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?

I grew up in a agriculture environment and very poor. I was living close to the earth yet reaching out for the stars that others had achieved. My family history was of very strong individual realists, moving from Europe to America and working themselves up from nothing to strength in the agriculture environment. My grandfather as my dad and I have a weakness for young beautiful women and this created my environment as a young man. My grandfather had acquired a rather nice dairy farm and was considered wealthy delivering milk to the nearby city through his hard work and my father had quit school to keep it running as my grandmother passed away. As a result my grandfather met a young and beautiful gold digger and months later my grandfather slipped on a bar of soap taking a bath and died shortly after signing the will to his new bride. My father with little education was relegated to doing dairy work for other wealth farmers for very low wages... usually around $35 a week with a free house to live in that was warmed by firewood or coal with a little house out back for taking care of business.

Survival meant hard work and we were taught young the importance of hard work and getting a good education. My mother was also a workhorse managing and cleaning the home... Following the first thaw in the spring she was harping at my dad to plow the garden and in some cases he accomplished the task with borrowed mules... Dad worked 12 hour days in the spring due to most of the cows giving birth in the spring and the related work of the milking and care for the animals but between morning milking and afternoon milking he would join my mother, brother and sister in the garden to start our first fresh vegetables of spinach, lettuce, radishes and onions... and of course get the corn, green bean and pea seeds in the ground along with the potatoes... we worked our asses off and my mom worked the hardest... you want to eat don't you she would say... the last jars of canned food, that she had canned from the last years garden were running out... as summer arrived it was off to the woods picking blackberries for those blackberry cobblers and jelly and jam that were the most usual canned desert through the next winter. On Saturday night my brother and I had the task of catching a young rooster for Sunday dinner of Southern Fried Chicken... catch it and put it under a laundry basket and the next day after church change into work clothes, boil some water over a wood fire outside and when boiling hang the chosen rooster on the laundry line and cut its head off and let the blood drain... then remove the insides being careful to save all edible innards and then carefully put the bird in the boiling water to release the feathers... give the cleaned bird to mom and wait in anticipation for a wonderful Sunday dinner with all the fixings! For shopping in the supermarket for mom was the very basics of seasoning, dried beans and ketchup... some bacon from time to time because mom always tried to have a little meat once a day when we could afford it... but our mainstay was pinto beans, chow chow, potatoes and a jelly sandwich made with her homemade biscuits and jelly.

Took my boys to the supermarket when they were seven and eight and they saw a tongue in the meat case and my oldest yelled out, hey daddy what's that? A cow tongue I answered... like a machine gun the questions came... why? Some people eat cow's tongues... Didn't it hurt the cow? ... that had to bleed a lot? ... how does the cow eat grass without a tongue? It made me think of how dislocated my kids were from when my brother and I killed our Sunday meal and knew where all food came from... These are very hard questions to answer when you are out of the link with your place in nature.

Great posts guys.

When I was very young, I spent the summer on my grandmother's farm. I still remember the lessons I learned there. Seeing a pig slaughtered makes quite an impression on a 7 year old from the city. Going out in the field and picking your veggies for dinner is another lesson you can't learn going down to the local Piggly Wiggly.

“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.”
http://www.farmradio.org/english/publications/voices/v2003sep.asp

Different nations have different approaches toward agriculture, in the states most agriculture communities offer formal training in school, Vocational Agriculture that teaches the history and changes in agriculture. There are also clubs like the Future Farmers of America that has competitions in all aspects of agriculture. In the US the movements against factory farms has created a counter culture of natural foods sources that challenges the status quo.

People in different nations see farmers in a different light... In America the farmer seems to be subordinated to a low class, less educated person unable to aspire to easier educated lifestyle. In Germany a farmer is respected more than a doctor or lawyer and considered better qualified that either, the same goes for the forestmeister... they are professionals. In Korea farmers are the absolute tip of the spear in society and are respected for their abilities and held above the rest. Korea makes better use of their natural resources to produce food better than any other nation I've visited... not one inch is wasted that could produce food.

Edited to add: Actually, there should be natural farming and unnatural farming... most of the farming in America is unnatural.