THE DEVIL IS AN EAGER AND A SANGUINE ECONOMIST. He is the fountain of all plans to increase production by borrowing now and paying later. He has boundless optimism and faith in technology. His is the energy that drives a civilization upward until it topples under its own weight. He is not altogether a bad fellow, but he is most dangerous when ignored.
Just as all human wealth is tied ultimately to the produce of the soil, so the Prince of Darkness is intimately related to the farmer. In one of the world’s great allegorical plays—Calderón’s auto sacramental, La vida es sueno (Life Is a Dream)—the Prince and his partner, Shadow, become farmers in order to seduce Man.
It is not one of those mystery plays that plod on with the ponderous certainty of a dutiful drudge. Shadow wants Man for her own, to sleep with him. After all, she reasons, she was first created, before the Light, and she thinks it unjust that Power, Knowledge, and Love should decree that Man become the husband of Light. She wants him, and she will stop at nothing to get him. The Prince, guided by his Envy, is a willing conspirator. Anything that makes Man unhappy is delightful to him.
But the garden is fenced against them. If they come as they are, they will be recognized and expelled. At last, the Prince hits on a scheme: if they are disguised as farmers, none will question them in the garden.
When they appear, Nature is about to give Man her own fruits and flowers as the tribute due to him as Lord of Creation. Shadow pushes her aside, saying:
”Get hack, you rusticated earth! All you’d give him
were little wildflowers, were it not for the industry
by which I add to your crude forms
all the paints that make them shine.
You give birth but I refine,
and so the fruits are mine.”
Man falls in love. The apple that Shadow offers him is obviously bigger, better, and tastier than any he has yet experienced. “Who are you, lovely maiden,” he breathes, “mistress over all Earth’s plenty, who bears away the prizes that Earth cannot keep from you?”
The apple is totally free, Shadow tells him, and when you taste it you will become just like God. But when he does bite into her gift, the Four Elements, until then his servants, depart from his side. The garden draws away from him and he is left to sweat, farm, and die with Shadow.
Ever since that primal scene, we have no excuse not to know the devil and his accomplices, but the farm has been the perpetual theater of his conquests. In one respect, we wish to be taken by him, for he is Eros and he moves us to increase. In some respects, every pregnancy and every crop is a bet on the future, a speculation that somehow resources will be found. As John Adams said to Thomas Jefferson, if we didn’t have desire, no one would go to the trouble of having children.
In his other aspect, however, we wish the devil would go away, because he is chaos and collapse. The Greeks had the good sense to split off Eros from Hades, making them two principles, but as messy as the devil is, his dual nature creates a useful heat and friction. Indeed, the rationalist divines of the eighteenth century so feared the energy of Calderón’s Prince that they banned the allegorical plays in which he is always a leading character. As Blake wrote of Milton, “He was of the devil’s part without knowing it.”
Calderón and Milton both kept the devil visible. They told the whole story by bringing darkness into conflict with the light. The rationalists put the devil under taboo and so gave him free rein to operate unseen in obscurity.
The soil, in its darkness, is under the special protection of the devil. It is the source of all generation of life, and it is the place to which the dead return. Hell is always underground. When Yahweh kicked Adam and Eve out of the garden, he specifically made the soil “accursed,” that is, he endowed it with this double principle of good and evil, rise and fall. To forget the devil’s doubleness when dealing with the soil is a dangerous thing indeed, because instead of harnessing his energy, we leave free his power for crime.
Every time the progressives are in control—I mean, those people who tell us that everything is gradually getting better and better, and that if a certain technical problem has not yet been solved it soon will be— you can wager that the unseen devil is rummaging about in the soil wrecking havoc, while his bright side, the sanguine economist, is predicting a painless era of plenty and heaven on Earth.
