Colin Tudge points out a few things that ought to be intuitively obvious but apparently are not (which largely explains why the world is in such a mess)
It ought to be intuitively obvious that farming in the broad sense, to include arable and ranching and horticulture and agroforestry and cultivated oyster beds and mussels on ropes, is by far the most important of all human pursuits. It does after all provide us, human beings, with about 95 percent of our food. It is the arena in which we engage most extensively with our fellow creatures – wild, cultivated, and domestic. Of all human activities too, taken all in all, agriculture in the broad sense has the greatest impact on the fabric of the Earth and the climate. To make way for farming in its various forms we have cleared the forests, drained the wetlands, ploughed and restructured the soil, and flooded the biosphere with pollutants — pesticides and excess phosphorus and nitrogen, and carbon dioxide and methane and all the rest. For good measure, agriculture in the broad sense gobbles up 70 per cent of the fresh water that we extract for all purposes.
On the plus side — although modern technophiles and neoliberals think it’s a big minus — farming is the single biggest employer by far. It employs 26 per cent of the world’s workforce, and if we add in food processing and distribution the total comes to nearly 40 per cent.
In short: how many of us can live on this planet, and for how long and in what condition, and indeed the fate of all life on Earth, depends to a crucial extent, not to say absolutely, on how we choose to farm, and where, and how intensively and extensively.
It seems obvious, then, does it not, that agriculture (in the broad sense (sensu lato) is, above all, the thing we absolutely have to get right (and which, in many respects, we seem to be getting most wrong). So it seems to follow (does it not?) that it ought to be the principal preoccupation of all governments – if, that is, governments are serious, and see it as their job to take care of their society and the natural world. Some governments are serious but some, including some of the most powerful, including those led for example by Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and the cosily nick-named but nonetheless ruthless “Bibi” Netanyahu, have their own agendas, which evidently have little to do with the general state of humanity or with the natural world. They evidently see other people as cronies or simply as units who do their leaders’ bidding, or else are classed as dissidents, or indeed terrorists. And the natural world for Trump is a golf course and a marina, and for Putin and many another macho leader it’s a place to ride bare-back and have their photograph taken, or to shoot bears. (Apparently Rumania’s former leader Nicolae Ceaușescu preferred to shoot them as they emerged from hibernation and were still rubbing the sleep out of their eyes.)
But in reality, for even the most serious governments, who really do give a damn about people and the natural world, farming is not their priority. Far from it. This is evident even in the job titles. Thus Britain’s erstwhile Min of Ag is now replaced by, and its tasks are subsumed within, Defra, where the “-ra” stands for “Rural Affairs”. Agriculture, it seems, in the minds of modern officialdom, is just another “rural affair” – which, in this neoliberal age, means in effect just another way to make money (or, in practice, usually not. Just wait for land prices to go up and then cash in has been a common survival strategy).
We might expect, too – given the absolute importance of agriculture – that to be Secretary of State in charge of Defra would be seen as a prime and enviable position, at least to rank alongside the Foreign Secretary or the Chancellor of the Exchequer. It might even be seen as a sacred trust. But again, no such luck. In practice at least in living memory Britain’s Secretaries of State in charge of Defra, from both the main parties, have mostly been young bloods on the way up or old lags playing for time before filtering off to the House of Lords. The former in recent years have included David Miliband, who by all accounts was rather good. He had no directly appropriate background but he took a keen interest, has a keen social conscience, and of course is highly intelligent. They also included Liz Truss on her way to Downing Street who famously homed in on cheese and told a somewhat stupefied Tory Party conference that Britain’s failure to produce more of it is “a disgrace!”. The old lags included Margaret Beckett from Labour and Owen Paterson from the Tories who assured us he was steeped in rural lore (he once had a pet badger, he said) and concluded that Britain’s farmers could solve their economic problems by raising more pork to sell to the Chinese (and with a different hat on would doubtless have advised Britain’s ailing miners to sell more coal to Newcastle).
In truth the deep problems of Britain’s and the world’s agriculture does not lie with details, whether of cheese or pork or indeed more broadly of pesticides and global warming. In the end, in this as in all things, the problem lies with the Zeitgeist, the “Spirit of the Age”; and with the underlying mindset: with our current understanding of how the world works and of what’s important and our attitude towards other people and other species and the fabric of the Earth.
A diversion is called for:
A Matter of Mindset
The policies and overall strategy of the current world are rooted in economic theory; which means we are guided or coerced in all that we do by the ideas, calculations, and rhetoric of whatever economic theorist happens to be fashionable, or whose ideas seem most advantageous to the small group of oligarchs or would-be autocrats who dominate world politics and commerce. This is the elite who have their hands on the purse-strings, and are supported by armies and/or police and sometimes, as with Trump’s “Immigration Control” enforcers (ICE), with their own personal hit-squads.
