Being self-sufficient in our little suburban home spaces. This is a pretty revolutionary idea. (At least to me) This is something we could work on/advocate right now.
I've always thought we had to go to the "land"—to the mountains, back to the farm to have the kind of self-sufficiency necessary to maintain freedom. But that's practically impossible for most of us.
This is a hopeful idea.
The Gunslinger
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Technically Assisted Self-Sufficiency:
The Answer to Almost Everything Avoided by Almost Every Politician
By John Harris, on March 10th, 2012
http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2012/03/10/technically-assisted-self-sufficiency-the-answer-to-almost-everything-avoided-by-almost-every-politician/
To give the devil his due, I believe Marx to be quite right about the way capitalist economies, having drawn laborers off the farm and into the city, proceed to render them obsolete with technology.
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I have never been able to read more than a few paragraphs of The Communist Manifesto at once. I have the same allergy to Rousseau when he writes about social issues—and to Ernst Bloch, and to others of that persuasion: “thinkers”, that is, whose modus operandi is to make a valid observation (sometimes quite a perceptive one), multiply it into the Universal Human Condition, wax wroth with indignation, and bolt away on some tangent whose insane trajectory places all peace and happiness on earth in jeopardy. To say that this rhetorical paradigm fits only and exclusively communist tirades would be unfair. I have had to sit through fundamentalist sermons that left my head aching in the same way. Heinrich von Treitschke’s Deutsche Geschichte des 19 Jahrhundert (through which I am currently trying to wade) constantly goes delirious in a similar vein over the prospect of German unity behind Prussian leadership. Let us, then, conclude that gross over-generalizing to justify an irrational—and often homicidal or suicidal—prescription is typically fascist, and leave it at that; for evangelical communism is a species of fascism.
It’s as if a party of spelunkers, lost in the bowels of the earth, should blunder upon a space where three tunnels depart in different directions. The castaways follow one tunnel only to find that it peters into a dead-end. Then they return to the crossroads and resolve, not to try one of the remaining two options, but to employ a high explosive in an attempt to blow the whole mountain off their heads. Whoever survives the blast will be able to cross this approach off the list of strategies… but the other two tunnels will probably also have been sealed. Why commit such folly to begin with? Who but a lunatic would make the suggestion?
To give the devil his due, I believe Marx to be quite right about the way capitalist economies, having drawn laborers off the farm and into the city, proceed to render them obsolete with technology. This cruel cycle has been repeated over and over again since the Manifesto appeared. As an educator, I hear all the time that the solution is for history’s losers to school themselves in developing or managing new gismos: get off the assembly line and make a place for yourself behind a keyboard. Such exhortations, however, are in patent bad faith. Obviously, there are far fewer available keyboards than there once were stations on the line—otherwise “retooling” would involve no saving of expenses and enhancing of profit, especially since technicians are so handsomely paid. Well, then (we are told in neo-Darwinian tropes), the race must go to the swiftest: let the masses compete, and let the brightest or the most energetic win out. That’s freedom in action.
Yes, but such athletic metaphors do not explain what we are to do with the forty or sixty or eighty percent who cannot obtain a costly re-education and the subsequent plum of white-collar employment. In a cruel irony that even Marx couldn’t foresee, these human “leftovers” tend to become drudges doing the work that simple machines might do, but would do more expensively thanks to the costs of manufacture and upkeep. It’s cheaper to pay a poor schmuck a few bucks an hour to mop your office’s floor than to buy and maintain the machine that does the same thing. The Industrial Revolution leapfrogs this bracket of manual labor and proceeds to higher assignments.
In the century or so that the industrialized world has had to mull over this jigsaw puzzle, few of the ragged pieces have been matched. What to do with the “leftovers”? Young women can stay at home and create Internet porn sites; young men can peddle illicit drugs. For those who have transport and can afford gas, the cocktail waitress/bartender route lies open (since the technicians at their keyboards get mightily sick of life by the end of the day); or a kid can always join the army, at least until our strained national budget will no longer accommodate an army.
The Marxist recommendation to “explode” the system (Marx and Engels’ image, not mine) will of course induce that catastrophic cave-in that crushed our spelunkers. Recent history has taught us that “revolution” amounts to pillaging the rich, consuming society’s resources quickly to the bone, and then settling into an inhumanly cruel autocracy wherein the “best” pirates, having climbed to the top on their murdered victims, slaughter protesters and look abroad for more cargo ships to waylay. Marx’s genius for getting the solution all wrong shines brightly here. For having pinpointed the problem in the essential motive forces of industrialization and urbanization, he proceeds to ignore other obvious tunnels offering escape and embraces the mechanistic urban world with a vengeance. Factories grind out production quotas to enrich one and all (under the shadow of machine-guns, as a practical consideration). The masses graze like cattle on a high-tech ranch when their strict allowance of gray pleasure is meted out within their strictly measured gray stalls during a strictly limited hour of their gray day. Humanity is throttled, the natural environment is shredded, barbarism earns a bounty, and the nightmare appears to have no end.
Welcome to the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba, and Kim Jong Il’s North Korea. Welcome, not to Plato’s Cave, but to Grendel’s Lair. At least in the days of our tribal prehistory, an elite few were ritually fed, strangled, and tossed into the swamp that the gods on the Other Side might be well disposed. Now the self-appointed gods among us bind, gag, eviscerate, and toss to the abysmal bottom those masses over whom they are supposed to preside—a sacrifice pleasing to them, apparently, for the rush of raw power it unleashes.
