So there’s a lot of people pining for a simpler, more agrarian lifestyle. Nevermind that we don’t have enough land or water for everybody to live a simpler, more agrarian lifestyle. The reality is that truly living that way is a hard, hard way to live.
Look. I’m old enough that I had elderly relatives growing up who lived that simpler, more agrarian lifestyle. I still remember sitting in the doublewide trailer home on 40 acres of land that was owned by one of my elderly uncles. I was talking to his elderly wife about the days when they lived on the hill behind my pasture, and she talked about how she would come down to my spring and wash the clothes by hand, whether it was hot or cold didn’t matter, and how hard it was hauling water back up that hill in buckets, and how hard they worked just to have enough to eat and to grow a small cash crop to buy what few things they couldn’t make, such as hand tools for hoeing and plowing the land, or globes for the oil lamps. They got up at dawn and worked non-stop until dusk, because otherwise they starved. In the summer they were dripping with sweat in the Louisiana heat and humidity. In the winter they were cold and often damp as cold fronts blew through with driving rain and high winds that cut through their ramshackle tar-paper shacks like the walls weren’t there, the wood stove kept them from freezing but stoking it was hard, hard work. But they still had to work, because the cow had to be fed, the pigs had to be slopped, firewood had to be cut and stacked, water hauled up the hill for cooking and washing, the honey pot had to be taken out and dumped in the outhouse (in the winter sitting on the outhouse seat simply wasn’t happening, so the house was *really* smelly in the winter)…
I said “But you were young then, and full of life. Don’t you ever wish you could go back to those days?”
“Nuh-uhn. That was a hard life.” That’s all she said, while looking at me like I was crazy.
At which point the “back to the land” types say, “well, y’know, we can go back to the land but keep high technology.” Uhm. Look. That computer you’re reading this blog post on? That computer required approximately 400,000,000 people on four continents and in two dozen nations to create it. Iron ore and silica sands had to be mined. Oil had to be pumped. Tantalum for capacitors had to be mined. Lithium for batteries had to be mined. All those industries employ millions of people to create the machinery used, build the extraction facilities, haul the ore, and so forth. Then comes the processing facilities, the smelters and refineries and plastics factories, which are millions more people to produce steel and plastic and pure silica capable of being used for semiconductor wafers and all the various doping chemicals needed and so forth. Then there’s the thousands of individual components in your computer, all the little springs and semiconductor chips and such and the hard disk drives and the platters inside them and the magnetic material on those platters and the little flying diamond disk heads that fly above those platters, all again requiring millions of people to create them. And then there’s the energy, gigawatts of energy. All of this requires concentration of resources, requires hundreds of thousands of factories all over the world each employing tens of thousands of people. All to put that one $600 computer in front of you.
The reality is that you can’t have a modern society without cities and factories and research facilities. Even Jeffersonian America wasn’t in reality the sort of rugged individualism that these people imagine. Thomas Jefferson’s plantation was a small town with hundreds of people doing all the tasks needed to keep it going, from blacksmithing horse shoes to making their own bricks to hoeing the cotton. Without all those people making his life far more pleasant, his life would have been unending toil. The only reason he fancied himself a gentleman farmer living a life of yeoman self-sufficiency was because most of those people were slaves. Without those slaves he would have been living like my elderly relatives back when they were young, a mean and hard life with little time for anything other than endless toil for meager rations.
Meaning that the reality is that these people are wanting folks like me — the people who create these computers and technology that they use to make their lives better than my elderly aunts and uncles’ lives were — to be their slaves. They want us to produce all this technology for them, while they produce little that we want in return. Because the reality is that small yeoman farmers eat most of what they grow. It takes factory farming to feed cities, and it takes cities to create technology. The Ottoman Empire tried to create a world-class nation out of an agrarian nation of small farmers, and found that all that they could tax out of the farmers was food, and not much of that because small farmers simply aren’t very efficient, and it just wasn’t enough when exported to buy the technology they needed to stay competitive in the modern world. The Ottoman Empire failed. Like every other nation that has attempted to become a nation of small yeoman farmers.
But that reality, alas, just doesn’t penetrate those who say that the way to a better America is to return to that Jeffersonian ideal of small yeoman farmers. They continue to pursue that impossible idea — impossible because the concentration of energy and humanity needed to create modern technological society precludes it — and ignore what we could do to make real progress. Such as livable cities with ubiquitous rapid transit systems. Factories and offices that are safe and humane places to work rather than being horrors out of Dickens. A system of commerce that is based on mutual courtesy and service rather than on dog-eat-dog attempts to rip each other off. A fairer distribution of the profits of creating all this technology so that those of us who create get paid according to what we produce, instead of fat cats taking our inventions and becoming millionaires while we make pennies on the dollar. Lots of other things that could be done to make this country a better place to live. But the back-to-earth morons aren’t interested in any of that. They’re interested in their Jeffersonian dream. Their Jeffersonian dream where people like me, the people who create the technology that lets them live a decent life on their small yeoman farms, are their slaves. They are, in the end, no different from the 1% who are doing their best to make the rest of us their slaves. The only difference is that they have less money.
– Badtux the Maker Penguin
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Badtux the Snarky Penguin 