Goats in the Argan Tree
“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else.”
- John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment (1936)
In the south of Morocco grows a belt of trees called argan. Argan products are very popular today as a luxury hair product, and on holiday recently I had the opportunity to peruse these wares at the source. It proved to be a lovely economics lesson and a reminder that ideas really do rule us. Though I have to claim ignorance in Moroccan history beyond a crash course provided by my very generous hosts, I’ve endeavored to place the argan story in some kind of genealogy in order to stand before the ideas, living and breathing, that shape this part of the modern world.
I started this blog to explore the life of the mind in a digital age. As I see it, we live in an era where unprecedentedly many people commit four years of life to a university education only to enter an economy that has more surplus IQ than our institutions can fill — entering into this world, it’s easier than ever to feel overqualified for what is asked of one’s labor on a daily basis, and very easy to fall into despair about where creativity could even be welcome or appreciated. Against this foil, the argan economy managed to make concrete the lesson from Keynes that I quote above — we really are ruled by ideas.
The argan belt, we’re told, holds back the expansion of the Sahara and until about twenty years ago served primarily, as an unsustainable source of firewood. They’ve begun cultivating them instead for the oil of the argan fruit, which then becomes the rave luxury exfoliant. What was once a matter of household industry in Berber villages has reached industrial scale, large enough to sell real purchase orders to L’Oreal. And Morocco is proud — the argan industry, as it is billed, is helping bring money into local communities and hold off the grave threat of desertification.
It’s harvested from orchards that dot the road from Essaouira to Marrakesh and then processed in operations that I can only find advertised as women’s cooperatives. Visit a souk in any Moroccan city and the predictable labels will accompany a photo of women producing the oil in front of a tree idyllically filled with goats. Women’s co-ops, biodynamic, UNESCO-protected, full of cute animals. An idea—let’s call it “Argan Idyll” — that evidently works for the tourists who flock to the stalls.
To be clear, the economics lesson I drew from the experience is not a tired critique of feel-good consumerism. We all know what this image is: women, cute animals, a litany of acronyms and labels explaining how ethical and good the whole operation is, how you’re helping make the world a better place, etc. An idea from our NGO political philosophers that, however appealing, probably belongs in Keynes’s “wrong” category. It seems like our own tastes in the US have moved on from, say, Kony 2012 — National Geographic has covered the supposedly detrimental effects of the practice and no one is particularly surprised or upset to hear it.
Indeed, there’s an analysis to furnish that the feel-good idea sells so well to affluent Atlantic consumers precisely because it plays to an anxiety about the complexity of our needs. As I mentioned in a previous article, Galbraith has volumes to offer on this topic. The lesson today is not about the affluenza of American consumers. No, the lesson is in the life of this Argan Idyll idea: how it moves institutions, how it flows through colonial and postcolonial narratives, how it sculpts the very landscape.
The Royal Seal of Approval
A couple of news articles I’ve found demonstrate that the Argan Idyll idea has been able to move the Kingdom of Morocco as well as publicly-traded companies into action. Sure, they’re reacting to what might be swept under the rug as “consumer demand” but what must be kept in view is the object of that demand: the consumers are purchasing, in the material form of scentless oil, the very idea of women’s co-ops, goats in trees, biodynamic communities. It is the idea that has been sold and must be reified.
Again, yes, the substratum of this power is the consumer demand funneled through the idea. As I’ve commented before, Galbraith puts it extraordinarily well — to the affluent societies of North America and Europe, it is the ability to tell consumers what to consume that is most scarce and best remunerated. That task — the production of demand — can only be done by positing ideas like the Argan Idyll. And sell well this idea has.
