Spirit in Action
The Triumph of Technique: The Industrialization of Agriculture & The Destruction of Rural America
Dan Dieterich is a founding member of ICE - Interfaith Community for the Earth, an organization formed to fight global warming and promote ecological well-beling. ICE is a member of Wisconsin Interfaith Power & Light. Working at the local level, ICE is a good example of how a small group of folks can harness their energy, in community, to bring about the big changes our world needs.
- Broadcast on:
- 12 Aug 2012
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- other
[music] ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And my lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmead. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ If you're a regular listener of Spirit in Action, you'll have had the pleasure of hearing some of the fruits of today's guest when he sat in for me a couple months ago sharing interviews he had done around the Pine Ridge Reservation and Wounded Knee. Robert Wolfe is a talented writer, researcher, and, and this lifts his other skills well above the crowd, a philosopher. He has written and edited some 18 books, but what we'll be focusing on today is the triumph of technique, the industrialization of agriculture and the destruction of rural America. A deep look into the dysfunction along with the roots of the dysfunction that is pushing our culture and country over a cliff. Robert Wolfe joins us by phone from Northeast Iowa. Robert, it's so good to have you here today for Spirit in Action. Thank you, Mark, for having me. I'd say welcome to Spirit in Action, but in fact, you sat in for me one time talking about the reservation and your interviews. Can you say a little bit about the American Mosaic radio program that you do? Right. We feature stories that are written by people in writing workshops that I have developed around the country. I've been doing this for about 24 years. It began with a project for the homeless in Nashville that went on for two and a half years, and we published six little books, check books, by the homeless. And then I moved on to Iowa, where we live now, and I began working with farmers and small town residents, and eventually this project just spread all over the country so that I have been running workshops in New Mexico and down in the Mississippi Delta in New York City in Chicago, trying to create a composite portrait of America by regions, and these books are published by, and the workshops are done through Free River Press, which is a nonprofit I set up about 24 years ago. And American Mosaic was, at first, an attempt to bring these stories to the radio in order to really promote the sale of the books, but it became an end in itself, and I think that I actually prefer the radio simply because we have the writers themselves in their own words, their own voice, telling their reading their stories. And the show now runs in about 12 states, I believe. And what's the purpose of this? You're trying to get people's voice. Why is that important in our modern society? You know, that's yesterday. That was so five seconds ago. Yeah, we're fragmenting at an enormous rate. I mean, we're divided as a country as a people. I'm not sure that there's an American consciousness anymore. I think the strength and the importance of the radio program is to bring an awareness, a gut awareness of what they really do know intellectually somehow up there, that people share the same common problems we have grown up on a goat farm in the mountains of New Mexico. But what you went through as a kid is very similar in a lot of ways to what a kid in New York City or Chicago face and so forth with a host of other problems and thoughts and life experience. I want this show to stress commonality rather than difference and to begin to help develop an American consciousness. And by the way, a lot of my heroes in literature are from the 1920s. People like Van Wicke Brooks and Lewis Mumford and Sherwood Anderson and Paul Rosenfeld guys who were, they were centered in New York City. They didn't necessarily all come from there. But during the 20s, they were there and they were really trying to help through their writings develop an American consciousness. And this is also what I'm trying to do with an online book that I'm writing now called A Search for America. And it's just based on the fact that I traveled a lot in this country. I've lived in a lot of different places. I've lived in 10 states that have had lengthy sojourns and others. All with the point of discovering when I was a kid, when I was 16 years old, I decided I wanted to discover the American soul. I thought it was such a thing. So I went out in search of it. And I ended up working on a cattle ranch. I was a surveyor. I talked biology and a Brooklyn ghetto school for girls. I talked in Mexico schools. I was a columnist for the Chicago Tribune. I wrote theater reviews. I wrote plays. I just did a whole variety of things, more jobs than I can list right now. And that was all an attempt to get to know people. So that's what this is called A Search for America. And it's an ongoing work that eventually publishes an ebook. But it's this passion of mine to understand America underlies all this work of mine that I've been doing. You know, I want to ask you a little bit about your personal background there, Robert. But first, this search for the American identity, American consciousness, as you put it, I've got two comments or questions. One is, don't we already know what the American consciousness is? Isn't it corporate America? I'm afraid that's number one. But number two, if we get a strong American consciousness, how is this different from the nationalism which can turn so much into, you know, God bless America and forget the rest of the world? Yeah, well, the first point, unfortunately, corporate America exerts an enormous control over how we think, what we think about, what we want, what we want to do. And it points up a negative aspect of American life that I've noticed over the years, you seem to become more mechanical. I know even going back to the 1930s, Lewis Mumford, who's referring to mass man, who seem to want to be part of groups. I mean, humanity always has it, to want to be identified with a group. But it seems that we're so surrounded by technology. Every facet of our lives is impacted by technology that we have eventually, it seems to me, many of us have almost like implanted it in ourselves. So we have