After I posted a flattering review of Hillbilly Elegy, the powerful memoir by J D Vance, and sent a link to my daughter in the NC mountains, she replied that it (Hillbilly Elegy) had been roundly trashed by people in her circle, and suggested I consider there may be factors other than poor culture, namely outside influences, that have made the Appalachian culture so destitute. She, being the strong willed and intelligent woman her mother raised her to be, went a step further and recommended I read Ramp Hollow, and then went further than that and bought the book and sent it to me to read. And no excuses! Okay, okay, I guess expressing an opinion can have consequences. Here I go again.
Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir, was a bit of a departure for me because I tend strongly toward fiction in my reading habits. Ramp Hollow was a major detour with its three hundred pages of generously footnoted citations and quotations by an extensive range of experts from squatters in the Kentucky hills to United Nations researchers in central Africa. Very thought provoking and not easy reading.
It’s basically an anti-capitalist screed and a paean to agrarianism. Capitalism is an easy target. Western civilization is largely based on capitalism and look at the evils rampant in our world--poverty, ignorance, pollution, greed, injustice, racism, shiftlessness, dependency, fraud, corruption. It’s a long list and capitalism can be linked to all of it. On the other hand it’s easy to praise the simple virtues of the good-hearted agrarians, the farmers who till the soil and make their living from the bounty of the land and the sweat of their brow.
But it’s more than that because Stoll offers some solutions that may enable a sustainable civilization, or at least postpone the ultimate demise of humanity on planet Earth. First, let me get some criticisms out of the way.
Stoll reviews a lot of history, and properly cites his sources, but he goes out of bounds for a historian when he asserts what he thinks people believed. “...investors believed the best use of the Kanawha Valley was to remove its trees and dig its coal. They believed that these commodities enriched not only them but West Virginia, the United States, and even the world--that imposing private property over these mountains enlisted a neglected land and a forgotten people in an inevitable movement. They also believed that nothing stood in their way.” We really have no way of knowing what individuals believed about something a hundred years ago, or even yesterday. In putting thoughts into their heads, Stoll presents them as condescending, rapacious, evil. Maybe they were just being human.
In Chapter 1 Stoll laments the way industrial agriculture passed over the mountains. In a long paragraph describing what he believes outsiders in the late nineteenth century thought of Appalachia, he blames the prejudices of elites for seeing the area as not being suitable for industrial agriculture. There’s no need to vilify investors over that. It’s simply that large scale farming in the mountains would be less profitable than in the plains. Not impossible in the mountains, just less profitable. So the investment capital went elsewhere. No need to impugn anyone’s motives as anything other than profit seeking and simple arithmetic.
Stoll goes after economists for not giving fair credit to agrarians. Quoting an adviser to the World Bank in the 1960s, “All the agrarian economists of the world agree that if those people were removed from the land agricultural output, far from falling, would increase.” Stoll thinks that’s wrong because they are giving zero value to the food produced by the agrarians. They aren’t. The smallholders are just feeding themselves. In terms of efficiency, output divided by input, agrarian efficiency is 1; industrial agriculture efficiency is greater than 1, so the agrarian economists of the world were right.
Stoll weakens his own case when he says, in characterizing the plight of the mountain people, “If I gloss over some of their social problems, it is because I have my eyes on other things.” Well, thank you for acknowledging your prejudice. America operates along a continuum from ‘individual responsibility’ on the right end to ‘cooperative effort’ on the left. As the political pendulum swings, and public sentiment shifts one way or the other, we never leave that continuum, and thank goodness for that because we could never have come this far without both ends playing a part. Stoll declares that he is marching all the way to the left end of the continuum to make his case, and thereby yields any pretense of considering all factors. I guess I should acknowledge that he declares his intention instead of leaving it to the reader to divine it.
Stoll looks to me like he’s taking on Goliath, and losing, when he attacks what he calls the “theory of stages”. “As simple as a child’s bedtime story, the theory of stages nonetheless served as the commonplace representation of material progress for centuries, exerting enormous influence over how elites (name-calling again) in the Atlantic World thought about history, political economy, and race... Never has there been a model of reality so utterly divorced from reality.” Divorced from reality? If civilization didn’t pass through stages of development, how does he think we got to where we are now? Twenty-first century civilization didn’t get dropped here in one fully developed piece by aliens (Or did it? Take it from there, conspiracy theorists!). I get it that describing the development of civilization in stages enables one to place one stage as more advanced than another, and therefore the less advanced one can be seen as needing to be brought into the future. It can be seen as giving the more advanced group permission to mess with the other one. This is a sad state of affairs, sure enough, but hardly new. After all, the mountaineers that Stoll is defending aren’t exactly natives; they emigrated from Sweden, Scotland, and Ireland to kick out the native Americans, who crossed the land bridge between Asia and Alaska to claim the bounty of the continent.