Production of argan oil by co-operatives, as far as I can tell, began in 1996 thanks to the efforts of a scientist by the name of Zoubida Charrouf. She’s become a bit of an influencer as a result of her efforts to get the argan oil economy off the ground. I’ve managed to find some press coverage from around 2014 detailing the story: a woman STEM professor sees deforestation threatening her country’s environment, finds a way to refocus the local economy to preserve the environment, and battles successfully against patriarchal norms that make local Berber men refuse to allow their wives to participate in argan co-operatives. She triumphs, the King shows up to shake her hand, and now L’Oreal offers you an incredible ethically-sourced hair oil. A story exquisitely manicured to fit the neoliberal image.
Digging a bit deeper, I’m led to believe it’s the result of a royal marketing team. Notice that the article from Al Fanar goes out of its way to mention the King of Morocco stepping in to sponsor the economic transition — the same King who sits on $8 billion in assets and who to this day jails dissident journalists and academics. Al Fanar is, of course, owned by the Alexandria Trust, a nonprofit whose board includes the former president of the Mohammed V University — a royally-endowed flagship institution that employs Zoubida Charrouf herself. That is, an outlet that is functionally a royal propaganda organ is explicitly putting the official seal of approval on the scientist-helps-local-women-be-environmental narrative. They seem to be in good company.
The Guardian, too, has helped to push an argan narrative. In 2015, they ran an article complete with explicitly disclaimer that it had been funded by the Olam conglomerate and thereby exempt from editorial independence. In this case, we see L’Oreal and BASF playing the heroes, trying to push potentially-exploitative co-operatives to follow Corporate Social Responsibility practices and to better educate Berber women about wage negotiations. L’Oreal’s representative in the piece explicitly says of the Berber women: “To lead this cooperative, [the women] have to get access to education. They have to understand what is business, what is a purchase order, what is governance, what is democracy, what is transparency, what is accounting.” A corporation explicitly purchasing press attention for its mission of teaching Berber women to be better at capitalism.
Of course, this is not the only coverage. More recently, it seems like there has been talk of wage depression in the industry that the Royal Moroccan Department of agriculture “declined to comment” on. Industrial processing has clearly punched a hole in the price floor, and with it, the narrative of women’s empowerment. It seems that Professor Charrouf is still actively trying to make the idyll real, but the engine of capital keeps running and industrial interests behave the way they do. The very fact of a qualitative conflict here, however, should sharply contrast with the foil attitude I describe at the top: here we see a real, conceptual, ideological conflict between economic players driven by the idea of women’s co-operatives.
Thus, the power of the idea. I have worked with BASF before. They’re a behemoth, and moving them is no mean feat. Powerful enough that the Kingdom wants the image flawlessly reproduced in the souks and in the press, down to having the King’s name on it; and powerful enough that public corporations will print propaganda expressing their principled commitment to it.
The Postcolonial Angle
I came to see not only the power of the idea, but also its ability to traverse the narrative landscape. Morocco, of course, has a complex colonial history whereby the monarchy that has ruled since the Seventeenth Century has always remained intact despite the imposition of a French protectorate from 1912 to 1956. In addition to the narrative goals of the present monarch, some of which I touched on above, the country still harbors, in their afterlives, a variety of French colonial narratives. The Argan Idyll seems to weave
Most strikingly, the story about desertification seems to be a French colonial formulation. We find from a makhzen publication, Morocco World News, an argument that the threat of deforestation is itself a French colonial fabrication intended to indict Arab agriculture and justify French intervention in Berber communities. Indeed, the French set up a separate schooling system to attempt the colonial divide-and-conquer playbook. In a classic postcolonial move, the monarchy also uses the deforestation narrative, lifted and shifted onto Berber agricultural practices, to promote its own development project in the argan belt.
There is, as far as I can tell, some real credence to this idea. Morocco World News links an article by Diana K. Davis at the University of Califonia, also Davis that’s very much worth a read. I’m not in an expert position to evaluate, but the point stands that there’s a real intellectual thrust to it. And, indeed, the fact of real dispute here shows the routes that older ideas have carved through Morocco in the last two hundred years. In short, Davis demonstrates that a narrative of protecting the Magreb from desertification by nomads has been the French modus operandi since their conquest of Algiers in 1830. Practiced and perfected in Algeria, it was brought into Morocco in 1912 and used to justify a policy of “rescuing” the “useful” parts of Morocco — namely, the argan belt and the mineral wealth of the Atlas — from the Arab rulers who, according to French ideology, bore collective guilt for desertification spanning back to their arrival under the Umayyads.
