The hubris of the modern condition
The self is a process. If we look for a thing, we miss it altogether. If we don’t allow it to create itself, it is truly no longer there. This same there-and-not-there quality applies to most things that matter. That statement is almost a tautology.
It strikes me that stewarding processes is what we best spend our time and attention doing. I built a compost heap of masses of bracken and cow manure. It will turn itself into a great medium for growing vegetables next year. The RHS[1] advise me that compost heaps should be neither too wet nor too dry, and ideally be kept a little enclosed to build up heat. But the process just happens if I take a little care.
Many everyday processes occur in the house. The kefir brews itself every day without any intervention from me except adding fresh milk. It will survive a week in the fridge without attention. The sourdough starter just gets better over the years. It gets refreshed whenever I make bread (for others — I don’t eat grains). It will survive a month in the fridge. These things just do what they do, with the tiniest amount of stewardship.[2]
For the ancients it was always the growth of plants in their season that was amazing in its provision of needed things. The move away from stewardship to exploitation and disaster is celebrated as the agricultural revolution and feeding the poor. [3] By assuming that we have control and need to design and manage, rather than steward and nurture, we lose the plot. I find that a fascinating process and it is deeply entwined with the notion both of science and of expertise.
From another perspective, this developing disaster is a con trick leashed on the public. What we see in the spirit of POSIWID is that the public get sold benefits which are real enough at first and later pick up the tab for all the damaging side effects that ensue. From the perspective of a Martian, humans are the species that cause desertification and periodic civilisation collapse. Monocultural agriculture causes soil loss and loss of forests causes aridification of local climates. Experts are slow coming forward with these facts as being the real demand for real science.[4]
It is not just agriculture. As we have rehearsed in these blogs, interventions in human health and in education have been pretty much counter to their intended outcomes. Every generation of parents want their children to do better thinking than they did, and every generation is disappointed. And we are now in a scenario where the health industry is wreaking havoc on people’s health. Not to mention a food industry that deliberately markets highly processed, low-grade food at inflated prices with inflated claims. Veggie burgers anyone?
The missing perspective is the stewardship of the processes we depend on. First, we need to pay attention. We need to pay attention to the damage we do, deliberate or not, and we need to pay attention to the processes that support our life, whether we have observed them before or not. Only then can we make wise choices that allow diverse things to flourish.
Observing, just observing
It seems a big stretch to talk about the failure of the health industry and the education industry in the same sentence as observing the soil on a Welsh smallholding. But that stretch is not an objective thing: it is a gap created in our thinking by our “education”. The powers of simple observation of what supports life are needed to observe the ridiculous and criminal claims of big pharma or whoever: we need to understand the nature of the sales pitch and the nature of the intervention. We need to be able to feel the significance of NNT=100.[5] If you have been recommended statins you are on the edge of this maelstrom.
Some of the wins here in north Wales are so simple. I can go to the butchers and get local meat that far outclasses anything you ever bought in a supermarket, at less cost. It tastes better and I feel better eating it in great quantities. Beef and lamb that wander the fields around us. I asked the butcher for half a cow to put the freezer in case we get snowed in, and it took him nearly three weeks to find just the right one! People know how to relate to things that matter, given half a chance.
We now live far enough from a big supermarket that getting them to deliver is a no-brainer for us. It’s not a no-brainer for them because they regularly get lost trying to find the house! Can you imagine how you get to a delivery system that goes to the same place every week and yet can’t find it? I think that is a great metaphor too. About having service as a nominal goal but not being able to get the basics organised.
Of course, I would be happier not needing to be supplied that way at all. I have no intention of us producing our own toilet tissue, but the bulk of our order is milk and cream which are certainly on the agenda for next year. The notion that we can reduce the supermarket to providing things that genuinely are commodities, rather than things that should be natural products, is very appealing.
There are lots of egg producers around here. Since our hens are not laying yet, that is of interest, especially the quality of the eggs produced. Our neighbours just showed us a place to go where there are trays of eggs with an honesty box to pay for them. The eggs are great, free range eggs and so, so fresh, but they consist of the eggs that are not perfectly egg-shaped, so they get rejected by the shops. £2.50 a tray when that will scarcely buy you half a dozen in the supermarket.
Commons
The social arrangements that underpin mutual assistance in an area like this are not obvious or easy to read. Since time immemorial, the existence of assets that many people depend on has evoked ways of managing those assets to the benefit of all. The image that most people associate with the notion of the commons is a literal village common, that anyone living in the village has rights to use. There are still many literal commons across England, despite a spate of so-called enclosures via Acts of Parliament in the 18th and 19th centuries. The management techniques used to maintain proper mutuality of access to these assets are quite sophisticated.[6]
The Lake District contains the largest area of contiguous common land in the whole of Europe. The fells are managed by farmers who have grazing rights for their sheep or ponies. Lakeland fell sheep are “hefted”, or tied to the land, by their heritage as a flock. Only sheep native to a particular fell can navigate the hazards of that fell — the crags and rivers and bogs. Ponies too have an intelligence that is intensely local in being able to work alongside farmers managing the fells.