Stoll doesn’t say much about religion, but there’s an obvious connection between Christianity and capitalism, a holy matrimony, so to speak. Both urge the believer to put off the present in favor of a future reward, the Christian investing prayer and faith and good works for a future in paradise after death, the capitalist investing a portion of earnings in return for compound interest. Together these two have created the juggernaut that is Western Civilization. Stoll states, “Some pronounce the coming of industrialization as necessary and even inevitable. I reject this mysticism.” I reject his rejection. Maybe not necessary, but definitely inevitable. It may have been an inevitable result of the nature of human beings, the drive to compete, the fight or flight reflex, the impulse to dominate and procreate. But add to that the combination of Christianity and capitalism, and you have inevitability.
Stoll says the transition to poverty in Appalachia “...came about under four linked conditions: population pressure, loss of the homeplace itself, ecological destruction, and the dwindling value of mountain commodities.” I can picture the first as leading to the other three. Dad and mom give their hundred acres to the three kids who each give theirs to their three, etc. In three generations it’s down to three acres apiece, not enough to subsist on, especially considering not all of the original hundred acres are suitable for farming. The rules of the Commons Communities would have to have a mechanism for limiting the population.
The book’s ultimate thesis is that there should be a place for agrarianism in the modern world, perhaps all over the world. He provides an excellent depiction of peasants or smallholders, and their ‘commons’. In a simplistic model, smallholder families live on modest plots of land, say 5-10 acres, which they farm for most of their food, and they share a forest, a commons, in which they all hunt and forage and harvest for fuel and building materials. The commons is essential to their subsistence. “The only rule for living on an ecological base is to observe its limits.” But there is the rub--humans multiply. Known as the ‘tragedy of the commons’, the problem is that some people eventually take more than their share, crippling the commons for everyone. One person strips the land of its trees, another poisons the water with chemical effluent, another pollutes the air. Or growth in population over-stresses the ecosystem. It’s one of the causes of collapse in Appalachia.
How can the commons be saved? Wouldn’t it be lovely if agrarianism worked? Who doesn’t love the romantic appeal of the ‘back to the land’ agrarians, the yeoman farmers, independent, living off their wits and the sweat of their brows? It’s a near universal appeal, as if it’s in our DNA, like the attraction of a fire in the fireplace. For the first million years of human evolution we hunted and gathered from the forests, huddled around a fire for warmth and safety, and for almost as long we farmed the land. There probably is something in our DNA that attracts us to these images.
Maybe it actually can work. Stoll steps up and offers a solution--the Commons Communities Act. It’s a law he proposes by which the United States would create a number of commons communities, complete with legal boundaries that include a commons to be available for use by all the inhabitants. Population would be limited to a specified number of households, and they would be self-governing. No non-resident, trust, or corporation would be permitted to purchase property in the community. Reminds me of Amish and Mennonite communities; the persistence of those communities suggests that it may actually be possible. But it must be acknowledged that it isn’t for everyone. And what happens when a rich vein of some valuable ore, say gold, is discovered in the middle of their commons? Or when the rest of society is getting ever more cramped and eyes the spacious comfort of the commons communities? Existence would not be without its stressors.
All in all, it’s an unhappy situation in Appalachia today. Stoll quotes from an article, almost a rant, published by Eric Waggoner, a teacher at West Virginia Wesleyan University, in 2014 following a major chemical spill that poisoned water for many people. In it he excoriates the corporations, greedy coal companies grasping for profit while impoverishing the workers, and elected officials who enabled the ripoffs. Then, in a paragraph that could have come straight out of Hillbilly Elegy, he fumes, “And, as long as I’m roundhouse damning everyone, and since my own relatives worked in the coal mines and I can therefore play the Family Card, the one that trumps everything around here: To hell with all of my fellow West Virginians who bought so deeply into the idea of avoidable personal risk and constant sacrifice as an honorable condition under which to live, that they turned that condition into a culture of perverted, twisted pride and self-righteousness, to be celebrated and defended against outsiders. To hell with that insular, xenophobic pathology. To hell with everyone whose only take-away from every story about every explosion, every leak, every mine collapse, is some vague and idiotic vanity in the continued endurance of West Virginians under adverse, sometimes killing circumstances. To hell with everyone everywhere who ever mistook suffering for honor, and who ever taught that to their kids. There’s nothing honorable about suffering. Nothing.”
But then Stoll makes a breathtaking misinterpretation of that rant. “As long as West Virginians continue to blame themselves for everything and yield their power as citizens, nothing will improve.” I would argue that as long as they blame others and expect others to fix things, nothing will improve. It’s only taking responsibility and exercising power as citizens, as Stoll notes, that can lead to change. Maybe he and I are actually saying the same thing. I keep thinking about what is necessary and what is sufficient to bring about a result. Accepting responsibility for their circumstances may not be sufficient to change things, but it darn sure is necessary. And it might be sufficient. But blaming outsiders is neither necessary nor sufficient.
I’ve come across as argumentative and critical in this review of Steven Stoll’s book. Let me make amends. He has delivered a thoughtful, important, well researched and well written work that shines much light on the story behind J D Vance’s memoir, and the story of Appalachia in general. I honor his work and thank my daughter for bringing it to my attention. If humanity is to endure within our planetary ecosystem, we must become a sustainable civilization. As population continues to grow, stresses on our global commons will increase, bringing the world ever closer to the brink of un-sustainability. It is often said that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. If we ignore the history of failing ecosystems, we may be doomed to a future that perhaps cannot be repeated.
