You, too, could have chickens. Credit: Oli Scarff/Getty Images
In my twenties, stuck in a London flatshare, I often fantasised about somehow acquiring a patch of land and forming an agrarian collective where we’d have no hierarchies, raise chickens and generally flee late consumer capitalism. Instead of being forced into the rat race, my liberated friends and I would create a radically egalitarian community where we made money somehow or other, we’d all have enough to get by with, and everyone would have time to write long treatises on the internet about Stuff.
In practice, possibly fortunately, this never happened. None of us worked out how to make the jump from the city to our bucolic dream. (Though I did, for a while, live in a kind of commune in Brixton, where I soon discovered that even radically egalitarian households rapidly form pecking orders that — in more everyday settings — would definitely be described as ‘hierarchies’, an experience that was formative for my now middle-aged politics.) As time went on, life took me in a different direction: I got married, eventually left London in rather more conventional style, and now live in a small market town in rural Bedfordshire.
Someone wittier than me remarked other day that the difference between British and American post-liberals is like the difference between Britpop and a rave in a derelict factory. The former is cheery, vaguely agrarian and occasionally at risk of being twee; the latter feels like an excerpt from a Mad Max film, all post-apocalyptic survivalism and weird technology.
This makes sense when you consider that there isn’t really space in England for everyone to build a survivalist bunker, so British post-liberalism tends to take a more sociable form than its wilder American cousin. My own domestic post-liberal utopia definitely shares a border with the world of twee: our first backyard chickens hatched this week, all claws and beak like tiny dinosaurs, and my husband and I are dividing our time between remote working and planting summer veg. It’s a painfully middle-class version of Back to the Land, and decidedly more Tolkien than Mad Max.
Working from home, I often think of the generation a decade younger than me wilting under lockdown in grim city flatshares like the ones that prompted my agrarian fantasies at the turn of the Millennium. I wonder how many of them dream of a more rural lifestyle — and how achievable that would even be, when graduate jobs are overwhelmingly city-based today. After all, it’s one thing being Blur-bassist-turned-cheesemaker Alex James, using a fortune garnered in the music industry to set yourself up as a country gentleman. But for the generation struggling with massive student debts, flatlining wages and soaring rentals, what prospect could there ever be of even settling down, let alone outside the big city with friends and a few acres?
One way round this could be to join a commune, though according to University of Waterloo ecologist Stephen Quilley these have “a patchy survival rate” compared to more conservative agrarian communities such as the Bruderhof in Sussex (founded 1971). Left-wing communes, Quilley told me, don’t tend to survive as long “because they have an individualistic culture, and raise individualistic children who want to leave and do something else”.
That said, some long-established communes such as Findhorn have survived beyond the founding generation, while keeping community and ecology centre-stage and managing to make ends meet without imploding like my Brixton effort did. (If anyone is tempted by the commune option, WWOOF has a list of current vacancies here.)
Or there’s the Britpop method already mentioned: use money earned elsewhere to subsidise your rural idyll. Arguably my own domestic chicken-raising and carrot-planting is a variant on the Alex James model, as both adults in the house also earn money elsewhere while producing veg (and, if Chicken Sunny and Chicken Flora both turn out to be girls, eggs as well) for our own consumption.
Of course, not everyone who dreams of a smallholding wants to become a commercial farmer. But for most people, buying land isn’t realistic unless there’s a business plan attached. So another approach that’s gaining in popularity is Community Supported Agriculture. CSA initiatives can take different forms, but what they have in common is ‘a partnership between farmers and consumers in which the responsibilities, risks and rewards of farming are shared’. The idea is to bring communities and farming back together, with communities having more access to farm life and in turn helping to support the more labour-intensive styles of growing that market logic routinely forces out of business.
Strawberry Grove Growers, a CSA market garden in Cambridgeshire, is one example local to me. Owned by its founders, it is neither a commune nor a millionaire’s toy farm, but run as a membership organisation supplying seasonal veg boxes to the local area. None of the three founders is wealthy: Felicity, 35, is a former nurse. She and her partner Sam started the project with their friend Connor, with all three founders working part-time to support it. Four years in, their membership is growing steadily, veg box subscriptions are at capacity and they are on a course to be self-supporting.
You have to be seriously rich to buy a tract of farmland just so you can sit on it and write poetry. So for most, the agrarian dream means some kind of business plan – even just to break even. Felicity told me that when they started Strawberry Grove, locals assumed they had far more conventional commercial plans: “Everyone thought we were going to build houses,” she says. “Even the council didn’t understand what we were doing.”
