Handmaiden Of The Garden

By Paul Gilk

Part 1

This is not exactly a book review though the late William 0. Douglas's Russian Journey, copyright 1956, is very much worth the reading. And, yes, this is the same William 0. Douglas who sat on the U. S. Supreme Court from 1939 until 1975, champion of liberal causes, backpacker and mountain climber, world traveller.
I have to say I like Douglas. In his Russian journey he goes to as many out-of-the-way places as he can; he enjoys meeting all sorts of people, even when (any excuse for a party) his various hosts drink him utterly under the table. He's a real mensch, a people person, openhearted and open-minded, an interesting and amusing and very factual guide through the Soviet Union of the mid-1950s.
In Alma Ata he is given a dinner and is expected, as guest of honor, to eat a portion of a sheep's right ear. He does; but "I would have ventured that I had a rooster's comb or overcooked leather shoelaces in my mouth. I put on a brave front, for I had the feeling that this night America was on trial in Kazakhstan. With a final valiant effort, the mouthful of sheep ear, quickly washed with red wine, went down a second time. This time it stayed down; and I could see signs of pleasure along the whole table."
He tells us he never found a barber who owned his own shop; that most barbers were women; that each haircut cost five rubles; and that all barbers were disinclined to chat or accept tips.
And he tells us, in great detail, about cooperatives, collective and state farms: collective farms were the most common, about 90,000 compared to 5000 state farms. He tells us how much the MTS (Machine Tractor Station), a separate state agency, charges for the use of its machinery, and that some of its fees are payable in cash, some in crops or other foodstuffs. He tells us of the private plots on collective and state farms, how they are managed, and how much they contribute to the total food production. But Douglas's most critical comments on the farming he observes are reserved for its inefficiency:

An Iowa farmer with 160 acres of corn and hogs may operate his farm without outside help; or if help is needed, he may have but one assistant who is either a hired hand or a member of the family. In Russia, one sometimes finds one worker to forty acres of wheat or corn land, but more often one worker to twenty acres or less. Roughly speaking, agricultural Russia averages five times the number of people to the acre as America and often has ten times the number of workers per acre.

In America one man occasionally cares for 500 hogs or even more. In Russia it is common to find one woman caring for only 10 hogs. (On the average one person takes care of 100 pigs in Russia.)

The examples could be multiplied on end. As the American farm delegation that visited Russia in 1955 reported, Russian agriculture has many deficiencies when measured by American standards, the most conspicuous of which is the overstaffing of collective farms. The statistics are not available. But one has only to visit a few collectives to see the needlessly extravagant labor force they have.
A large labor force might be necessary if feudal farming techniques were still in use in Russia. But they are not. Russia has gone far towards scientific farming. Between 80 per cent and 90 per cent of the Soviet farms are mechanized.
In Russia, mechanization in wheat, cotton, corn and sugar beets is so complete that there is little need for manual labor. At most airports I saw small planes that dust or spray cotton, wheat, and potatoes, that spread fertilizers, and that sow grasses. Sprinkler irrigation is common for cotton and hay. Most cultivating, plowing, and seeding on all farms is by machinery. Of course, tomatoes, cucumbers, grapes, apples, and many other fruits and vegetables require much manual labor. And cows must still receive individual attention. (In Russia, the milkers are usually women.) But there is usually a machine where technology permits it; and most of the machines I saw are Russian-made.
The mechanization of Russian farms has, of course, vastly increased their production. But it has also displaced a great number of workers. The tractor alone takes the place of dozens or perhaps hundreds of people on a single farm. The MTS, by bringing onto the collective its own skilled operators, has created a further labor surplus.
The extent of the oversupply of farm labor is indicated by the fact that in Russia about 40 per cent of the labor force is in agriculture, in America only 12 per cent.