become very machine-like, we're highly conditioned people. Nevertheless, maybe we never will get an American consciousness back again. And maybe that the best we can do is to get a regional consciousness. Working for that assiduously very hard here where I live and you live in the Driftless region, which is southeast Minnesota, southwest Wisconsin, with a little bit of northwest Illinois thrown in. We can identify with our topography, which is this hilly country with valleys, coolies, more and more people in the Driftless region, consider themselves residents of the Driftless region as much as or more so as residents of Iowa or Wisconsin or Minnesota and so on. So I think that our region has as good a chance of getting self-reliant and of making it through in some kind of decent way for the next crash, which I think is coming. I want to go back to the second question that you asked. And that was, can this national consciousness become nationalism? And yes, of course, it can easily become that. It can become something very frightening. But I'm looking at it somewhat idealistically through the eyes, let's say of Carl Sandberg or Rachel Lindsay or the painter Thomas Hart Benton, who were just literally celebrating various facets of American life, like Walt Whitman. I mean, those are my heroes. Those are the people who I admire. I mean, there are others, but they're the most public examples of what we can be and the spirit that I hope that maybe more of us can bring into ourselves and bring into our lives. Let's talk a little bit, Robert, about your background. You say you left home at 16 out on this quest. I've read in your books on American Mosaic and Triumph of Technique. I've read a little bit about your personal journey and you're talking about hitchhiking or jumping trains, doing all those things that people maybe associate with long bygone traditions. I don't think it's so easy to get on trains these days, for instance. But you did this stage of 16, number one, were you just that precocious? Number two, who were you imitating when you took off at 16? All right, Carl Sandberg. I mean, I'd read Sandberg's autobiography, "All the Young Strangers." I think by that time I'd read some of Kerouac on the road and the Dharma Bums. I'd even read "Burr Lives" autobiography, and during the depression, he'd been writing freight cars. And Doss Passos, in his book USA, has one of his characters, Mac, who writes freight cars. I had ingested all of this. I was listening to jazz. I remember when I was 16 years old and wanting to hitchhike, I had maps of the US in various states spread out in the living room floor. And I'm looking at routes going west, and I'm listening to "Birth of the Cool." The Miles Davis Breakthrough album back in 1949. So jazz was a big part of it, too. There was an energy at that time that I felt that it was in some of the literature. It was on this great TV show, Route 66, if you remember that. So in that sense, yeah, I was precocious. And very, very much wanted to get out of my hometown, which was New Canaan, which was a very stultifying, very conformist, non-tolerant community. And if it hadn't been for New Canaan, which was, by the way, that was a community where the men commuted to New York. They were, I guess, helping run the American Empire and their lives, the lives of the people there were, in fact, very mechanical. You see the men lining the station platform waiting in the train to come in every day. They're pretty much dressed identically in suits and hats, and they're all reading the New York Times in the morning. They'd on the return train in the evening, they're reading the Herald Tribune. The wives picked them up to the station. They'd take them home from the station. Kids were supposed to be perfect, looked good. So it was a very conformist, very confining town and society, and that, if it hadn't been for that, I don't think I would have broken away so soon. So it was, in a sense, it was good for me to be there, and I'd been able to judge a lot of societies by the restrictions and narrowness of New Canaan. And at the same time, in a lot of ways, very naive, still immature, but very naive, and I didn't when I went out and started beginning to absorb all this experience around the country, I wasn't judging people. I just realized that. And I just was absorbing and just absorbed for decades. Did you get degrees long way? You must have settled down, and if you were teaching biology and you got credentials to teach writing. Yeah, I was in and out of college until I was 24 and got my degree, and then a decade after that, I went back and got a masters at the University of Chicago. But I got my undergraduate degree at Columbia in New York with two years at St. John's in Santa Fe, the Great Book School. Well, what I mainly want to talk about today is the ideas material that you include in the book, The Triumph of Technique, the Industrialization of Agriculture and the Destruction of Rural America. Overall, I would say that this is a philosophical look at the progress of our world culture, and particularly how it manifests in the USA. You start with idealism and realism philosophies from way long ago, and why don't you tell folks what realism is and about its transition to empiricism so we can get people on the same page? Realism would be the equivalent of Plato's idealism, that there are immaterial archetypes for things and ideas. And in the Middle Ages, realism was opposed to nominalism, which was the philosophy that said that ideas are just, they exist in the mind, they're human constructs. So they're very different, and with realists then say that reality is transcendent. For me, and I am a Platonist, I mean I do believe that ideas, they're like emanations from God. So there's that rootedness, but when you come to nominalism and the idea that ideas are human constructs, then the weight of reality is shipped away from the transcendent to the material to this world here. And then that paves the way for all sorts of scientific investigations because there's a greater interest in what's going on here. And so finally, yes, we come to empiricism. And the idea that the only reality is to hear it now and everything has to be tested in order to prove it has to be provable in a very practical hands-on sense, whether it's with scientific instruments or literally with the human hands or whatever. And eventually, I mean, I'm missing out on all kinds of causes, but eventually it's not long before God just disappears from