Can We Call This Progress?

[coberst]

Can We Call This Progress?

 

Rugged individualism might be an appropriate expression for all the creatures in the world, with one exception. Humans have, in the last few hundred years, moved from being rugged individuals to our present state in which we have fashioned an alien environment in which we have become chess pieces or ciphers. We have invented the Artificial Kingdom where, as Simone Weil once noted, “it is the thing that thinks and the man who is reduced to the state of the thing”.

 

I think that we, women and men, have become chess pieces. We have become objects to be manipulated by the market and the corporation. We spend our days like the chess piece; we have a quantified value and are placed on the board and used as desired by some one who may be a real person. The real person has still the human characteristics of creativity, spontaneity, improvisation, spontaneously reactive, discontinuous, a mosaic more than syntax or cipher. Just what we find is missing when using the telephone to contact someone out there.

 

In an effort to understand where we are now it might help to start back in time and move forward. In frontier days each person was very much an individual. Rugged individualism was a popular expression. Each man and woman was a jack-of-all-trades and master of none. Each husband and wife was a team that together could and had to do everything that was needed.

 

In early America we were an agricultural economy. Most families were farm families we were all rugged individualist. The farmer was very much the jack-of-all-trades and the master of his or her domain.

 

As we move forward in time we see this team become a man working in a factory or office and the woman was at home raising the children and maintaining the day to day necessities for all family members. She washed, cleaned, shopped, sewed, and was still much of a rugged individual. Slowly the man became a specialized worker in a clockwork factory or office.

 

Moving forward in history we arrive at the present moment where not only is the man working in the factory or office but the woman joins him there also.

 

When we examine the factory or office workspace we find a very different occupation for the man and woman than the rugged individualism of emerging history of human evolution. We no longer are masters of our own domain but are ciphers in a clockwork that functions upon modern economic principles.

 

A pertinent example of this mode of commodification is how we have converted what was political economics into the modern economics. Political economy is the study of social relations. It is the study of culture. Political economy focuses upon the problem of how to regulate industrialization within the context of a healthy society, it worries about the problems of labor within a context of the laborer as an end and not a commodity—an object of commerce.

 

Economics, however, in its modern form, has replaced political economics. Economics has removed the pesky concern about labor as being human and has replaced labor as being a commodity—an object of commerce. Modern economics is now the study of scarcity, prices, and resource allocation. Economics has legislated that labor, as an end, is no longer a legitimate domain of knowledge for economic consideration. In doing so, over time, society has become ignorant of such concerns. Our culture has replaced concern about humans as ends with humans as means to some other end.

 

In the rugged individualist mode of living the individual was creative and master even though the domain of mastery was small. An individual’s personality is dramatically affected. Labor has become an abstract quantity and calculated into the commodity produced. We are the only creatures who have completely removed our self from what we were evolved to be. We are the only creatures removed from our grounding in an organic world. We came from a long ancestry of rugged individualist and now reside in the Artificial Kingdom. To what end only time will tell.

 

Do you feel like a cipher in our culture?

[Boerseun]

Well, saying it sucks is one thing. Saying it's not progress, is another.

 

We look at the "rugged individual" through unrealistic romantic lenses, and forget about the fact that if those pioneers didn't work the land to feed themselves (rugged individualist-style et al), they would have starved of hunger.

 

Today, you simply walk to the closest shop, and walk out a few minutes later with what would've taken the "rugged individualist" weeks to gather. Milk a cow? Bah! What took an hour out of the farmers' day now takes a few seconds.

 

The nett effect of all the above, is that the average human today has a lot more time on his hands to spend on stuff not directly related to survival. This means that we exercise our brains more today than our backs, a situation neatly reversed from the "rugged individual". And this results in an ever-increasing spiral of advancing technologies that takes us ever further away from where we were.

 

Mostly 'cause milking cows is a nasty job. Much rather get a machine to do it, it you get the gist of my argument.

 

I don't like it one little bit. That's why I stay on a farm, and I do as much as possible for myself. I make my own beer, I bake my own bread, I make my own knives, I fix my own vehicles, I have my own veggie patch, I don't kill my own cows, but I buy full quarter carcasses which I then process myself (I don't particularly like the killing bit), I make my own boerewors (SA-style sausage), I camp out, I fish a lot, I avoid cities and towns as far as I can. I understand your point - but I think maybe I'm just trying to avoid the inevitable. But I won't call it "NOT progress" - I just don't like it, that's all.

[coberst]

Boerseum

 

“In Mexico, farmers who noticed velvetbean growing wild in their fields used it to increase soil fertility and improve maize yields. In Northern Ethiopia, farmers reclaimed farmland from a river by constructing walls in the river bed and diverting the water flow. In India, an innovative farmer designed a tree plantation that successfully survived a severe three-year drought. Farmers' innovations have stood the test of time and hold the potential to meet the challenges of increasing production and managing the natural resource base.

 

During the last 40 or 50 years, however, many farmers have relied less on their own experimentation and innovation, and become more dependent on outside information provided through extension systems. This has had the effect of disempowering many farmers, as they became passive recipients of knowledge and technology.”

September 2003 / Voices Newsletter / Farm Radio International

[coberst]

Boerseum

 

“In Mexico, farmers who noticed velvetbean growing wild in their fields used it to increase soil fertility and improve maize yields. In Northern Ethiopia, farmers reclaimed farmland from a river by constructing walls in the river bed and diverting the water flow. In India, an innovative farmer designed a tree plantation that successfully survived a severe three-year drought. Farmers' innovations have stood the test of time and hold the potential to meet the challenges of increasing production and managing the natural resource base.

 

During the last 40 or 50 years, however, many farmers have relied less on their own experimentation and innovation, and become more dependent on outside information provided through extension systems. This has had the effect of disempowering many farmers, as they became passive recipients of knowledge and technology.”

September 2003 / Voices Newsletter / Farm Radio International

[Boerseun]

Farmers' innovations have stood the test of time and hold the potential to meet the challenges of increasing production and managing the natural resource base.

Although living on a farm myself, and having had to come up with some innovative solutions to some real interesting problems myself, the above is simply flat-out wrong. What you state here, is called confirmation bias. You simply enumerate all the instances of farmers' solutions that worked, and ignored the plethora of cases where the farmer made an error is his attempt at a solution. Many farmers have died in an attempt at being clever.

During the last 40 or 50 years, however, many farmers have relied less on their own experimentation and innovation, and become more dependent on outside information provided through extension systems. This has had the effect of disempowering many farmers, as they became passive recipients of knowledge and technology.”

September 2003 / Voices Newsletter / Farm Radio International

I'm not sure what the problem with this is.

 

Sure, plenty farmers have been using solutions other than their own. If farmer Bob hears of a solution invented by farmer Bill, why would he reinvent the wheel by trying to come up with his own solution? With the advent of radio and television over the last century, information is disseminated to the most remote corners of the globe - information which, amongst others, include solutions to problems that farmers might face.

 

Once again, I fail to see the problem here.