Clearly, there’s a lot more to be said about the French formulation of a “Berber myth” — attempts abound to find a European genetic origin for them, or to explain Berber social forms as more “innately Republican” than Arab ones. As an example I personally witnessed, Yves Saint-Laurent himself set up a museum of the Berber culture in his estate in Marrakesh — one that contains no text in either Berber or Arabic, and which explicitly declares the Berber culture as one “yet to be discovered.” My interpretation is that this is a clear display of the colonial anti-Arab narrative: declaring the Berbers to be a culture needing “discovery” from under the yoke of the Alawite sultans.
So, looking at a scale of time since the French Revolution, we see the arrival of the Argan Idyll spanning the courses between the French protect-the-forests idea, the Berber myth, and the new developmentalist story we see the royal press printing. Indeed, there’s a reprogramming of these stories: the old French idea of saving the forests is transposed by the Moroccan government, probably all too aware of its sway over Atlantic audiences, onto the “problem” of Berber firewood-harvesting rather than the older “problem” of Arab forest management. We still need to save the forests, but it’s a matter of using scientific methods such as the ones developed at Mohammad V University.
There’s obviously a great deal more to be said about the history of Morocco — I haven’t even scratched the surface of the years of lead, the Suez Crisis and the broader postcolonial moment, Algeria and the Western Sahara, etc. The point remains, however, very simply that an idea like Argan Idyll has to draw from older reservoirs. That we can so easily take for granted something like desertification only to rediscover its French colonial origins, and find that these have watered an entire industry: it goes to show that Kant’s adage holds up. Practice without theory is blind. We’re ruled by ideas, good or bad, to give us any direction to our activity.
The Balkan Angle
As I came to realize, there’s a much broader theme at work here that requires that we zoom out from Morocco for a moment. The power of the idea goes beyond the merely economic — indeed, it can be and has been a nation-building power. Though I think there’s much to be said about the future of Morocco, I’m reminded of a talk by Slavoj Žižek about how this precise effect has played out, across the Mediterranean, in another goat-filled land: the Balkans.
In short, Žižek’s point is that every Balkan national identity has been produced, counterintuitively, by accepting the projection of wealthy tourists and running with it. Not in the sense that some previous national identity was replaced by sheer economic force, the way it might be sold by a discount postcolonial theorist, but in the literal sense that there are places that have not had any meaningful modern identity prior to receiving a national idea from without.
As the preeminent example, we know that Greece is basically Disneyland for Victorian philhellenism. Athens, famously, had a population of about ten people at independence in 1821. Greece under the Ottomans was a society of merchants who called themselves “roumanoi” as they had since Byzantine times. As a state in the modern world, Greece was trying to found itself on Enlightenment ideals and Orthodox Christianity. At one moment there was a call for a united Balkan republic in the model of revolutionary France. Hardly Greek in the sense that we know, or even a national idea in the sense we’d come to understand in the Nineteenth Century.
Instead, thanks to the influence of British power, the Greeks inherited a national idea lifted from Oxford Classics curricula. They got Lord Byron leading charges of revolutionary Greeks and expressing disappointment that they weren’t marching like an Athenian phalanx. We saw the creation of Athens as an open-air museum of its Periclean glory, the destruction of 14th-century Frankish structures on the Akropolis using Schliemann’s dynamite, and the renaming of the Greek demonym to “hellenikoi,” a term not used in almost two thousand years. Quite literally, the imposition of a British fantasy, adopted and reified, created an entire modern national identity. And one that we generally look upon favorably. Despite its basically foreign provenance, the Greek national identity has produced stable social institutions.
