{"id":55400,"date":"2020-10-22T07:48:40","date_gmt":"2020-10-22T12:48:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=55400"},"modified":"2020-10-22T07:48:40","modified_gmt":"2020-10-22T12:48:40","slug":"a-small-farm-future-excerpt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=55400","title":{"rendered":"\u00a0A Small Farm Future: Excerpt"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u00a0A Small Farm Future: Excerpt<\/span><\/a><\/h3>\n
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Culture Crisis<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is the crisis of modernist culture \u2013 the ability to create ourselves as individuals and protect ourselves from the vicissitudes of the non-symbolic world, set against the ability to alienate ourselves as individuals and offload the consequences of our self-creation onto other people (including future people) and the non-symbolic world. In view of the other crises we face, the only convincing way I can see of transcending this crisis is to start making ourselves as individuals in less materialised ways that are more engaged with the Creation, the non-symbolic world, around us. The small farm future I describe is the most convincing form I can see that transcendence taking.<\/p>\n

One reason the prospect of a small farm future sits awkwardly with modern culture is that it flouts a sense of progress. Small-scale agriculture was what people did in the past, but we\u2019ve now progressed beyond it. It\u2019s hard to shake off this view because when we think about history through the lens of modernity we tend to use spatial metaphors with binary moral overtones. We move forwards, upwards or onwards, we lift people up out of poverty, we support progressive ideas and we don\u2019t look back \u2013 but when we do, we see backward societies where a lot of people farmed.<\/p>\n

In one sense, such objections are easily dealt with. A small farm future needn\u2019t be the same as a small farm past. We don\u2019t have to go back. But that\u2019s not quite good enough, because the culture of modernity involves a sense of radical rupture with the past, and a wholly new destiny for humanity \u2013 a destiny that\u2019s regarded as better than everything that went before it, largely\u00a0because\u00a0<\/em>people quit farming, left the countryside and got busy with their modernist life projects.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0A Small Farm Future: Excerpt Culture Crisis This is the crisis of modernist culture \u2013 the ability to create ourselves as individuals and protect ourselves from the vicissitudes of the non-symbolic world, set against the ability to alienate ourselves as individuals and offload the consequences of our self-creation onto other people (including future people) and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[15683,299,1912,3207,2601,6665,9738],"class_list":["post-55400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-chris-smaje","tag-farming","tag-food-production","tag-local-food-production","tag-modernism","tag-resilience-org","tag-small-farm-future"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55400"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55400\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55401,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55400\/revisions\/55401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}