These thoughts are not structured, but intended to suggest that if we are to
figure out some of the most basic theoretical questions that obsess this
list, it is necessary to look at why people may behave and have attitudes as
they do.
Thomas Hartmann, himself an adult with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity
Disorder, has written some interesting books on his proposition that people
with ADHD are 'hunters' in a 'farmers' world. His characterisation of the
hunter is as someone whose life and community depend on a restless, shifting
focus, searching for the hostile and the prey - whereas the farmer's health
and community depend on a steadfast commitment to the repetitive. And,
Hartmann says, in the modern world, the farmers, in all aspects of life,
have become dominant, and the hunters threatened. This is a concept which
certainly helps me understand aspects of my life in a bureaucratic world, it
may also provide an interesting perspective for people in academic
institutions, regarding the relative success of the constantly insightful
versus those with no boredom threshold who can plough the furrow
remorselessly. All this is, of course, a gross simplification, but I think
it's also useful to an understanding, for example, of why people in some
parts of Latin America or Madagascar just can't seem to damn well settle
down sensibly and be good farmers.
The business of sustainable farming demands a greater patience than much
conventional farming. However, at the same time as it demands a commitment
to the repetitive, it also demands - to be really successful - great
curiosity, memory, capacity for lateral thinking, willingness to look for
'a-ha' experiences, like Greg David with his mowing and the pig. These do
not seem to be universal human attributes, but I think that to get more
conventional farmers across the line, there has to be some shift at this
level of mental focus and capacity.
I suspect too that a lot of the laboratory science hunters may be a bit
attention deficited, may be happy in the hunt for dead squirrels. What
Hartmann's general proposition does not fully take into account is that a
hunter's heaven may be to find a shootable squirrel in the same tree every
day. That seems to me to be the boring stage that biotech research has
reached. Is a lot of imagination required to find genes these day? -. About
as much as chasing elephant with an Apache helicopter, I would have thought.
So there is a gulf between such people and real farmers, and a form of
exploitation of such hunters by large organisations sponsoring and
exploiting such work of 'discovery'.
A friend in another environment suggested something else to me recently,
that there is a comparable competition and pressure between people who are
'sensitive' and people who are relatively 'insensitive'. The nature of
modern urban life, the nature of bureaucratic organisations and business,
the nature of farming, is a squeeze on the sensitive, and the rules and
standards are increasingly those made by the insensitive. At a physiological
level, more (sensitive) people are succumbing to chronic illness, while
(insensitive) others seem unaffected by environmental factors at all and
can't understand the fuss. In relation to sustainable agriculture, there is
a problem in that this, fundamentally sensitive, activity is constantly
shouldered off the main track by the insensitive.
There is some public opinion which has growing apprehension of the way in
which the products of insensitivity (meaning kinds of social organisation,
workplace, foods, consumerist pressures) are closing in, but 'science' and
'technology' are doing nothing much to help them, just compounding social
confusion and gullibility.
I haven't figured answers, or strategies to offer, but I think it is
important to raise these broader social, behaviour-related questions. No
constant round and round of agronomy or GMOery will enable us to understand
basic human behaviour or solve the problems arising. I'm not saying give up
such discussion, but we should seek to read the code behind the exchanges we
have and look for insights at that level.
Dennis Argall.
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