But Douglas also visits farmers' markets; and I don't think it incidental or irrelevant that he finds them "the most colorful spots in mercantile Russia. They are lively, interesting, and exciting. The price is whatever the seller can get; and if the buyer is a foreigner, the asking price is always higher. Bargaining and haggling go on from stall to stall."
Isn't it odd that, on the one hand, Douglas concurs with the conventional "scientific" view of the "oversupply" of farm labor and, on the other, finds "most colorful" that particular market form which is the commercial tip of a reasonably thriving rural culture?
Here exactly is the rub: the technological developments of the past two centuries have made "inefficient" the older labor-intensive agriculture. To say that these changes -- revolutionary changes in historical terms -- were and are inevitable because they were and are "technology driven" is, I believe, a fundamental falsehood. Or at least a fundamental evasion.
Like Douglas, we will enjoy, even revel in, the color and zest of a "primitive" farmers' market; but we, like he, will probably not bother to realize that these bright human points of contact depend on the existence of a stable and functioning rural culture.
Or, if we look at society in the present-day United States, why do we continue to call the everlasting shrinkage of the farm population an efficiency (down to 2 per cent, more or less) while the rest of society is increasingly obsessed with fear of crime, kids using drugs, youth violence, capital flight, unemployment, etc.? Why don't we have a social policy that at least considers the long-term value of a stable and relatively prosperous rural culture? (If one reads Majority Leader Dick Armey's 1990 article "Moscow on the Mississippi: America's Soviet-StyleFarm Policy", with its utter absence of historical perspective and population figures, one might be tempted to agree with this former economics professor that "The guiding spirit of much of our farm policy seems to be a desire to freeze the farm economy in time -- to stop all change, prevent all innovations, scorn all efficiencies -- out of a fear that somebody in the farming business might have to switch jobs.")
The truth is that we are governed by inherited civilized values that exalt urban life and technological innovation and scorn rural culture and reform by retrogression. Economically, the so-called "economies of scale" (larger and fewer farms, big machine clear-cutting of forests, giant factory ships that net enormous quantities of fish, etc.) serve to drive down the monetary value of consumable Nature. Add to this new layers of global markets -- NAFTA, GATT, and whatever else is in the works -- and it's obvious that "raw material" prices are being forced to the lowest common denominator, worldwide.
It's precisely in this context -- the lowering of raw material prices and the holding down of wages; accelerating robotics; the multinational aristocracy of ownership and top management -- that we seek to envision a new self-provisioning commons. This is not exactly an easily achievable goal.

Part II Community, alternative economics, household production, neighborhood barter systems -- these are vestiges of an earlier social order. The question is: When people yearn for them, advocate their renewal, try to make them happen in their own lives, are they being real or are they wallowing in a hopeless nostalgia? At the very least we can say that these values represent a harmless "lifestyle option." Less condescendingly, we have to ask whether civilization has now achieved that level of technological mastery, economic regulation, international cooperativeness, and ecological management by which it is no longer susceptible to periodic returns to a "dark age" and therefore has no practical use for a peasantry or small farm culture. How would we assess this latter possibility?

In the history of civilization, peasants were the huge base of the social pyramid. Their production was taxed -- that is, taken away -- by the governing elite so that this elite could live a "civilized" life. Looking backward, modern economists and political theorists tend to justify this pattern of conduct on the basis of scarcity and backwardness: There wasn't really enough to satisfy everyone's needs; therefore it was necessary that the many live somewhat brutalized lives that the few might, with abundance, be the vanguard of civility.
What is civility? Etymologically, it nestles in with words like city, citizen, civilization. In the ether of our common understanding, it tends to connote refinement, positive vales, goodness, courtesy, politeness, and manners. Its opposite is the crude, the coarse, the barbaric, savage, uncouth, and pagan.
Now pagan is a strange word, perhaps one of the most loaded and abused in the English language. It comes from the same Latin root as peasant, pagus, meaning country district. It's rural, in other words, not civilized.
Yet one of the reasons we tend to be confused about the word is that is has served both as an adjective for pre-Christian Greek and Roman civilization (and as such holds high humanistic stature) and also as a religious whipword, connoting terrible evil, from the pulpits of Christian churches. This latter usage could maybe sometimes lean slightly into criticism of the excesses of Greek and Roman civilization but-- and here, sleepy reader, is one of my major points -- Christianity has unmistakably aligned itself with civilization, civility, refinement, positive values, etc., against "paganism." With some (mostly unexamined) confusion, Christianity has largely accepted the doctrine and practice of Progress, which has become, at least since the Industrial Revolution, the dominant doctrine of civilization.
Some might even say that Christianity has become the beautifully manicured white poodle leashed to progressive civilization, always ready to yip in a shrill but aristocratic manner at the dark sewer rats that scurry, in their cowardly, vulgar way, across the clean pavements of civility.
The image is ambiguously unfair; but it's true enough to shape a certain mood for this insignificant little essay. So let me take you by the hand, sleepy reader, as we consider a few intellectual puzzles.
First utopia. This contrary little word has been around since Sir Thomas More made it up a few hundred years ago. It originally stood as a mockterm, a middle ground, between outopia and eutopia: The former meant (or was intended to mean) what utopia means now, a perfect rationalized system; while the latter meant, simply, the good garden. One can find all this, and more, in The Story of Utopias, by the historian Lewis Mumford, copyright somewhere around 1920.
But in a much later essay -- and, given Mumford's thick volumes, a remarkably short essay -- Mumford ties the utopian impulse directly in with the origins of civilization. I refer to "Utopia, the City and the Machine". This little essay is, in my estimation, a revolutionary document. It says, in essence, that civilization is a pathological utopian project, driven by some demonic energy in the direction of perfection, of rational planning, of mammoth interventions in the natural world, a chronic itch to conquer and dominate, willing (and even eager) to exploit, suppress, and exterminate that which stands as a reminder of natural limitation and metaphysical boundaries.
Order. A new kind of order. An order imposed on the natural world, and on peoples and entire cultures that stand in the way or resist. That civilizations rose and fell indicated that utopian order was not fully perfected: and always, until the Industrial Revolution seized the countryside, there was that huge illiterate mass of uncouth peasants to exploit and restrain.
But, as Ronald Reagan taught us when he sold appliances for General Electric, Progress is our most important product. And with the progressive enlargement of the sphere of technology, the peasantry has been obliterated, human population has exploded, and cities are enormous festering sores on the skin of the earth.
Timid and shy in the shadows of utopian history, says Mumford, waiting patiently through the pathology of progress, stands eutopia, the handmaiden of the good garden.

