Consequences of Leaving an Agrarian Society

The 20th century witnessed a rare and irreversible shift, not seen since the ancient nomads planted their feet and began to work the land: a societal evolution.  The first societal evolution was from nomadic to agrarian. Thousands of years later, our familiar agrarian society has finally given way to a mechanized society.  Up until this point, the majority of people in the advanced nations worked in, around, or in support of agriculture. The average life was the farm life.

Each societal evolution welcomes a myriad of effects foundational to the new society. The agrarian shift resulted in a new grain-and vegetable-centric diet, the development of new building techniques, larger structures, new concepts in religion, philosophy, and law, such as the concept of owning land. However, the negative consequences – perhaps more sedentary lives, new forms of greed, famine, etc. – receive little thought in comparison.

Likewise, our shift from an agrarian to an mechanized society is a mixed bag. There are many tally marks for the better and for the worse to this transition, which I believe has taken a little over 100 years. The transition to a mechanized society began with steam engine locomotion in the early 1800s and completed some time between the two world wars, when the Great Depression forced many out of farming and into the open arms of Uncle Sam during World War II. These two events precipitated a sharp decline in the number of U.S. farms over the next 30 years, and the agrarian phase of the United States concluded just in time to welcome the civilian application of World War II’s technological innovations.

Here are a selection of the pros and cons of transitioning away from an agrarian society into a mechanized one.

The Good

The shift from agrarian to a mechanized society welcomes many quantifiable benefits.

First, a mechanized society is incredibly more efficient in production. Far fewer farmers are required to produce the food for a nation now than in our agrarian past. The concepts of the assembly line and specialization has pushed the rate of production of even complex machines far higher than under economies driven by independent tradesmen and skilled artisans. With this specialization, the age of machines can build vastly more advanced forms of locomotion, communications, computing, warfare, and production than an agrarian society. This specialization and efficiency permits fewer man-hours to be spent on the necessities of life, allowing a nation’s excess hours to be spent on further innovation and recreation.

These advances and technological innovations better support a growing population with better living conditions, at least in terms of monetary outlook, sanitation, and medicine.

The Bad

Nonetheless, this leaving behind of our agrarian society is not without its growing pains. There are variety of negatives aspects of leaving the societal model that has underpinned much of the developed world and virtually all of the West. Here are but a few to counterbalance the gains we just highlighted.

First, leaving an agrarian society tends to strain the resources of the younger citizens. As jobs move from the farm to the city, the youth must leave behind the shared resources offered by multigenerational living on the family farm, such as land and infrastructure. This results in each generation now having to duplicate living costs that might once have been shared in our agrarian past. Think today, how each young adult wishing to own a home must go into incredible debt to begin establishing what his or her parents and grandparents had already established. Eventually, when the older generation passes, that wealth is passed on, but not without all the inefficiencies inherent to moving, selling, taxes, and purchasing again. In our non-agrarian society today, we often treat home or land ownership like a stock – buy low and hopefully sell high, and repeat that a few times if we’re lucky. But agrarian societies generally looked at the land as the resource to acquire, rather than the money stored in it, and it was not lightly sold since this was the direct inheritance of their sons and daughters.

Second, the mechanized society has disconnected us from what the famed contrarian farmer Joel Salatin calls our “earthly umbilical”. Today, it is possible in a large metropolis to go a day (or more) without seeing a tree. Many roll out of their beds, ding an elevator to deliver them to the rivers of concrete we call streets, descend into grimy subway stations, ding another elevator to take them to the 22nd floor of a tower of glass and metal, and repeat the journey back after sitting and staring at a liquid crystal display for eight hours. While many may think of this as high society, it is a daily experience unheard of in times past. Always, in every corner of the Earth up until this mechanized age, men and women have breathed fresh air on the regular, walked on grass or sand or whatever the natural terrain offered, and at some time or other put their hands in dirt. Who is surprised at the rates of depression today? We have been severed from the therapeutics offered by the natural world around us. What do you think of when you think of peace? A serene valley. A sunset. A puffy white cloud. The ultra urbanized areas offer disproportionate symbols of chaos: bustling streets, honking horns, crime, and smog. There is then a very real, yet often unperceived cost to transitioning to a mechanized world in the area of mental health and happiness.

Third, though related to the second point, our increased experience of what is man-made in lieu of what is God-made results in inflated egos, an apathy for history, and a tendency towards an atheistic society. The more we revel in our own creations (skyscrapers, magnet-trains, the virtual world we invented, etc.), the more we perceive ourselves as our own gods, the masters of ourselves. We cast off the “superstitions” of the past, because we don’t understand them, and substitute for it something smaller which we do understand. That we call simply Science. Then we also look with disdain at our past, less advanced predecessors for their ignorance. Set aside the fact that they laid the first bricks for the wall we now stand on. So, we cast away the field of History in addition to Theology. 

As we sit on our jets over the Atlantic, we now laugh at those especially stupid ancient Greeks who thought the world flat, or the stupid religious Medievals who thought the Earth as the center of the universe. Rightfully so then, our descendants should sit in Heaven one day laughing at those fools who thought science incompatible with religion.

If anything summarizes this third point best, it is succinctly that we have substituted our philosophy with technology.

Conclusions

If we observe the good and bad points of this shift away from agrarianism, we find that while the shift away from agrarianism benefits society at the macro level (economics, defense capabilities, technological achievements, etc.), it comes at considerable cost at the personal level (shared resources, mental health, faith, etc.). Perhaps this is not surprising, as  the great dystopian novels overwhelmingly depict the sacrifice of personal, human interests for seemingly inhuman societal interests in a more technologically advanced world. What, then, is the better society? How does one compare a system that better fosters innate humanity against a system that better survives in a broader competitive world? I sincerely ask this question.

It is easy to assert that we should do the former, because it could maximize human happiness or that it better resembles the Garden of Eden. But the nation that shuns the new age of machines is doomed to fail, either from economic or military pressures. Likewise, it is easy to say we have no choice – that we must embrace the latter world of technological change, cost what it may in happiness to each person in that world. But, does this latter choice regard what is ultimately significant to religious-minded folks like myself? Or for the non-religious, at least a quest for the ultimate good, perhaps human happiness?

Perhaps there is some false dichotomy here, and the best way embraces the mechanized age without leaving the humanity found in the simplicity of the agrarian age. I hope this is the answer, though it appears far from what is realized today. Did the nomads have a choice between a nomadic life and an agrarian life? It seems not.  One either plants their feet firmly in one area or not.

Are we better off tending the fields or the machines?