A Labor Day Story of Toil and Soil
Towards a Trans-personal Politics

The reason I love working in the garden is not that I’m good at it but because it’s good for me. The toil and sacrifice required to coax a few scrawny tomatoes out of the soil is humbling. The sweet sight of a bank of zinnias that took no more than an hour of cultivation and a scatter of seeds is a sure sign of grace beyond effort.
I may have told you this story before but my life was forever changed by agricultural labor. In my twenties I was a fruit tramp in the apple orchards of central Washington. The hard work in community with others, combined with the spectacular surroundings in the Chelan valley transformed this lazy, spoiled suburban brat into someone who began to understand what goes into getting food on our tables. And now of course I’m convinced that every young person could benefit from something along these lines.
I’m telling the story of those days for the umpteenth time of course and I typically focus on the “sweat and toil” aspect which transformed my work ethic and appreciation for manual labor in general. What I usually don’t feature is the part about the community of workers who went through this together. We were a group of young adults with only a nodding relation to our future selves. We were joyful, enthusiastic playmates exploring what it might mean to live purposefully. We shared work, meals, music, laughter and endless conversation with a firm but tacit understanding of undefined direction. We had momentum. We were going. Before we needed to know where. But this communal learning is now indelible for me. And I’m sure not just for me.
Yep, cranky old Dave is here to tell you what. This connection to the soil is just another thing in a long list of important stuff we are losing. Most of it is connected to communal learning. Like a solid background in the study of humanities, like community involvement, political empowerment, even what we used to call good old moral fiber.
In the relatively brief story of our American history we have grown and thrived on one basic principle; the ability of an upright individual to freely choose to engage with others in a free society. Something called “the social contract”.

The arguments made by Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau that broke us free from the divine right of kings emerged from a world very different from ours. The dissident religious notions of individual worth operating at a productive distance from church authority were key to their theories of how the individual engages in the social contract. A freely chosen government created by a free and upright citizenry provides for a just and effective society. Nice and neat, right? And still true. And not getting us there.
The rest of this essay will go on and on about getting unstuck. I won’t use that word anymore here but that’s basically what I want to get across. Feel free to get a sandwich.
It’s seems we are looking at a crisis in environment, race and political polarization that is intractable. That should tell us that we may be missing something basic to effective societal organization. Classic liberalism, the gift of our founders, the thing that brought us out of serfdom and rule by princes and principalities has lately shown signs of wear. The twin children of this principle of social organization; capitalism and socialism, now seem to be doing a death dance, exposed to the consequences of their own hubris. Their glaring flaws, typically hidden by the smooth track of upward mobility and communal tranquility, are highlighted today by crisis and contrary circumstances.
Recognizing individual worth and collective justice has moved us dynamically into the modern world, but we are currently losing the things that made liberalism work. The current problem is that we continue to flail at the legacy structures derived from these political theories, trying desperately to avoid the conclusion that they are unable to cope.
There are two major things missing from the current arrangement that has now descended to us. One is the scale of the political structures we have obtained, the other is the slippage in our communal sense. The original social contract relied crucially on both of these to function. Classic liberalism is like a boat losing its sail and rudder. It still floats but it has begun to drift.
And here I will stretch this image to the breaking point; we are becoming lost at sea. The organizing principle which has previously served us well has now made it impossible to deal with (as for example) a looming environmental disaster and obscene economic inequity. And meanwhile we argue over adjusting things on the margins in terms of great ideological affronts (“That would be socialism! No free ride!” and “Capitalism is wage slavery”).
I believe that classic liberalism is failing us (I am not alone in this). Instead of being a force that unites free individuals it is acting to atomize us by overemphasizing individualism. But forced by crisis, there is something in our consciousness that is changing. There is something waiting to emerge. We need to spend some time imagining what that might be as we approach liberalism’s demise.
The first of these missing elements, the problem of scale, is an intractable dilemma in the context of the classic social contract (in fact that is why the bedrock liberal principle of laizzez-faire capitalism needed major adjusting during the era of the robber barons). The citizen who has become alienated from their government by the vagaries of size and bureaucracy is a person deprived of their citizenship. But there is simply no going back to the more intimate connection between individual and society that characterized the agrarian ideal of Jefferson. The clear way forward may lie in a redefinition of the individual. A new concept of what it means to be human seems required.
We can begin to form this new concept by looking at the other element, the problem of the vanishing communal moral sense. We have moved a long way away from being subject to an imposed moral code or even from the self-discovered relation to the will of God that was foundational to the Protestant/Deist/Liberal mind. Those who instituted the social contract either held to an imposed moral code or recognized the demands on the individual self to apprehend and interpret those teachings. Those less religious participated by finding other more existential reasons for acting ethically.
Today, although we give lip service to this we tend to operate very differently, and largely out of self-interest The lack of self-awareness and reflection on community that is sold by the continuously distracted society has brought us here. We no longer have the will (or even see a need) to exert the effort tied to the vital question; “What is it to be human?”. We’ve got scrolling to do.
This important assessment and re-evaluation of our ethical sense is the beginning of a trans-personal movement. What served us well as products of the enlightenment, the primacy of self and individual worth must now be radically transformed. The noble and self-sufficient citizen only functions productively in the context of a vivid awareness of communal responsibility. We are now seeing the consequences of a world of one without the other.
Nothing short of a new image of the self as an embodiment of “all in all” is needed. In the context of an atomized society imposed by modernity, individual people functioning on principles of personal self interest will become energizers of the problem instead of the solution.
The social contract must change to become a “universal contract”. Instead of an agreement freely chosen among individuals it must become an acknowledgement of an allegiance to our essential oneness. This awareness is at present not generally observed in action but is keenly felt. We know it in our hearts to be true. This involvement with exerting our personal will and our engagement in the distractions of modern life leave us little room to recognize this oneness fully.
We have tools to get there though. In fact, there are rich traditions of philosophy and religion as well as new discoveries in the science of the mind that can guide us. Yoga, meditation, a renewed focus on the humanities, even the therapeutic application of mind opening drugs like psychedelics can help.
This may sound too “woo-woo” for you. But we have no choice. The present crisis will provide the pain required to change.
And now it’s time to go work in my garden.
