Sunday, January 13, 2008
Agrarianism
Every once in awhile, something happens at work that reminds me very bluntly that I am not my own master. I recently went through a Human Resources training program for supervisors, where the main points were at-will employment, motivating the unmotivated, at-will employment, attendance policies, at-will employment, and the tremendous amount of legislation that has been passed to increase the rights of the employee to continued employment. One thing that seems to consistently be on the list of employees’ concerns is “job security†, or at least the perception of it.
What is job security? It is the belief that one’s job will continue to exist in the future – months from now, years from now, decades from now, until retirement. Rolled into it is the implicit understanding that we are not our own masters. As I learn more about the business world, I become more and more concerned about the dominance of short-term thinking in the investment markets, and how that gets pushed down into short-term thinking in real-life business decisions. Not all companies operate this way, but even at my fairly forward thinking employer, long-term thinking is a new thing, and something that no one expects to last very long as a management paradigm.
Many people chafe at someone else being their master. Jefferson pushed the idea of a rural agrarian society, in which people were not independent of each other, but independent of a master arbitrarily determining their fate. As the industrial revolution pushed forward relentlessly, more and more people left this way of life to become urban factory workers. However, this mostly happened in the north, while the south was largely left behind.
In the early 1900s, there was a significant intellectual debate between the southern agrarians, who wanted to preserve the independence, dignity, and quiet way of life that was traditionally southern, and the industrialists and progressives, who felt that efficiency and increased production were the ultimate goals towards which Americans should be moving. The agrarians appealed to people’s inherent love of the land, as well as their desire for independence. The industrialists appealed to the desire to be modern, wealthy, and chic. Clearly the industrialists won, but it has always amazed me to what extent they have won, basically wiping the agrarians and their mindset off the face of the earth. How did this happen?
It seems to me that it was inevitable in a free and technologically advancing society. Examine the introduction in the last half of the 19th century of mechanized ground driven farm equipment, like sickle bars, hay rakes, planting and harvesting machines, etc. Each individual sees an opportunity to decrease his labor and increase his production. Virtually all would make the choice to be more wealthy if given the option, especially at a time when the meeting of basic material needs was not necessarily a given.
Massive mechanization on small farms resulted over time in greatly increased production, eventually resulting in not just increased security in food supplies, but a reduced need for farm laborers and eventually in a greatly reduced need for farmers in general. As people left the land, they became a labor force ripe to be used by the industrialists, either in place or as they migrated to cities to look for jobs. This movement, both the agricultural industrialism that pushed people off the land and the factory industrialism that put the new surplus labor to work, resulted in the virtual destruction of the rural way of life.
To me, that loss of a culture seems entirely a tragedy, but it seems that it was an inevitable result of entirely rational decisions made by the individuals involved. The agrarians argued that this industrialism should be resisted and that culture should be preserved, and I am sympathetic to their arguments. However, I am completely opposed to the idea of large scale economic planning that would prevent individuals from making decisions that would improve their lot in life. In addition, how can I expect a society that is much closer to poverty and hunger than we are today to voluntarily stop development at an arbitrary point, so as to better preserve their culture? While I lament the loss of that culture, I cannot blame those who left it for their decisions that lead to it’s dissolution.
In “The South Defends It’s Heritage†, an essay by John Crowe Ransom, the author states:
It will be well to seize upon and advertise certain Northern industrial communities as horrible examples of a way of life which Southerners traditionally detest; not failing to point out the human catastrophe which occurs when a Southern village or rural community becomes the cheap labor of a miserable factory system. It will be doubtless a little bit harder to impress the people with the fact that the new so-called industrial “slavery†not only fastens upon the poor, but blights the middle and better classes of society too; and to make this point it may be necessary even to revive such a stale antiquity as the old Southern gentleman, and his scorn for the dollar-chasers and the technical specialists.
We as a country have now become one big northern industrial community as agricultural industrialization as proceeded apace, and now making a living off the land as an individual is virtually impossible. People have no choice but to join that industrial community, as all other options have been closed to them. We have exchanged our economic self-determination, our rural culture, and to some extent our pride, for our place in the industrial machine. Our reward is two cars in every garage and big screen TVs. It seems that our industrial masters have noticed too, as we now have Human Resources departments to cater to our psychological needs and spur us to ever greater production.
Henry Ford would be proud.
Comments
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Henry’s vision was not intrinsically bad, originally. He liked the agrarian ideal, as is evidenced by his contributions to the agrarian world- how many farms today are run by the offices of a Ford 8n, arguably one of the most common (and, at it’s time, inexpensive) pieces of equipment of it’s day.
I don’t think Henry did this to us. I think we did it to ourselves. We CAN undo it, and it’s not horribly hard. Agrarian self-sufficiency is still relatively possible, as are varying degrees therof. I still plant and grow and harvest as much of my own food as I can, on an acre lot. Victory Gardens in the USA- small plots of soil in backyards- made a HUGE difference in the food supply during the second world war.
I can’t disagree with a great deal of what you say, but I also know that I could be self sufficient- as could just about anyone with some patience and brains- in less than a generation.
og | 1/18/2008 10:11 AM CDT
