False values driving schismogenesis
We have noted that truth gets suppressed by dividing people over energetic beliefs. We have noted that beliefs are most easily rooted in linear propositions, such as eating less if you want to lose weight. We have noted that almost no-one wants to live the necessary complexity in our existentially threatened situation. Now, we want to explain some of the dynamics in terms of schismogenesis and the splitting into tribes with diametrically opposed beliefs.
Just to give a flavour of this argument, David Wengrow and David Graeber gave a learned presentation in Paris about the tribes on the west coast of the US, about where Oregon is now. There was a tribe with pale skin who were particularly skilled at making equipment and at catching the abundant salmon in season. The were enslaved by another tribe and used for their skills. In this situation the enslaving tribe would not dream of catching and preparing salmon for themselves because that is what slaves did. And the pale skin tribe, when not living as slaves, had more arduous dietary habits because salmon is what their captors ate. The logic of the situation is one of distinguishing yourself from “those people over there”, who are held to do it all wrong.
We are going to work with the metabolic rift that we discussed in a previous blog. We claimed there that none of the world’s problems could be solved without starting to bridge the metabolic rift. Now we are going to show that the metabolic rift itself can be seen as a schismogenesis dynamic between food producers and consumers. As consumers turn their back, ever more completely, on wanting to know about the ecosystemic services that support their very existence, food production moves to modes that are disgusting and self-defeating and incredibly bad for human health.[1]
One book driving these insights is Folks this ain’t normal, written by a vocal, angry farmer in Virginia called Joel Salatin. He opens himself to the conflicts driving this schismogenesis by making his farm open access, so people can observe his practices from close up. The complaints from the public and involvement of various government inspectors is truly comic and instructive. A random example would be of cattle bunched together, waiting to come through a gate, because that is what they do every day — at the same time they are perceived by the public to be overcrowded and distressed. The metabolic gap issue is that cattle are herd animals, bunching tightly together since time immemorial. And people anthropomorphise the cattle into a crush in a crowd.[2]
We need to pay attention to two issues simultaneously in understanding these schismogenic forces. The arguments that people make on both sides of food production such as “I don’t like the cruelty of animal farming” and “the customer will only buy/can only afford cheap food” describe both the split and the splitting. But the metabolic rift describes a growing ignorance that cannot lead anywhere constructive. If people’s beliefs, such as a plant-based diet being inherently less violent or kinder, are not compatible with the ecosystem that supports them (or increasingly fails to support them) then they are culpably ignorant, whatever the schismogenic forces. This is not simply a matter of taking sides.
Defining yourself
The whole nature of schismogenesis is that it is a matter of identity, of defining yourself over and against another sort of person. High-profile people such as George Monbiot can be very aggressively and publicly vegetarian even when they have enough ecosystemic knowledge and sense to know that the vegetarian impulse is not viable. There is a wave of fashionable vegan attitude that finds its way very rapidly onto food packaging. (Oreo sandwich biscuits healthy because they are vegan!)
From the food production side, big food knows where profits are to be made. The highest value-add items are snacks, above all snacks with a long shelf-life. These companies are only interested in health as a label, not as an outcome. They want you addicted to their food and if you believe that what you are addicted to is doing you good, that is great from their point of view. That easy analysis should be enough for people to understand the system but we are far more caught up in it than that, so the food industry identity is that they can ruthlessly exploit whatever ridiculous foibles come up in the market. The most recent example is the business opportunity to manufacture extremely low calorie shakes “to help people with diabetes”.
You can do a quick test on yourself to see whether you are capable of bridging the metabolic rift or the societal schism. I have in my life managed to pull and pluck a brace of pheasants and I am reasonably adept at cleaning whole fish. Whether I can kill and clean a chicken, especially if it comes from my own (future) flock, remains to be seen. The test is this: if you are not up for these tasks you do not understand our place in the ecosystem.[3] If you have an emotional problem with these images you will not readily understand that a cowpat is chicken heaven both for the enzymes in the pat and the grubs that quickly hatch in it.
What I love about this type of argument and understanding is that it is never about the presenting issues. It is not about a debate between George Monbiot and Zoe Harcombe on whether to eat meat or not. It is about understanding how dynamics originate and where they may lead — in this case to mass suicide.
A rather learned and eminent colleague commented this week on a previous blog, that the blog was highly entertaining to read but that he was left with no idea what the point was. I would suggest that this is another test of whether you can, in practice, bridge the schism, or whether your residual attachment to the arguments is such that the bridging becomes unavailable to you. Probably none of us want to kill that chicken but some people can see it is the price of finding our place in the ecology. By the way, Salatin says that if everyone fed their own food scraps to (their own) chickens there would be no demand for factory chicken farming in the US. Think about it.
