“I pledge allegiance to the flag,” the salute begins, words we learned by heart before we left kindergarten. “With liberty and justice for all,” it ends, a hope and a prayer more than a truth, for we know the many breakages of that hope our country has lived with and miraculously survived.
Our newest holiday, Juneteenth, is a celebration of that hope’s survival as well as black emancipation, the freedom we all needed from a system of bondage and injustice that plagued us since infancy. Before we dreamed of becoming an independent country of united colonies, black people were enslaved—taken hostage in their own countries, treated worse than cattle: bound, gagged, raped and killed, the survivors jammed into holds of sailing ships to become the machinery for turning virgin land into plantations—for the sole purpose of creating monetary wealth out of nature’s bounty. Devil take the hindmost.
On Juneteenth this year, I celebrated our common emancipation from that system, a freedom for me as well as the black Americans whose ancestors survived and bore children. The oppression of monetary wealth continues, however, seemingly shameless.
To balance the news, last week I opened an unread book from my piles called “The New Agrarianism” (2001), a collection of writings edited by Eric Freyfogle, a pioneer reclaiming the road between agricultural concerns and religious or spiritual values. As I began reading individual pieces, I rediscovered my true community of faith. Of course I’m an agrarian, what else could I be? Fourth-generation failed family farmer (but we always kept trying); a back-to-the-land dreamer in the ’70s; in the ’80s, a researcher on wide distribution of water resources as democracy’s necessity in the West; from the 1990s on, a resident of Lindsay, once the self-proclaimed “Olive Capitol of the World,” now not. These chunks of my life are all a profession of faith in something everlasting, eternal, but which few regard as a viable alternative to the industrial, capital-intensive form of agriculture causing the ongoing destruction of this valley.
One of the first essays I read was by Donald Worster, who has written extensively about water in the West and how its abuses are part of that destruction. In this essay, however, Worster challenged classic historian Lynn White, Jr., whose thesis naming the Judeo-Christian tradition as the root of the ecological crisis had a severe impact on academic thinking in the late 1960s. Worster acknowledges his colleague’s work, then says “I beg to differ. You’ve got the wrong guy. It wasn’t Moses. It was Adam Smith.”
I’ve never read Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations”; I think I sensed it’s economic single-mindedness and took a pass. But Worster summed up its message beautifully in a paragraph, after describing Smith and why he spent a decade writing that book, published in 1776, the year we declared independence. He was a Scotsman born in 1723 in a village near Edinburgh “where he grew up among fishermen and smugglers with the smell of salt air in his nostrils.” Essentially it was a humanitarian effort, as poverty in Scotland was rife from clearances, overgrazing and other land tenure atrocities inflicted by the British.
After traveling parts of the world, he decided he wanted to determine the “secret to increasing the wealth of nations,” which turned out to be relatively simple “though it took Smith an enormous body of text to reveal it.” The secret Smith found and declared to a hungry world is to establish a “‘system of natural liberty’ in which ‘every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest in his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men.’”
Worster named Smith as the cultural influencer we must overcome because he totally neglected the role of the natural world in human economies. But what caught my eye was the phrase “as long as he does not violate the laws of justice.” That part of Smith’s recipe for wealth building seems to be a missing ingredient these days.
Where are the laws of justice written? Certainly their roots were on Moses’ stone tablets, fleshed out in the prophets protestations, defended in Jesus’ preference for the poor. But beyond religion is the irrefutable truth that without justice, there is no liberty. They go hand in hand.
Trudy Wischemann is a writer still waiting for your recipes for restoring democracy at P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247. This column is not a news article but the opinion of the writer and does not reflect the views of the Mid Valley Times newspaper.
