Seeing Like A State: Agriculture high modernist

My current reading has revealed that state, nation state or a government tend, or should I say, must have a myopic view of its subject in order to rule over them effectively and efficiently. Which isn’t a bad and such a catastrophic ordeal if you measure it through the current view of course, but it is still a paradigm nonetheless, the only paradigm that can exist in today’s modern world.

It can be argued with such a mono-paradigm, type of governing, when a disaster struck, people would realize how fragile having only one type of state would do to the world. Maybe the world will fall into a state of anarchy, where law wouldn’t exist and barbarity would reign supreme. Or, would it? If you measure everything by the western rule and measurement, of course anything that falls outside of its view would be deemed as barbaric, maybe that’s why cold war happened. Beneath the veil of capitalism vs socialism, lies the true feelings of superiority of their system of governing or world view is the best. But then again, both are the product of western intellectual so who am I kidding.

Currently reading the chapter of agriculture high modernism, it seems imperative to me that the author is trying to convey a message that is lingering within the current modern state project, masking itself as the vehicle for progress, it seems that the state is eradicating majority of local knowledge, tradition and paste above it the veneer of modern project. Which, he had shown and pressure on this point numerous times that the project, mostly failed. He gives example of Tanzanian villagization, Russia (Soviet Union) collectivization and even America mass agricultural project. All of this project has one distinct characteristic, imperative whether it is pro-market or pro-state regulation, is that it is usually a mega-project which envisioned to give massive benefits due to state control and most importantly, mechanized view of the project. This coincide exactly what Neil Postman, Jaques Ellul and Heidegger to name a few, has said, the obsession with transforming everything to fit the technological view of the world, where it is thought that technology would be able to solve a lot of problems that we are currently facing. Never would the thought of technology ultimately create another unforeseeable problems, crosses their mind, the mechanized mind.

I’m getting sidetracked here, but the author gives one example, in the aspect of agriculture. It is a well known fact that monoculture, such as a large hectare of corn field, sunflower field or paddy field and even oil palm plantations is a massive state project, I’m calling it a state project because let’s be honest here, a lot of these agricultural project wouldn’t be attainable without state intervention so lets leave it at that. These agricultural project was according to the author, derived from the colonial practice from the West usually from 18-19^th century where, causing from the push of industrialization, the west had developed a science based agricultural practice that relies on empirical method to give the best and most importantly, steady yield of the plants. From their experience and belief, they believed using scientific method to plan out the planting of trees and plants are miles better than practicing traditional and local practice of agricultural practices. And that is how they anhilated the local practice and substitute it with their imported westernized practice. Usually in the monoculture style.

 

However what they didn’t take into account was that monoculture practice is so fragile and the risk of getting attacked from insects, infection are also extremely high. Because if you bunch up lot of plants and trees into one area, which, the type of plants are the same, if one gets infected, the infections and insects would easily pass over towards nearby plants of the same species. Now imagine if a cultivator cultivates thousands of the same plants in a field, what would happened if even 10 plants were to be infected? The capital loss would be massive. Pesticide is  just a patch up and extension to this problem as more and more insect and virus are building immunity towards these pesticide. Which prompt the cultivators to ramp up the dosage and quantity, if you think about it, it’s just like an arms race between two nations where eventually, both nation, or in this case I believe cultivators will lose.

Contrast to the monoculture style of cultivation with polyculture cultivation of local people, where a variety of plants are cultivated in one area. This practice, although not without flaws managed to reduce the viruses and infections massively, thus, reducing the loss of the cultivators.

This practice however is not popular with sovereign states for several reason, first it is difficult to collect taxes from a land that have numerous plants simultaneously, in other words, in the eyes of the state, it is illegible. Or to put it into rene guenon words, it is not quantifiable. Another reason is, it is not visually order, which is some cases of the state view, is more important than whether it is functionally working or not.