Two recent experiences of failing in attempts at public
narrative have pulled me back into thinking about strategies for what to do
when dialogue suddenly veers out of control into a realm of intractable
slipperyness and discomfort. The first was an almost textbook case of theinternet commentitis I have become so fascinated by recently: I will not
belabor it too far here, but the
basic gist was that I was called out for a claim that a critic immediately
identified as anti-science with calls for evidence and admonitions to read
experts. When I provided the requested information along with an explanation of
how the experts in question tend to produce normative explanations that do not
account for, in this case, the likelihood that genetically modified seeds are
improving the livelihoods of poor farmers, my explanations were met with increasingly
hostile and charicatured characterizations of my argument (which was about the
challenge of addressing indemnity requirements in the transfer of intellectual
property regimes into humanitarian food aid domains) as misinformation –
flawed, in large part, it appeared, because of the critic’s association of my
argument with that made by people this critic found to be intolerably opposed
to technology. No evidence I provided changed the response “this is not true,”
even when it came from the “same side” of the argument as my critic – and my
curiosity about how to productively engage with this persistent
characterization of my argument eventually turned to frustration and disgust,
as it became clear that directives like “You might also want to update your
knowledge of the situation,” with pointers to very general and outdated
information (explicitly discussed in the pieces I had provided) were largely
just launchpads for associative critiques. It felt like an elaborate
autocorrect problem, where I kept thinking I must have been misunderstood, or
that my intended message had not been expressed – because surely THAT can’t be
the response … for one thing, because how could someone become so hostile and
defensive over something this obscure and nerdy, and especially when s/he has
found someone else actually willing to discuss something so obscure and nerdy?!
My interest in this challenge of internet etiquette – and my
persistent feeling that there must be SOMEthing that could be done to help
frame a more accountable dialogue, where we were each actually responding to
the other, for example – was further piqued in an in-person dialogue failure a
week later. In a workshop on teaching food systems, some colleagues from animal
science would, from time to time, point out how animal science was a significant gap in the study of sustainable
agriculture. Everyone would nod in agreement and try to figure out what
they could do to rectify that, and I became fascinated by this animal gap as a
prime example of a corrective story that is easy to insert into a larger story
– a parsimonious story that people understand.
Once people turned to this idea of how under-understood the
role of animals is sustainable agriculture is, the degree to which the
understanding that we DO have is schematic and cartoonish became very clear:
although people may be able to characterize the basics of some of the questions
that might be asked (how can shifting agroecological practices emphasize the
value of pasture? can animal waste be a significant nutrient source to replace
energy intensive inputs – and even traction?), thinking about these immediately
highlights the schematic nature of most people’s understanding, even with a
fair amount of prior thought: what would stocking rates need to be to replace
synthetic fertilizers? What kind of labor to land ratios would switching to animal
traction engender, and what kinds of additional labor do animals require? How
can we adjudicate claims made in comparing impacts of confinement vs. pasture
raised animals? None of the answers follow readily just by logic alone, and
would require considerable study. Most people understand this. (The known
unknownness of animals provides remarkable parsimony.)
In contrast, as I reflected how much there was an analogous
situation with social science – the role of people
is not very well theorized in the study of sustainable agriculture – it turns
out that this is not a parsimonious story. It was as hard to hear as the direct
answer (with law review substantiation) I had provided my intenet comments critic:
partly because people ARE studying what people do, they may feel defensive when
they hear the critique that they are not really dealing with issues of labor
exploitation, the functions of capital (particularly the role of threatened and
enacted capital flight in shaping regulations at the national scale), and power
relations in general. In the same way that people have a very schematic and
cartoonish idea of the role of animals in sustainable agriculture, though, I
could quickly point to a number of examples of how schematic (or merely absent)
these themes were from a wide range of situations: classrooms (where in
hundreds of suggestions for improving the food system that students have
presented to me in class visits in the past several weeks, almost none have
been about policy, power, labor, or regulating capital), teaching workshops
(where people seem to be aware of these issues, but not to have the vocabulary
or categories to engage in such discussion, or to feel the need to make such issues
a part of their research frameworks), and even in work with senior colleagues
and their industry collaborators, who appear to have remarkably little to say
about relationships between producers and industry and capital. All of this highlighting
the considerable mismatch between the importance of people and the institutions
they create and the emerging repercussions of those – and any sort of analysis
of how these are working: why does it matter that there’s such capital flight
into agriculture right now? (Or, rather, into the idea of the potential of
agriculture and agricultural land?) What is the role of farmland ownership rules
in places like Minnesota, and the rising influence of real estate investment
trusts? What are the roles of other invisible institutions in constructing the
parameters of what we’re able to do and the choices we’re able to make – far
beyond the influence of corn syrup, something that does, mysteriously, seem to
pique people’s interest.
Maybe corn syrup provides a parsimonious story. It’s a
problem, though, if these more complex structural parts of food system stories remain
intractable, things like the effects of financial rules on corn futures, or
financialization of pieces of the food system.