To serve other examples, Žižek goes on to talk about how Serbia has built itself a bit of a “thug” brand — we now have Belgrade serving as the cocktail capital of Europe and a place that my friends are excited to visit to pay homage to the creation of turbo-folk. Slovenia, for better or for worse, has had to accept Žižek himself as part of the national brand — here, come to Ljubljana, this beautiful understated Adriatic city where young people all do philosophy and crafts and stuff. Personally, when I visited Ljubljana a few years ago, I was delighted to find both the high quality of food and crafts, but in a cartoonish moment, the receptionist at my hostel in Ljubljana in fact conspicuously reading a copy of Being and Time — would she be doing that if there weren’t a certain aesthetic idea being fed to Slovenia?
And, critically, what other national idea would Slovenia have? Or Croatia, for that matter? That country admitted into the European Union almost entirely for the purpose of providing more beaches for German tourists? These are places that cannot claim the Classical lineage of Greece, and whose history only a hundred-odd years ago was Franz Ferdinand daydreaming, guess what, a united Balkan republic for them before his demise in Sarajevo. There’s not only a creative potential but a creative necessity: there’s no such thing as “just another European country” despite Croatia’s attempts to be that — people, especially relatively-affluent Southern Europeans, need to be sold ideas that can organize social institutions. You may as well use ones that wealthy Atlantic consumers already believe in — yes, says Žižek, the Romanians should lean into the idea of being vampires.
To return to Morocco: although it’s a bit far-fetched to think of Morocco as scultping itself as a nation in the image of the Argan Idyll, and although there’s no question that the country has a strong pre-existing national identity, I can see the sketch of some transformations at work. The assimilation of Berbers from village labor into a more organized argan economy resembles the mass-production of Berber-patterned fabrics that I witnessed all over the medinas of Fez and Tangier. Jacquard looms running day and night in old houses to make enormous purchase orders. Pottery in traditional patterns lining the streets and even highways. My guide in Chefchaouen took extensive care to speak to the traditional patterns, seasonal organic fruits, and locally-sourced handicrafts. He had lived in the city his entire life, and rehearsing this pitch certainly must have left an impression on him and his family about what Morocco really is.
In short, the idea influences a sort of national becoming. Morocco becoming the place of modernizing mass-handicrafts that save the forests. Ancient oils, to paraphrase the L’Oreal ad, rooted in Berber traditions. Traditional patterns on vases and rugs available at container-shipping volumes. It’s happened elsewhere, and it happens all the time. Ideas rule us by trickling into our sense of collective identity.
Back Into the Life of the Mind
To recapitulate, I saw through the Argan Idyll idea how we come to be ruled by ideas in three ways: one, because ideas are what we must sell, ever more so with our increasing affluence, in order to conjure demand; two, because ideas organize our historical narratives and serve to guide interpretations as grand as the plight of the forests; three, because ideas organize our milieu so thoroughly that they begin to trickle in to our life experiences and the reality of who we take ourselves to be. Though it may be invisible from the vantage point of the haggling in the souk, or from the vantage point of the overqualified knowledge worker drumming their fingers in a spreadsheet, it’s through ideas primarily that social forms and landscapes and nations are sculpted.
In this reverie, I found a new perspective on my presupposition that IQ is overproduced and functional institutions scarce — we complain at work that ideas aren’t valued or that creativity has no place, and we’re met with stressed managers who can’t figure out why creativity would matter in an increasingly-competitive white-collar world. Is it our functional institutions that alone can provide an ability to see things like the Argan Idyll? Has our professional culture simply eroded any means by which to facilitate meditations like this one? I thought at first to label this economics lesson one “fit for a business school case study,” but my MBA friends assure me that no case study takes particular interest in the role of ideas as much as this year’s scientific-management methods. Not that everyone should just be paid to think like Archimedes in the bath all day, but surely there’s got to be a way to remember that ideas do in fact rule us from beyond the spreadsheets.
Well, at least business students can always go to Morocco for spring break. They should check out the argan products.
