(Ir)religion should be a Category of Historical Analysis
04/24/2013 17:16
One of the things that impressed me most about Gender and the Politics of History was the idea Scott introduced in the first few pages, that a big part of her project is challenging “the reliability of terms that have been taken as self-evident by historicizing them” (6). The meanings of everyday concepts have “the appearance of fixity” and are often taken unconsciously as “normative definition[s]…used to justify oppression” (4, 5). The everyday concepts she was concerned with were gender identities — I want to use the same approach to find the ways religion (and particularly irreligion) have been excluded from the analysis of social change over time that we call history.
“Meanings are constructed through exclusions,” Scott said. “Positive definitions,” she continued, are built from these dualities, but “categorical oppositions repress the internal ambiguities of either category” (7). This is a fancy way of saying that reducing complex reality to simple binary pairs oversimplifies the elements at either pole of the opposition, and hides interactions and relationships between the polar elements that may actually be keys to understanding them.
Added to this problem of abstraction and oversimplification, Scott said, is a layer of politics that goes largely uncriticized — or even unnoticed. Politics “sets and enforces priorities, represses some subjects in the name of the greater importance of others, naturalizes certain categories and disqualifies others” (9). This seems a bit problematic to me. Certainly politics (defined as power relationships imposed to benefit one group at the expense of others) can set these agendas, but other factors can as well. Abstractions and “culture” are part of the way people relate to the world, and there’s a slippery slope separating the idea that culture is “constructed” for the benefit of a ruling class, from full-on conspiracy theory. Seems like the burden of proof is on the person claiming that an abstraction supports some type of systematic oppression. Of course, sometimes it does. The things nineteenth-century Americans in the South “knew” about the nature of black people supported slavery. The way we “know” gender supports keeping women in a secondary, unequal position in society. I’m a bit surprised that Scott wasn’t more interested in the ways this knowledge was institutionalized and transmitted. Religion, for example, is remarkably absent from a book concerned with the misrepresentation of gender in western culture.
But maybe you have to be outside the frame to see the picture. Feminist historians were in a position to do this with respect to “gendered” history, since the normative definitions used to justify oppression were all imposed by men. But standing outside the religious frame, I’m amazed how little Scott had to say about religion’s role in the construction of gender. Scott mentions religion very briefly in the conclusion, when she criticizes the Roman Catholic Church for opposing abortion in Poland (in Poland? They were doing the same in the US, 210). The other section that could have included a discussion of religion — where a treatment of religion would have been a no-brainer, does not.
Scott’s failure to mention religion in the chapter “Women in The Making of the English Working Class” is jarring. Yes, I understand she wanted to talk about gender, which she thought E. P. Thompson left out. But failing to deal with the fact that most of the people she’s writing about were notorious freethinkers is a problem. “Tom” Paine, Richard Carlile, and the female volunteers who were arrested when they kept Carlile’s (freethought) bookshop open, were all “infidels,” and their radical (and feminist) agenda was informed by their secularism. Scott didn’t just “repress” their identities, she redrew them “in the name of the greater importance” of her gender argument (77-9). Interestingly, in doing so she leaned on Barbara Taylor’s book on the intersection of radicalism and feminism, Eve and the New Jerusalem, which also (incredibly) manages to sideline secular radicals in a story focused on the ultimate secular radical, Robert Owen.
Now it’s entirely possible that Scott and Taylor just didn’t think organized religion has been subjugating women for the last few millennia. Or maybe it’s a relationship they weren’t well-positioned to see. Scott paraphrased Gareth Stedman Jones, saying “Class and class consciousness are the same thing” (56). Later, she attributed the fact that gender “seems so unambiguous to ordinary people” to the “repressive function of civilization” as described by Sigmund Freud a century ago (202-3). I think you’re asking for trouble when you apply insights from an outside field to history, if they’re ideas most experts in that field think are out of date. But more important, I think the argument that gender has been confused and women repressed (clearly it has and they have) needs to be supported by a discussion of the actual, historical means of that repression on actual people rather than on Freud’s theories of the unconscious.
So what does this mean for me and freethought history? Well, the good news is that there’s a field for me to work in. The fact that historians like Scott have had other priorities, and that others like Taylor have been unable to see the picture because they were standing inside the religious frame, means there are still histories for me to write. The thing I’ll need to remember is that it takes more than theories “to detect some logic…underlying the varied manifestations of human behavior” (202). The way to mitigate the fact that “history, through its practices, produces (rather than gathers or reflects) knowledge about the past,” I think, is to talk about actual people and events, rather than about abstractions (9). I’m unsatisfied with a history where the “objects of study are…epistemological phenomena, which include economics, industrialization, relations of production, factories, families, classes, genders, collective action, and political ideas, as well as one’s own interpretive categories” (5). Abstractions are great, and we need to understand how they are constructed by people in relationship with cultures. But in the end, I prefer the people.
