The Plant Protection Racket
By Thomas R. DeGregori
Inferiority as a Luxury Item
Before the Industrial Revolution, artists and artisans would strive to make a work as perfect as possible. They used the technologies of their time to make as fine a product as their skill and limited technology allowed. Given the long painstaking efforts involved in creation, such items were few in number and available to only a minuscule number of elites. They were the crowning achievement of their time and brought great prestige to those fortunate few who owned them. Renaissance painters used the mathematics of perspective to create their trompe l'oeil (a French term meaning "trick the eye.") David Hockney's recent claim that some of the Renaissance artists achieved realism by using a camera obscura to design their paintings is controversial and shocking to many today but one wonders whether it would have mattered to anyone prior to the Industrial Revolution (Hockney 2001).
With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, one of the qualities that allegedly makes a craft item superior became its demonstrable inferiority....
...No previous transformation was as beneficial to human enterprise and creativity as the Industrial Revolution. Yet it was damned for being dehumanizing, and its technology was considered antithetical to artistic endeavors. The dualism between thought and practical action that characterized earlier civilizations such as that of classical Greece was revived with a vengeance. It is more than appropriate that among the anti-technology artists and artisans, there was a revival of Greek forms in neoclassicism. William Blake, who is famous for his reference to "dark Satanic Mills," was himself "dependent upon prosperous patrons for his livelihood" (Boime 1985, 111). The "fiery chariots," the furnaces, and other technologies were important images in Blake's poetry and drawings, reflecting more of an ambivalence to industrialization than is recognized by many who quote him. The neoclassicism in fine arts that followed Blake and the revival of Greek ideals were facilitated by "one of the first and most refined products of modern manufacture ... the steel pen, which everyday recorded the images, means, and ideas of the new era" (Howard 1985, 790-2). Steel pens were better and they were cheaper (Howard 1985, 794).
By the late 19th century, the elitist mania for handcrafted items led to an interest in "primitive" art which pre-Industrial European elites would have considered too crude to be art....
...As societies become more affluent and wages rise, hand made products become more expensive, sometimes prohibitively so. Even reaching out for overseas production in low wage countries is not always effective as these areas are seeking to improve their lot with low cost industrial production serving a mass global market. Affluence also creates an ever-growing class of well-off consumers, many of whom seek to emulate the crudities of consumption of the elites. The crude items of every day use that were the few meager processions of the poor have become the prestige consumption of the affluent. To acquire the "authentic" or "natural" or "real," be it in construction with expensive stone or wood or in foods, eating only the rare or organically grown - these natural lifestyles are expensive because the means for providing them are extremely limited, making it a way of life possible only for a privileged portion of the world's population. Time magazine had a cover story on "The Simple Life." A perceptive correspondent for The New Yorker made an "unofficial tally of Time's ‘expensive, high tech and sophisticated’ stuff, as against the new simplicity's ‘recyclable, cheap, plain and nostalgic’ stuff." The results were:
‘Recyclable, cheap, plain and nostalgic’ goods ... : $459.40.
‘Expensive, high tech and sophisticated’ equivalents: $145.83.
He concluded that he didn't think that he could "afford the simple life (The New Yorker 1991, 30, and Time 1991, see also Carlson 2000).
It seems that the poor can no longer afford the crudities that were once their lot in life and have to make do with the products of industry when they can afford any consumption at all. Even the poverty of Gandhi was costly, as his trademark goats had to be boarded when he was in urban areas, prompting the often-paraphrased comment of Edgar Snow that Ghandi never realized how much it cost the Indian rich to keep him in his poverty.
Consumption of inferior products has become a growth industry in affluent societies particularly in the area of food and health where the fetish of ‘inferior is better, safer and healthier’ has deep ideological roots. Terms like "organic," "biodynamic," "all natural," "alternative therapies," "herbal" and "holistic" have lost any meaning that they may once have had and are to be understood as endowing a commodity with immeasurable, not fully definable vital properties. The quintessential inferior vitalist product is the homeopathic remedy whose mystic vitalist potency is derived from having virtually every last molecule of the "medication" diluted away....
...In addition to higher levels of nutrition and cleaner, safer food, modern consumers now have an incredible array of foodstuffs from around the world as well as an opportunity to savor, with some frequency, cuisines from cultures whose culinary delights were unknown to their parents or grandparents. In an article appropriately titled, "Mean Cuisine," Greg Critser asks the question, "Why, in a time of unprecedented abundance for everyone--vine-ripened Mexican tomatoes for $1 a pound! World-class reds and whites from Montepulciano d'Abruzzo for $5 a bottle! An international glut of inexpensive extra virgin olive oils and cheeses and nuts and fruits at Trader Joe's and Price Club! - why oh why are the chefs of America so dour, so chary - so very very very bummed out?" (Critser 2001). "Why the big change" Critser asks? "Ten years ago, a pint of cold-pressed, extra-virgin Italian olive oil would set you back about $20. It was scarce, and so it was the chef's preference. Today one can buy a gallon for the same price. Today, of course, imported oil is not the chef's choice" (Critser 2001). The answer is abundance, and abundance is a threat to the values of snobbery of the critics of modernity.
Critser adds that the "culprit is globalization." The foods, particularly, those that were once imported at a price beyond the reach of ordinary citizens, have now become common and relatively cheap in supermarkets across the land. Globalization has been the mechanism by which the increasing global food production leads to greater diversity of available foodstuffs and therefore greater choice, but it also deprives the snobs of that sense of exclusivity in the items they consume. In a world of increasing free trade and technological advancement, the food snobs seek to pursue an anti-trade ("buy locally"), anti-technology agenda in order to preserve their status and self-esteem, even if it is at the expense of continuing the increase in food production to meet a growing world population and make the technologies of accessibility and abundance available to those who have not had the opportunity to benefit as fully as others from them. Rules that make items of consumption more expensive, restrict access to them to those who can afford them, thus making them more prestigious. Whatever the rhetoric used to defend them may be, the fact remains that those actively opposing the advance of science and technology are also working against the well-being of the less fortunate citizens of this planet. Humanism and science are today, as in the past, intricately interrelated in the endeavor not only to understand the world but also to make it a better place for all who call it home.