the scene altogether. I mean, he becomes, during the enlightenment, just as we know, the clockmaker, the image of the clockmaker is one that's brought up time. And again, the deists of the enlightenment felt that God, once he got the universe going, it wound up the clock, he kind of stepped aside, he's off the stage. There's no more presence of God within the material world. So eventually, this God, too, disappears as science gains more and more credence, and people begin to think that science can explain virtually anything and everything. There's absolutely no need for God, and the whole idea of God is scoffed at, or the idea of a creator. It becomes an object of derision. I don't care to talk to many people about my beliefs simply because when they hear the word God, they immediately think of the God of the Old Testament. A rather childish idiot who's self-centered and just smashes people for very trivial reasons. Of course, if you espoused these ideas today, you pretty easily get shouted down. Now, your book doesn't talk, and I think you maybe include the word God in there a couple times. So you're not talking about a specific metaphysical belief or anything like that. You're well documented in the triumph of technique. Still, as soon as you start talking about, shall we say, the good old days back before the Enlightenment and so on, I'm sure a lot of people close down their minds to you right away. Have you had that reaction? I don't even, there are very few people I'll bring it up with. I mean, oddly enough, now we're doing it on radio, so lots of people are going to hear. But I don't think most people have the intellectual apparatus now or the interest. So I just basically don't talk about it. I'll write about it, but these conversations just don't come up anymore. You speak in the book about some of the transitions that we've gone through in our society, including the steps through empiricism and the various parts that got us there through the Enlightenment and what we're at today in this increasing mechanization of our ideas. I'm thinking we see everything mechanistically. I don't think that you're attracted to these ideas that you're espousing simply because they're nice ideas from way back when. I'm assuming that you see them as having very, very strong, important impacts on how we live and what our life is worth here today. Is that fair to say? Is that a good characterization? Absolutely. I think it was in the conclusion of the book. I quoted a paraphrase, Dostoevsky, who said, "Without God, all things are possible." And I think that's precisely what we see happening today. I think the lid has been taken off. There's no moral center. There's extreme relativism. I just see everything from bad manners to torture. We justify torturing people all over the world. Because it serves our practical desires. Or the desires and the so-called needs of the people who run the corporations. I think increasingly Americans are becoming to realize that it's the corporations and the heads of corporations who are really dictating American policy at home and abroad. That our politicians are nothing more than servants for these corporate heads. You know, I'd like, Robert, if you gave me some more of the practical examples, like torture. Because we have no moral base. It's all relative. We don't have any way to make decisions other than maybe what, you know, the bottom line. That's all we care about from what the finances are. Can you give more examples? Just point out how this breakdown affects society that was motivational for you. Yeah. I mean, here's perhaps a trivial example, but maybe it isn't. The degradation of language. I think Clint Eastwood was the first person to make the A-word a popular word in his movies. And I think we saw the degradation of language through other films. And so people would talk brutally to one another. And this became common. And it seeped down into our daily intercourse. I mean, just the other day, I was walking down the street and there's one person trying to park a pickup and there's two young girls in the car behind. And a person to pick up is taking longer than the girl wants. And she's saying, "Learn to drive, bitch." And she's yelling that. I mean, it's like Tom on discourse. I mean, there is no manners or just, I don't know what they are anymore. When they exist, we use them if we think we can get something from somebody otherwise, forget them. So civility is gone. I think if we have another meltdown, well, okay, you want another practical example. No accountability. These guys on Wall Street, who not only ruined the lives of who knows how many, hundreds of thousands, perhaps even a million or more people in this country, through their speculation, which caused the real estate collapse, and spread across the world. And they were selling their swaps and whatever, to Greece and perhaps other countries. It caused this worldwide financial collapse. None of them have gone to jail. No one who commits torture goes to jail, which took away A.B.S. Corpus and Obama has not reinstated A.B.S. Corpus. I think people are so angry now because there are no rules. I don't think there are any rules. We've seen the law scoffed at. You see, if you're rich, you can get away with anything. So when we see that the very rich are getting away cheating on their income tax and doing this and that, then why can't I do it? Why can't I, Joe, the barber or whatever do it? Or if Clint Eastwood is a cool dude and he can use this kind of language and that kind of language, so can I. That makes me cool. And then all kinds of just barriers break down and relationships disintegrate. I mean, this is in the Indian, the Vedic terminology, this is the Kali Yuga. The Yuga being a cycle of time and the Kali is the goddess of destruction. We're in the Kali Yuga. The Greeks call the Iron Age, the age of degeneration. And it's just families fly apart. As Yeh said, the center does not hold. And if there is no center, if there is no God, I have nothing to guide me. It's just only whim and whatever satisfies my desires or my needs at the moment. That's what's uppermost. There are no restraints. Except if I think it's even for me to conceal my behavior in order to get what I want from so-and-so. So when you quote Dostoevsky without God, all things are possible, you're quoting that in a negative sense. Whereas I imagine most people think of it as a positive sense. Oh, so we don't have the clergy holding us down, telling us that we're sinners and