Science, Religion, and Inequality
04/08/2013 18:03
Coyne, who wrote a 2009 bestseller called Why Evolution Is True, argued in the Society for the Study of Evolution’s journal that “American resistance to accepting evolution is uniquely high among first world countries,” and that, “This is due largely to the extreme religiosity of the United States.” Coyne began by citing a 2006 survey of Americans asked to respond to the statement, “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from an earlier species of animals.” Sixty percent of Americans either disagreed with this statement or were unsure of what answer to give. Only four out of ten Americans agreed with the most basic statement of the concept of evolution.
It gets worse. According to a 2011 study, seventy-eight percent of Americans—almost four out of every five people in this country!—either believe that humans were “directly created by God in their present form within the last 10,000 years” or believe that humans developed from “less advanced forms…through a process guided by God.” And just twelve percent of Americans believe that only evolution should be taught in public schools—while twenty-three percent said only creationism should be taught. Fifty-five percent weaseled, and said the two “theories” should be given equal time.
It gets even worse. According to a 2011 Gallup poll, ninety-two percent of Americans answered “Yes” when asked if they believed in God. And the arguments today’s religious apologists use, that a secular society would be devoid of “morality, meaning, and human significance,” are identical to the ones they used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in America, and even earlier in Europe.
Science, as an organized profession, has done little to help the problem. Although ninety-three percent of top scientists (National Academy members) are agnostic or atheist, their professional organizations are spineless accommodationists. The American Association for the Advancement of Science claims “the overwhelming majority of scientists” believe science and religion are compatible. The National Center for Science Education claims “evolution does not make claims about God’s existence or non-existence.”
Follow the money. Scientists get $70 million in grant money from the Templeton Foundation alone. This is the same religious organization that funded The Historical Society’s recent multi-million dollar grant to study “Religion and Innovation in Human Affairs.” I was a member of The Historical Society, so I sent them a proposal for a token study on the influence of freethought—both on innovation itself, and on the religions these folks claim were so innovative. It was rejected, of course; so I turned my attention to writing popular freethought history and stopped hoping for an institutional or academic endorsement that would never come (more on that later).
Coyne concluded that the reason America is so much more religious and anti-evolution than the rest of the developed world is that we are “socially dysfunctional compared to other nations.” He cited a 2009 study that listed twenty-five indices of social well-being. Of the seventeen prosperous First World democracies surveyed, the US placed lowest, both in terms of social quality and rejection of evolution (and really, science in general). Several other studies have suggested two possible causes. Either “pathology breeds religiosity,” as hopeless people turn to God for help, or the wealthy use religion as a tool for “urging conformity and quelling discontent.”
The second article, by Solt, Habel, and Grant, concluded based on two different statistical analyses that increases in religious participation are caused by increasing economic inequality. In a time-study of the US since the 1950s, the sociologists found that whenever wealth becomes more unequal, religion increases both among the poor and the rich. The rich “adopt religion to justify their privilege” and to gain control over the restless poor. Social science expects “democracies…to respond to higher inequality with greater distribution,” but this process is short-circuited in societies where religion is powerful.
Although the Solt study didn’t go back farther than the 1950s in American history, if we adopted their reasoning we might expect the greatest periods of success for social justice movements to correspond with a high degree of secularity, and the low points to line up with peak periods of religion. A quick glance at the timeline of America suggests this may be true, and I think it’s an issue that urgently needs some very serious study. Another implication, which Coyne ended his paper with, is that “weakening religion may itself require other, more profound changes: creating a society that is more just, more caring, more egalitarian.” Improving social justice and expanding secularism may each be impossible without the other.
American freethought, seen as a movement, has always been closely aligned with radical social change. In 1825, Frances Wright began her commune at Nashoba in an effort to emancipate southern slaves. In 1831, freethinker Abner Kneeland offered his stage to abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison when no one else in Boston would. In 1833, Dr. Charles Knowlton was jailed for writing a birth control book that claimed women should be free to (and responsible to) limit the sizes of their families to affordable levels. These are just a few examples, from the early-nineteenth century years I covered in An Infidel Body-Snatcher and the Fruits of His Philosophy. Over the next few years, I’ll continue studying and writing about these connections, on both sides of the Atlantic.
