progress and the land

7/27/2019 Progress and the Land

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Paul Kingsnorth

Progress and the landYou are a nimby, a reactionary and a Romantic idiot.

You want to go back to a Golden Age, in which you can play at living in prettified village

poverty because you have never experienced the real thing. You are a privileged, bourgeois

escapist. You dream of a prelapsarian rural idyll because you cant cope with the modernmulticultural, urban reality. You are a hypocrite. You are personally responsible for the misery

of a lot of poor people in Africa who need you to buy their beans. You need to get real. This is

the 21st century, and there is business to be done. There is poverty to eliminate, an economy to

expand, a planet to be saved. You are not helping by playing at being William Cobbett or

William Morris. Snap out of it. Grow up.

These are some of the things you can expect people to say to you if you dare to talk, today, aboutthe land. Specifically, if you are foolish enough to suggest that there may be anything positive

about rural life, about working the land, about land-based communities or about the possibly

simpler or more essential life it may represent, you can expect to call down a firestorm upon yourunsuspecting head.

I have written books and articles and given talks for a number of years which have touched onthese issues. I have told detailed stories from all over the world about the struggles of land-based

people against the forces which would dispossess them. I have tried to explain what makes those

people so attached to the land, and I have also tried to explain my own love of the countryside,my own small works on the land, my need get my hands dirty, and what I think we are losing aswe continue to concrete over the fields and lose our folk memory of the soil.

Every time I have done so, someone has popped up with at least one of the lines above.

Sometimes it is said in mockery, sometimes in anger. Sometimes I have sensed that the accuser

feels some personal slight has been done to them. The phrases are so similar, so often, from somany different people, that they are clearly not the original thoughts of those who peddle them.

This is received wisdom, passed down over generations; a curiously Pavlovian reaction. The

assumptions behind it are clear: city good, country bad; city modern, country backward;

consumption modern, production antiquated; progress good, always and forever.

This kind of thing is not new. Seventy years ago, in the viciously entertaining second section of

his English travelogue The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell provided a critique of preciselythe same kind of nonsense. Orwell was a socialist, but he was an idiosyncratic one, and one of

the many complaints he airs about socialism in Wigan Pier is its incessant, dehumanising

machine worship. Orwell detected it wasnt hard to detect the extreme hostility of socialismtowards the land and the people who belonged to it. The land, it was clear, represented the past.

It represented reaction, smallness and stasis, inequality, feudalism and drudgery. In contrast, the
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urban, machine civilisation which Orwell both loathed and was impressed by represented a

bright, shining, necessary future. Orwells description of what happens when a challenge is

issued to a vulgar machine worshipper is worth quoting at length, because it could have beenwritten yesterday:

In the first place he will tell you that it is impossible to go back (or to put back the hand ofprogressas though the hand of progress hadnt been pretty violently put back several times in

human history!), and will then accuse you of being a medievalist and begin to descant upon the

horrors of the Middle Ages, leprosy, the Inquisition, etc. As a matter of fact, most attacks uponthe Middle Ages and the past generally by apologists of modernity are beside the point, because

their essential trick is to project a modern man, with his squeamishness and his high standards

of comfort, into an age when such things were unheard of. But notice that in any case this is not

an answer. For a dislike of the mechanized future does not imply the smallest reverence for anyperiod of the past When one pictures a desirable civilization, one pictures it merely as an

objective; there is no need to pretend that it has ever existed in space and time. Press this point

home, explain that you wish to aim at making life simpler and harder instead of softer and more

complex, and the Socialistwill usually assume that you want to revert to a state ofnaturemeaning some stinking Paleolithic cave: as though there were nothing between a flint

scraper and the steel mills of Sheffield, or between a skin coracle and the Queen Mary!

What is striking about this passage is that not only the arguments but the language they are

couched in have undergone little change in seven decades. What has changed is that it is not just

socialists who adopt this line now, but people from across the political spectrum. Try proposing asimpler life today; try suggesting that economic growth might be in some way not the panacea

it is claimed; try questioning the value of the internet or suggesting that we should scale back our

material lusts in any way. Within ten seconds you will be accused of wearing a hair shirt;

another five will see you accused of wanting to make everyone live in caves. Persist and youllbe compared to Pol Pot orif the accuser has even less imaginationHitler (he was a

vegetarian, you know.)

What is happening here, and why? Why does a love of or an attachment to the land or the

countryside elicit such strong and negative reactions in so many people? I think that we can bestuncover the origins of this attitude by taking a step back and examining the assumptions that

govern the civilisation we are currently living in. Every civilisation has its founding myths,

whether it likes to admit it or not, and ours is what we might call the progressive narrative. Since

the Enlightenment, this particular version of the human story has been pretty much all-conquering, certainly in the West where it originated, and increasingly in the wider world too. It

is a story as simple and powerful as the religious myths which it supplanted and upon which it is

parasitical.