Part III

I want to tuck in a more personal note.
I am the middle of three brothers; and, roughly twenty years ago, we each, in turn, had a crack at buying from our father the small dairy farm on which we'd all grown up. (Our mother died of cancer in the early 1960s.) This farm my father made, pure and simple, out of brush, stumps, and a multitude of rocks. He did it with axe, grubhoe, work horses, dynamite, stoneboat, wagon, and his own strong back -- nearly 40 acres of fields and close to 80 acres of pasture, some of it improved, some of it rough, some of it wooded, quite a bit of it swamp.
This farm-making project began about 1930, before my father was yet 20 years old. By 1940, he and our mother were married. By 1950, two of their three sons were born, and the subsistence homestead of log house and log barn had been replaced by an upwardly mobile small commercial farm. Electricity, a Farmall C tractor, two milking machines, 15 or 16 cows, a flock of chickens, a big garden, and a routine of physical work that most younger people today couldn't begin to imagine. A new house, a new barn, a new garage -- all lumber construction, freshly painted.
The 1950s were fairly prosperous for small farmers. But, in the next 30 years, only one functioning farm in the entire township passed into the next generation. Only one out of close to thirty. When a farmer retired, the farm retired with him or was rented out to the one farmer who got bigger and bigger.
The economic equation was fairly simple: The farms had become as fully commercial as their owners could possible make them in their own lifetimes. These farms were tiny by today's agribusiness standards; but they were representative of a huge achievement by these strong, big-handed men and women. The farms got electricity. Hot and cold running water. Indoor toilets. Radios and then televisions. The mass images of what constituted a desirable Standard of Living were identical in rural northern Wisconsin as in a comfortable suburb of Detroit. The sons and daughters of these small farms realized at a glance that if the object was to achieve the Standard of living -- and, at least implicitly, that's what they were picking up from the media and from their parents -- there were ways to do so that were infinitely easier then by farming. And they did, nearly every last one.
When my turn came to miss the brass ring (I won't go into how my brothers and I each failed to carry on the family farm: the particulars are germane to this little essay, but they are at once too comprehensive and too personal for this sort of writing), I found myself disagreeing with my father when he insisted the farm was not big enough, hardly, for one family, let alone several. From the Standard of Living perspective, he was completely and utterly correct.
From the Standard of Living perspective, the farm that's with it has had to get bigger, more mechanized, more chemicalized, all with less total labor. Therefore my position -- that the farm, and agriculture in general, needed more people, not less -- was absurd.
My idea was to carefully select the three or four or five best building sites on the farm (most of these were in rough pasture) and to make the farm into some sort of cooperative, some people working on the farm, some off, with a clear formula for sharing work, money, and produce. The increased on-farm labor would mean better gardens, better farming practices, time to mess around with ponds, reforestation, fruit trees, bees, a greater variety of poultry, solar and wind energy, market gardening and cottage industry. And if more folks did this in the neighborhood, we could start our own school; run a restaurant, inn, or hostel; try a horse'n buggy taxi service in a nearby tourist town. In other words, get real, play around, have fun, be creative, feel alive and free rather than half-dead and enslaved to an economic treadmill that offers no inherent rewards.
What agriculture needs is exactly opposite what public policy portends. Agriculture needs more people, a significant increase in on-farm population. And these on-farm folks, by greatly enlarging the magnitude of production-for- use, would begin to restore the life of the countryside. Is this nostalgia? Consider this: In all human history, there has never been a time when there was no rural culture based on self-provisioning. Until now. If this is not an experiment in social engineering, I don't know what is.

