiment - Leverburgh - showed that when crofting remained an alternative, Scottish islanders stayed away from the factory in droves. Also, historically, cities like Antioch were stocked by compulsorily settling local peasantry as well as Macedonian veterans.
(3) Cities become more attractive at the margins, i.e. for the rural poor, once that base level drops and the cities reach a natural or artificial tipping point. Byzantium, like the great cities of ancient China, throve because that was where taxes mostly got spent - and rural life was made harsher from paying taxes. That made a distorted choice, not a free one.
(4) Most rural people, if not oppressed by rents and/or taxes, were effectively free peasant proprietors; the comparison should be with those who stayed, not with those like the ploughboy who left. Even those were often demographically different from not having inherited yet, rather than part of a landless underclass (both cases existed). From what little we can reliably infer, unless someone is carrying an extra burden or being forced onto marginal land that yields with work, subsistence farming is a comfortable 20 hours per week.
(5) The USA in the 19th century - particularly around the middle of it - was not simplistically divided into North and South, but an industrial North, a slave economy with cash crops South, and an agricultural subsistence economy West. This was even recorded at the time, by Trollope.
(6) In most of history the cities suffered higher mortality, particularly infant mortality, and were population sumps. Of course they offered some degree of premium for those who had spent their earlier years outside. This comparative disadvantage wasn't cured by either capitalism or industrialisation, but by better understanding of sanitation.
(7) Because the countryside had more subsistence activity, wage and price levels were generally lower there. This misled many people who only saw the size of the wages without realising the cost of living (see Sinclair's "the Jungle" for an example in literature).
(8) Neither capitalism nor industrialisation did much to improve the productivity of land. That did not increase until scientific progress gave cheap artificial fertilisers. Labour productivity in agriculture went up rather earlier, with machine harvesting which was widely adopted in the 1830s in newly opened land. But it did not outcompete peasant labour in, say, the Ukraine.
(9) The 3% employed in US agriculture now does not represent simplistic improvement. It omits the fragility of parts of the economy necessary for survival. Read Gibbon to see how relieved he was that 18th century agriculture had become so broad based that there was no longer any risk of system wide collapse, such as was triggered by the barbarian invasions. Well, the tinder is now back even if sparks come from elsewhere now.
(10) Much of present unwillingness to mix technologies in our lifestyles, i.e. to be purely urbanite, reflects our lack of capacity. From oral tradition I know how to dig spuds, but I have met someone who was earnestly trying to grow an ornamental potato in a window box who literally did not know. For most of us it is the biblical "I cannot dig..."
None of this means we should go back, simplistically. But neither does it mean that our ancestors freely chose this, or that what stops us is a free choice; we were raised to this, and we are too many now for free reversion - certainly too many for free reversion to hunter gathering, even for the few who still have a taste for it. But remember, people in that life style rarely chose cities or agriculture freely.
Our present lifestyles are no guide to how we got here, and include considerable sunk costs borne by our ancestors.
Published: November 12, 2005 2:58 AM
Thanks P.M. for your comments, which are interesting. Two of the most famous cases of forced industrialization are the American South after the war and the Soviet Union. The former case, plus the TVA, is what drove interwar and New-Deal era dissident Southern intellectuals to take their stand against leviathan, which they unfortunately confused with industrialization as versus the real problem of federal imposition. This is as much a mistake as believing that eletrification of all rural areas is the very essence of Stalinist communism. The problem is not the ends but the means.
I'm not going to argue the point that cities are economically attractive or that machines improve productivity. But I will point out that Jefferson was born in 1743 and died in 1826, so his comments on agriculture reflected 18th century experience.
Published: November 12, 2005 7:13 AM
P.M. Lawrence is quite correct about peasants being forced into cities. Cultural historian Lewis Mumford wrote about the English Enclosure Movement that left the peasantry landless and with no choice but to flee to the cities, where they were forced into lives of hard labor at the hands of "capitalists."
The conventional wisdom is that this was all part of the early growing pains of the Industrial Revolution, but in truth it was but more state intervention thwarting the natural order. On the other hand, Mumford described monasteries that were cities unto themselves -- cooperative, technically innovative societies that were industrial in the sense of being industrious, devoid off the harsh divide between capital and labor.
