September 7, 2007
The Old Order Passeth II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 02:30 PM EST John Steele Gordon’s interesting post “The Old Order Passeth” notes that for the first time in 10,000 years agriculture is no longer the primary source of global employment, and its diminishment should not be mourned, because, as Mr. Gordon puts it, “Agriculture made civilization possible, but it made prosperity possible for only the few.” That is harsh, but not unjustly so. Agriculture produced a greater division of labor, storable economic surpluses, cities, and literacy, to list only a few of its achievements. It made people more numerous—a lot more numerous—but in most cases it also made them sicker and shorter and certainly much more unequal, in terms of both wealth and status. Rural life was proverbially dull and weary—a vivid American expression once described it as life spent staring at the wrong end of a horse—but in most times and places it was also remarkably unequal. That inequality was enforced by violence; when the inequality was occasionally challenged, rural life meant looking at the wrong end of a landlord, the one holding the sharp, pointy thing. I only became vividly aware of what bad luck the agricultural revolution meant for most of humanity in 1995, when I read a remarkable book by Robert O’Connell, Ride of the Second Horseman: The Birth and Death of War, which tersely described the order produced by agriculture as “the plant trap.” Not too long ago, more people seemed to remember something of this truth. In school, we were taught that over the gates of German medieval towns a phrase proclaimed Stadt Luft Macht Frei!”—town air makes men free. According to Mr. Gordon’s account, which stresses the fact the it also allows them to become richer, the decline of the share of world population engaged in agriculture means a chance at abundance (rather than subsistence) as the fate of most of the species. If this is true—and I think it is—it is of course not the only possible majority fate. Hordes of unemployable paupers living in urban slums is also a possible fate, but Mr. Gordon surely knows that. What animated his post, I think, was the fact that we are eerily sentimental about the rural past. We have a tendency to imagine rural life as virtuous and just, with the city as the zone of corruption and wretchedness. This is perverse sentimentality held with remarkable tenacity, and it affects people who ought to know better. In the country, I confess that I am unattractively proud when I can identify the crops raised in a field: That is rape seed, I smugly assert. Rationally, I am prouder of my grandfather, who escaped a farm in Appalachia to reach, after various hazards, including rounding Cape Horn as a merchant seaman, the idylls of Brooklyn. That was the progress of civilization, and as Mr. Gordon reports, it is now in reach of the majority of our kind.
|
