Monday, October 24, 2005

Modern Agriculture and Left Dhimmi Fascism (5)


When we look at Modernity and the traditional world
we must ask ourselves about the concept of "natural." Closely associated with that is "authentic." In the usual sense, Modernity is neither natural nor authentic. It is not Natural because it is Rational. It is not authentic because it is alienated. there is an argument to be made that Modernity is not Real. That people who live in Modernity are cut off from Life, and live inauthentic lives that mean nothing because they are not a part of Life but only parts of an economic machine, of capitalism, a creation of inauthenticity that is itself fooling its supporters into thinking it's valid, paying them in worthless trinkets, destroying the Earth in the process, and wiping out the last vestiges of natural man in his state of authentic existence, doing so for the simple sake of enriching further the global capitalist machine and its conspiratorial benefactors. Our Left dhimmi intelligentsia follow the post-Marxist critique above. Unfortunately, so do most suburban middle class citizens of the West, unknowingly, naively, innocently. and if we don't clear up the confusion among our fellows we are going to lose the battle between our Modernity and the fascists of Islam and philobarbarist dhimmi Leftist reactionaries.

The question of the benefits of natural foods is not one of the benefits of natural foods. One may prefer on aesthetic grounds the organic lettuce at the village market over the Frankenstein food from Monsanto's "Terminator seeds" but that is not the nature of the question. The question is how one views Modernity. One must surely prefer natural food to science food, delicious food from the unpolluted soil to bio-engineered edible oil products foodstuffs. It's not what we eat, because peasant communities often starved to death throughout history; the question is how we view our world's progress from the state of pre-industrial times to the revolutions of Modernity. That divides us, and it is how we see that division, as good or as evil, that determines how we act in the crisis we now face.

Reason or revelation? From whence the Truth? Rational inquiry or feeling? Science or intuition? Progress or tradition? Man, state, and Mankind or family, clan, and tribe? Individuality or community? Private ownership of ones own life or the submission to the will of Allah? I or we?

We have to mix and match. Science, for example, without intuition produces clerks. Rationality without passion is psychopathic. Me without you is utter loneliness. But life without freedom is a living death, and that is the history on Mankind until the freeing revolutions of our glorious Modernity. They came about and went hand in hand with the rationalization of agriculture. Private property for all and enough to eat created free men and free women cut loose from the bonds of feudal slavery, freed from the restraints of superstition, free from the outrages of privilege. Man stood up; and now Man is being dragged down back to the dead soil.

When and why did Modernity arise? We posit that Modernity began roughly 500 years ago in Western Europe. Henry the VIII sacked the monasteries and created a counter-church in England; The Spanish sent explorers to find new routes to the East that would by-pass the Muslim trade routes; Roger Bacon invented eyeglasses; Descartes split the man into mind and body; Francis Bacon invented inductive reasoning; and Cromwell created a citizen army. Copernicus revolutionized the universe and Man's place therein. Gutenberg spread the word, and Luther preached it. These and hundreds of other men and women contributed to the main outlines of Modernity, but it was only with the idea of privatising land and rationalizing agriculture that made the revolutions of Modernity possible because it was then that men could eat properly, thanks to the greed of the few who demanded the right to keep their cash and to use it to further enrich themselves. The Earth lost its sentimental value in the hands of the greedy burghers and became a source of money. Lots of it. And in America, many could have their own land and make their won money and enrich themselves if they could. The modern man ripped and tore the Earth for all it was worth, and he killed those who would stop him, as we see in France in 1790. But not just for the new burghers. For all men, universally. Most people on the Earth then and today looked on in horror at the rise of the Machine and the Modern man. They saw the triumph of the unnatural, the inauthentic, the sterile and ungodly. To this day they wish to destroy it, to smash aeroplanes into it, to blow up those who go to work in trains, those who dance, those who are free from the land and the bondage of primitivism. there are the barbarians, and there are those who love them: the philobarbarists. They want to destroy all that we do, and they might succeed because we seem to be unsure of our right path. We question or place in the natural order of life, and we question our own authenticity, wondering if we've lost something good by losing touch with Nature.

Ivan T. Berend, History Derailed: Central and Eastern Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, writes of the new agriculture:

[A] miraculous change occurred between 1700 and 1800: England became able not only to feed twice as many people but also to produce enough fodder to feed three times as many horses. (Quoting Jones: 1967.)
However miraculous the change appeared, it was not sudden, for it was based on a gradual development of capitalistic agriculture, first in its genuine "laboratory," Holland, but then mostly in Britain. The long process of eliminating feudal landownership, serfdom, and communal farming and developing capitalist landownership, tenant farming, and yeomanry was the main achievement of British development between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries.... [In] the general Enclosure Act of 1801, peasants' strip fields were incorporated into big landowners' estate and the enclosed peasants became wage workers. This created a wage-earning class and with the emergence of a market system that led to a more advanced from of division of labour, laid the foundations for a major breakthrough. (p.10.)
We are witnessing above the beginnings of a social revolution the likes of which Mankind had never before dreamed or feared: the commercialisation of land and rationalization for the sake of profit as opposed to rent. The seeds planted are of freedom, and the growth of free men is now threatened with destruction by those who hate it, the reactionaries of the Left and Islam, of fascist Romance and Islam.

