Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (13 page)

But he does not deduce from this that man's superiority gives him permission to ill-treat or kill animals. It is just the reverse. It is because man is so much higher than the animal that he can and must observe towards animals the very greatest care, feel for them the very greatest compassion, be good to them in every way he can. The Burmese’s motto should be
noblesse
oblige.
He knows the meaning, he knows not the Words.'

In Proverbs we read that the just man takes care of his beast, but the heart of the wicked is merciless, and St Thomas Aquinas wrote: 'It is evident that if a man practises a compassionate affection for animals, he is all the more disposed to feel compassion for his fellowmen.' No-one ever raised the question of whether they could asked to live in accordance with, these convictions. At the level of values, of ends-in-themselves, there is no question of 'affording'.

What applies to the animals upon the land applies equally, and without any suspicion of sentimentality, to the land itself. Although ignorance and greed have again and again destroyed the fertility of the soil to such an extent that whole civilisations foundered, there have been no traditional teachings which failed to recognise the meta-economic value and significance of 'the generous earth'. And where these teachings were heeded. not only agriculture but also of all other factors of civilisation achieved health and wholeness. Conversely, where people imagined that they could not 'afford' to care for the soil and work with nature, instead of against it, the resultant sickness of the soil has invariably imparted sickness to all the other factors of civilisation.

In our time, the main danger to the soil, and therewith not only to agriculture but to civilisation as a whole, stems from the towns- man's determination to apply to agriculture the principles of industry. No more typical representative of this tendency could be found than Dr Sicco I..

Mansholt, who, as Vice-President of the European Economic Community, launched the Mansholt Plan for European Agriculture. He believes that the farmers are 'a group that has still not grasped the rapid changes in society'.

Most of them ought to get out of farming and become industrial labourers in the cities, because 'factory workers, men on building sites and those in administrative jobs - have a five-day week and two weeks' annual holiday already. Soon they may have a four-day week and four weeks' holiday per year. And the farmer: he is condemned to working a seven day week because the five day cow has not yet been invented, and he gets no holiday at ail." The Mansholt Plan, accordingly, is designed to achieve, as quickly as humanely possible, the amalgamation of many small family farms into large agricultural units operated as if they were factories, and the maximum rate of reduction in the community's agriculture population. Aid is to be given

'which would enable the older as well as the younger farmers to leave agriculture'."

In the discussion of the Mansholt Plan, agriculture is generally referred to as one of Europe's 'industries'. The question arises of whether agriculture is, in fact, an industry, or whether it might be something essentially different.

Not surprisingly, as this is a metaphysical - or meta-economic - question, it is never raised by economists.

Now, the fundamental 'principle' of agriculture is that it deals with life, that is to say, with living substances. Its products are the results of processes of life and its means of production is the living soil. A cubic centimetre of fertile soil contains milliards of living organisms, the full exploration of which is far beyond the capacities of man. The fundamental 'principle' of modern industry, on the other hand, is that it deals with man-devised processes which work reliably only when applied to man-devised, non-living materials. The ideal of industry is the elimination of living substances. Man-made materials are preferable to natural materials, because we can make them to measure and apply perfect quality control. Man-made machines work more reliably and more predictably than do such living substances as men. The ideal of industry is to eliminate the living factor, even including the human factor, and to turn the productive process over to machines. At Alfred North Withehead defined life as 'an offensive directed against the repetitious mechanism of the universe', so we may define modern industry as

'an offensive against the unpredictability, un- punctuality, general waywardness and cussedness of living nature, including man'.

In other words, there can be no doubt that the fundamental 'principles' of agriculture and of industry, far from being compatible with each other, are in opposition. Real life consists of the tensions produced by the incompatibility of opposites, each of which is needed, and just as life would be meaningless without death, so agriculture would be meaningless without industry. It remains true, however, that agriculture is primary, whereas industry is secondary, which means that human life can continue with- out industry, whereas it cannot continue without agriculture. Human life at the level of civilisation, however, demands the balance of the two principles, and this balance is ineluctably destroyed when people fail to appreciate the essential difference between agriculture and industry - a difference as great as that between life and death - and attempt to treat agriculture as just another industry.

The argument is, of course, a familiar one. It was put succinctly by a group of internationally recognised experts in
A Future for European Agriculture:

'Different parts of the world possess widely differing advantages for the production of particular products, depending on differences in climate, the quality of the soil and cost of labour. All countries would gain from a division of labour which enabled them to concentrate production on their most highly productive agricultural operations. This would result both in higher income for agriculture and lower costs for the entire economy, particularly for industry. No fundamental justification can be found for agricultural protectionism"

It this were so it would be totally incomprehensible that agricultural protectionism, throughout history, has been the rule rather than the exception. Why are most countries, most of the time, unwilling to gain these splendid rewards from so simple a prescription? Precisely because there is more involved in 'agricultural operations' than the production of incomes and the lowering of costs: what is involved is the whole relationship between man and nature, the whole life-style of a society, the health, happiness and harmony of man, as well as the beauty of his habitat. If all these things are left out of the experts' considerations, man himself is left out - even if our experts try to bring him in, as it were, after the event, by pleading that the community should pay for the 'social consequences' of their policies. The Mansholt Plan. say the experts, 'represents a bold initiative. It is based on the acceptance of a fundamental principle: agricultural income can only be maintained if the reduction in the agricultural population is accelerated, and if farms rapidly reach an economically viable size.' Or again: 'Agriculture, in Europe at least is essentially directed towards food-production.... It is well known that the demand for food increases relatively slowly with increases in real income. This causes the total incomes earned in agriculture to rise more slowly in comparison with the incomes earned in industry; to maintain the same rate of growth of incomes per head is only possible if there is an adequate rate of decline in the numbers engaged in agriculture." ...'The conclusions seem inescapable: under circumstances which are normal in other advanced countries, the community would be able to satisfy its own needs with only one third as many farmers as now.'