Neither the people and their social arrangements nor the animals and their innate connection to the land are interchangeable. They do what works in a way that is not fully understood. This is the same effect as the notion of stewarding processes that we opened with. The best you can do is to observe intensely how these processes work and try to steward the space in which they can thrive.
As an example of breaking this paradigm, Natural England, via one of their city-educated bureaucrats, took a Lakeland man to court for damaging a site of special scientific interest (SSSI) by grazing his ponies there. The man, in his eighties, was essentially illiterate but came from a family that had used their grazing rights for centuries. In other words, the SSSI was the product of commons management, and the notion that it could have been damaged by these management practices simply does not compute. I did my little bit contributing to his legal defence fund, but the chasm in understanding or its lack was deeply depressing. Of course, we should expect Natural England to have trouble understanding stewardship!
The management of a commons is absolutely about understanding how the assets will propagate themselves and arranging that they are not exploited in way that will degrade the assets. You may have come across a notion of the Tragedy of the Commons which claims that the economic interest of the holders of commons rights will lead to the destruction of the commons itself. This turns out to an economists’ delusion or fantasy because it doesn’t happen in practice. Many people are convinced that commons management cannot work on the basis of that fantasy, ignoring evidence from all around the world that it works everywhere that it is not blown out of the water by powerful vested interests, as happened with enclosure.
So, my neighbours here have a way of trading favours. In our two months of making a start, no money has changed hands or even been mentioned. I do not yet understand how this works or what part I have to play. I do know that in all the permaculture books, looking for ways that land becomes self-sustaining and productive, there is always a dimension mentioned of finding in what ways your particular venture can serve and integrate the community. The hedge-dresser came on his tractor and cut the hedges on the road through our property so beautifully — a work of art — and I don’t even feel able to ask who paid his wages. The advice I have had is to play table tennis on a Friday night and afterwards have a beer in The Goat. So I shall.
Linear ideas
In Durham when I was a teenager there were wall-to-wall bread shops, or was it shoe shops?. I understood then that you could borrow money from a bank to open a bread shop and that the banks knew that bread shops were a safe investment for their money because there were so many of them. Despite planning restrictions around here, the bread shop equivalent is chicken sheds. A local person told me that civil servants were worried about running out of food in the Brexit scenario and that chicken is the fastest way to address that deficit.
Of course, I am taking the piss out of this sort of thinking. It is just so amazingly barren and flat. So devoid of possibility. The thinking that takes place in the community is more an analogue of an ecosystem, where many actors do many diverse things and build a web of interdependency and support for each other. Such a course necessarily makes space for new things to happen and for ideas to take root that would otherwise lack soil. The panoply of grants and incentives that farmers face are largely distortions of what people would otherwise do that has more intrinsic wisdom. Bureaucrats need to dispense money and measure the results. That legibility destroys life, important though the money is in the local economy.
We have been thoroughly indoctrinated to think that we can work out the best ways of doing things. That attitude has failed and is creating untold misery and destruction. 40 years of neoliberal economics has produced little benefit for most people and untold wealth for a tiny few. The sales pitch has been entirely false and increasingly false. Is there any chance that the IMF will abandon neoliberal policies?
The obverse of this observation is that there are many breakthrough initiatives by community groups across the world. Do they care if what they discover is no deemed by governments and NGOs to be scalable? Of course not, that is not their intention, not their agenda, matters not one fig in the real world they inhabit. We simply need to observe, steward, nurture processes that support life, that open up possibilities. If these things make a laughingstock of self-appointed experts, so much the better.
[1] The Royal Horticultural Society, established way back in 1804
[2] How brilliant would it be if our organizations did the same? And of course they do, but we’re often blind to it, and when not blind, opposed.
[3] Stewardship of course is at the heart of any thriving Commons, which binds a community and a set of practices with the resource. The tragedy/failure of a commons comes when those things are lost and it shifts toward exploitation.
[4] Unhelpfully, a growing number of students seek to suppress the controversial voices that might provoke better thinking. 2/5 according to an article in this morning’s Times.
[5] NNT is the Number Needed to Treat. Broadly, the number of patients you need to medicate/operate/whatever in order for one patient to benefit. Yes, just one person benefits, so you’d best be confident in your prediction of not doing harm to the others.
[6] If you’re interested, we recommend David Bollier’s Think Like a Commoner. Perhaps not unrelated, the excellent Portfolios of the Poor talks about the sophistication that the have-nots need to apply to their finances.