In the meantime, “movement atheism” seems to be at some type of impasse, trying to identify its priorities and develop some type of shared agenda for action. If Solt and Coyne are correct, the movement needs to get behind a social justice agenda that addresses American society’s growing inequities. Creating a better society, says Coyne, will help weaken religion and support science and progress. And being leaders in fights that bring meaningful, lasting change to regular Americans (regardless of their current religious affiliations) will not only create conditions supporting the growth of secularism, but give people reasons to join us.
The Truth Seeker
03/26/2013 08:59
Comstock's persecution of Bennett certainly seemed like a personal vendetta, but I don't know enough about Comstock yet to know if his approach to Bennett was actually unusual for him. I also didn't get enough of a sense, I think, of specifically what Bennett's contribution to freethought was. He often seems to be overshadowed by Ingersoll and others -- I was curious about Bennett's own ideas, in spite of the author using many quotes.
I had no idea that Bennett had written as much as he apparently did about Bradlaugh. The fact that he met Bradlaugh, Besant, Hypatia Bradlaugh, Aveling and Eleanor Marx, and wrote about it, is going to be very valuable to me.
Perhaps Bennett is less popular than some other freethinkers because he flirted so openly with mysticism and Theosophy. Nowadays it seems hard to accept the idea that freethinkers were open to "natural" phenomena we now consider to be supernatural superstitions. The relationship between freethinkers and spiritualists in the 19th century that Bradford hints at here is something that deserves much more attention. It has received a lot from the spiritualist side, I think -- now it needs some attention from the materialist angle.
MY book is available TODAY!
03/14/2013 10:32
After a troubled youth, Knowlton became a doctor and wrote America's first birth control book, Fruits of Philosophy, in 1831. He was convicted and imprisoned for that as well—this time with hard labor. Charles was an outsider for most of his life, fighting religious and social conformity. This is a true story about why outsiders are important, and what they can achieve.
Growing up surrounded by superstition and hypocrisy, Charles developed an unswerving dedication to finding and telling the truth. If the truth he’d found was opposed by authorities in the church and government, Charles went ahead and told it anyway. This is a true story about the power of integrity.
It’s also an adventure story, full of conflict, drama, humor, and a little horror. Charles Knowlton led an unusual life; it gave him a radical outlook and led him to develop a unique personal philosophy. But it was what Charles did with this outlook—the fruits of his philosophy—that really mattered. This is a true story about how experiences become ideas, and how ideas become actions.
Second Thoughts About Jefferson
12/11/2012 11:34
Jefferson admitted, later in his life, that he had made a play for Betsy Walker, the wife of one of his oldest friends. But apparently he stalked her, sneaked into her room where she was “undressing or in bed,” and had to be “repulsed with indignation and menaces of alarm.” Understanding that the woman was in a position to alert the household and probably accuse him of assault, Jefferson “ran off.”
Meacham excuses Jefferson in two ways. First, he says Jefferson was a man of his time and place. Although others in eighteenth-century America managed to elude the temptation, Virginians had built a slave society. And as Jefferson himself said, a boy born for command and “thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities.” There’s some truth to this, I suppose. But it’s an awfully convenient way to absolve Jefferson, and where’s “agency?” He’s only self-aware and responsible for his actions when he’s doing good?
Meacham’s second excuse for Jefferson also seems partially true, but with reservations. His role models, Meacham shows us, were all men who lived in, approved of, profited from, and in some cases had helped build Virginia society. “Small, Wythe, Fauquier, and Peyton Randolph established the standards by which Jefferson judged everyone else,” including himself. The first two were his teachers, the third the Royal Governor, and the fourth his politically astute cousin. And of course there was Jefferson’s dead father, “an imposing, prosperous, well-liked” planter. Meacham says farmer, as if Peter Jefferson had been a yeoman hewing a homestead out of the wilderness. And he says “The first half of the eighteenth century was a thrilling time to be young, white, male, wealthy, and Virginian.”
It was, at that. You could study the classics and play music by day, and attend parties at neighboring plantations by night. You could run you business as shoddily as you liked, and then balance the books on the backs of your slaves. You were almost expected to spend wildly beyond your means, and then blame the shortfall on British merchants. And you could have any prostitute, servant girl or slave you liked. As Jefferson said, “if that apostle [St. Paul — who, incidentally, wasn’t an apostle] had known that providence would at an after day be so kind to any particular set of people as to furnish them with other means of extinguishing their fire as those of matrimony, he would have earnestly recommended them to their practice.”