that we better obey them. A lot of people say, well, good riddance to that kind of control from God. This may be a useless detour, but what do you think of the Occupy movement? I don't know where it is now. I don't hear anything more about it. That doesn't mean it's disappeared, but they did not have, at least I saw a program. There may have been some people who were trying to develop. I think I did see on front line, there was a former Wall Street monkey muck who decided what she was doing was immoral. And she went to help draft some legislation with Occupy. But I don't see it as a general rule. I was asked by the local Occupy people to come and talk to them. And I did say that I felt that wasn't enough to demonstrate that we had to embrace regionalism. We had to embrace economic decentralization to try to get our regions, once we defined what our regions were, to get them as self-reliant and self-sufficient as possible. If you can't win the economic game that's being played, you better stop playing it and create your own game with its own rules, because the rules that you're living by now are ultimately going to defeat you. Hence, we have the local foods movement, we have a growing local and regional energy movement. Things of this nature need to be developed if we're going to avoid utter calamity in my view. I don't see any break on, for example, speculation. As long as there are no restrictions on Wall Street speculation, these guys, they're not changing their nature. They're just going to look for more money and they're going to do whatever they can do to get it. I just see inevitably another big time crash. And we, especially in rural America, better get our act together. We're in a better position than the people in the cities. I don't see how the cities are going to survive. I mean, I just have this apocalyptic vision. Yeah, I just heard recently that most cities, if the system collapses, that within cities, they've got maybe four or five days of food. And then that's when the famine hits in the cities. Out in the country, you have access to some real food and other stuff that'll give you life. Well, unfortunately, you know, there aren't enough people that's growing. Local gardens, home gardens are growing, but unfortunately, not enough people in rural America are growing their own food. But I think this is something that is growing. It's burgeoning. I think we'll see more of it because more people in rural America are rising up to what's happening. And I think we were ahead of the folks in the cities, you know, long before the city people thought that there was any possibility of collapse. We in rural America were well aware of it because we knew how dependent we were on urban financing. Our farmers' experiences collapsed in the '80s. We went through the farm crisis, which is still going on, and it was generated in urban areas. So I think we're aware of the fragility of the system long before urbanites woke up to it. You're listening to Spirit and Action. I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeet, for this Northern Spirit Radio production. My website, northernspiritradio.org, and on there you'll find seven years of archives of my Spirit and Action and Song of the Soul program. You can find links to our guests, like the one we have with us today, Robert Wolfe. He's author of a book, The Triumph of Technique, the Industrialization of Agriculture and the Destruction of Rural America. And when I say that one book, you might think, okay, that's his total production. No, there's at least 28 books, anthologies out there, including things like violence in the Promised Land, witnessing the conflict in the Middle East, Story Jazz, a history of Chicago Jazz Styles, an American mosaic, frozen poetry by everyday folk. So there's lots of resources. You want to find out about Free River Press, and you can follow the link from northernspiritradio.org. And while you're on the site, please drop us a comment. You can make a donation, help us connect with you, and help this vision go forward. Again, Robert Wolfe is with us here today. And the book that I want to concentrate on today is The Triumph of Technique, The Philosophical Framework, which he offers us for looking at the world, is the antidote to the corporate American approach that's been going forward for a number of years now. Let's get into some of the specifics of that, Robert. One of the things that I was fascinated to observe in the book, and I hadn't thought about it nearly enough, my ideas had glanced off of it before. But you said that one of the big, I think it's a moral evil, that emerged over the past millennium, is the merchant class that previous to maybe the 13th century, the merchant class was held pretty much in disrepute by everyone. I think that's why Jews, as a matter of fact, that was one of the few professions they were allowed to have in Christian controlled areas. So, the merchant class as a source of the problem here. Am I overstating that? Not at all, not at all. Now, in all traditional societies, merchants were looked down on because they did not produce anything. They were simply the middlemen. And in traditional societies, you made things, whether it was a pod or you nourished something. You grew crops. So, when you made or nourished something, you were imitating God the maker. And we were intended to make our living by the sweat of our brows. But the merchant, on the other hand, makes us living off the sweat of someone else's brows. So, the merchant was always looked down on, you'll find plenty of that in Aristotle and Plato. So, as technique develops, trade improves, trade increases. Science makes more things possible for us, increased navigation, better sailing ships, more efficient ships. So, trade increases and development of metallurgy. So, all these sciences, we can go on listing all the sciences that contributed to the production of more goods. And then, the merchant then is transporting these, selling these, whatever. But the important thing is that here, the merchant, and let me back up a bit and let me say that in traditional societies, there was this view that everyone serves a purpose. Society is a body, so to speak, in that each part of the body represents a different function or different class. Back up and go back to Vedic India, where they had priestly class, and you had the warrior/administrator class, you had the artisans, and then you had the chudra, the chudra were just the laborers, they were the lowest class. The