At this point in history the big idea that dominates all big and influential governments the world over is the economic theory that emerged from Chicago in the 1960s: the offshoot of capitalism known as neoliberalism. Personally, for what my opinion is worth, although I claim to be a socialist — when socialism is properly construed — I do not regard capitalism as the world’s great evil, as many seem to do. Capitalism at least as outlined in the 18th century by its acknowledged founder, Adam Smith, has many advantages, and can indeed be benign. Smith after all was a moral philosopher before he was an economist – and as the Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman commented in The New York Times on January 10, 2011:
“ … welfare-state capitalism — a market economy with its rough edges smoothed by a strong safety net — has produced the most decent societies ever known“
In similar vein, one of the Labour party’s greatest sons, Aneurin (Nye) Bevan, often written off in the Rightwing press as a loonie lefty, wrote in his “personal manifesto” In Place of Fear in 1952:
“A mixed economy is what most people of the West prefer. The victory of Socialism need not be universal to be decisive … It is neither prudent, nor does it accord with our conception of the future, that all forms of private property should live under perpetual threat. In almost all types of human society different forms of property have lived side by side”
Bevan after all was a great champion of small businesses and the people who run them, corner shops and the like, which he saw as essential ingredients of the supportive and egalitarian societies that we saw as the ideal; and it seems to me, as it does to many millions or indeed billions of other people, that farms should mostly be conceived as small businesses: enterprises firmly embedded within their communities that survive or indeed flourish by serving those communities. They are run for material gain or indeed for survival of course but also, vitally, as a service to society. Service to society – or rather to other people in general, and to the natural world – is the essence of morality. It is indeed morality in action.
But neoliberalism may reasonably be seen as capitalism with the morality leached out. Dyed-in-the-wool neoliberals see it as their task in life simply to maximise and concentrate wealth. In practice this means that all commercial enterprises of all kinds and of all sizes are enjoined or in practice forced to compete as ruthlessly as they can get away with, with all other enterprises of all kinds and of all sizes for maximum profit and market share in the allegedly “free” global market. In this scenario, to misquote the albeit fictional arch-neoliberal Gordon Gekko, as played by Michael Douglas in Wall Street in 1987:
“Morality is for wimps”
At least: the one moral virtue that the neolibs do seem to take seriously is that of loyalty; loyalty to the company that pays their salaries or to the national leader – “My president right or wrong”, as the slogan has it. In the Mafia, too, loyalty is the most prized quality. In practice, then, the market, which is intended to encompass the whole global economy, is dominated by the biggest and most ruthless players, which in practice means the transnational corporates (TNCs) who control the production of the world’s essentials, including food and (for the time being) oil, and the things that people for whatever reason will pay most for (notably motor cars); they, and the bankers and other financiers who lend them the money. And their concern, the raison d’etre of the TNCs and of the world’s financiers, their purpose in life, is not to help to make the world a kinder place and to take good care of our fellow creatures, but to compete to fill their own coffers and those of their shareholders. And of course the motive matters. It shapes the way things are done, and the way things turn out.
The goals of the ultra-competitive “free” market economy, insofar as there are coherent goals, are short term. In the race for immediate gain there is no time to contemplate the long term. But ventures that may be highly profitable in the short term may often prove disastrous in the longer term – including of course the clearing of forests and the frenetic burning of fossil fuels to stoke the fires of competitive commerce; and, of course, the sweeping aside of traditional skills and ways of life to make way for what is conceived to be modernity. This is called “progress”; but since there is no clearly conceived goal it is hard to see what progress means. Progress towards what? Progress should be what physicists call a “vector” property, to include movement and direction. “Progress” with no well-conceived sense of direction is mere activity, of the kind associated with headless chickens and bulls in china shops (epitomized by Trump).
One way around the conflict between the short term and the long term has been to redefine what the long term really is. For modern economists, technologists and builders, 30 years is the long term; a time too short to measure in the long history of humankind. If we were really serious we, humanity, would be thinking on the evolutionary, or indeed the cosmic timescale. What’s the hurry? Elon Musk is keen to get to Mars – but Mars will still be there in a thousand years’ time. The Earth should still be habitable by creatures like us for billions of years to come, and we might reasonably opt to extend our stay by at least a few more million – and could, if we only did conceptually simple things well, and kicked out the people who simply want to be rich, or even richer, and to dominate. Cosmologists and biologists and theologians and poets agree that the Earth is a jewel in the universe – a miracle indeed that we are privileged, briefly, to be part of, and at least dimly aware of. Yet we – not individually perhaps but collectively — treat it with what looks very like disdain, and now we are staring Armageddon in the face and taking our fellow creatures with us – which is not only tragic (what could be worse?) but is absurd. Things don’t have to be like this.
True, there are now signs that the leaders of even the most competitive and lucrative industries are beginning to realise the dangers of short-termism and of technologies that are moving faster than can be controlled – as in the present calls from some of the industry’s leaders to curb the runaway development of AI. But the underlying mindset remains. It is taken for granted among the world’s most powerful individuals and institutions that the economy must be competitive and must be driven by the perceived need to maximize and concentrate material wealth, and to do so now, or else the Chinese will get there first, and take us over. The future, it seems, can take care of itself. But then, as some modern zealots have been known to say,
“What has the future done for us?”
Such thinking must lead to disaster, which indeed is already upon us, and all too clear to see. Yet some of the most powerful are in denial:
“Fake news!”
