OK, We Need a Laugh, Right?

The sadness of farmers

Yesterday I went to visit Bonk Farm in Waimea, on the northern part of the island.  It was part of our agricultural career workshop for the teens that do 4-H livestock projects.  The farm was beautiful, but the farmer was sad.  I kept looking at his hands that were covered with the fine chalky dirt of the Mana plain. They were strong yet elegant hands, for all that they were caked in dirt and cracked with toil.  Mr. Bonk rubbed at the dirt on his fingers as he told of his many and increasing difficulties in being a farmer.  Partly this is to be expected: it is simply being honest about the heavy burden of toil and care that producing food for others imposes on a mortal human frame.  But he was sad in a way that seemed especially keen.  He said, more than once: "If you go into farming, don't expect anyone to help you, because they won't" 

And there it is, we don't help small farmers like Mr. Bonk nearly enough.  He should really be covered in honors.  He has a verdant, almost glowing organic farm and is clearly competent, persistent, resourceful and cares deeply about the health of his farm.  He deserves the full support of our society and community, but instead it is he that supports everyone else that does not raise their own food.   

There are farmers that do very well financially and see their farm almost purely as a business, there are those who make enough money and are happy with the life they lead with its many non-monetary rewards, and there are those that farm with passion and sadness, almost a kind of rage.  

Which of these are the most "successful" farmers I don't know. 

Animaholic

At the moment,  I have 6 dogs, 4 cows,  2 sheep and a goat in the immediate vicinity of the house, if not actually in the house (2 dogs). Around here, in the deep country, this is not out of the ordinary.
There are also the 16 horses which is an extravagant number.  I am in the 1% when it comes to horse ownership.
That is not to mention the other roughly 3000 cows on the actual cattle ranch.
We are all here because of the grass.  The grass that grows in the open fields, that for 100 years, produced pure white sugar and, when that became economically invalid, were too remote, too depleted, too steep, too rocky for anyone to want for anything else.  So we, the humans, made fences and ran water-lines and brought cattle to graze, and horses and dogs to herd them.
What is my relationship to these animals?  Predator? Slave-owner? Prison warden? Executive Director? Servant? God?  A little of each, depending on the day.
And what is their relationship to me?
All of them either work for/with me or are going to be eaten someday, by somebody.  We all bleed into each other, quite literally. The dogs bite the goat when I'm not careful and I must tend her wounds.  I castrate the calf and cut myself by accident.  We both bleed on the same knife.  I defend their world, this little bios of grassland that we have made together, all of us,  with every bit of stratagem, strength, and endurance I possess.  So that we can all keep bleeding into each other and into the landscape, for now, because its the most beautiful, vital thing I know.
Some humans argue that eating meat is kind of sin - that it is wasteful and cruel - and that all of this land should be converted to cropland or, if it is not suitable for that, left to go wild.  There is some merit to this argument, but it is too simplistic, too rational, too detached, too civilized.  Down that path, we will be growing all of our food in tanks and we will live in a world-city.  Down that path, other animals will be a distant memory, and all of the ways that we can live together will be lost.  All the ways in which we change each others minds and bodies will be lost.  We humans will shed no blood and we will be the worse for it.
It is very difficult to talk about this because our culture - Western civilization - is both too proud and too squeamish.  We are extremely violent but we are afraid of blood.  We are obsessed with food but don't like to get dirty.  We say we love nature but fear flies, mosquitos, maggots, diseases, rodents, and mud.  Not to mention any kind of excrement. Western civilization is about being clean, elegant, articulate, economically efficient and ruthless, preferably without having to see any blood.   That's why it's hard to talk about the unclean stuff.  That's why I need animals, so we can be unclean together.

Animistic Science/Scientific Animism

To elaborate a bit more on the science that Isabelle Stenger proposes - she defines good science by its willingness to be "at risk"

“…there exist constructions where the world and the scientist are both at risk.”  (Latour, in a preface for Stenger)

What is this “risk”?  

Instead of a science where the scientist exists separately from the object of study, in Stenger’s idea of science as a true and honest adventure the scientist (who could be anybody) will be changed, in perhaps uncomfortable ways, in the encounter with that which is being studied.   The object of study (that which is addressed by the experiment) will talk back and in that conversation, as in all true and dangerous conversations, what the scientist thinks he or she is - how she defines herself - is put at risk. 

It is a science that does not require an ever greater distance between this sovereign subject, the Scientist, and the abject, controlled object of study. It is the possibility of learning about the world without having to kill it first - epistemologically at the very least, if not in an actual slaughter.  (To make it hold still, to make it safe for us to study)

This would be science where we remember ourselves as animals among animals, with all that implies about our subjectivity, our relatedness, our duty of care to that which is related to us, our capacity to feel pain and joy that is not just ours.   It would be a science in which what we ate for breakfast or what birds live in our yard or who our grandparents were would be related to our doctoral dissertation (or our resume or the standardized test we are giving the children.) It would be  learning from an un-immobilzed world and we would understand and honor the risks in that. 

Science that is not another godtrick.

Where I fall in love (with another version/vision of) science thanks to Isabelle Stengers

What experimental scientists call objectivity thus depends on a very particular creative art, and a very selective one, because it means that what is addressed must be successfully enrolled as a “partner” in a very unusual and entangled relation. Indeed, the role of this partner is not only to answer questions but also, and primordially so, to answer them in a way that tests the relevance of the question itself. Correlatively, the answers that follow from such achievements should never separate us from anything, because they always coincide with the creation of new questions, not with new authoritative answers to questions that already mattered for us.

We can only imagine the adventure of sciences that would have accepted such claims as obvious, which would have accepted the very specific challenge of addressing whatever they address only if the situation ensures that the addressee is enabled to “take a position” about the way it is addressed. What we should not imagine, however, is that science would then have verified animism.

We may well think instead that the term itself would not exist. Only a “belief” can receive such a global name. If the adventurous specificity of scientific practices has been acknowledged, no one would dream of addressing others in terms of the “beliefs” they would entertain about a “reality” to which scientists enjoy privileged access. Instead of the hierarchical figure of a tree, with Science as its trunk, what we call progress would perhaps have had the allure of what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari called a rhizome, connecting heterogeneous practices, concerns, and ways of giving meaning to the inhabitants of this earth, with none being privileged and any being liable to connect with any other.

"Reclaiming Animism," e-flux.com, journal #36, 7/2012
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/reclaiming-animism/

Godtricks

Reading the post-humanist theorist Donna Haraway's When Species Meet, where she refers to refusing the temptation to play godtricks - I like this reduction of so many of our grand intellectual structures - the structures that justify human exceptionalism  - to various kinds of "godtricks." They are numerous enough - the most famous of them being the Christian/Cartesian cut between mind and matter that helped to lay the groundwork for science, technology, and general modernity.  Another is D.H. Lawrence's entertainment complex, a godtrick that, like most of them, is useful in the short-run and lethal in the long-run. Another, more prosaic, would be Western conceptions of property, by which we become the lord-gods of whatever bits of matter, even living matter, we can stake our claim to, generally by the exchange of bits of paper between our human selves,  irrespective of the prior independent existence of that piece of land or animal or lumber or metal.  It is ours, we are its god, and we have the legislation to prove that we can do whatever we will with it.  And of course there is that belief, that trick we have, of thinking that all of this, this world, is here for the one single purpose of providing us human with a living, that we are owed it, that we have a human right to food, shelter, gasoline and wi-fi.