The Kesroli Group is a modest-sized, close-knit think tank of top professionals from the world of business, finance, policy, public affairs, media and non-government organisations, comprising Indian citizens and those of Indian origin under the age of 50. In late 2009, key members initiated discussions on ongoing and impending situations with a view to generating awareness and solution-oriented discussion with what one member with extensive consulting experience termed “thought triggers”. The idea was that eventually these would contribute to policy and implementation that seek to make India a better place.
India’s Demographic Tsunami derives from that exercise. This section, titled ‘A Modified Internal Geography’, assumes all the ‘upside’ stories about India, from the growth of the economy and purchasing power to greater relevance in the global arena; these have generally tended to fuel exuberance and dampen realism to the point of delusion.
And so, this paper also assumes the ‘downside’, bad news that continues to escalate with the good, and the continuation of endemic corruption and official callousness that haven’t yet been dented by the gradual spread of instruments such as the Right to Information Act; and increasing political maturity of the electorate. Polity, government, administration and, to an extent, business, will for the sake of palatable expediency continue to ignore no-brainer solutions that have repeatedly, for decades, been suggested by some of the best minds from India and overseas.
Several of India’s hard-won gains locally and globally appear to be threatened in the near and medium-term future. It is becoming increasingly clear that, unless addressed quickly and emphatically, India’s inherent national crisis will witness greater churn in the next 25 years. There is reason to be concerned that this churn could, quite easily, extend to the next 50.
This churn will mainly be on account of population pressure; mismatch of aspiration and reality; and roots of conflict such as caste-related and tribal alienation. In the foreseeable future, India will also continue to have to deal with several violent reactions and movements that, like the present cycle of Maoist rebellion, will be rooted in issues of right to livelihood; defence of property; delivery of law and order; and justice. India’s embedded corruption will continue to exacerbate these lamentable deficiencies.
In addition, there is a high possibility of continuing identity-related conflict, especially in northeastern India. Several of these issues are likely to be influenced by external factors, such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, and in the foreseeable future, Nepal and Myanmar.
While in several instances these could be state-mandated—such as Pakistan, China and Bangladesh’s on-again, off-again policies of destabilising various aspects of India—there is the equally high possibility of change and churn in neighbouring countries directly affecting the internal dynamics of contiguous areas in present-day India. For instance, a breakdown in Nepal’s political and social fabric will directly affect the bordering present-day Indian states of Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal. Or, a huge displacement of population in Bangladesh on account of a rise of sea levels or population will directly impact the neighbouring present-day Indian states of West Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura, and Mizoram.
In both cases, there will be an export of people, politics and religious beliefs into areas of India already stretched due to their own resource pressures and deep feelings of an imminent takeover by ‘outsiders’ glaringly evident in the present day.
Even a medium intensity progression along these lines is likely to lead to conditions of implosion of the Indian State—in form and substance—as we know it today. While this has obvious ramifications for the state of the nation and India’s internal security horizon, India’s ‘health’ will continue to affect the country’s external behaviour, from diplomatic efforts to security initiatives and responses.
Such a crisis-ridden state, as outlined above, could be significantly closer than might appear. Consider the challenges.
How Will We Feed So Many People?
In 2020, just over a decade from now, India’s urban population will have gone up from around 23 per cent of the total at present to 40 per cent. In absolute numbers, this would mean a shoot up from 285 million to 540 million—an immense challenge, even with a rapidly growing economy. Alongside, while the proportion of rural population would lessen, it would still be in the region of 820 million. The same area, 350 million more people, and around the same number of new jobs to be created. As for feeding them: foodgrain production would have to increase to 260 million tonnes a year, up from the present 190-200 million tonnes, using roughly the same amount of arable land.
This is mild compared to the scenario closer to 2050. India’s foodgrain requirement would then be an estimated 400 million tonnes a year for a population in excess of 1.5 billion. According to an estimate, the ‘replacement level’ (a couple replaced by two children) should ideally have been reached by 2000. This ‘stabilisation’ of population is unlikely to be reached till the close of this century.
At current levels of incapable irrigation, uneven agricultural productivity, and increased rates of rural displacement on account of direct human intervention (watershed and water-table loss, deforestation), this could prove impossible. There will be no recourse but to import vast quantities of food, but what of the effect of people ‘on the move’ with nowhere to go but crushed urban and semi-urban zones? Human displacement will be on a scale bigger than anything seen thus far in India.