No thank you, Mr. Marx. If there is any true progress in store for the Average Joe, it must move in the reverse direction. We must guarantee private property, not confiscate it. We must revive the self-sufficiency of producing food with one’s own hands, not conspire with automation to stamp it out completely. We must use technology not to centralize authority more and ever more until human societies replicate termite mounds, but to decentralize it until, at last, every individual household produces a significant amount of its own food and energy and can furnish the minimum of force needed to protect its boundaries. Every man his own grocer, his own power plant, and his own cop: would the typical human being prefer that vision, or one of himself queued up—wearing # 5933028/4 on his back—in a gray jump-suit with wrench in hand?
Nothing is more essential to survival than food, and no image of human nobility is more primal and irresistible than that of the wise husbandman coaxing his harvest from the earth. The OWS crowd, in its collective inanity, may be able to generate sincere outrage at the prospect of a banker’s lavish rewards—mansion, yacht, private plane, summer house in the Bahamas—for doing no more than juggling figures. Even the most invincible imbecile, however, could not dispute that Farmer A, who rose at dawn and labored under the sun’s heat for months on end, deserves an abundant harvest in a way that Farmer B, whose fields are overgrown with weeds and whose barnyard is overrun with wild creatures, does not. Life on the farm made a lot of things clear that the weekly paycheck has obscured. It also gave children and adolescents meaningful work to do as they matured, taught a respect for the natural environment, and inspired a profound spirituality through close contact with life’s cycles and with death itself. The farm made adults of us, just as the city has made fatuous, arrogant cavilers and pettifoggers of us. When we left that honest labor behind, we lost far more than drawls and torn fingernails.
To advocate a return to the land would be as absurd as exhorting the nation to “go Amish”. What we successfully might do as a high-tech society, however, would be to transform our third- or quarter-acre of suburban residential space (also known as our home) into an energy-efficient incubator of sorts. The 3,000-square-foot dead (including the garage) that we call an attic—a source of major heating and cooling problems for most houses—might literally become a greenhouse, protected by hail-proof glass and generating healthy fruit and vegetables year round. Rainwater could be collected and processed for bathing and drinking, as well, by each domicile with a little technology. As for energy, the best way at present to reduce our consumption of polluting fuels is precisely to reduce consumption—not to substitute another fuel whose “cleanliness” is utterly bogus (e.g., solar energy: the rare earth elements in which solar panels are coated abbreviate thousands of lives in Third World mining towns). Proper insulation has conserved more coal and fossil fuel than the Chevy Volt ever will, except in a progressive’s dreams.
Not only can residential designs be overhauled to lose less heat and coolness, but the abolition of local zoning laws would permit residents to operate barber shops, cafés, studios, and other small businesses out of their homes, eliminating a gas-guzzling drive to work, reducing insurance and medical costs, and also drawing in many ambulatory neighborhood customers. E-Bay operators and their ilk already work at home, of course. In keeping with the high-tech theme, other business-people could stay off the street by going online. I might as well be teaching college classes at home before a camera: my students already spend the whole hour staring dazed into their laptops.
I could write a book about this futuristic Arcadia—a true conservative’s vision of progress. I have already indicated how it might radically reduce the toxic effects of heavy energy consumption, unemployment, and inflation, as well as implied how it might make our children safer and more responsible (viz., neighborhoods whose residents are often at home suffer from relatively little crime, for criminals thrive where they can pass unobserved). A pater familias might well secure a happy existence for his household of four or five simply by tending his greenhouse and repairing neighborhood furniture or trimming neighborhood trees. Families would not have to pull up stakes and move because the local factory closed or the local tech firm “insourced” hundreds of Asian nationals on green cards. A man could cover the ground he stood on. He would not have to be the slave to bourgeois capitalism that Marx makes of him—and that Marx would have further enslaved to the Will of the People.
Why is neither side of the political aisle pushing a vision such as this? Special interests, of course: certain elements in the private sector very much want us to burn more oil and buy more cars, while certain elements in the public sector want us even more to depend abjectly upon our elected “job-creators”. Yet a less deliberate but more oppressive force also chains each of our ankles to a thirty-pound shot: the sheer dead weight of federal, state, and local taxes and regulations that we have allowed to stifle our existence. Codes, zoning restrictions, safety standards, legal liability, property taxes, franchise taxes, licensures, certifications, user fees… the various “branches” of government leach off of our blood and sweat like great swathes of mistletoe growing on a moribund tree scarcely able now to send forth one green leaf. The answers to most of our major problems—vocational, educational, environmental, social, ethical, criminal, logistical—sit in our back yard, in some cases quite literally. We could smooth out these tangles ourselves if we were left alone to do so.
The day we finally do so will be the day a critical mass of us recognizes that government is no longer our friend and protector: it is Public Enemy Number One. The Marxian super-centralized cooperative offers no assurance of safety in numbers—of maternally nurturing interdependency. On the contrary, it offers the certainty of each individual’s being reduced to the meaningless, the irrelevant, the interchangeable, the indistinguishable. A human being who consents to become an invisible member within an innumerable herd has already died as a human being, whether or not he lives on as a biological unit.
Those who fail to grasp this truth will deserve their dismal fate if the impending series of critical choices facing us produces another ruling elite of “moderates”. Very little room for compromise exists. Nothing walks on three legs: you can choose either two or four.
John Harris holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and teaches college English. He is also the founder and president of The Center for Literate Values, a charitable organization serving home-schoolers and friends of the Western tradition; and he edits The Center's journal Praesidium (at www.literatefreedom.org/literatevalues.htm). His novel about Middle America's moral decline in the mid-70s, Footprints in the Snow of the Moon, is available as a free download at http://www.literatefreedom.org/footprints.pdf. | John Harris | semperluxmundi@yahoo.com
