Monoculture is the Devil’s Favorite Weapon

Recently Connie and I watched episode five of the BBC’s Planet Earth III. One video segment continues to haunt me—a drone shot high above trees in the Amazon. On one side of a sharp divide is a remnant of native rainforest teeming with life. On the other is a plantation of  eucalyptus, native to Australia, in neat lines, on barren looking dirt, some day to be harvested as pulp for paper manufacturing.

Through exquisite videography and expert narration, delivered by Sir David Attenborough, we had been shown how forests of the earth have, for millions of years, become intricately and wondrously interconnected. A cast of miraculously diverse organisms from fungi to plants, insects, and primates, work with the trees to survive and flourish. And for millions of years a balance between competition and cooperation has evolved that leads to life and more life.

Then along comes the human race: a race toward monoculture. And there is something demonic in monoculture.

While each individual tree in our natural forests supports a vast productive ecosystem, we humans are now able and willing to collectively cut down 15 billion trees a year, before we have even begun to understand this creative complexity,, and replace the forest and jungles with our various monocultures that may satisfy our appetites for a moment, but are destined to soon wither.

In Brazil they burn and cut the rain forest to farm eucalyptus here and soybeans there. Here in North America and Illinois, we are further down the monoculture road. In our neck of the woods here at Heatherhope, there is very little neck left. Everywhere I look around us today there are housing developments and industrial parks sprinkled within a sea of brown—brown disked land ready for vast acres of corn, soybean, or wheat to be planted in the next few weeks. Then will come the applications of pesticides and herbicides to insure monoculture.  Very few hedgerows.  A few stray tree lines, ditches, and streams.

Planet Earth III says in its website that globally we are fast transforming “rich and complex worlds into little more than green deserts.”

I would like Heatherhope to be different; but as nothing much more than a “hobby farmer” with 43 acres of land to steward, I am finding it rather hard to find consultation and resources to help me buck this trend. That alone is frustrating.

But even more disheartening is that our human race has been similarly brainwashed into practicing socio-political monoculture. 

I used to say that the Devil’s favorite weapon was polarization. But today I believe monoculture madness is a much more apt metaphor. And “green desert” is what we have been mesmerized into admiring and pursuing. So our social-political monoculture is fed by intellectual monoculture.

Postmodern philosophy helps us understand our folly. In the wake of the colonial age and the two world wars that the great colonizers of the world bequeathed to human history, philosophers started to think that all of our grandiose problem solving was really leading us to a vastly worse and more destructive problem.  We thought we were putting our wonderful heads together to systematize all logic and all reason into a wonderful whole—something universal and ultimate. With our advanced scientific systems we were, any day now, going to be able to create utopia.

But our idea of the universal too easily boils down to sameness. The logical and universal, along with the true, the good, and the beautiful, were, in the end, not universal or natural, but  our property. Perhaps we hadn’t perfected them, but surely they could only be at the end of the trajectory we were on. The foreigners, barbarians, and savages we encountered along the way were those who were on a different path.

On a mundane level when we enlightened ones thought of welcoming all of those poor migrants around the world, those “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” we welcomed them only on the condition that they saw the light, cast off their worthless cultures, values, and languages, and assimilated to our ways. The great assumption we were blind to was that we would all be better off if we could produce a great, assimilated monoculture. Anything else would amount to the poisoning of our blood, polluting of our values, upsetting of our harmony.

Postmodern philosophers have tried to burst that gassy, balloon of an vision. These voices tell us it is always destructive to try to erase difference. Such a force always arises from a myopic imperialism. Sameness, not difference rots society.. It is monoculture that is the Devil’s Trojan Horse of an idea. Monoculture of thought feels neat and tidy and definitive. It feels like an affirmation of good taste. It looks and smells and tastes like what nourished our dominant system yesterday, and will continue to nourish it for all time.

Certainly postmodern deconstructionists are a bother because they seem to be saying, “Trash is good.” They seem to be saying, “We can shoot down all the canon of Western Civilization by showing it is full of imperialistic prejudice, and in its place elevate talentless electronic noise that passes for music, and pass off a bit of paint thrown on canvas as art.” The postmoderns are heard to say it is safe to throw out  tradition to make room for a chaos which is nothing but bad tradition. We can “push the envelope” even when there is no longer any envelopes around. We can cancel institutions and forget about governing ourselves.

But true and vital tradition changes the tradition, by blending traditions. It will prove fatal if we dismiss the essential call to multiculturalism. Monoculture is the Devil’s tool because it keeps our ears and eyes closed to that which disturbs yet keeps us growing. Multiculturalism  is the inevitable result of an intricate system of interdependence that feeds future growth.

Monoculture’s promise of the universal only on our terms is a deadly, hollow promise. 

All around us today we hear good folk calling for “conversation.” We feel in our bones that our world is being torn apart by insane divisions that keep us from solving real problems. So we say the solution is to have conversations. Yet at the same time we feel in our bones that if we truly suggest solutions we will be shot down by those stupid, evil “others” who neither want, nor have the capacity, to promote the good of all.  So all we can suggest is “Let’s have a conversation.”

It is essential that we recognize what it is that frees us to converse. It is admitting to ourselves and to one another that all monoculture eventually becomes nothing more than a pretty desert.

I have never been to the Amazon rain forest, but every day I go with my dogs around Heatherhope farm. I try to make time to get off my trail bike and venture into the tall grass and wild verges that I have worked for years to develop. It’s not an easy detour. I must pick my way through downed branches and brambles.  The thorns and uneven ground are daunting. At times I can’t see where I’m going or where I’ve come from. In the summer the place is teeming with bothersome bugs. Death itself haunts in the form of the occasional nightshade plants and the rotting carcasses of mammals that didn’t make it. It’s messy, unkempt, and untamed.

But, the truth is, I may depend for my lunch on the wheat and soy and corn in the cultivated, monoculture fields surrounding us. But it’s those remnants of wild verges that hold the key to my tomorrow and tomorrow. The infinite organism of my wild places, and this deliciously diverse home planet of ours, depends on the endangered intricacies of the forests and the bogs, the untamed mountains and hedgerows. Weeds and wastes we call them. Life is what they are.

And I may delight in the safe, same societies of my neighborhood, my church, my nation, and my idea of civilization. My cherished “Western civilization” and “American homeland feels nice, but the great majority of humanity looks at us and thinks we are the foreign and odd ones. They have the solutions that have alluded us. It will be only by virtue of dangerous mix of strange and foreign difference that the welfare of our human race or life on earth will be be sustained.  

It is only when I can admit I am part of a whole that needs difference to thrive that I can have conversation with people and planet. I live now in a cranny of the world that is relatively safe and prosperous. But others who have been uprooted and abused by the unintended consequences of forces that keep me safe and well-fed, are coming through the gates. And younger generations are pushing their way towards me as well. I don’t yet groove to their music or appreciate their rebellious attitudes, but they have come to ask who died and left me in charge. Only when I recognize that all these immigrants and all these new generations bring with them insights and energies that we all need to survive and thrive, and quit planting  pretty and precarious deserts.

It is only when I trust others to both want a better life and to have a part to play in its unfolding, that I will be able to take my part in the conversation of the creation.