Self-sufficiency and collapse

Popular wisdom tends to frame life as a hierarchy. Everyone, we’re told, wants to live in a more developed country, have more stuff, make more money and have a bigger house. The underlying assumption is that life in Ghana is worse than life in the US and that development will bring people more of the things they want and need. In short, development makes lives better.

This is true with regard to really important measures of health, including maternal mortality, access to health care, access to clean drinking water, and the like. But spending time in rural Ghanaian villages has shown me that in one important way, this isn’t true. People living in “undeveloped” places know how to do useful shit.

I have no idea how to fix a car, build a house, plant a field of corn, butcher a goat or sew a dress. I have friends who can do one or two things on the list, but I would say that the majority of Americans lack a broad practical skill set. And I think this is increasingly true as you increase income—rich Americans in particular aren’t very likely to be able to do any of these things. Yet most Ghanaians are adept at these sorts of tasks, particularly farmers and other rural village dwellers. Earlier this week, I saw a hut that had a bamboo roof. It seemed like it would leak, but as I looked closer, I saw that there were two layers of bamboo—interlocking half-cylinders with no space for water to get through. It was a great design, requiring knowledge of plants and ingenuity and a bunch of other things you don’t learn in school.

My dad often dismisses my wistfulness about knowing how to do useful stuff by saying, “Who cares if you can’t make your own cheese? That’s why we have dairy farmers.” Or, “I don’t need to know how to build a house; I can just pay someone to do it for me.” And he’s definitely right—my desires to make cheese from scratch or learn how to garden are pretty much hobbies. Theoretically, I’d like to learn how to take care of myself, but in practice, there are always interesting books to read and people to see, and I never seem to get around to the cheese cultures.

Sitting on a handmade bench in a Ghanaian village, though, I was struck by a simple realization. If we run out of oil, or some other catastrophe comes along and Western civilization starts to collapse, the US is going to hell. There will be people in the streets pillaging and setting stuff on fire. People will starve, people will start killing each other and everyone will be terrified. Maybe I’m being too pessimistic about human nature, but I think a shock to civilization would lead, at least temporarily, to complete dysfunction in the US (and the rest of the developed world).

And you know what? I think Ghanaian villages would pretty much be fine. They might not be able to grow as many crops as they could before, and they might have to shift production toward staples and away from cocoa. They’d grow less food, and some people would probably go hungry. But it wouldn’t be anything close to disaster. People would mostly just go on living, because they’re actually able to take care of themselves.

I don’t want to glamorize life in Ghanaian villages, and as I said before, there are immense benefits to development, most especially in the realm of human health and infrastructure. But there are also immense benefits to practical knowledge and making stuff with your own hands. I hope some day, humans will be able to find a good balance between the two.