Despite all this, the present, neoliberal economy as championed by the real-life avatars of Gordon Gekko, and the attitude that goes with it, is held to be “realistic”. At least, any idea or enterprise that does not maximize short-term material wealth is held to be “unrealistic” – the smoke-dream of hippies and loonie-lefties. But as the Indian sage and activist Satish Kumar commented in Soil, Soul, and Society in 2013:
“Some people call me naïve and unrealistic. Then what have the realists got to show for their efforts? What have the realists achieved? … Under the watch of so-called realists, oceans are overfished and polluted, the biosphere is being saturated with greenhouse gases and population is exploding beyond the carrying capacity of the Earth. If this is the achievement of realists, then now is the time to say goodbye to the realists and give the idealists a chance”
I suggest, indeed, that although capitalism itself is not intrinsically evil as some maintain, that its neoliberal offshoot and more particularly the materialist, ultra-competitive mindset that lies behind neoliberalism, is perhaps the single most damaging force in our present world, hastening the world’s descent into entropy; and this, surely, is the greatest evil that earthly beings are able to perpetrate. Yet, to be fair, this does not seem to have been the intention of the economists who brought neoliberalism onto the world stage in the 1960s and ‘70s. Principal among them was the Chicago-based economist Milton Friedman (1912-2006) who wrote:
“The great virtue of a free-market system is that it does not care what colour people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another”
In other words, he saw the free market as the natural economy of free people in a democracy, or at least as the way to rub long agreeably enough in an intrinsically fractious world, and as the most efficient way to help us all realize our dreams – and indeed to “help one another”. But, as common experience and all history tell us, big ideas of all kinds are susceptible to misrepresentation and vulnerable to corruption, and neoliberalism with its materialistic and ultra-competitive premises, seems particularly prone to misuse. To quote To a Mouse yet again:
“The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!”
Clearly, the present world has ganged very much agley.
Yet we cannot blame the present and in many ways disastrous state of agriculture entirely on the dominance of neoliberalism. Quite simply, no merely economic system of any kind can provide the kind of framework we need to devise the kind of agriculture the world really needs. Economics as a discipline simply is not up to the task. The complexities of the world cannot be reduced to economic theory and still less to some economic algorithm of the kind espoused by economic ideologues (as in the neoliberals; “Let the market decide” or the Marxists’ “The workers must own the means of production”). We need to cast the conceptual net much wider. Thus:
Two competing models: Neoliberal-Industrial Agrculture vs the truly Enlightened kind
Whatever form it takes, whether arable or horticulture or what you will, farming in the broad sense gravitates towards one or other of two poles: “Neoliberal-Industrial” (NI) on the one hand, and what for the past 15 years or so I have been calling “Enlightened Agriculture” (EA) on the other. NI is the kind we mainly have in the western world, and is considered both modern and necessary; and EA is the kind we really need, but is mainly sidelined.
The two are quite different both in intent and in practice. To the modern neoliberal:
“Farming is just a business, like any other”
— an expression I first heard in the early 1970s when I worked for a few years for Farmers Weekly (and then, later, wrote reports for the old and much lamented Agricultural and Food Research Council, the AFRC). And in line with neoliberal thinking, at least in its present, corrupted form, the raison d’etre of business in general is to maximize profit. This in general is achieved by raising output and reducing costs.
Over the past 100 years or so oil has been tapped in super-abundance, and at affordable prices (indeed the modern economy has been built around it), and engineering of all kinds has leapt ahead by leaps and bounds (also driven primarily by the perceived need to maximize profit). Agricultural science has leapt ahead too: giving rise to wondrously productive crops that are able to thrive on hyper-fertilized soil in which traditional varieties would keel over, and livestock that is able to tolerate hyper-nutritious feed, all protected from the pests and diseases to which they are ever more prone by an ever-expanding pharmacopeia of pesticides and herbicide and fungicide and indeed by an armoury of -cides customised to deal with every class of potentially threatening organism. So it is that the most productive modern fields of cereal, suitably irrigated, typically produce at least 30 times more grain per unit area than was possible with the artisanal methods described in the Bible. And half the grain produced worldwide is now fed to super-receptive livestock who again at least in some respects (as in milk and eggs) may be at least an order of magnitude more productive than their traditional forbears.
So that’s one side of the economic equation taken care of. Modern farming is wondrously productive – miraculously so by traditional standards.
On the other hand, human beings have stubbornly remained high-maintenance; needing to be fed, and demanding more and more material reward for their labours. It must pay, then, as far as possible, to get shot of them, or at least as many as possible. And indeed, with huge modern machines, run increasingly by remote control, and already run to some extent by robots, it is becoming possible to run farms with virtually no hands-on human intervention at all. The dream of the neoliberal technophiles is coming true.
There is, though, of course, a downside. Modern farms are high-input (except in terms of labour) and high-tech. I have suggested indeed that at its most extreme, NI farming may be seen as industrial chemistry al fresco (now of course increasingly abetted by biotech). When enterprises are high-input it pays to be big, to achieve economies of scale. So it was that the highly influential Earl Butz who was US Secretary for Agriculture under presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford (and was not by all accounts a nice man) famously or infamously advised America’s and hence the world’s farmers to
“Get big or get out”
— and although Butz died in 2008 (aged 99) his spirit lives on.
Then again, although machines in general are becoming smarter and smarter, big machines on the whole don’t deal readily with complexity. So modern farms geared to big machines are required to be as simple as possible, conceptually if not technically – and that means monoculture. So as Butz also advised, farmers who want stay in business should plant crops – commodity crops, that make money —
“from fencerow to fencerow”.
To be sure, such a vision has some aesthetic as well as financial appeal. So it was that the British mycologist A H Reginald Buller FRS (1874-1944) wrote in his Essays on Wheat in 1919:
“There is no more exhilarating sight in the West than the prospect of the binders at work on the sea-wide, sky-skirted prairie, with the golden grain gleaming under the August sun and above and about all the cloudless blue dome of heaven. And when the last sheaf has been cut and the binders are silent, how splendid is the view across the gently rolling stubble fields: stook beyond stook … for a quarter mile, for half a mile … stooks cresting the distant horizon, ten thousand stooks all waiting to be threshed and each with its promise of bread, the gift of the New World to the Old. The unbroken expanses of the prairie create within one a sense of freedom which is best known only to those who dwell far from crowded cities, who plough and sow and reap, and whose daily toil causes them to commune unconsciously with Nature and thus to absorb something of her simplicity and her charm.”