idea there was, and in all traditional societies, is that it is the priestly class, which should rule it rightfully, that they are the ones that are, say, for whom reality resides in the immaterial world. The same for the warrior/administrator class, but for the priestly class, basically, and if we take it to India, the yogis, his contemplation is the highest good for the warriors and administrators. The highest good for them is to instantiate the vision of the contemplatives. Then the artisans' reality is in this world here, but for the lower class, for the chudras, the reality is also in this world, but the highest good is eating and sex and fulfilling the bodily functions, whereas for the artisan class, the highest good is in making and nurturing. But you have, in other words, four main classes, and the two highest classes see reality as residing in the transcendent realm. The lower two classes' reality resides in this world. Coming to our times, it's this merchant class that developed with the development of technology and technique that sees reality in this world, and then at one point, like with the Calvinists, yesterday God was acknowledged by wealth and prosperity where signs of God's grace. Eventually, once God disappeared from it, you've got merchants who are just wanting to get what they can, get what they can as fast as they can, and these are the people who are now in control of society, so that their ideas are in the transcendent. Clearly, I would say the universities are not run by contemplatives, they're run by materialists, and I know, for example, when I majored in philosophy at Columbia, it was all a materialist philosophy. We didn't talk about value. There is a wealth of discussion, thoughts, ideas that you just spoke about. I want to pick on one of them, which I would imagine from most of our listeners may get a negative reaction. You speak of the caste system in India. I guess in the West we had, or maybe in Russia, you know, there was the serfs and the lords, and that's a kind of caste system that we had in the West. Currently, you maybe have the rich people, or maybe the hedge fund manipulators, and down to the peons, the people who do labor, or whatever. There's any number of caste systems. Traditional societies, I think one of the criticisms that a lot of people would have is that was passed by genetics, you know, your father's brahman, so your brahman, or you're born into the untouchable caste that you're stuck in that caste. A lot of us are going to say, "Thank God that traditional society is gone." In your case, you know, you grew up in a town where here's what the structure is. Now, I realize it was already a corporate structure imposed over the town, but you had your role that you were supposed to plug into, and I think you resisted it. So, can you dispel for listeners perhaps the idea that you're calling that everyone should be in a caste system, and some of us should be the untouchables, or whatever. Yeah, I mean, there should be, obviously, mobility, but how do we -- I mean, the first thing we can't even talk about finding our proper place until we find our vocation. I mean, we have closed up our hearts to the degree that we don't really know what it is we want or are truly capable of doing. Since we've interjected a lot of values from advertising and public relations, we're told what we should want, and these false needs are perpetuated through more advertising and through peer pressure, too, keeping up with the Joneses or whatever. So, there won't be anything we can't even find our proper place in society or find out our right livelihood until we can shut ourselves off from this continuous din of advertising and public relations and begin to look inward and really see how we react, not, you know, to different stimuli or to witnessing this or that, rather than judging them by how we are told we should react. Does that make sense? Oh, it makes total sense to me. I do think that there's an important part of existence which just cannot be measured by a financial bottom line, and our society has increasingly tried to encapsulate reality in a financial bottom line. And anything that grows the GDP defined as how much money is spent. So, one of the criticisms I've heard, and I pass on from that critique of our GDP, is that so if someone does something that causes more cancer, which means that people have to spend more on medical care, that's a good thing because it increases the GDP. And that's the way most of the decisions in our society are made. So, I realize there's something totally screwed up that we do not have a good measure in today's society for the best. And the fallback position for almost everyone is does it grow the GDP or does it create more money in my pocket? Right. This kind of thinking is just ultimately self-destructive and we will, I think, regain any measure of health until we can get back to a genuine relationship with the earth and feeling for the earth and the land. But I think we need to get back to more handmade goods. I mean, we've lost the use of our minds and hands working together. Now, I think this is one of the critiques you're with Anderson had of American society and a degradation that he saw. I mean, it's what I saw for myself too. I mean, once you become a mechanical person, you cease making things intelligently. You lose that connection between hand and mind and you've already lost the presence of hearts. We've gone to rediscover our hearts and rediscover what we can do with our hands. And only then will we begin to recreate a society where proper relationships are established. It's really hard when people are not engaging with the bigger ideas when they're focusing on the little carrot in front of their nose. And I think that's a major part of the issue. Would you say that you do or do not lean in the direction of being a Luddite? No, I'm not a Luddite. I believe an appropriate technology is EF Schumacher preached. No, just find the technology that's appropriate for your situation. And so by no means am I a Luddite. No. So you're not anti-technology, you're not anti-progress. One of the comments you make in the book is that this philosophy of there being such a thing as progress really only originated a couple centuries ago. Yeah, well, that's a little bit destructive idea. I mean, it puts the emphasis on the material, once again, as opposed to individual development. No, I'm not a believer in progress. I think in fact that this road of so-called progress