India would need to provide productive opportunities for nearly 600 million people who are now aged 30 or less, in an environment of shrinking agricultural activity, massive leakage of development funds in rural, semi-urban and urban areas, and continual overburdening of urban spaces.
In this situation, India will be further hampered by the official and policymaking tendency to play percentages and not absolute numbers:
The Numbers Are Scary
One per cent in India equals more than 10 million people—and will soon equal 15 million.
An estimated 50 million live in urban slums. This number will dramatically increase, through the creation of new slums.
Estimates of those displaced by projects since India’s Independence average 50 million. Of these, a majority have been resettled, but not rehabilitated. Ongoing displacement will get more acute.
India’s landless rural peasantry is estimated in the range of 18-20 million. This will increase with further fracturing of landholding, and destitution on account of non-family issues (indebtedness; crop failure; non-remunerative pricing; cheaper imports; rising input costs on account of ‘terminator’ seeds and chemical fertilisers.)
A 10,000-strong armed Maoist cadre may appear minuscule when dealt within the blinding framework of percentages, but it is prudent to remember that it took 19 people and a relatively small logistics team to bring down the World Trade Centre towers, among other attacks, and trigger the nearly decade-long ‘Global War Against Terror’.
In ‘urban’ and ‘industrial’ spaces, India will need to absorb a vast, continually increasing workforce. The incidence of physical emigration for work or change of residence will dramatically lessen as traditional overseas ‘buyers’ of manpower look to replace such human resources with their own. Outsourcing or back-office employment is finite.
India’s growth of population and construct of education combine to ensure a disturbing spillover of the unemployed and the unemployable: a population that is increasingly vulnerable to radicalisation—from religious to the ideological.
Together, these problems represent vast pools of negative energy in the country, and there is little doubt that these problems are worsening.
India’s Map Will Change
By whatever name, manifestations of this negative energy, extreme left-wing movements or otherwise, will increase. Urban areas will see the emergence of livelihood-related violence that is currently being leveraged in several Indian cities around issues of ethnic identity and religion.
Several Northeastern states are in a condition of violent flux. The question of Jammu & Kashmir is, of course, a vastly disquieting matter (along with global, radical Islamism).
Current policy initiatives are worrying, as these are not oriented towards solutions, but towards the maintenance of conflict at ‘acceptable levels’ as deemed by the State. Insurgency scenarios and counter-insurgency capabilities take precedence over addressing issues of administration, skill sets and education (positive/negative job creation); food security; addressing the dispossessed (destitute, abandoned, resentful); and issues of urbanisation and migration. All this is bound to have deep political and geographic implications.
The map of India will surely change. More states and autonomous regions are likely—some estimates suggest close to 50 states from the present 28 in a matter of years. Telengana, Bundelkhand, Vidarbha, Marathwada, Jammu, Kashmir, Ladakh, Uttar Kannada, Dakshin Kannada, ‘Gorkhaland’, ‘Bodoland’, separation of the present Khasi and Garo Hills—are all likely units.
However, there is a limit to how much the drawing of lines and setting up of separate administrations can address inherent ills, as India’s present rot in politics and governance and great public apathy helps to perpetuate so many problems.
In extreme situations brought on by a combination of both internal and external factors, the de facto external boundaries of India too could change, in a replay of ‘Pakistan Occupied Kashmir’ and Aksai Chin. In this context, Northeastern India is particularly vulnerable.
A Modified Internal Geography
Extreme left-wing movements will spiral beyond present-day comprehension and reach, driven by increasing urbanisation in spaces around present-day metropolitan areas; continual pressure on rural and forested areas to cede space to extractive and related business (such as mining); increasing political, financial and development (health care, sanitation, education, job creation) focus by central and state governments on urban spaces that will lead to greater resentment in, and alienation of, rural spaces/ populations. The momentum for accountability will—as now—increase in urban spaces and reduce in rural spaces. The Right to Information and similar devices are and will largely remain urban phenomena.
The fabric will stretch, and could finally tear. Large areas of India will be reshaped along fault lines of internal conflict. The Indian polity will be radically altered. Left-wing, tribal and caste militias will control central, east, south-central, and west-central India. Driven by a chain of militia ‘conglomerates’ that will recruit from local and/or ‘victim’ populations, with leadership largely drawn from this pool, militias will form a bulwark against the Indian Union of City States.
City states already exist in all but name. Mumbai/Navi Mumbai; Delhi/New Delhi that would, in the foreseeable future, see an administration for the National Capital Region (NCR); Kolkata and Greater Kolkata; Chennai; Bengaluru; Hyderabad; and so on.