Enthusiasm always runs high when technologies are new. The drawbacks become apparent later. And however pleasing it may be to the eye, or at least to some people’s eyes, there can be no doubt that high-input monoculture, especially on the large scale, can be immensely damaging and therefore, very obviously, is not “sustainable” as the modern term has it — although it may be sustained for the 30 years which many now think of as the long term. So it was that in its Summary of the State of the Environment in January 2023 the British government’s Environment Agency reported that in England and Wales:
“Almost 4 million hectares of soil are at risk of compaction”;
“Over 2 million hectares of soil are at risk of erosion”;
“Intensive agriculture has caused arable soils to lose about 40 to 60% of their organic carbon”;
And:
“Soil degradation was calculated in 2010 to cost £1.2 billion every year”
For good measure:
“UK soils currently store about 10 billion tonnes of carbon. This is roughly equal to 80 years of annual UK greenhouse gas emissions”
In response, Rishi Sunak’s government launched a 25-Year Environment Plan which states that “England’s soils must be managed sustainably by 2030” and that “steps must be taken towards restoring the UK’s soils”
I will leave it to others to tell us how far those steps have progressed. It does seem clear, though, that if we take the future seriously then we need to change what have become our ways. But although this generalization now seems to be accepted at least in some influential circles, including at least some sections of the British government, I take it to be obvious from my own observations over the past 60 years or so that the changes that are likely to be put in place will not go far enough. Governments in general – or at least, relatively moderate governments of the kind that are typical of Britain – make plenty of ad hoc adjustments to the status quo but they are not radical, in the proper sense of the word. They do not have the time or the inclination, or in practice the expertise, that are needed to get to the roots of things, which is what “radical” literally means. I don’t want to be gratuitously pessimistic or a tedious old doomsayer but I beg leave to doubt whether the “steps [that] must be taken” will be of a kind that really could produce the kind of agriculture that Britain and humanity as a whole and the natural world really need. And, as I said at the beginning, if we don’t put agriculture to rights then we and the world as a whole really have had our chips.
What we do need is Enlightened Agriculture – and indeed to make EA the global norm. But to do this we need a different kind of economy; and for this we need to install governments that see the need for a different kind of economy; and for this to happen we need to take serious things seriously; and for this to come about we need to shift the Zeitgeist; and to achieve this we need to cultivate, and promulgate, a new mindset. In short, we need the Renaissance.
But I’ll come to that. First:
Enlightened Agriculture
I coined the expression “Enlightened Agriculture” about 20 years ago, and defined it to mean:
“Agriculture that is expressly designed to provide everyone who is likely to be born onto this Earth to the highest standards of nutrition (as understood by modern science) and of gastronomy (which each society defines for itself); and to do so without exploitation, without cruelty, and without wrecking the natural world”
The expression “Enlightened Agriculture” (EA) has not caught on, alas (too many syllables, some say) and for PR purposes has often been shortened to “Real Farming”, as in the Oxford Real Farming Conference (ORFC) and the Real Farming Trust. But the concept remains the same.
Enlightened Agriculture is a newly-minted expression but it combines two well established ideas: Agroecology and Food Sovereignty.
The term Agroecology was first coined by a Czechoslovakian agronomist, Basil M Bensin, in 1928 (so 2028 will be a centenary year which I trust will be well marked!). Agroecological farms are conceived not simply as business enterprises designed to turn a profit but as ecosystems. As one former organic farmer Rebecca (Becks) Hosking elegantly put the matter –
“My farm is a closed ecosystem with leaky borders”
Spot on. The idea of Food Sovereignty has been developed since the 1990s by the global peasant movement La Via Campesina. In all its legal ramifications the idea is immensely complex but in essence Food Sovereignty means
“Every society should keep control of its own food supply”
This does not mean that every society should strive to be totally self-sufficient (which for all but a very few would be impossible). But all should surely strive to be as self-reliant as is feasible (meaning that all should seek as far as possible to produce the basics they need to get by in times of siege or whatever). Overall, however, in this crowded world and climatically destabilized world, the trade in food is vital. But it is vital too that all trade should be fair, and good for all concerned. The present divide between rich countries and poor is evidence enough that this has not always or generally been the case these past few centuries. (There used to be an ad on television in which the peasants in some unidentified tropical country were overjoyed when “The man from Del Monte he say ‘Yes!’”. After all, if the man from Del Monte he say ‘No’, they all starve, while he goes home to his bonus.)
Crucially, the intention – the Goal – of EA is quite different from that of NI. EA is designed expressly to provide good food for everyone while taking care of the natural world while NI is designed to maximize wealth so that the farmers – or at least the traditional landowners, or the TNCs or insurance companies or whoever calls the shots – can compete in the global market. In practice this means that structurally the two kinds of farming are more or less total opposites. Thus, in the present economy, NI leads us towards maximally productive and therefore high-input, high-tech monocultures on the largest possible scale with minimal to zero labour.
EA farming in absolute contrast is not maximally productive and certainly does not produce arable crops on the vast scale just to feed to intensive livestock to provide meat that nobody really needs – or nobody at least who could afford it. EA is content to accept that enough’s enough. Farms run on agroecological lines are low-input which means they are as organic as possible which means they make minimal use of agrochemicals. In Small is Beautiful in 1973 E F Schumacher coined the expression “Appropriate Technology”. I suggest that in this most put-upon world Agroecology is the most appropriate technology of all.