Part IV

On the basis of current trends, it's possible to say we're headed rapidly into an international civilization with a multi-cultural elite of owners, managers, and policy makers; an anxious middle-class of bureaucrats, engineers, and elite workers; and a literally huge underclass of folks who just can't cut the mustard and for whom the future looks bleak. An experiment seems underway (the new Republican Congress, for instance; but also many state legislatures) to see how thoroughly funds and services can be reduced or eliminated from this growing underclass without provoking open rebellion. But even short of rebellion, it's prudent to anticipate an increase in crime and therefore an increase in police power.
(The so-called Information Super-Highway is mostly negative where it's not simply irrelevant. Its major negatives are: yet another layer of consumer pimping; displacing more workers with electronic gadgetry; the shrinking of privacy.)
In this emerging world, burdened with an enormous number of dysfunctional people, yet perpetually distracted by exotic and vivid images of sensuality, it will still be possible in small ways to improvise bartering, backyard and community gardening, and so enlarge and strengthen the tender threads of community life.
Yet there is an African proverb that is worth remembering: When elephants dance, the grass gets trampled. Just because we may have found a niche in which to practice an eutopian self-sufficiency does not mean that utopian order has disappeared from our lives, or that the disorder it leaves in its wake will not negatively effect us. The imposition of utopian order undoes the previous natural or cultural order; and when utopian order breaks down, there is chaos.
Perhaps the most unpredictable of all factors is the possible eutopian unfolding of Christian churches and denominations. If some sizeable number of church people awaken to the problem of the church's essential captivity by civilized utopianism, and if they find inspiration in substantial eutopian models for instance in Samuel's powerful warning to Saul on the occasion of Israel's inclination to become a monarchy or in Jesus's sustained disinclination to wield civilized power), then we may see a rather rapid growth of church-based farm communities, live-in "retreat centers," multi-family subsistence homesteads with an underlying spiritual discipline, all borrowing liberally from traditions of monastic routine and silence, from the practices of mutual aid and sharing that characterize Amish and Catholic Worker farms. This would provide exactly what was missing in the hippie, counter-culture, back-to-the-landmovement nearly a quarter century ago: spiritual stability.
What is the most important thing to look for, possibly to participate in? Precisely these religious subsistence homestead communities. Not cults. Not stockpilers of weapons. Not love-ins. Not gnostic waiting in spiritual anorexia for heavenly levitation. Gardens. Fruit trees. Chickens. Milk cows. Firewood. Homemade houses, barns, and sheds. Horses and buggies. Bicycles. Musical instruments and lots of singing. Neighborhood schooling. Books. Crafts of all kinds. Helping your neighbor. Welcoming the stranger.
It's precisely these sorts of particulars -- discovering the handmaiden in the good garden -- that are plain, repetitive, hard, and rewarding. They are the sorts of things, if enough people do them, that begin to add up to a culture.
Is this nostalgia? Contemptible atavism? Well, the longing for garden, home, and hearth may spring from a true sense of loss, and might therefore be called nostalgia, without embarrassment. But it is not atavistic. The alternative, our current and future clockwork orange "culture" of joy sticks and video games, is mere electronic veneer, a weird sort of sublimated masturbation, almost totally devoid of that sort of real work that actually bonds people in common purpose.
The question is: Is it possible to create a new rural culture? Or are we condemned to a deepening psychosis of MTV, the violence of Sunday afternoon football, and the rational depravity of utopian mindgames? Is utopia permanent?
In the meantime, eutopia subsists in the lean margins, waiting, as always, for the good gardens that could be.

Paul Gilk is a writer who lives in Merrill, Wisconsin. He is the author of Nature's Unruly Mob: Farming and the Crisis in Rural Culture.

NOTES

1. William O. Douglas's Russian Journey (Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York, 1956) doesn't exactly sparkle, but it's a very good meat and potatoes sort of book.

2. I happened on Dick Armey's "Moscow on the Mississippi: America's Soviet-Style Farm Policy" in Taking Sides: Views on Controversial Economic Issues, Sixth Edition, edited by Thomas Swartz and Frank Bonello, copyright 1993 by The Dushkin Publishing Group, Inc., Guilford, Connecticut. Armey's article drips with sarcasm, but that's not the worst of it. That a man of his education and political rank should write such a one-faceted polemic is simply inexcusable -- inexcusable and scary. But while reading Armey's wildly misleading piece, I bought a local newspaper (Wausau Daily Herald, February 21, 1995) with this banner headline: "Falling Prices Squeeze Income of Dairy Farmers"..." milk prices expected to drop 6% this year...a drop in milk revenues of about $185 million for the state as a whole, or about $6,000 per farm...a decade-long trend of dairy prices not keeping pace with inflation...average household income for Wisconsin farmers in 1994 was $36,500...up about $500 from 1993, with all of the increase coming from off-farm sources...net income from farm production was $8,900 -- the same as in 1993." (Emphasis added.)

3. Lewis Mumford's The Story of Utopias was published in 1922, but "Utopia, the City, and the Machine" was apparently first printed in Daedalus (Spring, 1965) before being included in its entirety in Mumford's Interpretations and Forecasts: 1922-1972 (Harcourt, Brace, & Jovanovich, New York).

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