I happen to prefer city dwelling to rural dwelling. Some people prefer the reverse. But the problem with your analysis is that you are hosting up rural dwelling food producers as somehow superior to everybody else. Even more, you posit a pre modern agrarian lifestyle as a 'natural one'. That makes no more sense than calling my home a 'natural' society. Your understanding of 'nature' and 'natural' are just a variant on old Enlightenment constructs, no more, and no less, than the concept of 'Progress' that you deride.
But all societies are a question of values and technology - they are human creations. That's true of the Native American hunter gatherers, that's true of Native American small scale agricultural communities, and that's true of the serf and nobiligy society of eighteenth century Poland, the industrial urban one of the turn of the century Ruhr, and the service one of modern day NYC.
The technology imposes constraints - a society where you need one hundred people to produce enough food for one hundred and twenty has less options available than the one where that same hundred can feed one thousand.
Those choices can be good or bad, and what is good and bad is a question of values as well - i.e. not natural, but a social construct. We can build pyramids to our rulers, have more leisure, construct cathedrals and temples to the glory of our gods, mass armies, provide health care, build McMansions, provide education and running water, fashionable clothing, research history, produce sitcoms - all choices.
Within your commentary you amalgate the question of one important constraint - energy in a future without large scale use of fossil fuels, and that of what constitute good choices within those constraints. But they are two completely different matters.
my family goes back on both sides to peasant and yeoman farmers and fishers, sorry, no courtiers (at least not with paternity acknowledged). the closest we get to aristocracy is a Thane, a kind or rural Big Man or squire, way way back on the paternal side. the other side is "peasants all the way down." I suppose family history (oral and written) may explain some of my political thought processes and sympathies.
somehow the experiments I've done in sustainable living -- like using a manual composting loo for 18 months, living without a car, conserving water and heating gas, vegetable gardening, eating local food in season etc -- don't strike me as quite equivalent to dressing up in shepherd costume and frolicking at the Petit Trianon or the Spanish equivalent :-) but ymmv. The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
FTR I make no claims of more or less "natural" standing for human cultures. [we can play semantic games with the word "natural" until it's perfectly "natural" to destroy the temperate climatic balance or to wage nuclear war -- so fuhgeddaboudit.] my questions are about more or less happiness, more or less freedom, more and less egalitarian sharing of resources, more or less potential longevity for human social organisations, more or less violence, slavery, authoritarianism, control, torture, etc. The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
for the historical dynamic of "civilisation". i.e. a new pseudorational ideology that justifies/perpetuates the regime of accumulation and the core/periphery dynamic needed to support a parasitical and idle elite, monumental construction, massive resource hoarding and concentration, grotesque displays of status and the other markers which we recognise as indicating "high" culture.
Some of the Peruvian highland cultures had a whole separate caste of persons whose specialised function was to trade surplus and luxury goods with neighbouring polities; but that trade and its currency were kept strictly and absolutely isolated from the subsistence economy necessary to ensure food security... What kingship/empire/hierarchy/colonialism introduces seems to be labour without food security, with elites controlling not only surpluses but all production; whoever controls the food supply controls our lives, which explains a lot about ADM and Monsanto...
btw, can we observe a distinction of terminology between agriculture, the tradition of the ploughed field and the (varying degrees of) monocrop, vs horticulture or permaculture, both of which were practised with high sophistication by many non-imperial type people?
There are value judgements throughout that imply the 'noble savage' vision of the world. No, you wouldn't put in those words, vocabularies change, but that's what it amounts to. For you the society where people have to work in the capitalistic economy or starve equals slavery - even those with redistribution that actually makes the choices less stark. On the other hand where you have to work as a food producer in a non-capitalistic agrarian economy - that's a laudable society. City dwellers providing goods and services are 'parasitical' upon the resource producing 'periphery'. The agriculture of the 'ploughed field' is imperialist and bad, 'horticulture' and 'permaculture' practiced by 'non imperialist' cultures, good. Small kinship based communities good, large political units bad. Non-indigenous 'imperialist' cultures vs. non-imperialist indigenous ones.
If it weren't for those type of value judgements I could read you as just an extreme pessimist, but they are there.
being "made to work as a food producer in a non-capitalistic agrarian economy" is not, in fact, anyone's idea of a good time -- nor did I ever suggest it was. monocropping and field agriculture do seem to be correlated historically with corvee labour (for both irrigation and monocrop cultivation), taxation, tribute, and control of [usually hard wheat] grain stores by a kind of evolving priest/king caste. this type of field labour is not an "alternative" to city life -- it's the original basis of city life. I don't see what is unreasonable about preferring the type of agriculture practised by some N Am indigenes, i.e. "food forest" tending and dense polyculture. it's a lot less backbreaking labour and it doesn't impoverish the soil, and provides a more varied diet. it's also quite adequate (modern experiments confirm the extremely high productivity per acre of intensive polyculture) to feed a fairly large population, unlike gatherer-hunter methods which require more hectares per person than we have left.
and yes, the ploughed field is a "bad" form of agriculture in many ways -- "bad" meaning inefficient or spendthrift -- in that it reverses carbon sequestration, and over time impoverishes the soil ecosystems on which all our lives depend. in combination with industrial equipment, neurotoxins (pesticides) and artificial and longhaul overkill "amendments," it's agricultural suicide. "bad" and "good" here have everything to do with our long term survival prospects. our culture will live longer if we don't kill the soil. that seems to me a working definition of "good".
so the question still remains for me, in what ways have non-imperial, indigenous cultures been more successful in staying power or sustainability than imperial cultures which tend to crash-n-burn regularly (not to mention in personal liberty or democratic decision making traditions) and why? and what lessons in adaptive behaviour could we learn from them now that the borders of imperial aggression have pretty much run up against each other, i.e. every square mile of the planet's surface is claimed by an imperial core?
is imperialistic behaviour adaptive? or maladaptive?
"nobility" (or "glory" for that matter) have nowt to do with it. it's a soft landing I'm hoping for, nothing more. The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
That's the social organization. How about minus corvee labour, taxation, tribute and control by a priest/king caste? It's still not anyone's idea of a good time - or is it?
it's also quite adequate (modern experiments confirm the extremely high productivity per acre of intensive polyculture)
Productivity per acre, how about productivity per hour of manual labour? And how practical is it when you add in the much larger amount of infrastructure you'd want - running water, electricity, schools, hospitals, telecommunication networks, decent housing, libraries, transport infrastructure - plus the industrial, administrative and service economy infrastructure necessary for such things for the six plus billion people in this world?