As for Southern "Reconstruction," since only 5% of Southerners actually owned slaves (DiLorenzo), what the North imposed on the South in the aftermath of the War for Southern Independence (it was in no way "Civil") was Stalinist to the core, the effects of which the nation is still paying for via its false assumption about the moral superiority of the north -- http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/16_2/16_2_4.pdf.
P.S. Thomas Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, 50 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Political foe and later pen pal John Adams died the same day.
Published: November 12, 2005 8:00 AM
I agree with the thrust of this article but it unfortunately perpetuates the myth that all pre-modern societies had poor nutrition, health care, and low life expectancies.
Libertarians should study the work of Dr. Weston Price, who documented beyond the shadow of a doubt that this was not the case and that we have much to learn from them, even while pursuing our high-tech lifestyles.
Here is an overview of Price's work:
http://www.westonaprice.org/nutritiongreats/price.html
For more information, read his fascinating and important classic:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0879838167/002-1313953-0072050?v=glance&n=283155&n=507846&s=books&v=glance
Published: November 12, 2005 10:21 AM
David (if I may), the conventional wisdom among scholars these days is that the enclosure movement, the bane of distributists and agrarians, had at most a marginal effect on population flows from the countryside to the city. Hayek makes brief reference to the enclosure movement in his essay "History and Politics," where he upholds the older view, but I don't think this is the mainstream interpretation any longer.
Published: November 12, 2005 12:19 PM
Tom, with all due respect:
(1) The conventional wisdom among economists is that our economy's in good shape and that Bernanke's the perfect choice to succeed Greenspan.
(2) The conventional wisdom among historians is that Lincoln was our greatest president.
(3) The conventional wisdom among legal scholars is that secession is unconstitutional and therefore illegal.
(4) The conventional wisdom among the American people is that they are free.
Suffice it to say, then, that I have no respect for the conventional wisdom, period, and will stick with Mumford and Hayek in the present case, as their take on the enclosure movement makes far more sense as to why so many peasants endured the terrible hardships of urban life at the dawn the Industrial Revolution: i.e., they had nowhere else to go.
Published: November 12, 2005 2:44 PM
I found that article made a short yet very pertinent comparison to the progress in medicine through industrialization.
Could it be that the division of work fails to bring the same improvement in agriculture as in medicine? But maybe the future isn’t so bright even in medicine…?
Sure, machinery and chemical improvement changed both the fields of medicine and agriculture. But now are the first ethical issues coming… that cause some to doubts about “the benefits of task division�…
I’m talking about the new genetic answers that mean a revolution in agriculture and cattle growing of course. Medicine still fights with the same issues though, as ever more genetic defects will be discovered from scratch and the “quality� of a human baby will be known soon within the “safe abortion� deadline. From “task division� we are going into “life division�. It seems that the limits of “specie� will vanish soon thus…
A human life is of course more valuable than that of other beings, plants or cattle. Still, we are breaking the barrier of the “specie� (a simple biological definition: sexually reproductible living beings) through cloning etc… even that of our own specie.
While the scientific progress and development is great, without a question, we fear to loose our identity through it, and also thus, our individual freedom. Going back to the old methods, reaching for a lost identity… isn’t that the theme of that “Matrix� movie too?
Published: November 13, 2005 5:05 AM
Preach it, brother. Down with the bad old days when half the households didn't have electricity, half lived in poverty, and half of life's energy was spent getting enough calories to stay alive.
Published: November 14, 2005 11:29 AM
My ancestors came to the American West to homestead. They had no chance of any land in Europe and were forced to work in "dark satanic mills." My cousins still own the original homestead. Why is the American Dream to be able to own your own land or home?
Remember that Mr. O'Hara told Scarlett to hold onto land, because it was the only asset that mattered in the end. Advice that still holds true today.
Published: November 15, 2005 1:56 PM
A site on the Horror of those bad vibes people, the people who comitted the evil Highland Clearances
Published: August 22, 2006 2:07 PM