Humanity, it tells us, started off grunting in the primeval swamps and will end up conquering the

stars. Each generation will experience better lives than the one before, thanks to the machine

civilisation we have built to cocoon us. Soon this will allow us to abolish poverty, stabilise andmanage our environment, extend US-style representative democracy to everyone on Earth and

create a global civilisation where everyone has access to Twitter, Starbucks and the Universal

Declaration of Human Rights.


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This is a caricatured but reasonably accurate version of the progressive narrative. It tells us that

things will always get better, and that if we work hard we can have everything. It is a powerful

and appealing story. For this reason, it is embedded deep in our culture, and you can hear itrising, unexamined, from the depths every day, through the mouths of politicians, journalists,

teachers, scientistspretty much all of us.

Implicit in this myth, and essential to it, is the idea that progress requires an escape from the

land. In the soil, in the woods and the fields and the moors and the mountains, lurks a dirty,

frightening and very un-progressive barbarism. The countryside is the home of murky customs,superstitions, witches, inbreeding, foxhunting and Tory MPs. Note how the word peasant,

which in its literal sense simply means small farmer, has become a term of abuse. Karl Marx, the

ultimate progressive (and a metropolitan social climber on the quiet) talked scornfully of the

peasant populations of Europe, mired in the idiocy of rural life. Revolution, he thought, wouldrescue them, by force if need be, from this slough of despond, corralling them into the factories

where they could be more useful.

The political left has always fetished the progressive, urban narrative. Traditionally they wereopposed in this by a conservative, often rural, right, who stood for king, country and the land

(much of which they owned.) Today, though, the progressive narrative has crossed politicalboundaries, broken them down and gleefully trampled upon them. These days, everyone from

socialists to environmentalists to David Cameron is a progressive, and the future is urban,

consumerist, fast-moving and mediated. There is no place for the land, for that might require us

to slow down, look around us, understand where we are, see ourselves as part of a web ratherthan as free-floating individuals taking their pleasure where they can. It might remind us of

where we came from and what we really are, and the consequences of that are too frightening to

contemplate.

The progressive narrative propagates a number of fantasies about the way the world is, but oneof the most pernicious is that everywhere is essentially the same. Places dont matter, individualhuman beings are free-floating entities, the same wherever they are brought up, detached from

the land, consumers in a global mall: citizens of nowhere. This is the point at which the left and

the right seamlessly meld into one. Leftists have long nurtured a vision of a world in whichboundaries are done away with, religion is dead, and we are all global citizens. Meanwhile, the

neoliberal right nurse their own dreams of a borderless world of free-floating capital, a global

market in which money is the arbiter of value.

Today, these two dreams have become one, though neither side will admit it. The longed-for One

World is rapidly approaching, and it is a world of increasing subservience to the machine. It is

also a world of Change, with a capital C. In the progressive narrative, change is the onlyconstant. Continuity, stability, the simple act of standing stillall are looked on with suspicion.

Attachment to place, locality, tradition and culture are tantamount to fascism. Look at the

election slogans of any politician anywhere in the world, allegedly left or supposedly right, and

there it is: Change. A slogan we can all do business with. This, of course, is not new either. Marxand Engels pinned its inevitability down over 150 years ago in the Communist Manifesto:


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Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions,

everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All

fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are

swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solidmelts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses

his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.

Marx and Engels thought all this was rather good. Constant revolution suited them fine; what

they were concerned about was who got the spoils. Today, that argument rumbles on, but theobsession with change is even more deeply embedded. Ethnologist Ullrich Kockel, Professor of

Ethnology and Folk Life at the University of Ulster, has been studying land-based communities

around the world for decades. In that time he has come up time and again against the dogma of

progress-at-all-costs and its corollary: a contempt for the land and its backward people. In hisrecent inaugural address to the university he lambasted this worldview, which he sees not only in

politicians and the media but in unthinkingly right-on academics who ought to know better:

Any positive evaluation of the past, and any analysis emphasising continuity over change isbranded as indicative of reactionary politics, emotional regression, or both: an irrational

scramble for shelter from the vagaries of the modern world. This diagnosis has become so

commonplace and deep-seated that anyone daring to challenge it would find themselvesimmediately relegated to the same politico-cultural sickbed. Under no circumstances must one

look for continuities (unless one wants to be seen as emotionally retreating into a fantasy Golden

Age).

Change, in other words, is the only constant. From Barack Obama to David Cameron, progress,

and its modern sub-narratives growth and development, is the only dish presented to us. Andbecause we must all abhor stasis, we must abhor the land. For what is more stolid, unchanging

and symbolic of the terrible, squalid past than mud, trees, and rivers? And who is more likely tostand in the way of growth, progress and the machine than the foolish, reactionary romantic doltswho persist in staying attached to it?