These metropolitan areas are already among the largest in the world. These will form security and trade corridor links with growing secondary hubs, and ultimately form a longer, secure chain that will run along northern and peninsular India’s extremities, approximating the present-day idea of the ‘Golden Quadrilateral’ system of expressways.
NCR will link northwards with Chandigarh and further on towards Jammu, which will form the northern bulwark of a re-ordered Indian state, with the loss of Kashmir Valley.
This corridor will travel southwest towards Jaipur to link with a hub in Ahmedabad and further, down towards Mumbai.
Mumbai will form the western hub along with an extension to Pune/Aurangabad, and form the link southward along the Konkan Coast with present-day Thiruvananthapuram (which will become part of the ocean-front city state of Kochi-Karwar).
A similar, south to east corridor will from here travel up to Chennai (then link with the inland hubs of Bengaluru and Hyderabad) as far as Vishakhapatnam; and then to the hinterland of Kolkata (Haldia) and finally to Kolkata. The intervening coastal space will be controlled by left-wing and tribal militias just short of the missile testing area of Chandipur on the southeastern edge of Orissa, which forms an important defence/ commercial zone along with Haldia. Militias will, however, control Orissa’s Paradip Port.
The north-to-east link will not be secure, as a severe breakdown of socio-economic and political cohesion, aided also by effects of the implosion of Nepal on account of a complete breakdown of the present-day political and economic process, will create vast null spaces devoid of ‘conventional’ administration. The region of the Gangetic plains will form a patchwork of rural and semi-urban communities that will be feudalistic in administration, collapsing into a ‘medieval’ format run by warlords or conglomerates of warlords.
The northern borderlands of this region will form alliances with the ‘Central’ Indian administration to oversee its ‘border defences’ by proxy. This will be to offset the southward push of displaced Nepali communities deeper into the Gangetic plains.
As the left-wing and tribal militia region will lie directly to the south of the Gangetic plains, the Government of India will have to deal with the possibility of warlords from the Gangetic plains entering into loose agreements with these militias to ensure flow of arms and ammunition and trade —including natural and chemical narcotics—and provide sanctuary for mutual benefit. These two groups will not impinge on the other’s territorial ambit after repeated failure of the Gangetic plains group/s to wrest control of central and eastern Indian mineral concentrations.
The United States of India
The concept of the ‘Centre’ of India will change. The Government of India will really be governing the United States of India, with a new Charter/ Constitution that provides for alliances with administrations of City States/ Hinterland Entities by agreement of their respective local representatives and referendum—unlike singular entities (as with the Subcontinent’s Partition exercise).
The ‘state’ or ‘province’ will merely be the hinterland to these cities, providing—with regional variations—food, industrial zones, trade parks, ports, airports, and defence hubs. Core areas of the City State will entirely be residential and service oriented. It will not be unusual for foreign governments or corporations to enter into separate diplomatic and business arrangements with preferred City States, after informing the ‘Central’ government.
The remainder of present-day Central, Centre-East, and Peninsular India will be outside the agglomeration of New States, dominated by several left-wing militias. Like the present-day Shan Region that forms the core of the so-called Golden Triangle of Myanmar, Laos and Thailand, the ‘Leaders’ or ‘Politburo’ of each region will hold sway over vast patches of territory.
This belt will comprise the present-day regions of Marathwada and Vidarbha in Mahrashtra; Chhattisgarh; Madhya Pradesh; Jharkhand; Orissa; and areas of West Bengal that have not been swamped by a population shift that moves steadily westward.
These pseudo-socialist zones will skirmish or maintain peace with the other, essentially to protect territories of agrarian activity, but overwhelmingly to control mineral resources and rivers/waterways in their territories. The Narmada river system; Mahanadi river system; and Godavari river system, for example, will be part of these zones.
The entity known as United States of India will enter into separate arrangements with the administrations of these militia-controlled regions for procuring primary materials and metals. Also, to ensure waterway flows, in exchange for major concessions—including maintenance of status quo until the ‘national’ entity feels suitably strengthened to begin to make forays to reclaim territory from warlords and militias.
This status quo, however, will remain in place for a considerable time. After a period of great churn leading to major dislocation of primary economic activity, there will be a balance imposed by realisation by ‘Indian’ authorities that, strategically, the requirement of troops and defensive/ offensive capability is more crucial along western, northern and eastern borders. Equally, that policing capabilities will be of critical value for maintaining control/ peace in the City States and Hinterlands. Safe-Passage Agreements for goods/ produce with warlord- and militia-controlled areas will, therefore, be of realpolitik value.