Homogenous monocultures, as favoured in NI farming, are very vulnerable to epidemic. A parasite – virus; microbe; fungus; arthropod – that can latch onto one individual plant or animal can zap the whole lot, since they are all the same, genetically and phenotypically. The biotech solution is to introduce resistance genes, perhaps taken from other, unrelated species. Well, doubtless, this approach has its place. Absolutely not should we be gratuitously anti-science. But nature’s way of dealing with parasites is to be diverse: mixtures of different species; and genetic diversity within each species. Then a parasite that gets the better of any one individual host finds itself confronted with quite different problems when it seeks to attack the plant or animal next door. EA farms, without the shield of agrochemistry and customized resistance genes, must do the same. In other words, farms run on agroecological lines should be as diverse as can be managed, and make as much use as possible of the natural vegetation.
Complexity in turn needs careful, hands-on management – “tender-loving care”, aka TLC. In the history of the world the knowledge and skills required to farm well have often been hugely underestimated and undervalued – and still are. The people who have traditionally been called the horny-handed sons and daughters of the soil have often been looked down upon. Occasionally, though, farmers have been properly appreciated – not least by Adam Smith, although he is commonly perceived as the principal author of the economic system that is now putting so many of them out of work. Thus in Book I of The Wealth of Nations he wrote:
“… there is perhaps no trade that requires so great a variety of knowledge and experience. The innumerable volumes which have been written upon it in all languages must satisfy us that, among the wisest and most learned nations, it has never been regarded as a matter very easily understood. And from all those volumes we shall in vain attempt to collect that knowledge of its various and complicated operations; how contemptuously so ever the very contemptible authors of some of them may sometimes affect to speak of them. The direction of operations, besides, which must be varied with every change of the weather as well as with many other accidents, requires much more judgement and discretion than that of those which are always the same or very nearly the same”
In similarly laudatory vein, in 1838, the American philosopher, cleric, and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), told the assembled throng at the Middlesex Cattle Show (later recorded in his essay on Farming):
“The glory of the farmer is that, in the division of labour, it is his part to create… He stands close to Nature; he obtains from the earth the bread and the meat … The first farmer was the first man, and all historic nobility rests on possession and use of land … And the profession has in all eyes an ancient charm, as standing nearest to God, the first cause”
This I would say is true in essence of EA – but not of NI farming. In modern terms we might invoke James Lovelock’s concept of Gaia – the biosphere conceived as a kind of meta-organism, of which we are part; endlessly intricate and wonderfully resilient, but nonetheless fragile. In NI thinking by contrast the Earth seems to be seen as a cornucopia, to be endlessly drawn upon, with little or no need of maintenance.
EA needs to be complemented by “Enlightened Cookery”. If farmers go to such lengths to produce good food we should take pains to prepare it as well as possible. Serendipitously, as I discussed not least in Good Food for Everyone Forever in 2011, Enlightened Cookery and Agroecology are perfectly in tune, which means they should be perfectly in tune with the needs of the natural world. (More on all this at a later date.)
Clearly, there is heavy reliance in all of the above on traditional practice. But there is nothing in the above that is anti-science. Or that indeed is absolutely not my intention. But we surely should take heed of the great pioneer scientists of the 16th and 17th centuries – Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Robert Boyle, John Ray, and the rest – who saw science as a spiritual pursuit, in effect an act of worship, an attempt to gain insight into the mind of God. But the kind of science matters. In my sixth form and university days in the mid-20th century molecular biology and immunology were the rage. That genes are made of DNA and not, as had been supposed, of protein, was finally established only in the 1940s. But events moved fast and in 1953 Francis Crick and James Watson revealed the 3D structure of DNA and sketched, in outline, how it provided the codes by which proteins are constructed. A little later immunology was put firmly on the map not least by the charismatic polymath (Sir) Peter Medawar who showed that there is much more to it than the zapping of parasites.
These were exciting times indeed. Combine these molecular insights with the still fresh-in-the-mind “modern synthesis” – which showed how Mendelian genetics chimes so beautifully with Darwin’s (and Wallace’s) concept of “evolution by means of natural selection” — and it seemed as if biology had been sewn up. Done and dusted. (Physicists have often made the same mistake, as each new insight came on board). Ecology by comparison – rooted in the homely pursuits of natural history – seemed a poor relation. The bright kids did the clever stuff.
Mercifully, the mood has shifted, at least in what I would call the more enlightened circles. The high-fallutin’ reaches of molecular biology and evolutionary theory are indeed wondrous but they are abstractions. Ecology deals with reality; life as it is lived in practice, with the fate of each individual organism inescapably intertwined with and dependent on the lives of all the other creatures of its own and other species in whose company it finds itself, and shaped by the rigours of the local terrain and climate. The complexities are endless, and to begin to understand what’s going on we need to involve all the traditional sciences, from geology to particle physics as well as all forms of biology. Ecology indeed is a meta-science. And I suggest that in any shortlist of great scientific insights of the 20th century James Lovelock’s concept of Gaia – the biosphere conceived as a kind of meta-organism – must rank very highly indeed; at least on a par with the revelations of molecular biology and evolutionary theory; or indeed with relativity and particle physics and cosmology and all the rest. The concept of Gaia also has a spiritual dimension of course. So indeed does all of science, although most scientists seem reluctant to discuss their spiritual leanings in public. But the underlying spirituality is more evident in the concept of Gaia than in most other scientific contexts.
