I thought I’d introduce a new element to the blog starting today with this first ‘news’ post. The idea is to intersperse my longer essay-style offerings with shorter postings on matters that seem newsworthy according to my idiosyncratic view of world affairs. ‘News’ in the sense of a mix of facts and opinion, because as The Guardian doesn’t say but ought to: ‘comment is free and so are facts and it’s harder to separate them out than you might think’. Anyway, let me know your thoughts.
Four brief items to kick off.
1. Manufactured food and the culture wars
The alt-meat and alt-dairy industry that I criticized in my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future seems to be acquiring some considerably higher-profile enemies than me in the form of European political leaders Giorgia Meloni and Viktor Orbán, plus US politician Ron DeSantis.
All of them are politicians of the far-right. With company like this, should I reconsider my critical position on manufactured food? Hmm, well … this pro-manufactured food article points to connections between these politicians and big business in the form of the meat industry, which is no doubt happy to play up to right-populist framings of meat as honest, traditional and determinedly non-woke. But the problem with the article, and with manufactured food narratives generally, is that their respective claims to sustainability and social justice are basically greenwashing for other corporate interests in the ‘disruptive’ food-tech space. So, right-wing or left-wing, nationalist or ecomodernist, the corporations are the winners either way, and we’re the fools for letting them divide us.
I’ve recently written about books by two ‘progressive’ thinkers – Naomi Klein and Caroline Lucas – who both make the point that the far right moves in and claims important issues where progressives fail to develop a coherent narrative. I can hardly think of a better example than farming, particularly localism and farming. I truly believe that the drift of too much of the left into a kind of vapid, top-down, techno-fixing ecomodernism is an enormous political failure which will haunt us in the future.
2. James C. Scott (1936-2024)
A shoutout for James C. Scott, who died recently, aged 87. Along with the late David Graeber, he was one of the two distinguished, anarchist-populist social scientists writing about agrarianism and world politics who’ve influenced me the most. Here are some of his books that I’ve just pulled off my shelf:
(I’m sure I also have a copy of The Moral Economy of the Peasant somewhere, but I can’t seem to find it).
I went to a seminar given by Scott at Johns Hopkins University as a callow youth in the 1980s during my brief and ill-fated attempt to do an anthropology doctorate there. I can’t remember much about it to be honest, apart from two things. First, Scott was worried about leaving home to give the seminar because lambing was about to start. One of my colleagues opined that he was just playing at being a farmer – the larping critique that forever attends anyone trying even mildly to practice what they preach in our precariously virtualized modern world.
Second, I remember my professor Ashraf Ghani tearing into Scott on some point of Marxist principle or other, and Scott impressing me with his unfazed and easy-tempered manner of reply. For all that, maybe there’s a lesson to be drawn about the downsides of ruralism and agrarianism from Ashraf’s later misadventures – or maybe the lesson is that global powers should stop their wargaming in other people’s rural backyards. But let’s keep it brief. As I’ve said many times before, I think the future for most people globally is going to be a rural and agrarian one. The challenge of our generation is to try to make that future as positive, peaceful, pro-social and non-patriarchal as possible. Few other things matter as much.
It emerged more recently that Scott had had some entanglements with the CIA in his early years researching peasants in Southeast Asia in the 1960s. Not all that surprising, really. US governments of that era were terrified at the prospect of communist peasant revolutions sweeping the world. All of a sudden there was a surprising amount of research money sloshing around in American universities to fund eager graduate students in their studies of ordinary peasant life (another of my Johns Hopkins professors, Sid Mintz, reported a historian friend of his, a medieval specialist, saying as he eyed the anthropology department’s budget on a university committee that he wished the middle ages could rise up as a communist threat).
I don’t know enough about what Scott did or didn’t do to have an opinion about all this, though I’m inclined to endorse the characteristically forthright opinion on X of my colleague, Anthony Galluzzo:
“RIP James Scott. Seeing Like A State was a transformative book for me, and his “high modernist ideology” certainly informs my own discussion of hypermodernism in the recent book. Cue toy Bolsheviks and various other hypermodernists shouting “CIA” as a way to avoid his arguments.”
It brings to mind a debate under my last blog post about the times in history when you’re called to take sides. A lasting contribution of Scott’s work is his answer to the question of choosing between communism and capitalism – neither of the above. But it’s not always easy to tread the line.
Anyway, RIP James Scott, and thanks for what you gave us.
3. Climate activism
There were some interesting discussions under my last blog post, including the recent sentencing of four climate activists to lengthy jail terms. Joel’s point about the pearl-clutching that goes on when middle-class activists suffer from harsh sentencing of the kind that’s routine for less celebrated and well-connected folk is well taken, although I’m not a big fan of jail for anyone but those who pose major risks to other people’s safety. Perhaps the more worrying trend has been cases involving judges threatening juries if they fail to convict or finding people in contempt of court for merely mentioning climate change. More than far-right dismissals of manufactured food, I think these erosions of basic legal principle are a more worrying trend that governments of different political persuasions seem happy to nod through.
Unfortunately, climate change and activist efforts to address it are a classic joint action or ‘tragedy of the commons’ problem (more accurately, a tragedy of failing to create a commons). “I’ll do something about it if you will…”
4. Looking forward…
In terms of personal news, I’m looking forward to talking with Carwyn Graves (author of the magnificent Tir: The Story of the Welsh Landscape) at the Green Gathering in Cas-gwent/Chepstow on Saturday. On this blog, I hope to tie up some loose ends from recent posts with two further posts – one on renewable energy and the other on urban/rural network efficiencies before moving on to new ground. But there may be a slow turnaround of these posts for various reasons. One of them is that I continue to have minimal internet access at home and have to head into town if I want to get a connection. And, as featured across said internet, I reportedly hate towns…
Current reading
Larry Siedentop Inventing the Individual – the Origins of Western Liberalism
