Proudhon, peasants and nature

It might sometimes seem futile to defend a wilderness whose experience was often listened to or read more widely than directly experienced. But how could a child raised in a concrete tower or in a block of cloned houses know what his living conditions deprived him of? For many, the hate for the technological system does not come from being deprived of the world they knew; it comes from not having been able to know this world. This text by Proudhon, taken from Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, Volume II (chapters XXXVI et seq.) is the relay of a world that has disappeared and that we can't wait to see again.

Until the age of twelve, my life was spent almost all of my life in the fields, sometimes busy with small rustic jobs, sometimes with herding cows. I was a herdsman for five years. I don't know of an existence that is both more contemplative and more realistic, more opposed to the absurd spiritualism that is at the heart of Christian education and life, than that of the man in the fields. [...]

What a pleasure in the past to ride in the tall grass, which I would have liked to graze, like my cows; to run barefoot on the united paths, along the hedges; to sink my legs in, putting on (reining) the greens turkeys, into the deep and fresh ground! More than once, on the hot mornings in June, I happened to take off my clothes and take a dew bath on the lawn. What do you say about this shitty existence, Monsignor? It makes poor Christians, I assure you. I could barely tell me from the non-me then. For me, it was anything that I could touch with my hand, reach for my eyes, and that was good for me; non-me was anything that could harm or resist me. [...] All day I filled myself with blackberries, rapunzels, meadow salsify, and that was good for me; non-me was anything that could harm or resist me. Bees, cherries, rosehips, rosehips, lambrusques, wild fruits; I was gorging myself on a mass of raw vegetables to make a well-behaved petty bourgeois die, and which had no other effect on my stomach than to give me a great appetite at night. Calm nature does not hurt those who belong to it.

Alas! I couldn't make these superb peckers anymore today. Under the pretext of preventing damage, the administration had all the fruit trees in the forests destroyed. A hermit would no longer find his life in our civilized woods. Forbid poor people to gather even acorns and beechnuts; forbid to cut grass off the trails for their goats. Go, poor people, go to Africa and Oregon:

... Veteres migrate coloni!

What a lot of waves I've been through! How many times, soaked to the bone, I dried my clothes on my body, in the wind or in the sun! So many baths taken at all hours, summer in the river, winter in the springs! I climbed the trees; I stuffed myself into the caves; I caught the frogs on the run, the crayfish in their holes, at the risk of encountering an awful salamander; then I did without hesitation my hunt on the coals. From man to beast, to everything that exists, there are secret sympathies and hatreds that civilization deprives of. I loved my cows, but with an unequal affection; I had preferences for a hen, for a tree, for a rock. I was told that the lizard is a friend of man, and I sincerely believed that. But I've always fought snakes, toads, and caterpillars. — What did they do to me? No offense. I don't know; but the human experience has made me hate them more and more. [...]

Those who, having never experienced these powerful illusions, accuse the superstition of people in the countryside sometimes pity me. I was older and still believed in nymphs and fairies; and if I don't regret these beliefs, I have the right to complain about how they made me lose them.

This was my education, the education of a child of the people. Not everyone enjoys, I agree, the same strength of resistance, the same investigative activity; but all are in the same position. It was this contrast between real life suggested by nature, and the artificial education given by Religion, that raised philosophical doubt in me, and warned me against the opinions of sects and the institutions of societies.

Since then, it took me Civilize. But will I admit it? I am disgusted with what little I have taken. I find that in this supposed civilization, saturated with hypocrisy, life is without color or flavor; passions without energy, without frankness; the narrow imagination, the narrow imagination, the affected or flat style. I hate houses with more than one floor, in which, unlike the social hierarchy, the small ones are stacked at the top, the big ones built close to the ground; I hate churches, seminaries, convents, convents, barracks, hospitals, asylums and nurseries, just like prisons. All of this seems demoralization to me. And when I remember that the word pagan, paganus, means peasant; that paganism, peasantry, that is to say the worship of rural deities, rural pantheism, is the last name under which polytheism was defeated and crushed by its rival; when I think that Christianity condemned nature at the same time as humanity, I wonder if the Church, by dint of taking the opposite view of fallen religions, has not ended up taking the opposite view foot of common sense and good morals; if his spirituality is something other than the spontaneous combustion of souls; if Christ, who was to redeem us, did not is not rather to have sold us; if the so-called three-times holy God is not, on the contrary, the thrice-impure God; if, while you shout to us: Head up, On Sùm, Look at the sky, you're not doing exactly what it takes to throw us upside down into the well.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon