Perpetual ferment hasn’t been bubbling much lately so I thought I’d write about my experience yesterday at an agricultural society luncheon talk. The speaker was the publisher of an agricultural trade publication, and his talk focused on bringing the brand online. It was basically an introduction to new media publishing, which was a new topic for the society membership, most of whom were men over the age of 50. Not much to report on the talk. For me, the really interesting thing about the event was the pre-talk discussion at my table: a spirited dog-pile on the slow food movement. Last month’s speaker had been a slow food advocate, and the guys at my table were still savoring their contempt for what he said and how he said it. One observed, “People tell me they respect agriculture. They don’t respect agriculture, they just like food.” They traded anecdotes about urban naïveté toward the flyover states. One mentioned a businesswoman who looked at the endless tracts of corn in Iowa and asked, incredulously, “Who is going to eat all this corn???” “Did she think it was sweet corn?” “YES!” The table rocked with genuine laughter. Apparently the slow food speaker had been savaged in the Q and A, and the men at my table revisited the best bits: “Where are you going to get all these farmers? You’d need ten million people willing to farm! Nobody wants to farm! It’s dirty. It’s unrealistic, it’s unscalable, it’s unsustainable, and it’s never going to work.” All agreed that the best Q and A zinger had been: “Have YOU ever farmed?” Unfortunately the speaker’s answer had been “no.” As my lunch companions piled on, I realized I was watching the ritual behavior of a tribe working hard to contain a threat. These were businessmen, expert in running large operations, deeply invested in industrial methods and products. These were Friends of Monsanto.

It’s not often I am physically surrounded by real live people whose views on a topic are opposite to my own habits of thought. These men weren’t total aliens to me: my maternal grandfather ran an enormous wheat operation in Nebraska, then my mother and her brother took it over for a while. I was familiar with the conservative culture of the Midwestern industrial farmer. I’d seen the producer’s exasperation with bureaucracy, the service industry, and consumer culture. My uncle, who would have turned 80 today, was working more than 1200 acres when he died; he was also a rock-ribbed Republican. My paternal grandfather, what we might call a traditional agrarian farmer, worked forty acres where I grew up, and after he died my father farmed weekends in a manner too serious to be considered a hobby but not serious enough to be a career. I’ve done a share of farmwork, for pocket money, or just for the exercise: I’ve picked tomatoes, watermelon, cantaloupes, and corn. I’ve plowed, planted seedlings, turned vines, and stapled crates. But I’ve never really farmed, not like my relatives did. The men at my table were right -- farming for survival is hard, you get filthy, and at certain times of the year you have to work 18-hour days. And you run the risk of hail.

My lunch companions were certainly not dirty; they were wearing suits and talking about the stock market. At that table, they were captains of industry. Some had doctorates in agricultural science; others bred racehorses or published on bovine genetics. The day’s speaker, sitting to my left, was the CEO of a multi-media firm but he took care to establish his bona fides by mentioning his Christmas tree farm. During his presentation he cited a rising star in ag media named John Phipps. I googled Phipps, expecting to find the Sean Hannity of agribusiness, but was pleasantly surprised at his evenhanded tone (yet unsurprised at his faith in the Invisible Hand). Some of his comments on organic farming clarified what I’d witnessed yesterday. In a blog entry on industrial agriculture’s hostility to what he calls the agrarian movement, Phipps describes the market for organics, free-range eggs, and local produce, then observes,

Industrial producers like myself have been trying to write off these developments as consumer fads, but I think they are woven into the cultural shifts made possible by abundance and the differences in values of Boomers and succeeding generations. We also have struggles with a larger issue: agrarians are boldly snatching our outdated "family farm" image which we flog in the halls of Congress to attract subsidy support.The growing divide between agrarian and industrial producers no longer alarms me. In fact, heated opposition to the agrarian movement is the last thing industrial ag should be spending time on. The market is sorting this one out as we speak.

Overall, Phipps calls for a frank self-evaluation of industrial agribusiness: the work is a massive tech-intensive, scalable operation capable of high caloric yields, and the agriculturalist is a CEO and entrepreneur as well as a hands-on manager who joins the workers on the factory floor. According to Phipps, Big Ag needs to be honest with itself about what it does and who it is. In casting off romantic images of the farmer, it doesn’t hurt that Captains of Industry are fewer and farther between in our post-industrial economy, and the role is there for the taking. Agribusiness finds itself in a uniquely protected niche as the financial markets plunge: some pundits are saying the safest investments are gold and farmland. Stop worrying about the small farmers, says Phipps – trust in the market.