has led us to this through the brink of self-destruction. And I will say furthermore that this emphasis on technique, which is a byproduct of, I'll call it a barren rationalism, has led to the triumph of the irrational, that most of society's actions, what we do collectively, in many cases individually, is actually driven by our unconscious impulses, and most of them not very good ones. This whole business of torture that we've embraced as a nation is one example. Lewis Mumford, back in the 1950s, was saying that Caliban, the monster from the tempest, if you recall, he was now in charge. The tempest, basically, if you recall, took place on an island. Prospero the magician was in charge, and his servant was Caliban, this monster. Well, we've reversed things, so the Caliban is now in charge, and Prospero is in prison. The very fact that drug and chemical companies can continue to produce things that are poisoning the air and the water, the fact that we're tearing up mountains to get it cold or to get it minerals, the fact that we're fracking, potentially destroying a great deal of our water supply. These are all irrational acts. We're doing things that have just enormous capacity for self-destruction. We see the environment collapsing. We see species disappearing every day. Our leaders pretend that we are rational, reasonable people when, in fact, we're just the very reverse. You know, I'm afraid that we're going to finish this hour without discussing enough of the really important ideas with respect to agriculture in your book, The Triumph Technique. Again, we're speaking with Robert Wolfe, the book, The Triumph of Technique, the Industrialization of Agriculture and the Destruction of Rural America. All of these ideas, philosophical ideas about how our country and how our world views what happens in this world are extremely important and foundational to a good critique of what's going on in our society. So I do urge people to get ahold of the book, The Triumph of Technique by Robert Wolfe. Take a look at those ideas. Right now, Robert, I want to highlight some of those ideas about agriculture. First of all, I'll start off with the observation you make in the book. A number of the founders of our country, and certainly Thomas Jefferson among them, believed that farmers were a good and necessary linchpin to development of a democracy. And obviously, over the past century, the portion of our country who are people who are actually involved in agriculture has shrunk to what, maybe a percent or something in the population. We're now city dwelling, there's very few people rural, and this changes democracy. Can you talk about that idea a little bit? Yes, as I said earlier, when one is connected to the ground, to the earth, when it's connected to seasons, to the weather, one is aware of a great deal more than one is when one lives in a city. I mean, the urbanite who is essentially, who can turn on his air conditioning, he can sort of adjust the environment to his wishes, he lives in a concrete city. Abstract ideas become more and more important. When I say abstract, I mean, things that have little base, I mean, he can build worlds that really have no connection with what is. This is where you get speculation. When the city dominates the country, and city thinking becomes dominant, then you get the dominance of money. What we talked about earlier, the merchant, is now in control of our civilization. He gets more and more abstract, so instead of actually dealing with gold or silver, now we deal not even with dollars and so forth, but we speculate it's all our finance, big financial moves are all made on computer, and they all exist virtually. There's no tangibility to any of this stuff. And we've seen the consequences of that. We saw the financial meltdown of 2008, and I think we're going to see another one coming within a year or so. So that's what I think we lose. When we cease being a country of farmers and people who are in one way or another connected to the land, we can create abstractions that are devoid of reality, devoid of rootedness, and they are instruments of destruction. And the idea of the destruction of democracy? Yeah, when money becomes the, once the power shifts to the cities, then the money necessarily shifts to the cities. And fewer and fewer people under our system rise to control, because once they gain control of senators and representatives, then they control the votes and they write the legislation. And eventually, as we've seen, let's say, a field within the economy that might initially consist of 200 firms is whittled down to 100, and it's whittled down to 15. Now, how many major telecommunications firms we have, maybe five, I don't know, banks. We've got five or six huge banks, and the numbers, you know, the size drops off significantly. And it's the same in every other area of the economy. Each sector of the economy is dominated by a handful of companies, corporations. When that happens, they can do pretty much what they want, and your vote and my vote don't count for much. And Spangler, the German historian, pre-World War I historian, predicted that in the 20th century, we would see the victory of money over democracy. And unfortunately, we've moved significantly in that direction. Talk about some of the specifics that you deal with in the triumph of technique about how, particularly in, I guess, this last century, we've commodified agriculture and agricultural labor, and what that means, I mean, there's the genetics, there's the pollution, the way that we pour chemicals into the system. There's the effect that we have on the people who are producing this because, again, they're just commodities who are producing other commodities for us. I think that comes down to technique and the ascendance of science and the whole idea that arose in the Renaissance and gained momentum, which was that the only aspects of reality that are real are those that can be quantified and measured. Eventually, its values don't count. It's what you think about a situation is of no value unless you can somehow put a number to it, you know, whether it's in terms of a firm figure or in terms of statistics. And when that happens, I mean, all these ideas is that the growth of money, the growth of scientism, the growth of technique, mathematics, I mean, it all converges into what you're talking about, the commodification of people and things. Once money dominates and once quantification dominates, what else do you have? Of course, I