A further play of reality will come to emerge on account of protecting business and industry. There will be vast paramilitary commitment to protect business enclaves (including Economic Zones); factory sites; power plants; dams and waterways; highways and subsidiary roads. Urban policing will be more ‘militarised, with forces trained in urban warfare. The penal system will be among the first ‘infrastructure’ spaces to be upgraded. This is a natural progression in spaces that will have among the densest and most inequitable conditions on the planet.
There will be a growing incidence of urban and industrial areas controlled entirely by business in nominal partnership with administrators—a more concretised version of, for example, the system in Jamshedpur, which is run by the Jamshedpur Notified Area Committee, on which executives of the Tata Group and its nominees have representation, as does the Government of Jharkhand. (In this scenario, Jamshedpur will be over-run. The Tata Group and other businesses will have to sue for peace with militias.)
This realisation will be arrived at after a series of developments in relatively rapid succession in a matter of 5-15 years: a massive tribal uprising along central, eastern and southern areas as a reaction to large infusion of troops by India to protect mineral and related production areas. This will be managed by successors of present-day Maoists and newer left-wing militias that will ride on spontaneous outbursts and procurement of arms. After cities like Raipur, Jamshedpur and Nagpur are over-run by these militias, there will be strong public and business demands in other parts of India to impeach the administration of the day in New Delhi and demand a rethink of the Constitution, and insist on a new Charter of Unity.
A Proxy War with China
By this time, West Bengal would be under severe pressure to staunch the inward migration from Bangladesh; and Nepal would have imploded, leading to a proxy war there between China and India. Proxy wars would also have erupted between the two countries of Bhutan and Sikkim, leading to the increasing vulnerability of the so-called Chicken’s Neck region in West Bengal—for long the post-Partition gateway for India to its northeastern region, and the corridor to enable force projection against China in the eastern sector.
Waterway and roadway treaties signed with Bangladesh would have long-collapsed on account of turmoil in that country, leading to a squeeze in transit of goods and people from ‘Mainland’ India to Northeastern India.
This will lead the Northeast to effectively become another area of proxy war between China and India. While China will retain the advantage of a superior logistics position, India will attempt to use a counter-faction in Myanmar to supply proxy wars from western and southwestern Myanmar to retain control of the various tribal homelands in the present-day Northeast. Global opinion will ensure the conflict remains a non-nuclear one, bolstered by the heightened presence of Nato and Asean navies, air defence forces and troops in the Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean area.
As a concurrent development, there will be a move towards greater ‘nationalism’ and an accompanying consolidation of right-of-centre ideologies and politics—though not necessarily through present-day political approaches.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in its current form would lose meaning. The Congress would move closer to the right in its actions. The driving force of this shift will be a sense of survival—an ‘Indian-ness’ that has organically evolved since Partition in vast areas of the Republic of India, even as this sentiment/reality has fallen woefully short in other areas.
There will be greater elements of Hindu militancy, but in the overall scheme of things, this will be akin to a range of militant influences that will inevitably exist in crushed urban spaces—such as student factions professing ‘liberation’; radical Islamist cells; and suchlike.
Whichever way you choose to look at it, there is a tsunami brewing, and it will hit the country much before we are ready for it, given India’s present state of polity and governance.
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
1. The idea of a rash of Indian states is developed from the ‘India 2047’ project by Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi (India Today, August 15, 1997).
2. Data on the section on urban pressures is derived from India’s Urban Awakening: Building Inclusive Cities, Sustaining Economic Growth by Shirish Sankhe, Ireena Vittal, Ajit Mohan, et al, 2010; and Institute of Conflict Management, New Delhi.
3. Data on food security is derived from World Food Programme (wfp.org)
4. Some ideas have earlier been articulated in Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country, Sudeep Chakravarti, Penguin, 2008 & 2009); and ‘Root Cause’ columns by the author in the business newspaper Mint (livemint.com).
5. Jayant Sinha of Omidyar Network and Kesroli Group critiqued an early draft of the original paper prepared for Kesroli Group. ‘India’s Demographic Tsunami’ is his given title.
+++
Sudeep Chakravarti is an independent analyst of socio-political and security issues in South Asia; a futurist affiliated to the World Future Society, Maryland, USA; a columnist; and consultant to media, corporations and think-tanks. Also a writer of narrative non-fiction and fiction, he lives in Goa.