This is not a new phenomenon, caused by one economic system or another, but a perennial struggle. The first cities of the Western world rose around 4000 B.C. in the fertile triangle between the Tigris and Euphrates (which, by the way, are two of the four rivers mentioned as running through the Garden of Eden). Their wealth was based on the first state-organized farming. The Mesopotamian cultures were the first to introduce the plow, the yoke, the potter’s wheel, and, above all, large-scale irrigation. Growing primitive wheats and barleys, the Sumerians, Akkadians, and Babylonians cultivated thousands of acres adjacent to the rivers. On the basis of these, grew their ziggurats and warring city-states.
To look today at those barren lands, dotted here and there with hillocks that once were proud temples, you would never think that Western civilization was sourced there. But all of these early cultures were defeated by a devil called Tiamat. Her weapon was salt.
Water carries dissolved salts. If these are not ultimately deposited in the sea, they concentrate in the groundwater. The Tigris and the Euphrates are very long rivers that deposit most of their salt load before they reach the sea. (The Nile, by contrast, has supported agriculture for millennia, because it flushes its salts with an annual flood.) They also leave layers of silt on their bottoms, gradually elevating the course of the rivers.
The Mesopotamians increased tenfold and more the total production ever achieved before irrigation, and with the help of their gods, they expected to prosper limitlessly. But Tiamat was at work unseen in the soil. In the irrigated fields, the water table rose, not only because the siltation was elevating the river bottom, causing the rivers themselves to rise, but also since irrigation brought water in far more quickly than percolation could dispose of it. For a few centuries, though, everyone prospered.
Then, the flowers began to appear. White, tinged with red and yellow, they spread across the flat surface of bare soil. They were deadly flowers of salt. At first, the farmers resorted to barley, a more salt-tolerant crop than wheat. Then, they practiced fallowing to allow the water table to drop between plantings. But eventually field after field had to be abandoned.
The farmers did not give up without a fight. Even when populations had tripled, and yields per acre had declined to only one fifth or even one tenth of what the fields had first yielded centuries before, they struggled to feed the cities. The only way to do that, however, was to double the rate of seeding and to use the fields intensively, never resting them. So the harder they tried, the more grain they wasted, the quicker the salt rose, and the more yields declined. Tiamat won. By the year 1000 B.C., most of southern Babylonia had been completely abandoned.
Ignorance of the devil always leads down this path. More technology, greater planting rates, more intensive use, greater dependence on larger holdings, and fewer farmers are supposed to save the day. Instead, they hasten decline. The Romans found out about it when their immense slave-farmed estates were exploited beyond the soil’s tolerance, leading to massive erosion and declining fertility. Medieval Europeans became so desperate to feed their booming cities that they took the leaf mould from the forests to use as compost on the fields, improving the latter briefly at the cost of the destruction of the former. Forests declined not simply from overcutting for firewood and ship’s timber, but because the soils beneath them were robbed.
History’s great observer of this process was William Cobbett, whose Rural Rides documents the destruction of the English countryside during the nineteenth century. He set clearly the distinction between the yeoman farmer—who owns, lives upon, and therefore knows the land—and the absentee landlord who rents it to cultivators whose only job is to extract from it as much profit as possible.
The economist runs roughshod over the health of the land. Of this Cobbett had no doubt. “It is the destructive, the murderous paper [money] system,” he wrote, ’’that has transferred the fruit of the labor, and the people along with it, from the different parts of the country to the neighborhood of the all-devouring Wen.” The word “Wen,” meaning literally a boil or carbuncle on the skin, was his name for London.
The national debt, taxation, and the stock markets were in his view inimical to the soil’s health, because they tended to concentrate wealth into great, compact masses. These concentrations benefited the few who owned them, and benefited the governments, because they provided a convenient and available source of tax revenue. But great parcels of land could not be treated like stock certificates, or when they were, the result was erosion, poverty, and declining yields, just as the increasing populations of the city called out for more food.
But the devil is nothing if not resourceful. No matter how often the same situation recurs and how often it is pointed out, the economists still stand up to claim that everything is getting better and better. The devil’s most charming and pernicious argument is the argument from history itself. He says, “Well, all the past problems have been solved by human ingenuity, so the current ones will be too.” He does not factor into the equation the vast human misery that has been created along the way, for this suffering, after all, is his deepest delight.