Innovation and Infinite Desire

by Jason Peters, Hillsdale College

It is a fantasy of the industrial episode—that brief blip in human history that began with the Industrial Revolution but is now showing signs of congestive heart failure, complete with the attendant edema below the knees—that infinite desires can be satisfied indefinitely in a finite space.

Let one keg of beer stand for all the beer in the world and let me stand for everyone in it. Suppose that I desire to drink unlimited beer every day of my life for the fourscore years and ten that are given to me. Does anyone really need to be convinced that this single keg will prove unequal to my desire? In no time my fantasy about beer-drinking will have to stand trial in the sober courts of reality.

Now, as a home-brewer, I might protest and say that I will simply make more beer, since I have the know-how. And jolly good for me. But my brewing more beer presupposes available water for my wort and topsoil to grow barley and hops in, and that is a large assumption that human behavior might have something to say about. I’ll come back to it presently.

I don’t think my claim about infinite desires and finite spaces requires anything like scientific analysis. A clear head and an aptitude for honesty should suffice. I include honesty because I think we’re often more mendacious than we realize, and this means there are all sorts of reasons any one of us, myself included, might disagree with a plain truth, such as “you can’t satisfy infinite desires indefinitely in a finite space.”

For example, if a man belongs to Political Party x, and a plain truth sounds like something someone in Political Party y would say, he is very likely, especially these days, to give himself permission to reject it out of hand.

“That’s something a commie libtard would say.”
“That’s something a right-wing nutjob would say.”

End of consideration. Switch brain to “off.” (Discover, maybe, that it’s already off.)

Or, again: if you want the standard of living we’ve been enjoying for only a very short time to continue forever, you might scoff at anyone—me, for example—who tells you that you’re living in a fantasy. Let us say that a woman behind the wheel of a GMC Yukon—on her way to Starbucks after dropping Colten and Jayden off at soccer practice—doesn’t want the era of unlimited mobility to end once the last drop of oil has been extracted from the finite earth, so she puts her faith in the “alternatives.” She assures herself that if wind and solar won’t work (and they won’t), then we can use nuclear power to run her Yukon plus our Harleys and snowmobiles and lawnmowers, all the while believing that the attendant dangers of going full-blown nuclear are entirely beside the point.^[i] I have heard this attitude or disposition referred to as ‘the psychology of previous investment’: we’ve always lived at this standard; we will therefore live at this standard always.

How does Mrs. Yukon, together with all the other men and women in Fantasy Land, defend this claim?

The standard assurances are ready at hand—thanks mainly to governments and universities: “We’ll figure out a way.” “Someone will think of something.” “We’re more advanced than they were back then.” “We’ve got nature licked.” 

But this kind of faith is at once bad religion and bad science. It is also a confusion of categories. Energy and technology are two different things. One runs the other. When the one runs out, the other doesn’t run.

That a certain faith in progress can be both bad religion and bad science was first suggested to me by Wendell Berry in a book titled Life is a Miracle. By reversing the terms, however, he put it somewhat differently and also more forcefully: “To trust ‘progress’ or our putative ‘genius’ to solve all the problems that we cause is worse than bad science; it is bad religion.”

Berry is a Kentucky farmer and writer who farms without a tractor and who writes without a computer. And it is not the least remarkable thing about him that he is a good farmer and a good writer, notwithstanding his inclination to work without the implements of “progress” in both of these endeavors. For one of his enduring arguments, though he wouldn’t quite put it this way, is that high-energy inputs are no guarantee of high-quality outputs.

Quite the contrary. They often guarantee the opposite.

In farming, to take the first example, the general and usually thoughtless capitulation to high-powered technology is something that in the past the sober courts of reality haven’t been taciturn and in the future won’t be silent about. Their verdict is pretty clear: industrial farming is destroying the sources we live from. Call those sources “Nature” if you like. It’s a serviceable enough catch-all word. But “topsoil” and “groundwater” are a bit more precise. Nothing lives without them, and when they are gone we will discover just how misplaced our faith in progress has been.

I mean for example our belief that we won’t ever pump the aquifers dry, which we are currently doing.^[ii] I mean for example our confidence that nitrogen-based fertilizer—whose feedstock is natural gas—will always be a viable and limitless substitute for real fertility. But the truth is that no hotshot in Silly Con Valley or R&D or the Agricultural colleges is going to invent a substitute for earth’s mysterious thin outer layer, that loamy but vulnerable neighborhood called “topsoil,” which, when it was healthy and deep and abundant, did such a remarkable job of retaining water and fostering the mysterious biodiversity that tomatoes and cucumbers and oregano come out of.^[iii]

And still there’s more to the story. Industrial farming is combining with other external and predatory forces to destroy old established farming communities and the lives and livelihoods of rural people. The plot line is the usual one, and Berry has addressed it in many books and essays, principally in The Unsettling of America (1977): it is the story of machinery, of “labor-saving devices” evicting laborers from their own labor. That is to say, it is the story of our willingness to replace ourselves with machines, which we have done to the point of absurdity: the point at which we have a massive unemployment problem and can’t figure out why.

(What is the difference between a Ph.D. economist and a former cashier? The Ph.D. economist, who still has a job, sees self-checkout lanes as evidence of progress or “creative destruction”; a former cashier, who doesn’t, doesn’t.)