OLDER COMMENTS FIRST
7 COMMENTS
Permalink
A very, very important story.. unfortunately written in the driest, most EPWesque way possible.. so much so that I had trouble reading through (and not just because I am the child of a Google-enslaved era)
Anyway, I would urge the editors to do smaller, relevant stories on the issue of population explosion (god, 'explosion' seems to be an understatement) in India. And make them readable, please.
Thanks!
Permalink
Have gone through this shocking article. While I tend to agree with the fact that there are problems at hand which have the potential to spiral out of control but, this doomsday prediction seems more an imagination of fertile minds than reality.
Food security is the major issue facing a huge nation like ours but let us not discount the fact that a lot of other countries will be in need of productive manpower. This may lead to India becoming the human capital provider to the world.
The above article is an indication of the worst case scenario but then this group of highly intellectual individuals should also give out workable alternatives for the same to be prevented.
Instead of predictors of doomsday why can't people give options to prevent these scenarios
Permalink
Good job, this warning. Someone had to pop the Castle-in-the-Sky bubbledom that the Indian Elite lives in, and Open magazine has done it again.
Open is a very important magazine for this reason. It does not want to tell the Rich more tales of how they will be Richer Still in the years ahead thanks to liberalisation, FDI, blah blah blah. You keep attention focused on the Maoist crisis. Your only weakness is that you make no effort to analyse any of this in larger intellectual terms, so after a point, reading all these horror scenarios are a big drag.
What is this thing called Maoist ideology? Why does it have appeal? What are the intellectual positions for or against it in the red belt forests? Is China involved at all (intellectual patronage)? Essays on all this may be EPWish (to quote the commenter above), but we have had enough coverage of 'ground conditions' and all the bloodletting. We do not know how significant the threat of Maoism is in terms of whether it will gain adherents of the mind (rather than gun).
Permalink
PS: Have one small confusion. You state earlier on in the essay that India will achieve more "political maturity" in another 10-15 years, but later you also say the Congress Party will move rightwards, pushed by an "Indian-ness" you do not elaborate on but suggest will not be Hindutva because you also say that the BJP brand of politics will decline. So what are you talking about? An essay on that, perhaps, Sudeep?
Permalink
Are you mad? Lucky that I didnt subscribe ur magazine...
Permalink
On Mr Chakravarty's behalf, Mr Menon (commenter above, asking "are you mad?"), Let me assure you that sanity need not be determined by projecting a rosy pictures of India's future. In fact, we are now so accustomed to reading drivel about India's success and greatness (originates mostly from places where making India do as they say is strategically important to their own dominance) that we have forgotten that India is the world's largest home to the poor, and false portrays of India's success will only result in the country's ruination. Churchill said that India was not a country, it was just a geographical term, like the equator. The way to prove him wrong is not to believe the bullshit you are fed by the cheerleaders of our "success", but gain the courage to face the reality staring you in the face. We have failed our poor.
Permalink
Can't help but marvel at the flip side of "propensity for success". For some perspective rather than critique Sudeep for his brilliant effort, please refer the eight fold agrarian path at the newagrarian.com ;
AGRARIANISM 05.01.2008
The Eightfold Agrarian Way
The “Eightfold Agrarian Way” is an outline of an agrarian philosophy for the twenty-first century. It is both a catalog and a prescription: a catalog, because it began as an attempt to find the common ground in three thousand years of agrarian thought; a prescription, because I believe that the philosophy I found is as valid for the future as its first authors thought it for the past. But it is only a beginning, a starting point for further discussion and debate.
New Agrarianism, most importantly, is not about preserving a way of life or recreating the past; it is about building the future. These eight principles draw heavily on past expressions of agrarian thought, from ancient Greece to twentieth-century America, but they are not bound by them. Agrarians have few models but the past, and the past is valuable for the lessons it teaches, but each of us must live in the present and plan for the future.
New Agrarianism is about creating a new kind of rural community, one that is genuinely rural but that is fully a part of twenty-first century American society. The old ways don’t work any longer, as mid-size farmers and residents of dying towns have been slowly recognizing for decades. Large-scale commercial farms apply an industrial model to agriculture that is destructive to rural culture and community.
Sustainable agriculture is a beginning, but New Agrarianism is about more than agriculture. It is about a search for sustainable community, sustainable culture, sustainable life. A New Agrarian may not be a “family farmer,” nor a full-time farmer, nor even a farmer at all. Agriculture is not the only possible expression of agrarian values; many forms of craft or community building could be thought of as agrarian.