My point, though, to summarise all of the above, is that agriculture must be taken very seriously indeed, which the powers-that-be do not; and if agriculture was taken seriously and practiced appropriately then humanity could reasonably be looking forward to millions more years of agreeable existence, together with a great diversity and abundance of other species; and that the world as whole, including or especially agriculture, must not be made to march to the drums of economic theories – and especially not to the prevailing drum of neoliberalism. We need to think far more broadly and behave very differently. The shift required is truly radical, and indeed amounts to nothing less than a Renaissance, which literally means re-birth. This is the point of this whole website and I have said it all before. But here to round off this essay is a brief outline of what is entailed.
A very brief recap of the idea of Renaissance – and the need for a new kind of education
It seems reasonable to discuss the idea and the practicalities of Renaissance under three headings: the GOAL; the “BEDROCK PRINCIPLES”; and the FOCUS. So:
The Goal
Our Goal – humanity’s Goal – should, I modestly suggest, be –
“To create Convivial Societies that enable and encourage Personal Fulfilment within a Flourishing Biosphere”
All three are important – society, individuals, and the biosphere; and all are interdependent. Indeed they are like the legs of a tripod. If any one of the three is deficient, the whole is compromised. Thus it seems impossible for any “normal” person with normal human feelings to achieve what ought to be personal fulfilment, or at least to feel truly at ease, if they live in a conspicuously unjust and dysfunctional society. To be sure, some of the world’s most powerful people (again the names of Trump, Putin, and Netanyahu come to mind) seem positively to relish the misery of those they see as nonentities or as dissidents. The misery of others seems to make them feel more important. But then I suggest that those who feel this way may properly be seen as psychopaths. (How it is that psychopaths often seem to get to be in charge is another story.)
There is much talk in the modern world of “progress”. But progress is a meaningless term unless we have some Goal in mind – what it is we are trying to achieve. Then we can say that progress is movement towards the Goal as defined above. Without such a sense of direction “progress” simply means “activity”; and activity without clear purpose is pointless and likely to be damaging. Metaphors involving headless chickens and bulls in china shops come to mind. Governments, it seems to me, rarely spell out convincingly what it is they are trying to achieve and why. We might indeed at least as a rough-and-ready contribution to moral philosophy suggest that “good” might be conceived as whatever nudges us towards the Goal, and “bad” is what pushes us further away. As things are, it hardly seems controversial to suggest that much of what is happening in the modern world, driven by the ambitions of “charismatic” leaders and more generally by governments and commerce, is very bad indeed. Economic “growth” per se is not intrinsically desirable. It depends on how the money is raised and who gets their hands on it and what it is used for. Kicking out immigrants as seems to be the usp of Reform and the like is even less convincing.
The vocabulary is important too. “Convivial” literally means “living together” – but if we are to live together tolerably, without perpetual strife, the co-existence needs to be amicable and supportive. The ultra-competitiveness that is now so much admired is not appropriate. Games are played out as competitions but in truth, when played in a proper spirit, they are innately cooperative. The players cooperate to create fun. The competition is there just to enhance the commitment. Perhaps above all we need to cultivate cooperativeness!
“Fulfilment” is a better term than the usual “happiness”, which tends to be equated with hedonism – short-term pleasure. The shepherds I have met have always found shepherding fulfilling (that’s why they do it) but delivering lambs on freezing hillsides in the small hours is not immediately pleasurable. And “biosphere” meaning “living world” is surely preferable to the more usual “environment” which literally means “surroundings”, which in practice means stage scenery or indeed, in the modern economy, real estate. It is good and necessary to feel part of the biosphere – “at one with Nature”; part of the essential concept of Oneness, of which more below. “Environment” is an entirely anthropocentric concept, meaning we are the centre of things and implying that the rest is for our benefit. We need instead to cultivate an ecocentric – or, better still – a Gaiacentric mindset.
The Bedrock Principles
The Cambridge literary critic F R Leavis put the matter beautifully in The Great Tradition (1948):
“What for — what ultimately for? What, ultimately, do we live by?”
This, he said, was the question that inspired all the greatest novelists in the English language (a shortlist in which he included George Eliot, Jane Austen, Henry James and Joseph Conrad, and later added D H Lawrence). It is indeed the question that in an ideal world everyone should ask themselves. What are our values? What do we feel really matters? And why? What, indeed, should be our guiding principles?
The answer, I modestly suggest, is that we need to be guided by what I want to call the Bedrock Principles of Ecology and Morality.
It is easy to see how the ideas that emerge from Ecology may be seen to be “bedrock”. Ecology is indeed a science (or a meta-science) and science is expressly intended to help us understand physical reality – what’s in the universe and how it all works – and reality is assumed to be a constant – and indeed “real”. So ideas rooted in bona fide science should indeed be “bedrock” or at least potentially so.
But morality is altogether more slippery. It has often been said to be “relative” since each individual and each society has his or her or its own opinion on what’s right and what’s wrong. Yet despite the apparent differences between societies, there seem nonetheless to be points of agreement that are held more or less universally. In short, all normal (non-psychopathic) people at least have an intuition of what is good and what is bad. Where exactly such intuitions come from again must be discussed another time. For now I just want to suggest that any idea or feeling that is more or less common to us all can reasonably be called “bedrock”. At least, we feel, there surely must be some profound reason why any particular idea is held so widely
In their quest to define and describe morality moral philosophers these past few hundreds and thousands of years have pursued three main lines of thought. Some, known as Utilitarians, have defined good (or goodness) in terms of outcome. Most succinctly, the English utilitarian moral philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) suggested that good is what brings
“The greatest happiness to the greatest number”
This is all very rational, in the spirit of the Enlightenment – all very practical and indeed arithmetical — and seems nowadays to be the most widely accepted of moral principles. But it does leave open the question of what it is that makes people happy, and why. Psychopaths are made content by other people’s misery. Why do most of us feel that is bad?