But if Felicity and her business partners are on their way to being self-supporting, maybe perhaps there is hope for those who dream of their own patch of land without being millionaires or joining a commune. And maybe there are ways for our food chain to become a bit smaller-scale, more local and more more labour-intensive without being killed by the brute logic of the market.
If so, it will be welcome. The pandemic has prompted concern about Britain’s fragile food security: currently, half of the food we consume is produced overseas. One biologist estimates that by shifting toward more labour-intensive gardening methods, Britain’s entire fruit and veg requirement could be met using a mere 200,000 hectares of green space – just 2% of current farmland. Allotment-style management could even make cities fruitful: a recent study estimated that cultivating just 10% of urban green space could supply 15% of a city’s population with five portions of fruit and veg a day. So at least from an ecological point of view, there’s a strong case for more small-scale growing of all types — including Strawberry Grove style initiatives supported by a wider community.
From my own experience, pursuing a kind of 21st-century update on the productive household, the Bilbo Baggins dream has many upsides but some challenges too. For one thing, a productive garden is a serious commitment. You can forget going on holiday in August, as that’s peak harvest season. And as Felicity says, unless you’re a millionaire toy farmer who can afford to hire a manager, there’s always work that needs doing, outside, whatever the weather. “In the winter it can be tough,” she told me.
Whether you’re dividing your time between growing and something else, like Wendell Berry, or Roger Scruton, or producing full-time like Felicity, it’s also a lifestyle that does away with the idea of ‘time off’. “Unless you’re willing to work hard this isn’t the life for you,” Felicity told me. Though our growing is on a smaller scale, I can relate – there’s always something that needs doing. And while it’s a lifestyle that offers flexibility for mothers, you can forget maternity leave: Felicity had her first baby in January and has continued working in the garden, with her baby son in a sling.
As long as you love your work, this is all fine. As Felicity puts it, “If you love gardening, it doesn’t feel like work.” But those of us drawn to the Tolkien rather than the Mad Max postliberal aesthetic, busy promoting chicken-rearing and the joy of limits as possible solutions to all manner of ecological, economic and sociocultural issues, probably need to think pragmatically about the trade-offs as well as the advantages of the agrarian idyll.
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SubscribeI barely remember who John Kaczynski was and have no idea who Sean Fleming is, but I have to say I agree with (1) and (2) notwithstanding that the ideas came from a psychopathic batso – indeed I have been banging this drum almost a decade to any who are willing to give my tedious ramblings a hearing (and not too many are tolerant, even of those who have the first clue what I’m waffling on about).
Certainly not read any Jacques Ellul or Martin Seligman, I did read The Naked Ape four decades ago and I don’t see that as an influence. What interests me though, is that totally disconnected people, including some randoms like me, reaching similar thoughts about the nature of technology – in my case not so much technology writ large but more specifically the nature of algorithms – but that stuff gets rather technical so UnHerd is probably not the place to discuss that.
On (3) I agree partially – the time of (3) is now, and the next couple of decades are going to be pretty catastrophic – in part because large scale technological unemployment is coming – but other reasons too, including advances in both algorithmic and genetic tech soon forcing us to confront questions about our nature we have been sweeping under the carpet. We can hope though things will improve beyond that, although it is a moot point who or what that ‘we’ will be by then.
I also think there is some truth to (5) but it’s an insignificance, although (4) is of course violent criminal madness. As to the green anarchists , neo-Luddites, primitivists, eco-fascists etc, there is no chance any of those will have any impact on the direction of humanity and its relationship with technology, no matter what acts of madness they commit. The numbers involved don’t matter even if the anti-tech movement becomes huge. It’s the American Indians vs the incoming Settlers -it’s a clash between low-tech and hi-tech – and that only ever has one outcome.
For me, ultimately, it boils down to this: technology will not alter to accommodate human societies; human societies and humans must decide either to alter themselves in reaction to fit around technological advance, or junk modernity and revert back to older models of human living (and accept this comes at the cost of a different form of oblivion). It’s a binary, there isn’t really a middle ground, no matter how much you may wish for it. As such, reversion is not really something I believe has any likelihood of happening.
You agree with (2), that we are “biologically and psychologically maladapted to life in a technological society,” but think reversion is unlikely, so we must alter ourselves to accommodate technology. In what ways?