So Jefferson emerges from his youth a seriously compromised character. Possibly to the point where I’m not that interested in reading on. I don’t think this was what Meacham intended. In fact, if anything, he seems to be working really hard to excuse these issues he’s brought to light. Not to argue for some complex, self-contradictory but still interesting and important Jefferson — but almost to bring these issues up for their sensational value, and then pass lightly over them as if they don’t matter.
For example, after Jefferson fled from Mrs. Walker’s “menaces of alarm” when he tried to seduce her, Meacham says simply that “Frustrated by his failure with Mrs. Walker, Jefferson took solace in a glorious autumn of plays and politics in Williamsburg in 1768.” Meacham moves quickly on to Jefferson’s courting of Patty Wayles in 1770, and their marriage in 1772. “Jefferson paid the clergyman £ 5 and tipped Elizabeth Hemings— Sally’s mother’s first appearance in his account books,” says Meacham. Elizabeth’s sixth child, Sally Hemings, was born the following year, in 1773.
John Wayles died in May, 1773, heavily in debt (surprise!), and Meacham says “Patty Jefferson did not hesitate to move Elizabeth Hemings and the Hemings-Wayles children— Patty’s half siblings— from the Forest to Monticello in the wake of her father’s death.” Perhaps his point is to suggest Patty had some affection for the children (interesting that his citation for this statement is Annette Gordon-Reed’s The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. That probably deserves a closer look), but half a page later he sums up by observing “Jefferson now had charge over three branches of his or his wife’s family…One man, Thomas Jefferson, stood at the center of this eclectic universe.” As if it was some unprecedented cosmic accident, and not the predictable and all-too common result of the society Jefferson supported and profited from.
As has been recently shown by the reactions of historians and their readers, it’s important that Sally Hemings was a slave and a half-sister of Jefferson’s wife. What’s even weirder and creepier is that Sally was younger than the Jefferson’s first daughter, Patsy, and was probably conceived while Patty Jefferson was pregnant and unavailable to her husband. I’m not saying Sally was Jefferson’s daughter, product of “other means of extinguishing their fire,” (although that would be an incredible idea for a novel), but it’s important to an understanding of both Jefferson and his times that she could have been.
First impressions of Jon Meacham’s Jefferson
12/06/2012 15:38
My father was very enthusiastic about this book, after reading the first few chapters. So I downloaded the Kindle version and started it while I rode the bike today (Jefferson: “Not less than two hours a day should be devoted to exercise, and the weather should be little regarded.”). It begins well!
Since I’m writing a biography, I probably pay more attention to some of the mechanical aspects than other readers. There’s a tension, when you’re writing about someone who is long dead or who just didn’t leave a lot of detail aside from documents; an urge to dramatize. And this urge leads immediately to the thorny field between the pasture of history and the woods of fiction.
So my mind went immediately there, when Meacham began (as every writer wishes to) with a very concrete and active scene: “HE WOKE AT FIRST LIGHT. Lean and loose-limbed, Thomas Jefferson tossed back the sheets in his rooms at Conrad and McMunn’s boardinghouse on Capitol Hill…” nah, I thought, he’s making stuff up. He’s fishing, but I’ll nibble and see how far from “historical truth” he’s willing to go to sell his story. But before the three-sentence opening paragraph was done, Meacham had surprised me, snapped the line and set the hook firmly. Jefferson “swung his long legs out of bed, and plunged his feet into a basin of cold water— a lifelong habit he believed good for his health. At Monticello,” Meacham continued, “his plantation in the Southwest Mountains near the Blue Ridge of Virginia, the metal bucket brought to Jefferson every morning wore a groove on the floor next to the alcove where he slept.”
It’s concrete, vivid, sensory, and at the same time it gives you an interesting and novel insight into Jefferson’s personality. A biographer’s dream opening paragraph. And it’s backed up by five endnotes that elaborate for a page and a half on the sources of this information and expand on Meacham’s portrait of Jefferson. So I’m very excited about reading on.
And I’m asking myself, do I have something concrete, like Jefferson’s bowl of cold water, that I can start my own story with and snap that hook into my reader’s cheek? Something that not only captures attention, but in some way opens a secret window into the character? Turns out, I think I do. Years before he ever took up a knife and dissected stolen corpses, my guy was good with a hatchet. He split a hundred thousand shingles before he was seventeen. There’s gotta be something I can do with that!
As I read on, I’ll be looking for more writing lessons. It’s just great when a book can not only give you a new view of an interesting topic (which Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power promises to do), but can also teach you about the art of writing at the same time. I haven’t read any reviews (beyond a couple of reader reviews on Amazon, which are mixed in their response to the book), so I don’t know if I’ll be as impressed at the end as I am at the beginning. But there’s something to be said for beginning well!