Deontological moralists on the other hand put much store by the concept of duty – which in effect means we should follow the rules as laid down by what are perceived to be some higher authority. This seems fair enough if the higher authority is all-seeing and all-wise and is indeed the personification or reification of goodness itself. This is how Christians perceive God to be; and the Ten Commandments – “Love your neighbour”; “Thou shalt to not kill”, etc – do seem eminently wise and to the point.
But can we ever be sure that we are not mistaken? Can we be sure that whoever or whatever is issuing the commands is really “good”? Many, after all, including many who in different circumstances would have been perfectly nice (I like the word “nice”) felt it was their (patriotic) duty to follow Hitler, who nowadays is commonly and reasonably though not apparently universally held to be the epitome of evil.
In truth, both the utilitarian approaches to morality have their uses, and both in practice are deployed in political arguments and in everyday life. Yet both have obvious shortcomings.
But there’s a third and conceptually straightforward way to home in upon what ought to be our moral principles, which is due largely to Aristotle — who indeed was a very down-to-earth thinker. This is what has come to be called Virtue Ethics. Aristotle cut through the moral convolutions of his teacher, Plato, and of Plato’s hero Socrates, and simply suggested that in practice we should simply ask what it is about people that leads us to feel that some people are indeed virtuous, and some less so (or indeed are positively bad).
In Aristotelian vein it seems reasonable to approach moral philosophy essentially as an exercize in natural history; and to ask what kind of virtues in practice the world’s formal religions and the various “indigenous belief systems” take most seriously. In practice, after all, it’s the world’s clerics who have been and are the principal guardians of moral thinking. Sceptics, not the least of whom in modern times is Richard Dawkins, like to stress the differences between the moral codes of the different religions and conclude therefore (as many in earlier times have concluded) that moral principles are “culturally determined” and in the end are a matter of opinion. But it seems to me (and to many others) that of all the virtues identified in serious religions and belief systems three in particular are common to all, albeit with different degrees of emphasis. They are:
Compassion
Humility
A Sense of Oneness
And, we might reasonably ask, could anyone with an ounce of compassion have perpetrated the disasters in Gaza and the Left Bank, or Ukraine? Could anyone with any true conception of compassion, or humility, or a sense of Oneness threaten so airily to “bomb Iran into oblivion”? Could anyone who recognises the concept of humility seek to build empires, and so to impose their will on all humanity? Yet empire builders have commonly been seen to be heroes – and although the general mood is changing the urge to build empires or to re-create what was there in the past is as strong among some of the world’s most powerful people as it ever was. Could anyone with any sense of humility or of oneness, or the concept of Gaia, trash ancient forests just to raise feed for cattle to provide meat that no-one who can afford it actually needs? The antithesis of humility is hubris, which the old Greeks held was the greatest folly and sin of all. Clearly, much of what is happening in the modern world is hubristic in the extreme. No wonder the world is in such a mess.
So what’s to be done?
Just to come right back to earth: we — humanity; the world — need EA to become the global norm. Indeed we need to build our lives around it – if, that is, we seriously care about the things that most of us feel are of most importance in life, and if we seriously care about the future of humanity and our fellow creatures. If we seriously care about Life on Earth – which cannot be the only life in the universe but surely must be among the most wondrous – then — surely? — life should be seen to be sacred. Whether or not we “believe in God”, “sacred” is the only word with sufficient gravitas; and the present trashing of life should be seen to be, at the very least, a sacrilege. It is beyond mere crime. It is a sin.
But EA is at odds with the Zeitgeist. In particular, it is at odds with the prevailing, neoliberal economy, which in practice is a more or less ruthless global competition for material gain; perpetual material increase in an all too obviously finite world. It makes no sense. EA is what really matters. Indeed, as John Ruskin succinctly observed in 1860 in Unto this Life:
“There is no wealth but life”
And Life plays by its own rules. We did not create Life (was it “created” at all, and if so who or what by, and if not, then what?). We can but do our best to understand how it works as well as we are able, and to abide by its rules, if “rules” is the right word. Hence the emphasis on ecology.
The economy, on the other hand, is our invention: or, rather, in practice in societies that claim to be “civilised”, it is the invention of one or other or a collective of intellectuals who are labelled “economists”. Given that it’s a human invention it should be under human control, and could in principle take whatever form we want it to. Beyond doubt, the form that the economy takes is of supreme importance. In practice the economy shapes our lives – in large part it determines how we live our lives; what we can do and can’t do; in effect, therefore, what kind of people we become. It is the means by which we seek to translate our aspirations into actuality; the means by which we can reach our Goal, or are prevented from doing so; assuming, that is, that we have some idea of what our Goal should be – apart from mere “growth”; more or the same. It is the conduit to better times, or the bottleneck that prevents us doing what we really want and need to do.