For one thing, the daunting complexity (along with the bad news one is
likely to encounter in learning to navigate this complexity) turns people off
to analysis – which then sets them up to be seen (and to become, perhaps)
anti-science and technology. And this seems important, because if science is
supposed to be helping, and people say they don’t want to hear the science,
rather than that it’s not capturing the values people have, or to make a
difference in measures that matter to them (or how to account for things more
thoroughly – like the inputs that go into feed and infrastructure) – then we
are not building better science, we are just confirming the problem with
skepticism about people who demonstrate skepticism about science itself.
The problem with skepticism and the problem with this
parsimonious story
What do we learn from how easy it is to say “animals aren’t
included in sustainable agriculture” and apply it to the problem with making
the idea more legible that people might not being adequately included? Part of
my recent experience with aggressive skepticism (and this seems to be
increasingly echoed in a particular social domain of skeptical science, as
recent efforts to debunk the health claims of organics or to conspicuously enthuseabout Bangladesh’s adoption of commercial patents for genetic modification tobrinjal in tweets aimed at journalists promoting open source seed) suggests
that part of the problem is slippage between what different parties think is
interesting (and hence the focus of attention) in a particular problem space.
This makes it very hard to hold each other to the terms of
what’s interesting. So for example, part of what I’ve been saying by asking the
question of what would poor people’s genetic modifications of crops look like
is that in food improvement discourses, genetic modification has been justified
in terms of improving crops via tolerance to things like drought and salinity
and resistance to blight. This is generally an adaptation kind of narrative – and
there’s a whole critique of adaptation for resilience because it puts the onus
of response on those already most vulnerable – however, in general, I don’t
disagree with the argument that you want all possibilities on board, although I
am concerned about the way this tends to dismiss systemic critiques and shift attention
instead to a reactive set of practices which does reduces the power of the
critique that the system itself needs to be significantly changed to build in
more resilience. Monocultures could be a good illustration if you could
actually have a dialogue about this, where you were having substantive
agreement or disagreement. But it’s difficult to get to that kind of analysis
of whether you’re having a substantive conversation because in many skeptical
dialogues you’re not actually having something like a dialogue, you’re having
something more like a volley. And arguably, a volley is better than a DUEL,
where you’re at least exchanging shots and you could imagine it shifting from
military metaphors to game metaphors. The current way it comes across seems so
hostile.
There seems to be something important in this defensiveness,
though. It is often expressed by people who set themselves up as identifying
with the scientific perspective, who I might characterize as tending to look at
one set of focal points more than at the larger discourse that gives them
context: claims made about the healthfulness of organic produce make a good
example here (particularly in contrast to attention to the ways these claims circulate
in society – they are overrepresented, perhaps). But when skeptics lash out in
a mythbusting “We’re going to set things right” kind of mode, which is very
normal science, there seems to be a problematic kind of set up involved:
Mythbusting gets such an emotional reaction and the
emotional reaction is part of what it seems likes skeptics are prompting – so
they can demonstrate how much the kinds of decisions people are making are
irrational and are not based on the kinds of criteria skeptics think are valid.
So they’re prompting an irrational kind of argument, then they have been
validated in their arguments that this is the wrong thing to be happening in an
argument, not the basis they respect. And it also seems to make skeptics
strangely impervious, as in my experience – because if they’re expecting an
emotional kind of reaction, and then they get something that’s more like a
science reaction (but that says, here are the limitations of that approach),
this is not a narrative trajectory that they may be ready to engage in. (I
remind you again that Popular Science just had to close down its comments section for more or less exactly this reason.)
You can’t necessarily argue, for example, for the benefits
of, say, virus resistance, against the costs of seed company concentration if
we haven’t had a chance to evaluate that very well because it’s not a question
people have been willing to put into their models, or into their large-scale
assessments, or, frankly, into practice, because most of the traits that are out
there are NOT for blight resistance, even if I would like to hear more about
those. It ends up being parallel to the frustration of the social sciences when
people are not engaging with power.
Since it seems clear from a political ecology perspective that
you need to engage both with power and with ecology, I want to think about the
power of political ecology (and particularly political agro-ecology) as a way
to frame narratives to help create the space for dialogue and for figuring out
what is the problem space – and are we asking questions that are mutually
comprehensible before we start attacking each other for the ways that the
evidence we provide doesn’t answer the question the other person is posing?
I think one of the keys to this may be more explicitly
framing the relationship between things that already seem like common sense –
like the idea that organic agriculture might be better not for the reasons
people claim. But then they get attacked for attacking organics, even while
they recognize that the claims that are being made are not really the point –
they recognize, in this case, the commercialization of organics and discount
that. But maybe they aren’t evaluating how strongly those ideas are shaping the
larger political discourse and what it does. So this relationship that I’m
arguing needs to be better fleshed out has to do with the way that people frame
their motives for things. For example, I don’t think power is dealt with well
enough. People could more explicitly state their tacit implicit knowledge,
“everybody knows that power is a problem here” – and that might help us get to
be able to much more explicitly and specifically describe the premise of what
it is we’re looking at: we don’t necessarily mean just everybody’s everyday
knowledge about the way power tends to work (although that may be a really good
place to start), but also to acknowledge the patterns where we have good reason
to believe that this kind of knowledge has tendencies to go wrong, to have
systematic biases – and if we can acknowledge this, we may be able to also see where
a more systematic approach might help us to identify heuristics that can help
us with these biases, such as leaving out labor, control, and problematic power
relations from our food improvement stories.
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