The Grapes of Wrath

I’ve been rereading John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. This passage from Chapter 5 is shockingly relevant to the farm crisis today. It describes the early stages of the consolidation and corporatization of farms that continues to accelerate. Even more relevantly, it illuminates the systemic nature of that process, that defies any attempt to locate blame. Here, agents of institutional landowners are coming to notify tenant farmers that they must leave their land.

Some of the owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do, and some of them were angry because they hated to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold. And all of them were caught in something larger than themselves. Some of them hated the mathematics that drove them, and some were afraid, and some worshiped the mathematics because it provided a refuge from thought and from feeling. If a bank or a finance company owned the land, the owner man said, The Bank—or the Company—needs—wants—insists—must have—as though the Bank or the Company were a monster, with thought and feeling, which had ensnared them. These last would take no responsibility for the banks or the companies because they were men and slaves, while the banks were machines and masters all at the same time. Some of the owner men were a little proud to be slaves to such cold and powerful masters. The owner men sat in the cars and explained. You know the land is poor. You’ve scrabbled at it long enough, God knows.

Next comes a man driving a tractor, demolishing the homes and gardens of farmers who had farmed the land for generations. Steinbeck understood that no human being—not the man driving the tractor, nor the bank that hired him, nor the bank’s local president, nor its board of directors back East, nor its shareholders and bondholders, were to blame for that loss. Or, perhaps, all were to blame. But really it is the reflex of blame itself that he casts into doubt.

Blame allures the victims of a system with its promise of an easy solution. It substitutes a problem that we know how to fix, for one that we do not. Here is an exchange between a tenant farmer and the tractor driver, who has warned the tenant that his house is in the way of the tractor:

“I built it with my hands. Straightened old nails to put the sheathing on. Rafters are wired to the stringers with baling wire. It’s mine. I built it. You bump it down—I’ll be in the window with a rifle. You even come too close and I’ll pot you like a rabbit.”

“It’s not me. There’s nothing I can do. I’ll lose my job if I don’t do it. And look—suppose you kill me? They’ll just hang you, but long before you’re hung there’ll be another guy on the tractor, and he’ll bump the house down. You’re not killing the right guy.”

“That’s so,” the tenant said. “Who gave you orders? I’ll go after him. He’s the one to kill.”

“You’re wrong. He got his orders from the bank. The bank told him, ‘Clear those people out or it’s your job.’”

“Well, there’s a president of the bank. There’s a board of directors. I’ll fill up the magazine of the rifle and go into the bank.”

The driver said, “Fellow was telling me the bank gets orders from the East. The orders were, ‘Make the land show profit or we’ll close you up.’”

“But where does it stop? Who can we shoot? I don’t aim to starve to death before I kill the man that’s starving me.”

“I don’t know. Maybe there’s nobody to shoot. Maybe the thing isn’t men at all. Maybe like you said, the property’s doing it. Anyway I told you my orders.”

Maybe there is nobody to shoot. Then what? OK, within this monster made of men (and these days, women too), among those manning the machine, some are more cruel, more rapacious, more ruthless than others. But they did not design the system. It more like the system designed them.

I just got off a call with some activists in the regenerative agriculture space, including some experienced farmers. One made it clear: the problem isn’t actually the Big Four meatpackers. Their margins are tiny. It is more the distributors, he said. Someone else could have explained why it isn’t the distributors either, given the economic forces they must contend with. It must be the chemical companies. The GMO seed companies. The Big Food consumer brands. The financial institutions that own their stock. BlackRock. The pension funds desperate for a decent return. The government. But no, all of them are parts of the machine.

To recognize this is the beginning of liberation from that machine. No longer directing energy at false targets, we can look to the machine itself and how to change it. And we can approach its servants in the spirit of, “I see you are stuck in this system, and here is a way out.” We can approach them as a friend.

As Steinbeck said, some are proud to be important and successful slaves to the machine, and some worship its mathematics. But that, he says, is a kind of refuge from feeling.

