A little post in favor of small scale production

Hi all. Sorry for the scarcity of posts lately, as we have been preparing for adoption-related travel to India as early as Friday. I am grateful for all the people praying for us for that, and it also struck me yesterday that people want to share in your joy, which is a positive aspect of human relationships in our broken world.

But on to today’s little topic - I just finished reading C.R. Wiley’s book The Household and the War for the Cosmos. Actually I got it, and read it, on the same day, so it’s like that. This is largely a book about piety and order; there is an order in the cosmos, and piety means fulfilling your duties in that order. (For those who care about such things, it is also a book that fits nicely in the classical Christian tradition, up to and including "here is a story from the Aeneid, and here is a story from the Bible, and look they make the same point... but in the end, the descendants of Abraham triumph over the descendants of Aeneas.”)

But it is also a book about how our conception of the home and household has changed. The modern home has become an “evening recreation center”, Wiley says. Everyone goes off independently to their own projects during the day - the husband and wife to work perhaps, and the kids to school - and then everyone returns home independently in the evening to relax, before again going their separate ways the next day. But that sort of behavior is very much an historical anomaly. Historically the home was, for the widest possible meaning of “economic”, the center of economic production. Husband and wife and children all labored together on common tasks, also building things they expected to pass along to the next generation. And perhaps, Wiley suggests, we should be making an intentional effort to move a little back into that direction (and although it is a “moving back”, modern technology might actually help us out here).

As I’ve said, if you tried to list all the “why was our response to COVID-19 so dysfunctional?”, there are a hundred things that could be said. But one of those things, I think, is that we are largely a dependent people today, not an independent people. And I do mean that we are neither independent in lifestyle nor in mindset (the latter is more important, but the former strongly contributes to the latter). I cannot find it in his 120 pages right now, but somewhere Wiley mentions that when the United States was founded, we were largely a nation of independent proprietors, and now we are largely a nation of wage earners. Well the independent proprietor, again in both lifestyle and in mindset, is more able to say to an overbearing state, “look we don’t much need you, and you’re misbehaving, now get yourself back into line”. The wage earner… or even more so the person who works in an occupation that is licensed by the state… or perhaps even more so the person who actually works for the state, finds it more difficult (again, in both lifestyle and mindset) to say such a thing.

In certain areas of the world, protests against COVID-19 rules have continued for many, many months now, with apparently little effect upon leaders who feel themselves pretty isolated from the common people and who thus don’t particularly care how upset you are. It has a lot of people saying “so what are we supposed to do, because nothing we’ve done seems to be working?” For example:

Jeffrey A Tucker @jeffreyatucker

We've seen revolutions against colonial powers, against monarchies, against totalitarian Soviet-backed regimes, against thuggish dictators in banana republics. But what does non-electoral revolution look like in an overly bureaucratized developed democracy?

Then came one reply, and I’ve seen many like it elsewhere:

Patrick Carroll @PatrickC1995

@jeffreyatucker Agorism comes to mind.

Now I don’t want to make this a pro-agorism post, particularly inasmuch as that word means different things to different people and I don’t want to endorse all of those things. But for many people, at least part of what agorism means is producing what you can, practically, yourself, and trading your products or skills with others in an informal or weakly-formal manner that involves the state as little as possible. I think I’ve mentioned Sally Mayweather here before, who calls himself “Sal the Agorist” on Twitter, and his common refrain is “grow your own food, be your own bank, buy a 3D printer”. That the first, and the last, of that trio are pro-small-scale-production comments is obvious. (The middle is a reference to cryptocurrencies, which Sal certainly also sees as money-without-the-state.)

And so, although I would definitely not say to anyone reading this, “you need to be doing EXACTLY this and this and this”, I have noticed more and more people lately trying to promote this greater-independence (and informal dependence on people you know personally, contra our big, regulated, bureaucratized systems) mindset, and I’ll leave you with just a couple of those comments. First, here is a little Twitter thread that was quite popular a few days ago. (Again, I am NOT saying everyone should go out and purchase a hog, or ten - I’m certainly not going to - but this gives you some idea the thinking.)

William Wheelwright @ploughmansfolly

REMINDER: if one in ten American households raised a 1/2 acre garden and kept 35 laying hens, there would be no industrial egg or vegetable production (level one)

William Wheelwright @ploughmansfolly

If those same households raised ten hogs per year, it would eliminate the industrial pork industry (level two)

William Wheelwright @ploughmansfolly

If those same households (or another neighbor household) kept two dairy cows, not only would industrial dairy be eliminated, but American dairy production would triple. (level three)

William Wheelwright @ploughmansfolly

Obviously, a sane government would incentivize these practices by offering significant tax relief to any family that undertakes them with integrity. Sadly, the American state is occupied by actors who despise the American nation. But that won’t be true for much longer.

Some folks also commented on the bizarre, arrogant criticism Wheelwright received for this thread. I’ll let you go look that up that criticism if you want to (qt = “quote tweet”):

Jason Snyder @cognazor

@RizomaSchool @ploughmansfolly Geez, just saw some of the qts...a lot of people are going to be in for a shock over the next few decades...

Why in the world would people get angry at the suggestion that it would be pretty easy, and a good idea, for most of us to become just a little more independent? Well I might suggest that if you’re a statist, you intuitively understand the long-term threat.

The Rizoma Field School folks who collected the Doomer Manifestos you might enjoy reading have also followed that up with some action-oriented posts about small urban gardens and micronurseries. (There are also some fun books on the topic, which are literally just fun to keep on your coffee table and flip through.)

That is all! I will end this post with a photo of our own 3D printer, because you cannot stop me. Sorry, nothing in production today. They are fun though.