No philosophy can succeed if it applies only to a small minority within a society, and New Agrarianism is about deep, broad, long-term change. We live in a society that is majority urban, and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. New Agrarianism, creatively interpreted, could apply equally well to life in the city — to any life, in fact, that values connections with nature, with place, and with community.
A New Agrarian sees human life as a part of nature and believes that human and natural processes should be integrated.
An agrarian believes in, if not the primacy, then at least the uniqueness of agriculture among human endeavors.
A New Agrarian tends to be conservative in philosophical and practical terms, if not necessarily politically.
A New Agrarian believes in the worth of old-fashioned virtues, but also believes that one doesn’t have to be a prude about them.
A New Agrarian prefers informal means of social and economic organization to formal ones.
A New Agrarian strives to integrate the economic and spiritual aspects of his or her life.
A New Agrarian embraces “neighborliness” as a practical and informal balance between individualism and communitarianism.
A New Agrarian believes in the importance of place — that localities should be distinctive and that how one lives should be tied to where one lives.
1. A New Agrarian sees human life as a part of nature and believes that human and natural processes should be integrated.
To see human life as a part of nature means to believe that whatever humans do, wherever they go, they remain inextricably tied to natural processes and to the rest of the world, influenced by and influencing in turn the biology, geology, and climate of the planet. This does not mean that we should “go back” to nature, whatever that might entail; it means rather that we are already there. To see ourselves as separate from nature, let alone above it, is a conceit.
The traditional Judeo-Christian view, in which humans are the product of a separate creation and the remainder of creation is given for our dominion, to be disposed of as we see fit, fails to see human life as fully part of nature. But the view of most environmentalists fails just as badly, by supposing a “pristine” nature that existed before human occupation and that we can re-create in nature preserves or by believing that humans can minimize their “impact” on nature. Just as the conservative supposes that humans are superior to nature, the progressive supposes that we can live outside of it. To say that humans are a part of nature is not to deny the ways in which we differ from other animals or our responsibility as stewards; it is to recognize that when we steward the earth we are stewarding our own future as well.
The second half of the principle follows from the first. If we are a part of nature, it makes sense whenever possible to work with nature rather than against it. This does not mean that we should not make use of plants, animals, or natural formations and processes for our own ends–that is our own natural process, as it is the natural process of every other species on earth. It means rather that we should take advantage of natural processes for our own ends rather than defeating or circumventing them–ride piggyback on them, as it were, rather than trying to outrace them. To defeat natural processes is a form of violence that should be used as a last resort, in desperation only, not as a mode of daily living. Because humans are fundamentally part of nature, by such violence we will ultimately destroy ourselves.
A simple agricultural example is pest management: pesticide defeats nature by killing and destroying; organic methods, which focus on growing healthy plants less attractive to insects, take advantage of natural processes for human ends.
Another is hunting, which, despite the protests of environmentalists, is a natural process, one that humans, like countless other species, evolved to employ. (Dissenters may consult my cat.) It is thus superior in the agrarian view to industrial livestock operations, which defeat nature not by merely killing animals for food but by denying them the chance ever to live in the first place.
A note: This does not mean that humans must live in harmony with nature. Harmony is a word I would prefer to see stricken from the English language, save in reference to music. In reference to human affairs, it is absurdly optimistic, utopian, not reachable even as an ideal. To suggest that humans can live in harmony with one another or with nature is to flout human nature–and nature itself, for that matter. Life on earth is largely about struggle and conflict; it is in how we resolve conflicts that we demonstrate our character. Harmony may or may not await us in heaven, depending on your metaphysics. Meanwhile, it is dangerous, I believe, to take as one’s goal heaven on earth: it is an ideal doomed to frustration, and frustrated idealists too easily become cynics or hypocrites.
Agrarians know that they live in an earthly garden, not the Garden of Eden; they must accept nature as they find it and cannot take on ideals towards which they do not intend to work.
2. A New Agrarian believes in, if not the primacy, then at least the uniqueness of agriculture among human endeavors.
Agriculture, which is simply the production of food and fiber for human use by natural means, depends more closely on natural processes than any other human endeavor. It is dependent upon natural processes for its success, processes that remain outside human ontrol despite our attempts to reproduce or manage them — the weather, the life cycles of plants and animals, the workings of life on a cellular level.