The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.

Every man in a bank hates what the bank does. A similar statement could probably be made about Congress, along with any number of other institutions. To some degree, it is true of whole nations and civilizations. Certainly there are some who are blind to the cruelty, taking shelter in the numbers, the justifications, and the ideologies. That is only possible, though, if there is something they are unwilling, unable, or not yet ready to feel. And even if they don’t “hate” what their organization does, or their country, or their civilization, still an unease worries them, a feeling of homelessness.

The Grapes of Wrath was a massive best-seller when it came out in 1939, indicating a high degree of public understanding of the economics it describes. Its message would do us well today, both as an antidote to society’s present intoxication with blame, and as an exposition of the basic economics of the machine, which have not substantially changed.

Something has changed though, and changed for the better. Whereas the logic of the machine once had a powerful ally in the ideology of progress, today that ally grows infirm. No longer do the tractor’s long, straight furrows seem an intuitive improvement over the curves and organic irregularities of the homesteads of a dozen tenant farmers. No longer does the vision of an earth fully subdued beguile us. Or at least, its spell is waning. As it releases us, we become free to feel that which had hidden behind the math of security and control.

The machine, though it may have taken on a life of its own (already it had in 1939; all the more in the age of AI), is still a human creation, both in its genesis and its continuation. As the tenant farmer muses, “It’s not like lightning or earthquakes. We’ve got a bad thing made by men, and by God that’s something we can change.” Truth.

We can. But will we? What I said above about the infirmity of the ideology of progress is only half true. In AI discourse, practically everyone agrees that machines will soon be doing nearly all the work, ushering in either mass unemployment or an age of leisure. Nearly identical predictions prevailed during the Industrial Revolution: limitless leisure, perfect health, social harmony, material abundance. Some of those predictions have woefully failed; others have achieved a perverse fulfillment: abundance without substance, leisure without ease. Steinbeck understood it well:

The driver sat in his iron seat and he was proud of the straight lines he did not will, proud of the tractor he did not own or love, proud of the power he could not control. And when that crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumbled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift past his fingertips. No man had touched the seed, or lusted for the growth. Men ate what they had not raised, had no connection with the bread.

The disconnection has widened with time. We do not have the luxury of blame, which displaces grief onto anger and anger onto hate, distracting us from the path of return. So far has the machine taken us into separation that most of us hardly know what we are missing. We have forgotten what it is to sow and reap and winnow and thresh and grind our wheat into flour and bake it in the oven. We have forgotten what it is to know and be known by the ones who sing make our sheets, our shoes, our songs, our stories. We have, most of us, forgotten what it is to live among the landmarks of our grandparents’ tales and memories. We have lost so much, yet even having forgotten what we lost, we long for its recovery. We even recognize what meets our longing, and come alive in the presence of those practices and technologies that restore the world’s unruly intimacy and put life back at the center.

Returning now to agriculture, these technologies include regenerative practices that restore vitality to soil, water, and the farm ecology, including relations to the community of workers and eaters. I am part of a group of activists that is publicizing a petition to the Secretary of Agriculture, led by Moms Across America and Farm Action. Here it is. Please sign it. It may seem a weak and futile gesture given the huge size of the agricultural-industrial Machine that continues to devour 64 farms a day in the United States, but we are at a watershed moment. The petition calls for policies to rescue family farms and tip the scale just a little toward regenerative practices. These practices align with the awakening to the path of return I have described. I like to say: Politics is a lagging indicator of consciousness. Maybe the consciousness behind organic, regenerative, and permaculture practices—tracing a lineage from indigenous and traditional roots through Steinbeck and Steiner, J.I. Rodale and Wendell Berry, Bill Mollison and Allan Savory, Masanobu Fukuoka and Vandana Shiva, Gabe Brown and Rick Clark—is strong enough now to alter the soulless juggernaut of agricultural policy.