But whatever form the economy takes, and however important it may be, we should never lose sight of the fact that it is, in essence, and in the end, just a pragmatic device. It should not, as now is so often the case, be seen as an ideology. Indeed as one of the greatest of economists, John Maynard Keynes, observed, in a more agreeable and rational world —
“ … the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs … and the arena of heart and head will be occupied where it belongs, or reoccupied by our real problems, the problems of life and human relations, of creation, and of behaviour and religion”
[Quoted by Archie Mackenzie, Faith in Diplomacy, Caux Books, 2002, p 200]
Still less should we allow economic ideology to achieve the status of a religion, and treat economists as gurus or as prophets as has often been the fate of Karl Marx or indeed of Milton Friedman. Indeed as Keynes observed in 1930 in Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren:
“If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid”
And yet: when ideas of an ecological kind or indeed of a moral or spiritual kind are at odds with the economic norms of the day they are held to be “unrealistic” – the smoke-dream of hippies and loonie-lefties – although, to quote Satish once again, “what have the realists got to show for their efforts?”
In short: as things are, EA, which marches to the drums of ecology and morality, comes up against the perceived imperatives of the prevailing (neoliberal) economy and the ultra-competitive and materialist mindset that goes with it. We need EA: if we are serious about the future then it must become the global norm – and the prevailing economic lore is preventing EA becoming more than niche. So we cannot develop the kind of farming the world really needs unless we re-design the economy, and we will not introduce a more appropriate economy until and unless we install governments who see the need for it, and we will not appoint appropriate governments unless we, humanity as a whole, create a new Zeitgeist; ideas and attitudes that are truly intended to make the world a better place, and take seriously John Ruskin’s observation that “there is no wealth but life”.
In practice, very briefly – to be expanded upon at length! – I suggest we need to proceed on two main fronts. First we need to build the future, more convivial and viable world around the many millions of Grassroots initiatives around the world that in a myriad different ways are already helping to make the world a better place – sometimes aided by governments but also, perhaps more often, seeking to do good things despite officialdom. Of particular relevance, of course, are the grassroots movements that are focused on food and farming. More broadly, I have suggested elsewhere on this website that it could be good to create a semi-formal Renaissance Movement to achieve some degree of coordination and cooperation. The present powers-that-be are as dominant as they are not because, on the whole, they are doing the right things, but because they are so well organized and coordinated. On the face of things the various branches of the powers-that-be are locked in mortal competition. But as Anne Applebaum argues in Autocracy Inc (2025) the most powerful players in effect are all pulling on the same rope. They all want the same thing—power –and in reality the relationship between them is one of synergy, as much as it is of tension. (Trump and Putin need each other.)
We also need a new kind of Education to develop the kind of ideas that are needed to underpin the Renaissance, and to help create the necessary Zeitgeist. I am working on this with a few (though I hope ever expanding) like-minded people. The essence of the intended curriculum is its breadth. Thus on the one hand we need to recognize that all big ideas, including those of science as well as (more obviously) of moral philosophy and religion, are rooted in the end in Metaphysics which, in the words of the Iranian-American Muslim theologian and philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr –
“Metaphysics addresses the ‘ultimate questions’”
And I take these “ultimate questions” to be:
“What is the Universe really like?” – which is the core question of science;
“What is good? – and more to the point, “What is goodness?”; a question that Socrates addressed, via Plato;
“How do we know what’s true? – to which the answer is, “We don’t – but some ideas seem to get closer than others. And:
“How come?” Why is the universe the way it is, and not some other way? Why indeed does it exist at all.
Short of revelation by some all-seeing deity who we can be sure is really an all-seeing deity and not some mischievous deceiver, there can be no certain answers to such questions. We can but try. It seems clear, though, that what we call rationality, by which in the West we place such store, cannot alone lead us to the truth. In the end our perception of the truth springs from intuition, a feeling in the bones, expanded by imagination. These in-built intuitions, which underpin our conscious reasoning, are what the Oxford philosopher and historian R G Collingwood (1889-1943) called “absolute presuppositions; and he very neatly defined metaphysics as –
“The sum of all absolute presuppositions”
In short, metaphysics seeks to identify the set of largely unconscious ideas that underpin all our conscious ideas and holds them together; and since metaphysics aspires to address all the biggest questions in life it ought reasonably to be seen as the most important academic discipline of all (just as agriculture, I suggest, is the most important occupation). But metaphysics as a formal discipline has virtually gone missing from modern education. And that, says Hossein Nasr, is a huge mistake: a root cause of the world’s ills and misconceptions, which largely explains why we fail so dismally to get to grips with them and put them right.
On the other hand, at the other end of the spectrum, if we seriously want to create a functional world we need to attend to the minutiae, the day-to-day practicalities – including or especially the arts, crafts, and science of growing and cooking; and we need to relate the minutiae to the grand metaphysical overview. This approach, I suggest, is in the spirit of St Benedict, who emphasised the importance both of spirituality, with special attention to prayer, and of horticulture and the brewing of exceedingly fine liquors.
Present-day formal education I suggest misses out both on the minutiae (cooking is not part of Britain’s core curriculum) and on the grand metaphysical overview. The standard academic disciplines, including history and geography and the nuts and bolts of science (but usually without the philosophy of science) and so on deal only on what might be called the middle ground. The deep metaphysical roots for the most part are ignored, taken for granted, and the minutiae for the most part are marginalized. Cooking, the essential complement of farming, seems to be thought too lowly to be included in standard, core curricula.
So that’s it.
I would as always be very interested in your comments.
Addenda
Many of the points in the above need to be discussed and expanded at length (as long as it takes). They include:
Enlightened Cookery. What is it exactly?
The concepts of Oneness and Harmony
The true meaning of Socialism
Where do our intuitions come from?
The biological dimension (a huge topic!)
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