More Bolton Hall
10/17/2012 15:32
More on Bolton Hall’s 1907 book, Three Acres and Liberty
I was really interested in this book, as I mentioned a week or so ago. My reaction after reading the whole thing is mixed, but is a little bit typical of my reaction to everything from the Progressive Era, and for that matter, to the Era itself. On the one hand, I was (and still am) very impressed that a lot of what pass for state of the art ideas in the organic/sustainable farming world are in fact very old ideas that were abandoned under the pressure of the twentieth-century agribusiness model of agriculture. On the other, the author is entirely too impressed with the role of experts in helping the poor, benighted workers of the world get back to the land.
The initial thought of the book is a great one, though. Hall says, “We are not tied to a desk or to a bench; we stay there only because we think we are tied.”
Among the other important ideas, which somehow we failed to act on in the twentieth century, is this one: “It is more important that small power be developed on the farms of the United States than that we harness Niagara.” Where would the power grid conversation people like Maggie Koerth-Baker are having now be, if we had developed local, sustainable power sources?
Hall’s premise in this book is that “One hour a day spent in a garden ten yards long by seven wide will supply vegetables enough for a family of six.” Hall goes on to say “The world seems to be divided into those who have to count their pennies and those who couldn’t count their thousands.” And since this is the case, those of us who count pennies should take advantage of the opportunity to save most of our food budget by doing it ourselves.
The really interesting thing about this (and again, the thing that seems like it could have been written today in response to the way things are now), is that Hall’s idea is that by freeing people from having to buy their food, you free one parent from having to work outside the home. Hall is clear in his claim that this is better for the children and the family, and for society at large. Where Hall and his associates made vacant urban land available to poor or unemployed people, he claims that in addition to growing self-reliance they saw actual improvements in people’s health. Working outdoors and eating an improved diet increased people’s physical health while solving problems and developing hope for the future improved their mental health.
In addition to this very contemporary perspective, Hall provides a lot of information that’s interesting to the historian. We don’t normally think about the fact that “what typically attracts the gardener to the great cities is stable manure,” or “the backwoods of the Middle States [was] made accessible by cheap autos” in the first decades of the twentieth century. But this transition from horses and railroads to automobiles was happening just as Hall was writing, and beginning to erode the truth of the old adage that “Wealth, activity, and political power concentrate at the inlet and outlet of the railway funnel.”
Hall writing style is very effective. He combines idealistic claims such as “The best and most effective way of helping people in need is to open a way whereby they may help themselves,” with practical observations, like “idle men and idle land are already close to each other—the men can reach their gardens without changing their domiciles or being separated from their families.” Then he throws in a little humor: “‘Quite right, mother, quite right,’ came from a man nearby. ‘The world can never know the evil we men don’t do while we are busy in our little gardens.’”
Hall quotes several other writers whose conclusions match his own. For example, Liberty Hyde Bailey: “An area of 150x100 feet is generally sufficient to supply a family of five people with vegetables.” And here and there he adds a bits of contemporary wisdom that now seem hopelessly lacking in political correctness: “when there is a large job of…weeding to be done, you can hire Italians or other foreigners to do it better and cheaper.” But he also quotes Varro’s De Re Rustica, written in 37 BCE, and says “historians have made a mistake in not reading it.”
Hall recommends a wide variety of intensive gardening techniques: use of manure instead of commercial fertilizers; “super close culture,” where plants are set very close together to use the land and water efficiently and keep down weeds; “companion cropping” and “double cropping,” to extend the growing season; rotation to reduce the impact of pests; soil inoculation using nitrogen-fixing legumes (just recently discovered when he wrote); mulching to save water; raising chickens, ducks and rabbits to use waste and produce food and manure; canning and drying to preserve even small quantities of food; and even disposal of city sewage by using human waste on urban gardens. He talks about Rochdale cooperatives, politics, and economics as understood at the beginning of the twentieth century. And he quotes a passage from Lincoln that I’ve never run into before: “Population must increase rapidly, more rapidly than in former times, and ere long the most valuable of all arts will be the art of deriving subsistence from the smallest area of soil. No community whose every member possesses this art can ever be the victim of oppression in any of its forms. Such community will alike be independent of crowned kings, money kings, and land kings.”
I was really interested in this book, as I mentioned a week or so ago. My reaction after reading the whole thing is mixed, but is a little bit typical of my reaction to everything from the Progressive Era, and for that matter, to the Era itself. On the one hand, I was (and still am) very impressed that a lot of what pass for state of the art ideas in the organic/sustainable farming world are in fact very old ideas that were abandoned under the pressure of the twentieth-century agribusiness model of agriculture. On the other, the author is entirely too impressed with the role of experts in helping the poor, benighted workers of the world get back to the land.