Though he regards the agrarian farmers with some benevolence, Phipps dishes out a spot of contempt for the agrarian consumers. Pointing out that the biggest producers of organic foods are corporations like Kraft and Coca-Cola, he argues that earthy-crunchy types see corporate ownership as a betrayal of “organic” values:

Despite complying with the rules, many food advocates are outraged at large operations providing products they imagined would come from smaller and frankly, quainter farms.The rise in the local food movement underscores this disappointment. My own feeling is it's not really about the food characteristics - it's about the desire for an attractive and pleasantly rustic rural population to grace modern life at the convenience of non-farmers.

The jabs at the slow foodies suggest a cultural divide not at the level of the market, but at the level of social reality. Like the businesswomen flying over Iowa, he thinks localvores nurture a Fisher-Price image of the traditional family farm and fail to grasp the scope of what is really necessary feed the nation and the world. They link farming with tourism. In a sense, I’m reminded of Jack Nicholson snarling “you can’t handle the truth!” At the same time, I wonder whether the highly educated and prosperous businessmen at my table still might smart a little at the image of the picturesque rube. Yet they saw the utility of invoking that image when lobbying for subsidies and tax breaks. Listening to my lunch companions slag slow food, I knew the object of their scorn was not small farmers, though they worked at transcending whatever stereotype they saw in that role, when convenient. Their real target was the urban elite who styled themselves slow food experts – who do a little gardening, read Michael Pollan, visit Lancaster County, and feel obliged to write letters to Congress or the New York Times about fixing the food system – in other words, members of MY tribe.

Today I ran into a friend who makes her living in the local food movement; I briefly described my experience and she told me the cultural divide between industrial and agrarian farmers is actually beginning to give way. I’ve run out of blogging time and I don’t have any big conclusions. Oh, and the lunch wasn't very good. The vanilla mousse tasted like fish.

A Bit of News

Our esteemed colleague, the pravdakid, has recently undergone a change of academic status. Congratulations, David.

Something I just have to get off my chest

Went to see Synecdoche, New York this past week. I was pretty stoked, given what I'd read about the movie and the reputations of almost everyone involved. Which made the narcissistic, jejune piece of crap that I sat through for two hours all the more infuriating.
If I ever see Charlie Kaufman in person I'm going to punch him in the nose.

Football and Chabon

This next comment is for loyal PF reader Al C., who has been following the fortunes of the University of Tulsa football team this fall. Al will no doubt be wondering how it was that a highly favored Hurricane squad lost, at home, to East Carolina this weekend.
Here's the answer. They just weren't all that good. Many non-BCS teams are undeservedly ignored by the national media and other coaches: Utah and Boise State would be examples here. Tulsa was deservedly ignored: their defense was not great and their offense built up the big numbers by doing well against very weak teams. I say this with no great sadness in my heart, since I am not a big fan of Div-1 sports, and certainly not at a school as small as Tulsa (we have only about 3,000 undergraduates, 4,000 students total). I suspect that there is probably some non-crazy explanation for why we have a Div-1 football team, but for the life of me I can't figure out what that would be.
At any rate, I was not at the game. I was at the public library Saturday morning, listening to Michael Chabon, who received our city's big literary prize, The Peggy Helmerich Award. He was charming, if a bit disorganized. I had read one of his Details columns a few days before at the gym. It was about an old writing teacher who had passed away, and it was a lot more compelling than the talk, by and large. The best line from the library discussion was when he said that his relationship to plot was analogous to Bob Dylan's relationship to singing.

Optimistic Quote for the Day

“Reason is at its best related to generosity, to being able to acknowledge the truth or justice of another’s claim even when it cuts against the grain of one’s own interests and desires. To be reasonable in this sense involves not some desiccated calculation but courage, realism, justice, humility, and largess of spirit; there is certainly nothing clinically disinterested in this.”

Terry Eagleton, Illusions of Postmodernism, Blackwell, 1996, 123.

Quote for the Day

Mongol General: "What is best in life?"

Conan the Barbarian (aka the current Republican governor of California): "To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women."

When We Fail to Manage Risk

Last Thursday I went to Huntsman Hall to see a talk by U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, titled “When We Fail to Manage Risk.” The Dow had fallen 700 points the previous day. The housing bubble and the credit crunch and the subprime meltdown and the extra digit on the Times Square deficit billboard were all over the news. I was curious to gauge the mood of the business community so I went to the talk in order to eavesdrop on the audience. For the presentation itself, I had low expectations. A few weeks prior, the Department of Homeland Security had run a campus recruiting event – the word on the street was, they needed statisticians and analysts to deal with all that surveillance data they’d been gathering. So I thought this talk would be part of a recruitment drive for talented students whose private sector prospects had plunged with the markets.