This is the attitude that has led, and continues to lead, to the destruction of land all over theworld, and of the forced dispersal of people who remain attached to it. The religion of progress

decrees that we should all become part of the mediated, virtual world of happy urban consumers.

But some people persist in not being interested. Small farmers are not big consumers. Peasantsare not much interested in voting. Tribal people would rather hunt and fish than let a PLC dig for

bauxite under their ancestral forests.

And this is their doom. Consider Stalins forced farm collectivisation, or the slaughter of tribalpeoples from Indonesia to the Amazon. Consider the tens of thousands forced from their homes

by bulldozers in India to make way for dams to fuel the growing cities. Consider the North

American Free Trade Agreement, which destroyed the livelihoods of Mexican peasants for thebenefit of US agribusiness. Consider the ongoing concreting of countryside in rich countries like

Britain, where farmers still haemorrhage from the land.


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All over the world, people are being forced from their land in the name of the Machine. We

rarely hear their stories. What we hear instead is an unceasing diet of progress-is-good-for-them

propaganda, which differs little from Victorian lectures about the White Mans Burden and theneed to bring civilisation to the savages. Poor, unhappy peasants, we are told, long to leave their

scrappy rural lives for the big cities. Our duty is to help them do it, by means of development and

growth.

Stories that do not fit this narrative tend not to make the light of day. Some years back I spent

time with peasant farmers in Brazil, who were part of the Movimento Sem Terra, or landlessworkers movement. The Sem Terra are peasants without land. Often they have been forced from

their land; sometimes they have left it to go to the cities, then changed their minds when they

saw the reality of urban life. Now the Sem Terra is the worlds biggest social movement, and it is

made up entirely of poor, small farmers whose wish is not for jobs in call centres but for land.They get it by force, occupying the unused estates of rich landowners. The successful Sem Terra

I spoke to had never been happier; the land was where they wanted to be.

A similar tale can be heard in India. India, we hear in the media almost every day, is a thrusting,modern success story; a land of Microsoft and call centres and dynamism and growth. But more

than all this, India is a land of farmers. The progressive narrative expects them to leave theirpointless little farms and get with the urban programme. But many of them have other ideas.

Vast farmers movements have arisen in India in recent decades, counting millions amongst their

numbers. They have invaded the offices of multinational seed companies, built bonfires of

genetically-modified crops and undertaken marches, hundreds of thousands strong, across thecountry. All this for the right to continue to farm; to continue to stay on the land, despite the

efforts of the progressive classes to force them off.

Stories like this come in from all over the world, every day, if you know where to look. You may

have read, for example, one of the gazillions of pieces in the mainstream media over the last fewyears about how many Chinese people are leaving the land and flooding into the cities. Therewere far fewer stories explaining how last year more people left the cities to return to the

countryside. In fact, to my knowledge, there were none. Its not the story were supposed to be

hearing. The continued existence, and often resistance, of land-based communities is a two-fingered salute to the dogma which requires us to believe that everyone everywhere, given half

the chance, would thrown down their hoes for a job in a Motorola factory.

All of this gives us, in the rich world, food for thought. In my young days, I used to think that

the system could be smashed with revolution and resistance and the likethe time-honoured

tools of the excitable political radical. I dont believe that anymore. I dont really believe that the

system can be smashed at all. But Im pretty sure it is beginning to crumble by itself, as the mythof progress hits the buffers of reality. The economic woes that have shaken the whole machine

over the past eighteen months are as nothing to the ecological woes that are unfolding, as the

climate and the soil itself shiver beneath the force of our delusions. The world, it seems, cannot

take much more progress of this kind. It has been calculated, for example (and by real scientists,not by troublemaking eco-hippies) that if the global economy grows at an average rate of 3% for

the next twenty years, we will consume in that period resources equivalent to all those consumed

since humanity first evolved. Something, clearly, is going to have to give.


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George Orwell, finally, concluded that progress and reaction have both turned out to be

swindles. He was right about that, and every year it becomes clearer. But what remains? To

Orwell, the answer seemed a despairing one: quietism robbing reality of its terrors by simply

submitting to it. But there is, it seems to me, another way. To put a spanner in the works ofthe

progressive narrative, to foul up the machine in your own small way, the best course of action is

simply to stand your ground. What really gets in the way of all this change, progress,development and other euphemisms for destruction and profit is grounded people who knowtheir place, in the physical sense, and are prepared to fight for it if they have to.

To belong to a piece of land, to know it and be able to work it, to walk it until you know what it

wants, is a lifetimes work. To do such a thing, or even attempt it, is to slow down, breathe more

deeply, spend less time in front of screens and more in the sun and rain. To get your hands dirty,

to grow your own food, to provide for yourself and your family, to stand your ground, know yourplace all of this is to commit an open heresy against the ossifying religion of progress. In an

increasingly placeless, rootless world, the best way to resist is to digand the best way to rebel

is to belong.

progress and the land

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