The initial thought of the book is a great one, though. Hall says, “We are not tied to a desk or to a bench; we stay there only because we think we are tied.”
Among the other important ideas, which somehow we failed to act on in the twentieth century, is this one: “It is more important that small power be developed on the farms of the United States than that we harness Niagara.” Where would the power grid conversation people like Maggie Koerth-Baker are having now be, if we had developed local, sustainable power sources?
Hall’s premise in this book is that “One hour a day spent in a garden ten yards long by seven wide will supply vegetables enough for a family of six.” Hall goes on to say “The world seems to be divided into those who have to count their pennies and those who couldn’t count their thousands.” And since this is the case, those of us who count pennies should take advantage of the opportunity to save most of our food budget by doing it ourselves.
The really interesting thing about this (and again, the thing that seems like it could have been written today in response to the way things are now), is that Hall’s idea is that by freeing people from having to buy their food, you free one parent from having to work outside the home. Hall is clear in his claim that this is better for the children and the family, and for society at large. Where Hall and his associates made vacant urban land available to poor or unemployed people, he claims that in addition to growing self-reliance they saw actual improvements in people’s health. Working outdoors and eating an improved diet increased people’s physical health while solving problems and developing hope for the future improved their mental health.
In addition to this very contemporary perspective, Hall provides a lot of information that’s interesting to the historian. We don’t normally think about the fact that “what typically attracts the gardener to the great cities is stable manure,” or “the backwoods of the Middle States [was] made accessible by cheap autos” in the first decades of the twentieth century. But this transition from horses and railroads to automobiles was happening just as Hall was writing, and beginning to erode the truth of the old adage that “Wealth, activity, and political power concentrate at the inlet and outlet of the railway funnel.”
Hall writing style is very effective. He combines idealistic claims such as “The best and most effective way of helping people in need is to open a way whereby they may help themselves,” with practical observations, like “idle men and idle land are already close to each other—the men can reach their gardens without changing their domiciles or being separated from their families.” Then he throws in a little humor: “‘Quite right, mother, quite right,’ came from a man nearby. ‘The world can never know the evil we men don’t do while we are busy in our little gardens.’”
Hall quotes several other writers whose conclusions match his own. For example, Liberty Hyde Bailey: “An area of 150x100 feet is generally sufficient to supply a family of five people with vegetables.” And here and there he adds a bits of contemporary wisdom that now seem hopelessly lacking in political correctness: “when there is a large job of…weeding to be done, you can hire Italians or other foreigners to do it better and cheaper.” But he also quotes Varro’s De Re Rustica, written in 37 BCE, and says “historians have made a mistake in not reading it.”
Hall recommends a wide variety of intensive gardening techniques: use of manure instead of commercial fertilizers; “super close culture,” where plants are set very close together to use the land and water efficiently and keep down weeds; “companion cropping” and “double cropping,” to extend the growing season; rotation to reduce the impact of pests; soil inoculation using nitrogen-fixing legumes (just recently discovered when he wrote); mulching to save water; raising chickens, ducks and rabbits to use waste and produce food and manure; canning and drying to preserve even small quantities of food; and even disposal of city sewage by using human waste on urban gardens. He talks about Rochdale cooperatives, politics, and economics as understood at the beginning of the twentieth century. And he quotes a passage from Lincoln that I’ve never run into before: “Population must increase rapidly, more rapidly than in former times, and ere long the most valuable of all arts will be the art of deriving subsistence from the smallest area of soil. No community whose every member possesses this art can ever be the victim of oppression in any of its forms. Such community will alike be independent of crowned kings, money kings, and land kings.”
Bolton Hall
10/05/2012 17:04
I’m fairly sympathetic with these ideas, but I’m also a historian. So I wonder whether there have been other periods when this combination of apocalypse and “back to the garden” came together -- or what other combinations may have occurred to our ancestors. After all, this is not the first time the country and the city have been set against each other as competing models of the good life.
So I was really excited when I found Bolton Hall’s 1907 book, Three Acres and Liberty. Apparently, this is the book (and he’s the guy) credited with launching the “back to the land” movement in the early 20th century -- although he called it by the much more appealing name, “forward-to-the-land.” I’ve just started the book (so I’ll do a complete review in a couple of days), but so far it’s great, and I’m struck by the number of times what I’m reading in this hundred year old book could have been written by Lodgson, Salatin, or Ussery (or for that matter, by me). Some examples:
“We are not tied to a desk or to a bench; we stay there only because we think we are tied.”
