half for others

[David Dunn]

Originally posted by shugyosha

not at all david, i just think you should rely on your own experience rather that other´s, if you want to see the truth, and that is what is kongo zen is about? to rely on onself no?

We can't all experience everything though Jimi. I have to rely on expert knowledge in most areas because I can't know about everything. Moreover my experience is limited. I have lived in England for over 30 years, but that doesn't make me an expert on English history, politics, economics or whatever. My next door neighbour would disagree with me on many issues. In that case I can't pull the "well I've lived here for 30 years" argument.

On the other hand if you ask me about the turbulent motion of liquids and gases I might know considerably more than the the next person.

Mizuno Sensei says that Kaiso emphasised that we should 'read between the lines', and analyse things for ourselves. He has never said that I should adopt a particular position on political matters.

[Eastwood]

Originally posted by David Dunn
Michael,
I'm not sure we should go too far in this debate on a Shorinji Kempo board.


We are not at the ravages of nature any longer, so we are able to romanticise 'closeness' with it.


Quite simply food production across vast tracts of the globe is barely able to feed the people there. Our intensive farming methods, and GM offer a chance to improve that situation.



Kongo Zen cannot (and I think should not) dictate what side to come down on. Otherwise we would be a political organisation, rather than a budo organisation.

David,
My apologies if the selective quoting above distorts anything you said, but I wanted to make clear what parts of your post I'm responding to most directly. Let me start from the last bit and work up to the top.

'Kongo Zen shouldn't dictate what side to come down on': I agree completely. I meant my previous post to convey the kind of information and logic I used to come to the conclusion that the people aiming to conserve farmers (as opposed to "agricultural production") are using a Kongo Zen-ish approach to the world, one that suggests we consider them as philosophical and practical allies. If my information or logic is poor, then my conclusions would be in doubt. So, I don't mean that Kongo Zen tells us what to think. I mean that Kongo Zen suggests to me a reliable way to approach the problem. It suggests to me that I have very little reason to care what Prince Charles thinks, but that I might do well to care more for what a practical farmer thinks (one who knows the soil) than I do for what an industrial farmer thinks (one who knows financial information). If I'm wrong, I'm wrong (not Kongo Zen).

"food production across vast tracts of the globe is barely able to feed the people there. Our intensive farming methods, and GM offer a chance to improve that situation."
My knowledge of famine (including famines in 17th century Japan) suggests that they happen 2 major ways. 1) Wars. Monoculture approaches, i.e. industrial agriculture, starve people then because monoculture depends on global distribution which always breaks down in wars. In contrast, traditional agriculture at least has all necessary food grown within ox-cart distance. 2) Industrial Agriculture takes ownership out of local hands. Thus, even if a local would know to store reserves against climatic variation, its not his decision. As we all know from how pension funds mysteriously evaporate, macro-level logic doesn't guarantee micro-level, (humanist) logic. Incidentally, agriculture in 17th Century Japan had the same problems when it was driven by tax policy or other overly macro logics.



"We are not at the ravages of nature any longer, so we are able to romanticise 'closeness' with it."
Actually, we are never quite allowed to escape nature. The macro-micro logic problem above is a problem of human nature. Humans in a macro-logic environment (gov't ministry, bank, corporate headquarters) are all too likely to ignore the human (micro) suffering of people because they suffer at a remove. My resistance to industrial agriculture is not a matter of romantic humanism, but rather an attempt to be aware of human nature. As a result, I support agriculture that keeps a balance of power for the soil and the people who work it - the crucial power to decide what to plant and how to grow it. When I first learned of ADM's efforts to force farmers to buy seeds that produced one generation of plants, but only sterile seeds, I decided that corporate controlled genetic modifications was a romantic dream that could only end in tragedy. [This strategy proved unpopular, so now ADM seeks to achieve the same results by suing farmers who replant the next generation of seeds. They can't replant with ADM designed seeds because that violates patent law. Crazy enough for you?] Here I ask you to look in the mirror. Perhaps the idea of a bright GM'ed future is rather romanticized.


"I'm not sure we should go too far in this debate on a Shorinji Kempo board."
To me, that depends on how we approach the debate. If we're simply trying to tossing opposed sets of statistics at each other, then it would be as if we were trying to solve the gassho gyaku gote setup by both of us trying to take the exact same technique at the exact same time - very unskillful. But if we are trying to see how to think through a real problem in our world using the same logic we train in, then it seems we have a lot to be interested in here. The limit on the debate, as I see it, is that we should be working very hard to see it in terms of Kongo Zen, so that we can talk the same language and interact as kenshi, not just two strangers. Then, any disagreement left at the end would probably be quite profitable to everyone involved. Believe me, I don't think Kongo Zen will bring us all to the same answer.


That said, my basic response to your arguments is that you seem to take up a lot of studies from people at the macro level of the argument. I say, of course they think industrial agriculture is good. Local agriculture offers much less financial skim and, accordingly, much more benefit for the locals. My judgment in this case is informed by family friends in various African agricultural aid programs who recount that genetic science has much promise and could be done well, but consistently the politics at the macro level ends up starving the locals of food, or fire material, or other agricultural products required to live healthily, or a sufficient payoff to repay their debts. I grant your premise that genetic modification could do wonderful things, but not that it will. My question about your approach is - In what ways does your argument take account of the people involved?

