I think the dramatic change in my opinion of Monsanto (from "Monsanto is Satan" to a sort of uneasy acceptance) has resulted mostly from a change in my fundamental values but also partially from a change in my understanding of the company over the last eight (not ten, turns out) years.
In the middle of high school it was pretty clear to me that Monsanto was a business run by men willing to watch the world burn - hell, they'd even burn it themselves - as long as the bottom line was healthy. The company was most famous for the pesticide
Roundup, but could also be remembered as the villain of Silent Spring, the most important book in the American Environmental movement. And they were genetically modifying food, which differed from sorcery only in subtle ways to the American public as a whole, and which was certainly an unproven technology in my mind. Worst of all was the shocking case in which a man's field spontaneously grew his neighbor's Monsanto seeds and they sued him for patent infringement when they found his plants were resistant. I was on a diet of
Orion,
Daniel Quinn, and
this dude who I now recognize is totally nuts. (I already knew that it was important to be critical of most everything you read but thought that somehow the dedication of people like Jensen to the world made them compelled to faithfully represent their subjects. Ha!) At that point in life, graphs like this one were amazing explanations of just how fucked we really all were and why modern life was so hectic.
I still value many of the things that first meant a lot to me then - our duty of stewardship to the environment and humans' need to go see and really inhabit the real world. I don't know if I'm still exactly an Ishmael-style animist but that's probably in the ballpark. But seven years ago I literally believed that a huge die-off of most of humanity wouldn't be such a bad thing from the perspective of the whole ecosystem, considering just how quickly we've managed to trash the place in the last microsecond of our planet's existence. So why would I support a company that made the whole food chain seemingly unhealthy, contributed to monoculture and sped the destruction of topsoil, and in the process all we got out of it was MOAR people? And on top of that they were litigious with their intellectual property and acted like they owned the base pairs themselves, at a time when I didn't even use closed-source software because I was so sure information needed to be free? Fuck right off, Monsanto!
Then things changed. First, I got a job
carrying gross burgers to grumpy blue-collar tourists, and I got to care a whole lot more about human suffering - people who smoked because they [felt they] couldn't afford to eat, getting paid far less than a living wage by a corporation thought of as an upstanding corporate citizen and a pillar of the community. The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, it's said. I don't know if it's right that seeing the 'real world' in that way made me start to care more for my immediate part of the ecosystem and less for the rest of it, but that's definitely what the effect has been.
I went to school and studied anthropology, no doubt influenced by the
Ishmael phase, and got to appreciate the enormous breadth and quiet grace of human cultural practice (unsurprisingly, the classes I loved were the ones about food and making a life in the world, not the other boring stuff like religion, diffusion of innovation, warfare, or whatever). I still saw serenity in rivers and great blue herons, but the same beauty was present in humanity too. (Even though we chop stuff down and overfish stuff sometimes.)
And while I've always been a pragmatist, that led to skepticism and pessimism when I was in high school and early on in college.
This dude came along and made
a pragmatic case for optimism, which has been more influential than anything else on the site. The tone of everything is a lot brighter now than it once was.
Finally, I started studying economics and then joined the business school, which has totally changed my perception of commerce. Before that year, money was an inconvenience that you had to bat out of the way in order to be an anthropology professor or somebody who lives life one gig at a time and makes the saxophone
really sing - an impediment to authentic living that society somehow hadn't figured out a way around. Now I'd probably give you a definition more along the lines of revealed preferences - society really values white picket fences, one caribbean vacation a year, and machines that can tell you if you have hypertension, and so we invest our lives in making those things happen, with a convenient
medium of exchange. It's an imperfect definition what with income inequality and things we all think are important but nobody pays for, but it's a pretty good first approximation. And so suddenly Giant Corp. isn't big because it abuses mom and pop retailers and invades the third world, but because it does a really good job producing three or four things that society has decided are worth a piece of our finite lives. And it's not really that substantial of an entity, either - Giant Corp is a tool that people use to make society more like their vision of how it should be. It's owned entirely by people, and it's actions are more or less dictated by its owners' preferences, with the occasional governance problem interfering.
So where does that leave Monsanto?
Turns out
Bowman was a wilful infringer and the journalist from whom I read about him was more concerned with the message than the truth, though I'm honestly still uneasy about their intellectual property policy. I'd say Disney is about ten times worse when it comes to abusing intellectual property laws, and Disney doesn't even really do something that I consider worthwhile - and if you really want to see some horrifying IP law, check out Monsanto's sector mates,
Myriad. And
roundup has an amazing safety record, considering its reputation. It's also effective in miniscule doses, unlike
some organic alternatives. A new objection I have to the company is that they function outside of free markets to some extent, which I think raises the chance that the company isn't really enacting society's values - just like the military contractors, it's hard to make the argument that society is buying just as many Monsanto products as people value when the transactions are taking place through
the USDA. But I think that may be the price for a somewhat well-functioning democracy, and it doesn't make sense to compare an ideal society that can never exist to a messy one that actually does. Monsanto also doesn't make
that much money, relative to the enormous apparatus they have to put in place to make their products - 12% return on assets is certainly healthy but it's not like they're Coca-Cola (which everyone here seems to worship anyway). Finally, I've come around on a big way about how bad people starving is, and Monsanto products seem to do a good deal to help with that (though it's not something I've really critically looked into). I certainly don't dispute that there are warts on the company's record, but my views on those have really changed by my new opinion of 'business' as a societal institution.
So here's what I've come around to now:
corporatismcapitalism and agribusiness have lots of big problems. But there's no passing the buck: they're ultimately tools that we use to do the things that we value. Sometimes we look at the holes in the ground and say "I wish society would value thing X more than thing Y, like I do, and dig over there rather than here", and other times we need to look at the tool and say "that's really a wasteful way to dig a hole - I need to advocate for freer markets, or cheaper financial intermediation, or better public awareness of issues, or better corporate governance, so as to sharpen the shovel a little bit".