“In truth, teaching is but another department of gardening.”
“It is hardly too much to say that when we are tired out or ill either we have been doing the wrong thing or doing it wrong.”
“The world seems to be dividing into those who have to count their pennies and those who couldn’t count their thousands.”
“You raise more than vegetables in your garden: you raise your expectation of life.”
And that’s just the first chapter!
Holy Shit!
09/28/2012 12:28
Holy Shit, Logsdon’s 2010 book about manure and compost is based on his conviction that soil fertility is the key to human survival. He says it very clearly in the introduction: “My bias— it will be called bias anyway— is that only on smaller, decentralized farms and gardens can food and manure be managed in a truly economical way. Only if populations of animals and humans are spread out over the land will we be able to survive.” This is not unlike the position taken by many of the other Chelsea Green authors, the difference is that Logsdon is an old guy who has been thinking and writing about these ideas for almost five decades. For me at least, that adds a little something to his argument.
The soil destruction = collapse argument has some popular-history credibility, since it was Jared Diamond’s thesis in Collapse. Of course, the situation in the ancient world may have been much different: they were not able to make up for used-up or eroded fertility with chemical fertilizers. But maybe that’s not such a bonus for us. Another way of looking at it is their problems were not exacerbated by reliance on chemical fertilizers, and they still failed. Logsdon observes that many ancient civilizations failed after depending on a mono-crop (ironically, often maize), and then points out that we don’t understand how serious our situation is: “A society so utterly urbanized as ours may not want to face up to what that means, but the end of cheap chemical fertilizer would be almost as earth-shaking as a nuclear bomb explosion.”
Like some of the other guys I’ve been reading lately, Logsdon cites old books (like F.H. King’s Farmers of Forty Centuries, 1911) whose authors seem to have been aware of the issues we’re rediscovering today. I really ought to go through the literature and do a history of soil fertility advocacy. When did it begin? Logsdon quotes a 1908 article in the Breeder’s Gazette, which says “. . . Southern Michigan, denuded of fertility by continued wheat growing, discovered a route to prosperity through the mutton finishing lot and farmers in that state now feed sheep and lambs regardless of the cost, to get a supply of manure.” Were these authors ignored or forgotten? Was it Progressivism? Agribusiness? In any case, Logsdon thinks the age of manure is ahead of us. As chemicals become more expensive, he says “People could raise their own meat, milk, and eggs almost for free by buying feed for their animals with the proceeds from selling the manure.” Problem with this idea is that manure is heavy. The same oil crunch that is going to make chemicals outrageously pricey is going to make it impossible to transport compost from where it’s produced to where people might pay big bucks for it. So the only lasting solutions, as he says earlier, are local ones.
Other books Logsdon mentions are Morrison’s Feeds and Feeding, 1915, and Alva Agee’s 1912 Crops and Methods for Soil Improvement, which Logsdon says “basically announced the arrival of the manure pack.”… I really need to go through all these books and put together a booklist of old sources that are available free online! Most of the rest of Logsdon’s book is devoted to descriptions of manure handling strategies for different types of animals, including humans. It’s interesting, looking at farm manure not as a nuisance by-product that needs to be dealt with, but as a central product of animal agriculture. Barns, Logsdon remarks at one point, “should have been designed for making and preserving manure of high fertility value and for ease of handling.” Maybe in the future they will be, at least among small farmers who read books like this one.
There’s also an interesting discussion of the differences between thermophilic composting, which is familiar to most gardeners, and the slow composting of the deep manure pack in animal stalls. I’ll need to spend some more time thinking about this – already we have about three or four potentially different things going on outside: a pack of horse manure we inherited from the previous owners, a pack we’re building under the sheep, goats, and chickens, a garden-variety compost pile, and a worm farm. Clearly I have more reading to do on this topic, as well as a good deal of experimenting!
And just when you think the whole thing is based on old, folksy wisdom from the depression era, Logsdon rolls out scientific research done by Harry Hoitink and his students at Ohio State University about the disease-suppressing qualities of composted manure. “We now know,” Logsdon quotes Hoitink, “what the genes are in plants that mediate the natural systemic, induced resistance in plants by active composts. Can you believe that?”