To borrow an idea from Wendell Berry and countless others, while most human endeavors are linear processes, agriculture is cyclical. Manufacturing extracts resources from the earth and converts them to a new and permanent or semi-permanent form for human use. Recycling aside, those natural resources, once turned into a manufactured human process, never return to their natural state. Even in non-industrial societies, objects such as pottery, tools, and weapons may outlive their creators by millennia. The products of agriculture, by contrast — food, at least, if not fiber–are consumed and converted, via digestion and decay, back to their natural constituents–which are made, by other natural processes, into food for another season.
I should say that sustainable agriculture, at least, is cyclical. “Modern” agriculture is more likely to follow the one-way industrial model of production. A New Agrarian, believing that agriculture is and must be different from other human endeavors, believes in the need for sustainable agriculture.
The New Agrarian also believes that that it is both possible and desirable for some forms of manufacturing to take advantage of natural processes (see principle 1) and thus become more agrarian. But agriculture above all must work with nature rather than against it.
3. A New Agrarian tends to be conservative in philosophical and practical terms, if not necessarily politically.
Politically, many agrarian ideas would be radical, even revolutionary. Philosophically, however, a New Agrarian may be quite conservative, preferring the practical over the fantastic and the simple over the unnecessarily complex.
Forget, for a moment, the usual political meanings of “conservative” and “liberal.” Philosophically speaking, I think that a liberal is essentially optimistic about human nature while a conservative is essentially pessimistic. A liberal, in other words, believes that people are basically good; a conservative believes they are basically rotten, or at least highly corruptible. (What a liberal or conservative might choose to do about those beliefs is anyone’s guess; a conservative, for example, might believe that people are rotten and must be kept under control–or that people are rotten and therefore not fit to be put in charge of anyone else.)
A New Agrarian need not go so far in condemning human nature–optimists are more than welcome–but no pie-in-the-sky let’s-all-live-in-harmony crap (see principle 1) will be tolerated. An agrarian philosophy must begin with a realistic acceptance of human nature and of nature itself, and learn how to work within the world we inhabit.
Practical conservatism is easier to define. Although change is certainly not to be feared–a New Agrarian is not hidebound–it is also not to be valued merely for its own sake. When a problem has multiple solutions, the agrarian employs a workaday version of Occam’s Razor and chooses the simplest. The tool to use for a particular job is the best one for that job, and a new tool should be demonstrably better than the one it replaces, not merely newer. If a new tool or method or idea is demonstrably superior to the old one, however, it should be readily adopted. What is right for the New Agrarian is what works, so long as it is consistent with his or her values.
4. A New Agrarian believes in the worth of old-fashioned virtues, but also believes that one doesn’t have to be a prude about them.
There was a great deal of value in earlier systems of virtues. Industry, meaning the willingness and desire to work hard, is useful if one intends to get bread from the soil. Frugality means not a Scrooge-like forbearance of any petty luxury but a willingness at least to count to ten before embracing new extravagance and, I think, a refusal on principle to dispose lightly of creation. (For that reason, I cling to the traditional view of good Pennsylvania Dutch farmwives that bad cooking is a sin.) Temperance, in its original sense, means not to swear off liquor but simply to embrace moderation as a guide in all things, to put good sense ahead of momentary indulgence–to temper one’s desires, not to deny them entirely. All three are sensible guides for life in any time or place, not least so in a rural setting.
One does not, however, have to be a prude. There is far too much good in creation not to enjoy it, and far too much misery not to embrace the good while we have it. Every rural culture needs its festivals, its carnivals, its ferías, its periods of reckless abandon that revive and restore. And however much we may enjoy our work (or wish to), the struggles and irritations of daily life need food, beer and wine, music and dancing, and sex to make them bearable. Food and sex are good things; never let anyone tell you otherwise. It is only when they are removed from all social and cultural context, allowed to roam free as ends in themselves — think fast food or prostitution — that they risk becoming evils.
All things in moderation, says the New Agrarian — even excess.
5. A New Agrarian prefers informal means of social and economic organization to formal ones.
Agrarians abhor concentrations of power. This is nearly universal, whether it makes them politically conservative or liberal; some find concentration of political power more abhorrent, some concentration of economic power. But power corrupts, and New Agrarians detest all its forms equally. Concentration of political power withers free thought and voluntarism; concentration of economic power stifles initiative and innovation; concentration of military power enforces tyranny and breeds barbarism.