No serious exception can be taken to these statements if we adopt - as the experts have adopted - the metaphysical position of the crudest materialism, for which money costs and money incomes are the ultimate criteria and determinants of human action, and tile living world has no significance beyond that of a quarry for exploitation.

On a wider view, however, the land is seen as a priceless asset which it is man's task and happiness 'to dress and to keep'. We can say that man's management of the land must be primarily orientated towards three goals -

health, beauty, and permanence. The fourth goal - the only one accepted by the experts - productivity, wilt then be attained almost as a by-product. The crude materialist view sees agriculture as 'essentially directed towards food-production', A wider view sees agriculture as having to fulfil at least three tasks:

- to keep man in touch with living nature, of which he is and remains a highly vulnerable part;

- to humanise and ennoble man's wider habitat; and

- to bring forth the foodstuffs and other materials which are needed for a becoming life.

I do not believe that a civilisation which recognises only the third of these tasks, and which pursues it with such ruthlessness and violence that the other two tasks are not merely neglected but systematically counteracted, has any chance of long-term survival. Today, we take pride in the fact that the proportion of people engaged in agriculture has fallen to very low levels and continues to fall. Great Britain produces some sixty per cent of its food requirements while only three per cent of its working population are working on farms. In the United States, there were still twenty- seven per cent of the nation's workers in agriculture at the end of World War I, and fourteen per cent at the end of World War II: the estimate for 1971 shows only 4·4 per cent. These declines in the proportion of workers engaged in agriculture are generally associated with a massive flight from the land and a burgeoning of cities. At the same time, however, to quote Lewis Herber:

'Metropolitan life is breaking down. psychologically, economically and biologically. Millions of people have acknowledged this breakdown by voting with their feet, they have picked up their belongings and left, If they have not been able to sever their connections with the metropolis, at least they have tried. As a social symptom the effort is significant.’

In the vast modern towns, says Mr Herber, the urban dweller is more isolated than his ancestors were in the countryside: 'The city man in a modern metropolis has reached a degree of anonymity, social atomisation and spiritual isolation that is virtually unprecedented in human history.'"

So what does he do? He tries to get into the suburbs and becomes a commuter. Because rural culture has broken down, the rural people are fleeing from the land~ and because metropolitan life is breaking down, urban people are fleeing from the cities. 'Nobody, according to Dr Mansholt,

'can afford the luxury of not acting economically','" with the result that everywhere life tends to become intolerable for anyone except the very rich.

I agree with Mr Herber's assertion that 'reconciliation of man with the natural world is no longer merely desirable, it has become a necessity'. And this cannot be achieved by tourism, sightseeing, or other leisure-time activities, but only by changing the structure of agriculture in a direction exactly opposite to that proposed by Dr Mansholt and supported by the experts quoted above: instead of searching for means to accelerate the drift out of agriculture, we should be searching for policies to reconstruct rural culture, to open the land for the gainful occupation to larger numbers of people, whether it be on a full-time or a part-time basis, and to orientate all our actions on the land towards the threefold ideal of health, beauty, and permanence.

The social structure of agriculture, which has been produced by -- and is generally held to obtain its justification from - large-scale mechanisation and heavy chemicalisation. makes it impossible to keep man in real touch with living nature; in fact, it sup- ports all the most dangerous modern tendencies of violence, alienation, and environmental destruction Health, beauty and permanence are hardly even respectable subjects for discussion, and this is yet another example of the disregard of human values - and this means a disregard of man - which inevitably results from the idolatry of economism.

If 'beauty is the splendour of truth', agriculture cannot fulfil its second task, which is to humanise and ennoble man's wider habitat, unless it clings faithfully and assiduously to the truths revealed by nature's living processes.

One of them is the law of return; another is diversification - as against any kind of monoculture; another is decentralisation, so that some use can be found for even quite inferior resources which it would never be rational to transport over long distances. Here again, both the trend of things and the advice of the experts is in the exactly opposite direction - towards the industrialisation and depersonalisation of agriculture, towards concentration, specialisation, and any kind of material waste that promises to save labour.

As a result, the wider human habitat, far from being humanised and ennobled by man's agricultural activities, becomes standardised to dreariness or even degraded to ugliness.

All this is being done because man-as-producer cannot afford 'the luxury of not acting economically', and therefore cannot produce the very necessary

'luxuries' - like health, beauty, and permanence - which man-as-consumer desires more than anything else. It would cost too much; and the richer we become, the less we can 'afford'. The aforementioned experts calculate that the 'burden' of agricultural support within the Community of the Six amounts to 'nearly three per cent of Gross National Product', an amount they consider 'far from negligible'. With an annual growth rate of over three per cent of Gross National Product, one might have thought that such a 'burden'

could be carried without difficulty: but the experts point out that 'national resources are largely committed to personal consumption, investment and public services.... By using so large a proportion of resources to prop up declining enterprises, whether in agriculture or in industry, the Community foregoes the opportunity to undertake,-, necessary improvements' in these other fields.

Nothing could be clearer. If agriculture does not pay, it is just a 'declining enterprise'. Why prop it up? There are no 'necessary improvements' as regards the land, but only as regards farmers' incomes, and these can be made if there are fewer farmers. This is the philosophy of the townsman.