Colin Tudge, author of “Feeding People is Easy” (Pari Publishing)
has sent me the following reflections on “Gentle Action”. Your comments would be most welcome.
I have been reading “Gentle Action” with a great sense of “Yes indeed! This is right!”
Your comments in chapter 1 about human perception and society brought to mind John McMurray, much neglected these days but very pertinent. In the last chapter when you talked about human creativeness I thought of John Ruskin and William Morris; and also of Tina Beattie, a very fine, modern, Catholic theologian who suggests in The New Atheists that the Judaeo-Christian concept of Creation should be thought of not in the Enlightenment fashion, of a watchmaker making a watch – a piece of engineering – but as an act of artistic creation, in which the thing created acquires its own momentum and carries the creator along. As she says, this reconciles at one stroke the perceived conflict between the idea of Creation and the idea of evolution. A neat notion.
However, as Marx said, the point is not to analyse the world but to change it – and here I find myself a little perplexed. Of course the world does need changing radically. If we go on as we are we have had our chips. But I also reckon that the way forward is not by reform or by revolution but by Renaissance – taking what is useful from the status quo but otherwise ignoring it, as far as this is possible, and building something quite new, allowing most of the status quo to wither on the vine.
“Gentle action” seems to me a very good general modus operandi for bringing the Renaissance about (as illustrated by your Middlesborough example). But I cannot see how gentle action could simply be applied to the status quo, to change what we have into what the world really needs. At the moment the world is run by what in effect is a consortium of powerful governments plus corporates plus big banks. They are all offspring of the Enlightenment and individually and collectively their philosophy and modus operandi is the precise antithesis of what you are envisaging in Gentle Action. They are seeking, top down (despite the lip service paid to democracy) to impose an algorithm on us all – that of the neoliberal, global market, which is intended primarily to generate money which it effects to maximize through ruthless competitiveness. There is nothing underhand about this. They make a virtue of it. Increase of money – GDP – is called “economic growth”, and in effect is the sole and stated ambition. Material growth and the elimination of human skill by industrialization is equated with progress and is seen unequivocally to be good. In truth, of course, the algorithm is failing horribly – and the general reason for this is that it is so unsubtle. The approach is ultimately materialistic, reductionist, positivist approach, as you describe. The things that really matter slip through the mesh.
Tesco, just to take one important example, now has enormous control over the world’s food supply, “from field to fork” as the cliché has it. Archetypally it is “top down” – and again it makes a virtue of this. “Vertical integration” is the key to its success. It scours the world in search of bargains, playing one farmer off against another in the competitive spirit of neoliberalism, and (largely because oil has been cheap, and because modern governments favour big companies that generate wealth) it is able to sell high-class produce cheaply to people who can afford to pay. Governments find this convenient and they, like Tesco itself, are prepared to overlook the collateral damage, including the destruction of agrarian economies worldwide – and indeed make a virtue of this in the name of progress.
It seems to me that gentle action is a form of reform – implying a step-wise progression by painless increments from what we have to what we really need. But there seems to me to be no plausible route by which Tesco could be converted step by step from what it is into something the world would actually benefit from. In general, I think of the early 20th century American evolutionary biologist Sewall Wright, who pointed that in theory an elephant could be converted gene by gene into a daisy – but in practice this cannot happen because there is no plausible route by which this change could happen, because the intermediates are nonviable. So Darwin’s suggestion, that gradual change over time could convert anything into anything (“a bear might become a whale”) is, as a generalization, is untrue. Specifically, a farmer friend of mine likes to comment that “Tesco has nothing the world needs except real estate”. To be sure, it has pioneered some retail techniques which a future, saner world might borrow; but these little bits of technique do not justify the entire superstructure that has given rise to them.
Tesco is an extreme example – the corporate that even other corporates love to hate. Clearly, there are some advantages in big institutions, and co-operatives of one kind or another have a long and honorable history. If there was a plausible route by which shareholder-director driven corporates could become people-controlled co-operatives, then this might be a way forward. But this I feel is qualitatively different from what was proposed at the September meeting at Pari. At present, certainly in the field of agriculture, I am putting my money on Renaissance: not trying to convert the status quo, but constructing something different in situ.
I feel this is an important discussion and I hope we can continue it.