mean, you've lost God, you've lost any sense of a center to the world or a purpose to human existence, so, of course, people are going to become commodities and they become machine tenders, they become servo mechanisms. And I would add that even a lot of these, the mid-level managers, they're all replaceable. And the concept that some people have that there's this class of rich people and then there's the rest of us. And this is though the rich who are going to have rich kids and so they create lines and they will always be in charge and the rest of us will always be poor. Well, no, as soon as some poor guy does well and goes up the ladder and becomes rich, we see just the same kind of corruption that goes on. I remember there was a poem by a troubadour poet, a baron who was cursing the rich peasant. But anyway, we have to get rid of this idea that there is a certain class of people that are bad and we are good, poor people or whatever are the victims are always incapable of being corrupted or of acting in a corrupt manner or doing evil things. I just have to recognize that in this society, so many of us are just cut from the same cloth. And some of the side effects that you talk about in the triumph of technique about how this has affected and how the mechanism went forward within our government. Essentially, the destruction of, shall we say, the rooted agricultural worker, the farmer. You talk about in the 1940s and 1950s how this structure was manipulated through, including under Eisenhower and before that, there used to be something called the Grange, which essentially was a farmer's union and did some good things. And then we see the emergence of something called the farmer's bureau, which is manipulating things really for the detriment of real farmers. Can you talk a little bit about that history? Because I think it's largely ignored in our society. The Grange did very well at organizing farmers for a while and they had collective bargaining power, but they went under because they got too ambitious in terms of setting up businesses. That's my recollection. The Farm Bureau really -- I forget the origins of the Farm Bureau, but I do know that there are extensions through -- the extension agencies grew out of state universities and that these were initially intended to help small farmers. And in many cases they do, but yet they're also propagating ideas from the state universities who are working in tandem with companies like Monsanto. At the Farm Bureau now, it makes its money through selling insurance. Mostly with members of non-farmers. Again, they're front pretty much for Monsanto and Dow Chemical and so forth. And though they pretend to be a ground up organization, they're in fact a top down organization. I have a friend of mine, a farmer up in Minnesota, who didn't believe that when I told him so, he joined the Farm Bureau and he became an active member of it and found out for himself that indeed things are top down. And of course the Farm Bureau has enormous -- well, I'll tell you, I'll give you an example of just how powerful the Farm Bureau is. And it's very powerful with the federal government. That's a great deal of leverage. A friend of mine in Tennessee was protesting Malafian Spring. Malafian kills bullweevils. And so there was a lot of crop dusting out in West Tennessee. And these one friend of it had gotten thoroughly sprayed. Well, he spent at least two years of his life devoted most of his time to the detriment of his business throughout -- from West Tennessee over to Nashville in order to lobby against Malafian Spring and to put some limits on it. And he thought he had some backers -- I'm one of the Democrats -- but when it came to crunch, they deserted him. They couldn't even get a 25-foot setback from schools. This is how powerful the Farm Bureau is. But the top things off shortly after his campaign fizzled -- well, you know, he must have still been active on the campaign. He was visited by two FBI agents who came down. They had some bogus excuse. And they said that they -- would he mind if they went through his business? He's a -- he sells rare maps and globes. And so they went through -- the whole idea was to intimidate him. Two weeks after that, he got a visit from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation for the same reason. There was the case of an elderly couple in Chicago that ran a bakery. They had signed a petition on behalf of the defenders of wildlife to protect wolves in Yellowstone Park. Well, the Farm Bureau was on the side of the ranchers. They wanted to eliminate -- destroy all the wolves out there. So this couple was visited by FBI agents. This was reported on 60 minutes years ago. In other words, you best not mess with the Farm Bureau's agenda or the heat of the government will be brought down upon you? Absolutely. Absolutely. Of course, we need more documentation to believe that that's the case. And, you know, a couple of isolated cases. For all, we know that Chicago couple were also running drugs or who knows drugs. But the point is, of course, that there is something there to be looked at carefully. And if these are the interests being served, as opposed to the interests of the American people in general, hopefully we can reorganize the system. We're at the end of our hour. I still need to hear, what's the solution? Is the solution the transition town movement? Will that make the difference? Or you spoke of regionalism? How can we get there from where we are now? I think one through the local foods movement, which continues to grow through people doing their own gardening through something even more ambitious, which would be local and regional energy production in various ways. But financing, I helped kickstart a movement out here with time banking. In time banking, it's a form of bartering where every person's hour is worth the same. And you do your trades online. I mean, you make trade online, but then you perform the service. This would bring people into the economy who otherwise couldn't afford a service. It means, for example, if you need a service and say you need your house roofed and I'm a roofer, I do it for you. It takes me 30 hours. And I am indebted to the system to perform 30 hours of service. And it could be to one person, it could be multiple people. That plus a revolving loan fund for business startups. I think we have to consider things like these micro lending systems. There are probably any way we can think of to get off this highly