My own study of the question suggests that the reason corporate agriculture wins out in the U.S. is because all the "experts" say it's the best way, but all the evidence says that the farmers who survive are the ones who stay out of the borrow-money/buy-more-land-and-machines/farm-it-harder trap set up by the experts. If both first world farmers and third world farmers go bankrupt in droves every time they listen to the macro level experts, why the heck should we believe such dangerous experts?

Here, the quote "everything depends on the quality of the people" reminds me not to simply trust in science or scientists, but remember that it is corporate officers and their captive lobbyists who control the policy in question. Should we trust them? I'd rather trust experts who farm to keep farming healthy.

I would also be happy to frame this as an argument about pressure points. Would it be fair to characterize your argument as holding that the experts of genetic modification and of economics are the relevant pressure points? My argument is that industrial agriculture makes social elites the pressure points whereas traditional agriculture innnervates the entire farming population of a country. I vote to put the pressure points closer to the soil, closer to the place where the damage is happening already.

Sorry about the length again. I look forward to learning more from people's responses.

Michael Eastwood

[jonboy]

Hi

I'm going to pretty much stay out of this debate except for one comment.

reminds me not to simply trust in science or scientists, but remember that it is corporate officers and their captive lobbyists who control the policy in question.

So what you are saying is not to trust the people who interpret the science and base their policy upon it? Therefore science and scientists are simply doing their job and providing exact answers that may or may not be interpreted badly.

If you can't trust science, what can you trust?

[David Dunn]

If you can't trust science, what can you trust?

I'm going to reply properly when I've got more time. But hear, hear to the above. Only science is epistemologically sound enough to avoid prejudices of politics.

One question Michael, why do you make 'industrial agriculture' and 'corporate agriculture' synonymous?

[Eastwood]

Originally posted by David Dunn
One question Michael, why do you make 'industrial agriculture' and 'corporate agriculture' synonymous?

If I were a philosopher of differences, I'd probably not make them synonymous. But focusing on such details - like discussing the philosophical differences between uchi uke and uchi oshi uke - seems mostly a waste of time.

Why do they seem similar? Basically, 19th century industrial models and the (19th century?) idea of a corporation as a legal person have so interpenetrated each other in our day that I see little point in teasing apart the differences. Imagine, only a few lifetimes ago, whatever a corporation did was the legal responsibility of its registered owners. That's not true anymore for the big ones, and so both corporate and industrial logic are less humanistic because no one human bears both the costs and the profits. Imagine what companies would act like if their shareholders could be stripped of all their possessions when the company pulled an Enron. It wouldn't be pretty, and companies would stay smaller, closer to the micro level. [By way of suggesting that I'm not a romantic idealist -- As I understand it, the corporate form arose because business owners felt exposed to social criticism, bankruptcy, even assassination for vicious business practices. So I understand that protecting the uber-rich via corporate legal forms also protects the powerless against pre-emptive "security measures" by the nervously wealthy.]

If you know you're committed to building community, then you know to support farm owners whose orientation is tied to the health of their soil, of their livestock, and their communities. That's plenty of ground to learn. Those guys are non-industrial farmers because they are first experts in farming synergy. Industrial/corporate farmers are more expert in the numbers. The farms look, smell, and feel different. Yes, I know there is a spectrum. I would like to nourish movement toward the nourishing side and away from the abstracting of resources - such profits always seem to come less from growth and more from impoverishing the soil and rural economies. Ask a soil conservationist what happens when pesticides kill most of the creatures required to aerate and enrich soil. Ask an industrial farmer/expert - they will say plow deeper and fertilize. Fertilizer is from petroleum (not an infinite resource) and bigger plows cost more money.

Why kill the soil in the first place? Because industrial logic says - anything goes as long as it withdraws more profit from some local economy than the rest of one's particular industry is capable of. and, OF COURSE, wasting the soil through extravagant growing will "profit" more than not because corporate accounts do not expense ruined soil effectively (remember, something is not used up until it is gone - a bit late for saving the soil). Corporate logic drives the same process of removing wealth from there to here (from soil to dollars). Yes, I know that slash and burn agriculture by locals is ruining South American jungles. They are not farming experts, but rather a kind of economic refugee. I would call them industrial farmers too.

So, I'm not sure how to differentiate industrial and corporate farming enough to find a distinction with a difference.

[Eastwood]

Originally posted by jonboy
If you can't trust science, what can you trust?

Jon, I do trust scientists to care about their work. I also know they don't pay the bills, but instead have to apply for what grants are available. Agricultural academics in the U.S. have a lot to answer for with their hare-brained advocacy of bigger-is-better agriculture. The problem, for example, is not that genetic modification cannot produce good things, but rather that the owners of genetic modification knowledge (the ones who bought it) can scarcely resist using it in ways designed solely to profit for one or a few years in one's particular post. The industrial age is all about city economics, not rural economics.