But rural decline is a matter not only of innovation; it is a matter of policy failure that dates back to the Get-Big-or-Get-Out injunctions handed down by Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz during the Nixon administration. Since that grim moment in American history, and I mean grim, when the government actually told farmers the scale at which they would be allowed (and required) to farm, it has been official US Government farm policy to support not farmers and farming but large agribusiness corporations, one upshot of which is a marked disparity between the price of goods leaving and those coming to the farm. Subsidies keep the price of food artificially low, but the cost of inputs and of other goods continues to rise. Farmers are left with no choice but to farm more acres—and thus by overproduction to drive prices down even more—and to do so in the very manner that is most destructive to the land.^[iv]

How long can Iowans, for example, be excited about high corn and soybean yields when those yields have come at the cost of half the state’s original endowment of topsoil? By one report the US has lost 57 billion metric tons of topsoil in the last 160 years. That’s a lot of squandered ecological capital for people who claim they like to eat. Left to herself, and given favorable conditions, Nature can make an inch of topsoil in about 500 years; industrial farming can spend an inch in 25. There’s some math here that grade-school children used to be capable of, a “story problem” the POTUS might test a man with before appointing him Secretary of Agriculture.

It appears that no-till farming hasn’t turned out to be the silver bullet some thought it would be, nor has ethanol production solved the problem of energy scarcity. For ethanol has this in common with wind and solar power: it can’t run itself. Like wind and solar, it runs on a platform built and maintained by oil. Perhaps more to the point, in farming as in other matters the problems caused by industrialization can’t be solved by more industrialization, any more than the problems caused by beer-drinking can be solved by more beer-drinking.

Here’s a description of government-sponsored ethanol production: Plant the nation’s richest farmland in an annual monoculture, in corn, to keep our cars running at the mere cost of the land’s capacity to produce food.

That way madness lies.

Innovation might, as in farming, bring us some benefits, but it might also result in certain kinds of losses. One of these I’ll call physical losses. Large-scale farming has in a sense evicted topsoil from farms. After World War II machinery (and credit and chemicals) replaced people, and so as the people left the land to seek “more meaningful” work in cities, the land itself left the land and is still leaving it. The word for this is “erosion.”

Another kind of loss that innovation might result in I’ll call intellectual and/or cultural. For large-scale farming has also evicted older knowledge and skill. My father could drive a team of horses on the farm he grew up on; my sons, on ours, cannot, nor can I teach them how. The tractor has seen to that. Now suppose that in an energy-scarce future we will need older forms of knowledge and older skills and perhaps even older technologies, such as horse-drawn implements. Where will we turn to find this knowledge and skill or these tools? How will we acquire them—if, like the soil, they too have disappeared, evicted by progress? The future might well belong to those “backward” Amish farmers. Talk about marketable skills.

And will we have the character required of us then? Long ago someone impatient with Berry’s technological reticence once complained to him with the tired old line, “you can’t go back in time!” Without missing a beat Berry replied that he wasn’t talking about going back in time; he was talking about going back in character. In the late 1980s he elsewhere stated what that “going back” might look like: “We must achieve the character and acquire the skills to live much poorer than we do. We must waste less. We must do more for ourselves and each other.”

Maybe I who emptied the keg have achieved the character to reduce my consumption and acquired the skills to brew my own beer. We did allow that I might have the know-how to make more beer and therefore actually do a little more for myself and others. But remember: we also supposed I’d have water for my wort and topsoil to grow barley and hops in, whereas in the mechanized utopian future I no longer do. It all blew away while I was trusting progress to solve the problems caused by progress.

I am left with little more than the sober courts of reality and their lessons concerning limits.

Jason Peters is Assistant Professor of English at Hillsdale College and author of The Culinary Plagiarist: (Mis)Adventures of a Lusty, Thieving, God-Fearing Gourmand (FPR Books 2020) and Wendell Berry: Life and Work (University Press of Kentucky 2007),

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^[i] In Consulting the Genius of the Place Wes Jackson writes, “It is generally assumed that the probability of a reactor accident, such as at Chernobyl, to be one in ten thousand. Years. That might seem safe enough. But with a thousand reactors, we should expect an accident every ten years on average. We currently have around 450 reactors worldwide, which means an accident every twenty-two years on average. Are we not already on schedule?” And even supposing we can make them safe, “what sort of police state tactics must we employ? Such a police state would require stable governments to keep the materials out of terrorists’ hands.”

 

^[ii] Look for the evidence if you think it’s lacking. Meanwhile, consider what Aldo Leopold said in A Sand County Almanac: “The ecological fundamentals of agriculture are just as poorly known to the public as in other fields of land-use. For example, few educated people realize that the marvelous advances in technique made during recent decades are improvements in the pump, rather than the well. Acre for acre, they have barely sufficed to offset the sinking level of fertility.” Indeed, improved pumps will mean more rapidly depleted aquifers. This is the famous “Jevons Paradox”: greater efficiency leads to more resource depletion, not less.

 

^[iii] We should be so lucky to see the meddlesome DEI industry get interested in biodiversity. But then like so many Ph.D. economists and others who think food comes from the grocer, or heat from the furnace, these gurus ignore the real wealth of the world that backs the paper wealth we foolishly believe we can go on living by forever.

 

^[iv] Such destruction includes, for example, compacting the soil with heavy equipment, by massive tillage exposing the soil to erosion or by no-till practices requiring more in the way of herbicides, and rejecting the practices of the old diversified farms that built soil rather than exhausted it. Diversified farms invariably included animals, and no one ever asked the land to produce nothing but annual monocultures. Consider also that manure from mass meat-producing operations is a liability instead of the asset it once was on diversified farms, where it was returned to the ground as fertilizer. And so on.

Discussion Questions:

1. Berry once wrote that the goal was to “achieve the maximum of satisfaction from the minimum of consumption.” How close are we to achieving this ideal?
2. The average personal debt per American is, not including mortgages, roughly $22,000. The nation’s debt is in excess of $34 trillion. How much of our “wealth” is illusory? Are we buying off the consequences of overindulgence by pushing the bill to future generations?
3. Do you know where you food comes from? More accurately, do you know the origins and story of the food on your grocer’s shelf?