Yet New Agrarians recognize the need for order in a community or a society. They are not anarchists, wistfully though they may glance in that direction. People do and must live in groups, and they must make decisions about their collective future in some organized way. The New Agrarian prefers, however, an informal order based (ideally) on convention, courtesy, and cooperation, or (practically) a semi-formal “grass-roots” order that invites the contributions of all, accepts diversity rather than demanding consensus, and leaves room at the margins for dissent. Enforcement, too, should be as informal as possible, relying on community disapproval rather than force to maintain order. Being practical (see principle 3), New Agrarians recognize the need to “get things done,” but are unwilling to sacrifice diversity and innovation in the name of questionable progress.
6. A New Agrarian strives to integrate the economic and spiritual aspects of his or her life.
Modern society–or capitalist, industrial, postindustrial, postmodern, however you choose to categorize it–asks us to separate our work from the rest of our lives. Work and family, far from being integrated, compete for our attention. Home and workplace are separated not only psychologically but physically, requiring long and wasteful commutes. Worse, work is rarely expected to be personally meaningful in any way. Most of us are happy if our work does not too openly conflict with our values; that it could actually put our values into practice is nearly unthinkable.
The psychological and cultural damage done by this separation of the economic and spiritual aspects of our lives I will, for the moment, take to be self-evident. The New Agrarian believes that it is both possible and necessary to unite the two, to make our work both economically productive and spiritually satisfying. This is not an endorsement of the Protestant work ethic. The New Agrarian does not value work for its own sake, but values work to the extent that it produces something of value and to the extent that either the product or the process is spiritually rewarding. Work should be more than an exchange of labor for capital; it should have a positive personal, social, and cultural context.
This unity of the economic and the spiritual extends beyond work. We would be happier, the New Agrarian believes, if the food we ate came from land and people we knew or from our own labor, if our purchases reflected our beliefs, if the products of our labor remained in a community of which we were a part and might make that community stronger–in short, if every aspect our lives had a positive social or cultural context.
7. A New Agrarian embraces “neighborliness” as a practical and informal balance between individualism and communitarianism.
“You never have to bother to get people to help you move,” according to an old Pennsylvania Dutch saying. “If you were a good neighbor, they were always happy to help. If you were a bad neighbor, they help to be rid of you.”
New Agrarians recognize the need to help and be helped by their fellow human beings, but they may not necessarily be happy about it. They are inclined to individualism, to crankiness, to going their own way. As a result they reject overly communitarian notions of society or government–and anyone else who thinks to tell them what to do. This has often been a tendency among farmers, particularly in the United States; but among New Agrarians it is even stronger, because they are dissenters, minority voices insisting that their society is misguided but that they know the way.
Yet committed agrarians must see the need for some glue to hold a community together (see principle 5). In place of welfare or charity the agrarian substitutes neighborliness, an informal willingness to help someone in need with the unspoken assumption that help will be received in the future. In an agrarian context, time and not money is the common currency, and gifts of work not of cash are the basis of neighborliness.
8. A New Agrarian believes in the importance of place–that localities should be distinctive and that how one lives should be tied to where one lives.
The centrality of place to an agrarian way of life is so important that I could have listed it first, as the foundation of New Agrarian thought. I have chosen instead to express it as the culmination. Agriculture, if it is to be thoughtful and sustainable, must be sensitive to place, must let its methods be determined by the land to which they are applied. Informal and voluntary means of social organization are possible only when the individuals thus organized know one another and determine for themselves, locally, the shape of their organization. Large scales make concentration of power both necessary and possible. One can only unify life’s economic and spiritual sides on a small scale, locally and individually; to do it on a large scale would mean enforcing the spiritual beliefs of one person or group at the expense of everyone else.
But place is more than just a necessity of an agrarian way of life. It is a positive good in itself. To be not only sensitive to the place in which one lives but also a part of that place makes possible a deep, multifaceted integration with nature and with community. New Agrarians are interested in other places and eager to learn from and about them, but they do not spend their lives wandering the globe doing so. Each New Agrarian prefers to make his or her own place, neighborhood, community, locality all that it can be. The New Agrarian is neither cosmopolitan nor xenophobic, but embraces instead an “enlightened parochialism” that seeks to blend local tradition with thoughtful progress.
Calls for diversity too often forget diversity of place. The New Agrarian sees it as the foundation and the culmination of positive, meaningful life on earth.
There is no quid pro quo in neighborliness, no careful accounting of debits and credits in a ledger of favors; neighborliness is informal, voluntary, enforced only by community disapproval and, perhaps, by karma. Such a system is easily abused and requires great care to maintain. At its best, however, it creates a practical and flexible balance between the needs of the individual and the needs of the community. And being voluntary as well as necessary, it fosters a bond among members of a community that is both economic and spiritual.
Add your comment