Dynamic technological innovations followed. Among them, the modern crop-rotation system.... The old method of preventing soil depletion through two- or three-field crop rotation meant that half or a third of the arable land remained fallow at any given time. Modern scientific crop rotation-- the so-called Townsend four-crop rotation... decreased fallow land dramatically. The more sophisticated Norfolk system used seventeen kinds of rotating crops, which successfully preserved and even enriched the soil, thanks to the nitrogen-fixing mechanism of the legumes. This single-innovation increased the area of cultivated land by at least one-third. Land amelioration also advanced tremendously. Manure, previously used for heating, was discovered to improve the soil. Drainage, canalization, and other methods of soil reclamation all contributed to higher yields. Improving farming equipment also increased productivity. Heavier, steel-tipped plows drawn by horses rather than oxen yielded 50 per cent faster and deeper plowing and better soil preparation. Other horse-drawn machinery also appeared.
[....]
According to some estimates, the yield of wheat per acre increased only from 8 bushels during the half-millennium before 1650. By 1800, however, the yield had increased to 20 bushels per acre, and the marketable surplus more than doubled, increasing output by roughly 50 per cent. Scientific farming resulted in another revolutionary innovation in animal husbandry: livestock, traditionally grazed in pastures, began to be kept in stables and fed new forage crops such as clover and turnips in the crop-rotation system. This way, farmers could avoid slaughtering a great part of their stock in wintertime, a necessity that had for centuries prevented an increase in animal stock. Consequently, herds sharply increased: during the seventeenth century, the average size of sheep flocks on farms in the upland region of Oxfordshire increased more than four times (Jones 1967.) The milk production of Dutch cows increased by three to four times during the second half of the eighteenth century.
As a unique consequence of these efficiencies, much of the agricultural labour force was released from farming and hence was ready to work in other branches of the economy. In the late seventeenth century, fully 60 per cent of the active population was engaged in agriculture in Britain. By the early 1800, this share had dropped to 30 per cent. (pp. 10-11.)

What we witness unfolding here is according to the Left dhimmi fascists the worst catastrophe to occur in Human times. One needn't look far to see the tragedies of the displacement of massive numbers of people from the settled idiocy of rural living and their crowding into vast and filthy, violent and fire-prone cities. Blake's "dark Satanic mills" employed children stuffed int chimneys, Dickens recounts his own childhood labouring in a bottle factory, and his contemporary, the missionary Henry Mayhew provides detailed statistics of the most minute and major horrors faced by London Labour, London Poor. Engels' Conditions of the English Workingclass would likely have horrified Zola writing Germinal, his novel on the conditions of French and Belgian coal miners in the 19th century. Even in the 20th century, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle is a narrative of revolting workingclass conditions in America. These stories are not the whole story of Modernity. For the Left dhimmi fascist they aren't even the real story. That story is the rise of Man from the land. It is that which they hate. It's the alienation of Man from his natural condition as an animal that the Left dhimmi fascist hates. It is his current inauthentic state of individualism and freedom from Nature that ruins the dhimmis's day. It's not Human suffering the fascist dhimmi is concerned about: It is Man's separation from the land that bothers him to the state of murder. There are good reasons for his reaction, and we will continue to open those reason up to inspection as we carry on in this blog's life.

Man's alienation from Nature and his resultant inauthenticity arises from his removal from the land due to the successes of modern agriculture. The removal from the land offends the fascist. He hates the mechanization, the creation of cities, the cold calculation of business, the mediocrity of money-making. He hates the logic of science, it's rationality. Look at Pol Pot, chairman Mao, Hitler: all drove men from the cities to die in rural dystopias. We will again and again return to this hatred of reason and cities to find fascism festering in the minds of the philobarbarist Romantic. And here, more from Berend, is what they hate:

The rise of Northwestern Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was also driven by a highly revolutionized science and philosophy, which evolved int a new zeitgeist. A widespread new concept of human society and the universe, a new value system and anew way of thinking, emerged in the West. The people of the age developed an unquestionable belief that reason and experience can uncover the laws of nature and society and facilitate the reorganization of societies.
The initiators of this scientific and ideological transformation from the mid seventeenth centuries were concentrated in Northwestern Europe, especially in the Netherlands, which attracted emigre philosophers; in Britain; and later in int eighteenth century, in France.
[....]
The Newtonian scientific weltanschuung changed people's ways of thinking about nature and society. It became a pillar, not only of Enlightenment scholarship, but of civil engineering.... [M]athematics became a practical tool for artisans in the early seventeenth century. Traders, merchants, seamen, and carpenters developed it more than academics did. (pp. 12-13.)

This is the rise of a new creature, the free man thinking for himself, enquiring about himself and his world, and finding he can think well indeed. but the resentment is there, too, in many. The hatred of change, the hatred of non-conformity, the hatred of seeing men who are born lesser than others rise to heights undreamed of. And those risen men, those giants, they are seen as mediocre, as mere mechanical and lifeless thinkers uprooted from the soil, living in unnatural cities, pursuing mere money, unheroic men, out of touch with nature and their places in the greater order.

The old order was collapsing. Berend quotes two of France's Enlightenment philosophers:

Montesquieu...attacked absolute power.... Political liberty cannot exist, he argued, "when the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body... there is no liberty, if the judiciary power be not separated from legislative and executive." Moreover, "the legislative power should reside in the whole body of the people" that can be represented by their delegates.... [And] Rousseau established an entirely new concept of legitimate power, stating that only the "state that [is] governed by laws...[and in] the the public interest... [has] legitimate government." (p. 15.)

Rational agriculture; rational law; rational man. The forces of reaction, the Counter-Enlightenment, the Left dhimmi fascists. Islam is the fascist's garbage proxy in our struggle today for control of our future.

In our next post we'll see what Berend writes of the Central Europeans under Muslim control in the Balkan areas, and we'll see the difference between Islam and Modernity.

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