centralized, overly centralized system that is now controlling our lives. Do we have the power to do it? As county supervisors seem very apt to be bought off by various interests and powers. And so sometimes we just can't successfully fight, let's say, a confined animal feeding operation, which I tried to do. Well, we can't stop a fracking operation, but we have to try, we have to try to do what we can to salvage what we can of a humane existence. My view of the future is fairly dim, but I think we have to continue to fight for economic self-sufficiency. We have to fight for developing decentralized economies. And it's easier to develop that economy in a region which has recognizable features, such as our driftless region, which I said has characterized by hills and valleys. But decentralization to me is the answer and it can be promoted through literature, through plays, through poems, through stories, through songs, through essays, newspaper articles, people talking about it. I think literatures can be an important component to help develop that regional consciousness. I think the regional consciousness has to come first before you can begin thinking about this collective work, this collaboration, which is very fine. It's a very complex art. I don't know if we've ever seen it consciously perform, but it's something that we have to do in my mind if we want to have a humane future. And maybe I've saved for last a foundational question. You had some religious, spiritual background growing up and you've clearly got something now. Would you care to share it and how important is some sense of the big thing behind the existence that we live on this planet? How important is that in terms of the ultimate solution? I think it is the root of it. It's the root of it, reconnecting with what in the book I call the origin and center of all things. It has to be the most important thing in my life. If I don't have that, I don't have any rooting or any grounding. And it's the only way we're going to really truly be able to reconnect with one another in a way that we're not trying to hurt others or just grab what we can for ourselves. And we've all had experiences where we know that we have acted on behalf of the community, but if we look at it, a lot of times we can see how much of our own egos were involved and how much we really were doing it for applause or something like that. So that stuff has to be rooted out. It has to be a real internal cleansing within each of us. And with a reform of prayer or contemplation or meditation you practice, that has to be the foundation of your life if you're going to make change. And given that all the people listening to this program will hear you say this, can you say something about your background where you've come to anything that you care to share about that? The most dramatic point, I'm not a Catholic now, but I converted to Catholicism. I was writing for the Chicago Tribune. I was writing a weekly column and a lot of features for this Tribune. And it all, I would go before the editor and I would say, you know, the world is on fire and I'm writing about where to get a great taco or how to put together a great stereo system. And he would say, well, people need to be entertained. They need to forget their lives. But I got to the point where I realized what I was doing was utterly meaningless. And so I was praying for right livelihood. I was actually saying the Roseway I had converted to Catholicism a year or two before that. And then I called Catholic Archambasas in Chicago. Unfortunately, I spoke to a woman who understood that I was a writer and I wanted a situation. I wanted to go to work for the church. And so she pointed out two institutions in Chicago, two Catholic institutions where I might find a place and it would be good for me. And one of them was Ms. Ricordia, which is a home for the retarded and for, I think, severe MS. So I was a house parent. Ms. Ricordia had and has a tiny little collection. A collection of maybe eight houses, suburban style houses with eight residents and usually supposedly three. At that time, we would live in adults who were supervisors. And so I did that for a year and that changed me. That was my changing point. That's where my heart began to open up. And I found out later that that was a place where the Jesuits would occasionally send young people for young men for their formation. But that was the pivotal changing point for me. And I decided after that that my work was going to be service work. That's what I consider free river press, giving a voice to people around the country. That's my service. And you said, Robert, that you no longer consider yourself Catholic. Do you have a name for what you are now? No, I still pray to Jesus. And I have some forms of meditation that I do. One of which is you can ask Jesus to come into you. And it's like I can feel him permeating my body so to speak. And that's, and you just stay with that meditation. But no, I left. Last time I took the Eucharist in a Catholic church was with a priest who was later hauled off by the bishop. So when those priestly scandals hit, I could no longer attend mass. So I guess we could offer a disclaimer. You're not urging that anybody do anything specific. Follow your footsteps. But that this is just an important concept. This is an important foundation for being able to look squarely at what we need to do to make this world a better place. Is that a fair way of putting it? Yes, we have to look into ourselves into our own hearts. Well, I thank you for doing that, Robert. All that you've done with free river press, I think people will be immensely enriched. If they look at an American mosaic, if they listen to your radio program, if they see the collected writings you have of homeless people, of farmers, of people who are not professional writers, but just everyday folk, as one of your titles says. There's richness there just to finding who we are and the analysis that you have in the triumph of technique is just such a breath of fresh air for looking at our world and seeing a better way forward. So, I thank you for all those good works that you've done, that you continue to do through free river press. And I thank you for joining me for Spirit in Action. Thank you very much, Mark. Very much appreciate today. I've enjoyed it. Yeah, well, I'm glad you did. I don't want to torture anyone. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. And our lives will feel the echo of our healing. (upbeat music)