Wow! Two great posts on this deceivingly simple chapter. The Japanese word, "baka" is indeed usually translated as "fool." It is often used to discribe someone as a simpleton, but has a higher meaning that Scott alluded to, that of the wise fool. Something like Shakespeare's fools. He is, I think mocking himself to a large degree. "What, after all, do I know?" he seems to be saying. I am just a simple farmer with a tiny understanding of nature. That's all that is possible given human limitations. But it doesn't mean that people cannot live as within nature and appreciate the wonderous complexity that we can never fully know.
This would be almost humorous if it weren't so dangerous and distructive. We think we know nature and then act on that assumption trying to "improve" on nature. That, according to Fukuoka, is not possible. It will only lead to problems. Then we try to fix the problems and we create more problems with each problem being more serious than the last. "The usual way of creating a method is to say, how about trying this and how about trying that. My way was the opposite. How about
not doing this, and
not doing that...this was the course I followed.
When he went back to his family farm he set out to create a concrete example of how this way of thinking could be of value to humanity. He had no idea what the farming would look like. He peeled back one unnecessary technique after the other until he reached a very simple, yet sophisticated way of growing crops which were in line with his way of thinking. Each of the discarded techniques, like plowing, using chemicals, seeding in the spring and not the autumn when the seeds would naturally have fallen to the ground, flooding the rice fields and so forth, were all unnecessary agricultural techniques that developed over time as attempts to mitigate the problems caused by the last attempt at mitigation.
For example, farmers plow largely to get rid of weeds. By plowing, however, they put natural succession back to square one (bare soil) which is the condition where quick-sprouting opportunistic species (weeds) have an advantage. It also stirs up weed seeds that were deep in the soil and would never have sprouted without the plowing. So our misguided attempt to cover up one of the problems caused by plowing is actually causing the problem in the first place!
This leads to work! Ugh. What had been given to us by nature without our having to do anything now needed to be maintained by human labor. So a guiding principle for Fukuoka-san was also trying to pare down the amount of work he needed to do.
One of the ways Fukuoka discribed his way of farming and gardening is "do-nothing agriculture." It's not because he was lazy. He saw that almost everything we do in modern agriculture, including traditional organic farming, is unnecessary. It only
seems to be necessary because of the poor actions that preceeded them.
Oh, yes, the thought that humanity knows nothing and that all human effort is useless. At first I thought this was one of those tests where he was saying something so extreme he couldn't possibly be serious. After thinking about it for the past 35 years I believe he was being literal. Many people have trouble with this statement. Many find it depressing, as you did, Rainbow. Others point to all sorts of human activity that seems to have been great accomplishments. What about medical advances, for example? Again, we cannot know what the ultimate side effects of our actions will be. We created antibiotics and have succeeded in creating "super infections." We create great art and music, but can they match the beauty of the outline of a tree against the sky and clouds or the sound of the wind rustling through leaves or the babbling of a mountain stream?
Fukuoka-san is not opposed to work, or to writing poetry. It is unnecessary work that gets him riled. Humanity needs to do work to live and writing poetry is an appropriate way of expressing appreciation for creation. I think what he is saying is that if the effort is done in a boastful way (look at this great thing people have done) or in an attempt to improve upon nature and use nature strictly for human benefit it will be worthless in the end.
One of the reasons, I think, people find Fukuoka's statement about the uselessness of human effort depressing, and some are even angered by it, is that people largely define themselves and find their own self-worth on that basis. They think it is human nature to try to understand nature and make "progress" in every area. The more grand human accomplishments become, and the more grand their personal accomplishments, the more important they feel. Fukuoka-san was not big on the idea that trying to understand the world and constantly expand our horizons is inherently part of human nature. It is the product of a the human intellect which sets itself apart from nature and then has the audacity to think it is more clever and more important than nature including other forms of life. The world was made for human use, right? Better to sit and do-nothing (after the chores are done, of course). Ideally, the farmer or gardner comes to feel like they are doing nothing even as they are working in the fields. That's where "mu" comes in.