Finally, Logsdon points out the possibly surprising fact that unlike what we were taught for so many years in Ag. Econ. classes, the economics of small production is often better than that of highly capitalized, debt-leveraged corporate farming. For example, Logsdon says “An up-to-date, 5,000-acre corn and soybean farm needed a corn price of around $ 3.86 a bushel to break even in 2009, economists at the University of Illinois said recently. Others say $ 4 is more like it today. A farmer told me just yesterday he thinks the number is closer to $ 5. Yet anyone with 40 acres of land— and it need not be an Amish farmer either— can plant it to corn and net at least $ 2 a bushel at a $ 4 selling price, using hand, horse, or small tractor power. At 150 bushels per acre, he or she could net $ 12,000 for their labor on 40 acres, a tidy little income for spare-time work, especially in these times of serious unemployment.” And that’s corn – there are any number of more profitable alternatives for small farmers these days. Holy shit! It’s a lot to think about!
Explorers on a new planet...
09/05/2012 15:45
As you might expect, the first part of this book, where McKibben explains how the old world has been destroyed, is much more detailed than the second part, where he offers some suggestions on how we might move forward. The scientific consensus is alarming: “We now know that the climate doesn’t have to warm any more for Greenland to continue losing ice,” says a climatologist from the University of Ohio (pp. 4-5). There’s a “50 percent chance that Lake Mead, which backs up on the Colorado River behind Hoover Dam, could run dry by 2021 (When that happens, as the head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority put it, ‘you cut off supply to the fifth largest economy in the world,’ spread across the American West (p. 6). And “glaciers could disappear from the central and eastern Himalayas as early as 2035, including the giant Gangotri Glacier that supplies 70 percent of the dry-season water to the Ganges River. That would leave 407 million people looking for a new source of drinking and irrigation water” (p. 7). In other words, we have a solid timetable for the water war.
The oceans are “more acid than anytime in the last eight hundred thousand years, and at current rates by 2050 it will be more corrosive than anytime in the past 20 million years (p. 10). “Coral reefs will cease to exist as physical structures by 2100, perhaps 2050.” If I recall, that’s where pretty much all the ocean’s remaining biodiversity is.
McKibben is famous as the man behind 350.org, but even in 2009 as he was writing this he said “we’re already past 350—way past it. The planet has nearly 390 parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We’re too high. Forget the grandkids; it turns out this was a problem for our parents…the last time we had carbon levels this high: sea levels rose one hundred feet or more, and temperatures rose as much as ten degrees” (pp. 15-16). And contrary to what others are claiming, McKibben quotes scientists who believe “changes in surface temperature, rainfall, and sea level are largely irreversible for more than a thousand years after carbon dioxide emissions are completely stopped” (p. 17).
And then there’s peak oil. “One barrel of oil yields as much energy as twenty-five thousand hours of human manual labor—more than a decade of human labor per barrel. The average American uses twenty-five barrels each year, which is like finding three hundred years of free labor annually” (p. 27). “So does modernity disappear along with the oil?” he asks (p. 30).
Already, as only the earliest changes were beginning to be noticed, the World Bank announced “1.4 billion people, it found, lived below the poverty line, 430 million more than previously estimated. What defines the poverty line? $1.25 a day” (p. 76). No wonder “The U.S. military… costs more than the armies of the next forty-five nations combined; the Pentagon accounts for 48 percent of the world’s total military spending” (pp. 144-145). But will that save us at home? According to Nobel winner Steven Chu, “the rapid melt of the Sierra snowpack means ‘we’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California…I don’t actually see how they can keep their cities going’ ” (p. 156). “And if our societies start to tank, we’ll be in worse shape than those who came before,” McKibben warns. “For one thing, our crisis is global, so there’s no place to flee. For another, most of us don’t know how to do very much—in your standard collapse scenario, it’s nice to know how to grow wheat” (pp. 98-99).
So what’s all this mean? First, we have to stop looking to idiots like Larry Summers, “treasury secretary under President Clinton, now Obama’s chief economic adviser: ‘There are no . . . limits to the carrying capacity of the earth.’ ” (p. 95). (This guy has been president of Harvard!) And Jerry Falwell: “I can tell you, our grandchildren will laugh at those who predicted global warming. We’ll be in global cooling by then, if the Lord hasn’t returned” (p. 12). (Hitchens was right! Religion ruins everything!) And Barack Obama: “speaking about the upcoming Copenhagen climate talks… ‘We don’t want to make the best the enemy of the good.’ ” (p. 81). (That should be his campaign slogan this time around!)
But really, it’s a little hard to see how McKibben navigates from this to a very short description of localism and community-building ending with a retelling of the 350.org event in October 2009. Maybe he wouldn’t have been allowed to publish the book if he had suggested what the world is going to look like. Better to leave to the imaginations of the reader what he means by “dispersed and localized societies that can survive the damage we can no longer prevent” (p. 212). After all, he did mention Mad Max (p. 146)…