Complex arguments
I saw a comment the other day that medical research is often undermined by the need to present the findings in a way that can be immediately comprehended. Without claiming too much in the way of forethought, these blogs meander and loop back on themselves to give space and form to the complexity of what is discussed. The snake oil salesman always has a simple pitch. Here you may be left wondering what the point is. Similarly, the entertainment aspect of being rude about some stances that are clearly not viable allows us to move our mental furniture, just a little, gradually.
In the schism created by schismogenesis, the identities taken up are like talismans, not like logic. I don’t care if George Monbiot only eats vegetables: why would I? But when he tries to persuade other people, his arguments are too simple to do justice to the context. He becomes a snake oil salesman even though he would not want to be so. He is a journalist and knows about getting ideas across.
There is a minimum necessary complexity in an ecosystem if it is to flourish. When the owner of Knepp Castle estate in Sussex went in for rewilding as a programme to restore the profitability of his farm, he understood that there used to be an ecology that thrived on that particular piece of land. And that if he wished to avail himself of the ecosystem richness that used to flourish before he started planting corn, he would need some understanding of how it worked.
What he did was interesting. He said that there are no more aurochs that used to roam there, since they are extinct, so let’s use longhorn cows as an ecosystem proxy. It is not possible to have lots of wild boar, because they can attack the public, so let’s use Tamworth pigs as a proxy. And so on. The complexity is not in any thinking or purpose of the owner’s: it is in the self-balancing of plants and animals in a landscape. If you say “I don’t like pigs” or “let’s do this without deer”, all sorts of things don’t work anymore. You won’t get your economic return, and you won’t get it because your thinking was not able to mirror the necessary complexity in the ecosystem.
The vegetarian argument is a massive mistake of this sort. There is no way to regenerate soils and soil fertility without animals, herbivores in particular. If you think you have found one, it is guaranteed that you will merely be exploiting previous accumulations in an unsustainable way.[4] There are tens of billions of micro-organisms in a tablespoon of soil. Their interactions are simply unimaginable. But that is what soil is and it needs to function rather closely to how it evolved if it is to do the necessary work.
Angles on the schism/rift
We could list the starting points of the arguments that people bring the food production schism, to the metabolic rift. Some people have religious beliefs that play here. Many people erect ethical arguments. Some people would claim spiritual truth for their stance. Dieticians make outlandish claims about human health. The government eating guidelines we have waxed hot under the collar about. For a long time and for reasons not at all clear to me there has been demonization of meat. Much of this is painted as a bucolic agricultural paradise, where bounty flows and everyone is happy.
All these angles are part of the schismogenic play. Their reference points for truth are not the reference points in the working of the relevant ecosystems which alone offer a way through. Of course many of the angles are long on self-justification and feeling superior, whereas we need to be humble enough to play our part.
The ecosystem of which we cannot but be a part, and which will collapse if the part we play is not close enough to our niche, is not negotiable or manageable except within its own parameters, its own set of infinitely complex relationships which we cannot reorder. What is easier is see when we are missing the mark, when bird or insect numbers collapse or when soil becomes barren and erodes. Then we need to find our way back to an adequate mimicking of the way it really works.
Nobody has to tell a wild plant, bacteria, insect, fish, bird or mammal what to eat to sustain health, how to self-medicate to recover from disease, or how to develop and reproduce. Ironically, people must now be told by ”authorities” what to and what not to eat. Do humans lack the ability to identify and choose nourishing foods or has that ability been hijacked? –Fred Provenza, Nourishment
If we are willing to invert the logic for a moment, Fred Provenza describes how he and other scientists came to the conclusion that domestic animals had lost their wisdom about what to eat because they ate the wrong things. Of course the problem was actually that the scientists had not yet understood why the animals were eating what they were eating. There is a perfect microcosm in which ecosystemic wisdom cannot exist because the scientists, experts, and authorities know better. What we should be doing is pouring cold water on any knowledge that claims it can do better than evolved solutions to problems of survival.
So robust are the abilities of ecosystems to recover their health that we only have to be tolerably close to a solution. We only have to pause in our destructive hubris. But that seems to be too much to ask. Provenza also takes us to another favourite topic here. In an experiment where diabetes was induced in rats, the rats were able to completely control the symptoms by choosing a diet that worked. According to the authorities on food and health humans are not as intelligent as rats.
[1] I sometimes wonder whether anything that has the word ‘science’ appended to it becomes divorced from the thing it purports to be, what the everyman might imagine it to be about. Food science has little to do with real food.
[2] So often, the advice given is in the view of the advice-giver, rather than the receiver. Sometimes this has fine consequences — near me is the remnant of the oldest allotment garden in London, started in 1832 because the local bishop quite liked gardening and hoped that the poor would too…
[3] I have fond memories of Robert Heinlein’s novel, Stranger in a Strange Land, in which the way to honour the dead was to eat them and praise their soup…
[4] There is of course a nice parallel in capitalism and economics, most of the time your profits are in essence rent-seeking efforts that make use of latent value that has built up naturally, rather than coming from creating additional value in the ecosystem.