I think some of that is already happening. Because of technology we now see ourselves in ways we never have before, and that creates feedback loops – humans eventually alter themselves in reaction when confronted with information, especially about themselves, and being altered then allows us to alter some more. For example I now work in ways totally different to 20 years ago, because I have instant access to facts and data (which I don’t need to memorise anymore), and access to other peoples ideas and suggestions to improve mine – it’s like having a somewhat whimsical enormously powerful personal djinn, but it cannot be denied that I’m fitting in around the way the djinn operates, and it’s then difficult to decide who is the master and who the slave.
And moreover, we are now on the verge of getting hitched pretty directly to technological and biotechnological systems so boundaries between us and algorithmic processors and human created wetware biotech will blur soon enough. I believe such tech is no more than a decade away.
This all stems from the fact that there is an impedance mismatch between biological systems (us) and electronic algorithmic processors we created (computing systems), which are many orders of magnitude faster. And as we can replicate much of human decision making on computers, it’s a one way street – you eventually get to the point where machine decisions first are indistinguishable from human ones, and then outdo humans – through sheer brute processing power if necessary, even if human thinking processes themselves cannot be fully replicated. The issue of ‘real intelligence’/sentience becomes an irrelevance if you cannot tell them apart from algorithmic decisions. For humanity the only route to survival is to incorporate the machines within us. All other routes lead to demise or zoodom. There are dangers of course, huge ones, but there isn’t really a choice.
I posted a detailed response but it has gone into ‘Awaiting for approval’. Perhaps the UnHerd algorithmic policeman is a sensitive soul and doesn’t want any more discussion on the topic.
Gunther Anders, the great German philosopher and an activist against the nuclear bomb, called our age of the 3d Industrial revolution “post-civilizational cannibalism”. Anti-technocracy is not “back to the woods”, it is not a return to savagery – on the contrary, technocracy is a culmination of Western savagery and ignorance. To fight technocracy, all is needed is true culture, true education, true philosophy, true Word, true intellect. Gunther Anders wrote in 1956, in his book The Obsolescence Of Man (which is as good as banned in the US or in English in general), providing a portrait of the technocratic terror: “In order to stifle any revolt in advance, one must not use violence. Methods like those used by Hitler are outdated. You need only develop such powerful collective conditioning that the very idea of revolt will not even cross people’s minds.
Ideally, individuals should be conditioned by limiting their innate biological abilities from birth. Then, we would continue the conditioning process by drastically reducing education in order to bring it back to a form of integration into the world of work. An uneducated individual has only a limited horizon of thought, and the more his thoughts are confined to mediocre concerns, the less he can rebel. Access to knowledge must be made increasingly difficult and elitist. The gulf between people and science must be widened. All subversive content must be removed from information intended for the general public.
Above all, there should be no philosophy. Here again, we must use persuasion and not direct violence: we will massively broadcast entertainment via television that always extols the virtues of the emotional and instinctive. We will fill people’s minds with what is futile and fun. It is good to prevent the mind from thinking through incessant music and chatter. Sexuality will be placed at the forefront of human interests. As a social tranquilliser, there is nothing better.
In general, we will make sure to banish seriousness from life, to deride anything that is highly valued and to constantly champion frivolity: so that the euphoria of advertising becomes the standard of human happiness and the model for freedom. Conditioning alone will thus produce such integration that the only fear – which must be maintained – will be that of being excluded from the system and therefore no longer able to access the conditions necessary for happiness.
The mass man produced in this way must be treated as what he is: a calf, and he must be kept a close eye on, as a herd should be. Anything that allays his lucidity is good socially, and anything that could awaken it must be ridiculed, stifled and fought. Any doctrine questioning the system must first be designated as subversive and terrorist, and those who support it must then be treated as such.”
I’m not convinced Kaczynski inspired anything. People are now acutely aware of the dangers of modern technology based on the internet and the huge power wielded by leading internet-based companies. They are also living with the widespread destruction of livelihoods by IT-based tech and automation. That’s what’s driving the reaction against much technology.
Kaczynski provides a rudimentary ideological framework for those who feel the need of such a thing to underpin their fight against tech, but I’m not sure it’s either necessary or a driving force of the movement. There are plenty of modern anti-techies who set forth their own simplistic, although fundamentally accurate, analysis of the dangers of big tech. These manifestos can be reduced to one or two pages and I think that’s all the manifesto most anti-techies need.
Those who intend to wage a campaign of violence against technology might do well to ponder Kaczynski’s fate. He is, indeed, still alive. For the past twenty years he’s been incarcerated in the federal supermax prison in Colorado, in more or less permanent solitary confinement.
Wow. This is an enormous eye-opener. Ted K is a modern day prophet/martyr. Hmmm.