The eavesdropping was dull, since most people were engaged with their phones and laptops. But the talk was more interesting than I’d expected. Chertoff drew on natural disaster scenarios to illustrate his points, but the economy was the obvious subtext. He started out by solemnly informing us that the core responsibility for risk management lies with the private sector. After all, he said, the right to balance risk and reward – to take chances and reap the consequences - is “the definition of freedom.” After the shout-out to the free-market folks, Chertoff spent the rest of his talk explaining why the market can’t do it alone. In his words, “we have difficulties because of the way we are wired.” Because humans are bad at “estimating time-horizons,” we choose immediate gratification over long-term safety. Because we are harbor a blindness to “collateral and cascading external costs,” we set up conditions whereby our actions come back to haunt us. Because we “resist transparency,” and hate to explain ourselves, we foster faithlessness. Unchecked, markets (us, only bigger) are impulsive, selfish, and secretive. That’s why we need the Department of Homeland Security to protect us from ourselves. Apparently, strong yet realistic regulation can check dangerous human tendencies without smothering human initiative. In his diagnosis of our current financial problems, Chertoff neatly de-politicized greed by framing it as a hard-wired flaw that could be diagnosed and compensated for through sound managerial techniques. From a Foucauldian perspective, the talk practically analyzed itself.

From a Hornerian perspective, I thought the talk was a little perverse. To illustrate why people should be required to build elevated houses on flood plains, Chertoff described touring a neighborhood after a bad hurricane. Whole rows of houses were “crushed, as if a giant had stepped on them,” but occasionally he’d see a house that was practically untouched, because it had been built on stilts. In Chertoff’s words, these homeowners could move back into their intact houses “like it never happened.” OK, yes, that’s an overstatement -- if your neighborhood is a pile of rubble, even if you still have a house your situation is not good. My point is not that Chertoff is being disingenuous, but rather, that his focus on individual risks and benefits constrained his ability to promote his larger cause. The anecdote exemplified a problem for public discourse in general: when we talk about public responsibility for the public good, we are rhetorically hamstrung by the neoliberal frame. A focus on individual outcomes impoverishes our ability to conceive of the common good on its own terms, without the baggage of zero-sum ideology (i.e., one guy wins and one guy loses) which (IMO) is the constant subtext of the individualist frame. Chertoff made this point: if the builder and the buyer accept the costs of elevating a house, then the owner will survive a hurricane. But there’s a false equivalence afoot. I admit, I’m a knee-jerk communitarian, so people who take sides in the eternal struggle between big bad gummint and the feisty lone individual may not agree with me, but maybe in order to really conceive of the community protecting the community, we need to talk about it and think about it through a different frame.

I read The Grapes of Wrath last August on vacation with my family (I got teased for picking such a gloomy beach read.) It’s a remarkable book, and now that everyone’s talking about the Great Depression I think of it often. Anyone interested in sustainable agriculture will find it eerily relevant. Steinbeck has a lot to say about community and the common good. Since the economic slide appears to be snowballing, I’ve found myself pondering how things will go –will we start using powdered dry milk and Tang again? Will multigenerational households become typical? Will we go all survivalist and suspicious and start hunkering down with our guns and canned goods? On the latter point, I found this very cogent argument against the impulse to hoard and defend. To survive a financial/social/ecological catastrophe, Charles Hugh Smith wrote,

…the best protection isn't owning 30 guns; it's having 30 people who care about
you. Since those 30 have other people who care about them, you actually have 300
people who are looking out for each other, including you. The second best
protection isn't a big stash of stuff others want to steal; it's sharing what
you have and owning little of value. That's being flexible, and common, the very
opposite of creating a big fat highly visible, high-value target and trying to
defend it yourself in a remote setting.

Read the whole essay: Smith is not a pie-in-the-sky hippie dreamer. In his view, people are sinful, some more than others, and bad things happen when we fail to manage risk. However, he and Chertoff have very different ideas about how to survive a catastrophe. In Smith’s pragmatic view of risk management, he invokes a moral economy / gift economy fueled by voluntary relationships, not a market economy running on profit and loss. Sure, there’s a false equivalence here too: Smith describes a smallish community on the edge of a wilderness, and Chertoff is working on a national scale. Still, Smith makes me feel a lot more capable and optimistic about surviving the years ahead. I’m “on the job market” – I sent out a bunch of job applications, and today I got an email notice that one job search has been suspended because of “the current economic crisis affecting American higher education (and beyond).” I hope this does not signal the start of a trend, but if it does, I’ll work on my home-brewing skills and follow Smith’s advice on risk management.

Note: After posting this I read a Chris Hedges essay on TruthDig that quoted Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul on elites' obliviousness to a concept of the commons. He puts it nicely:

“Their inability to see the human as anything more than interest driven made it
impossible for them to imagine an actively organized pool of disinterest called
the public good."