posted on January 11, 2008 03:22:49 PM new
A Wendell Barry piece I came across in my files today. He is a farmer and thinker about many things. I thought some of you might enjoy it. It hits the mark for me and how my family lives.
Wendell Berry
IN DISTRUST OF MOVEMENTS
The movements which deal with single issues or single solutions are bound to
fail because they cannot control effects while leaving causes in place.
I HAVE HAD WITH MY friend Wes Jackson a number of useful conversations about
the necessity of getting out of movements - even movements that have seemed
necessary and dear to us - when they have lapsed into self-righteousness and
self-betrayal, as movements seem almost invariably to do. People in movements
too readily learn to deny to others the rights and privileges they demand for
themselves. They too easily become unable to mean their own language, as when a
"peace movement" becomes violent. They often become too specialized, as if
finally they cannot help taking refuge in the pinhole vision of the
institutional intellectuals. They almost always fail to be radical enough,
dealing finally in effects rather than causes. Or they deal with single issues
or single solutions, as if to assure themselves that they will not be radical
enough.
And so I must declare my dissatisfaction with movements to promote soil
conservation or clean water or clean air or wilderness preservation or
sustainable agriculture or community health or the welfare of children. Worthy
as these and other goals may be, they cannot be achieved alone. I am
dissatisfied with such efforts because they are too specialized, they are not
comprehensive enough, they are not radical enough, they virtually predict their
own failure by implying that we can remedy or control effects while leaving
causes in place. Ultimately, I think, they are insincere; they propose that the
trouble is caused by other people; they would like to change policy but not
behaviour.
The worst danger may be that a movement will lose its language either to its own
confusion about meaning and practice, or to pre-emption by its enemies. I
remember, for example, my naïve confusion at learning that it was possible for
advocates of organic agriculture to look upon the "organic method" as an end in
itself. To me, organic farming was attractive both as a way of conserving nature
and as a strategy of survival for small farmers.
Imagine my surprise in discovering that there could be huge "organic"
monocultures. And so I was not too surprised by the recent attempt of the United
States Department of Agriculture to appropriate the "organic" label for food
irradiation, genetic engineering, and other desecrations of the corporate food
economy. Once we allow our language to mean anything that anybody wants it to
mean, it becomes impossible to mean what we say. When "homemade" ceases to mean
neither more nor less than "made at home", then it means anything, which is to
say that it means nothing.
AS YOU SEE, I have good reasons for declining to name the movement I think I am
a part of. I am reconciled to the likelihood that from time to time it will name
itself and have slogans, but I am not going to use its slogans or call it by any
of its names.
Let us suppose that we have a Nameless Movement for Better Land Use and that we
know we must try to keep it active, responsive and intelligent for a long time.
What must we do?
What we must do above all, I think, is try to see the problem in its full size
and difficulty. If we are concerned about land abuse, then we must see that this
is an economic problem. Every economy is, by definition, a land-using economy.
If we are using our land wrongly, then something is wrong with our economy. This
is difficult. It becomes more difficult when we recognize that, in modern times,
every one of us is a member of the economy of everybody else.
But if we are concerned about land abuse, we have begun a profound work of
economic criticism. Study of the history of land use (and any local history will
do) informs us that we have had for a long time an economy that thrives by
undermining its own foundations. Industrialism, which is the name of our
economy, and which is now virtually the only economy of the world, has been from
its beginnings in a state of riot. It is based squarely upon the principle of
violence toward everything on which it depends, and it has not mattered whether
the form of industrialism was communist or capitalist or whatever; the violence
toward nature, human communities, traditional agricultures and local economies
has been constant. The bad news is coming in, literally, from all over the
world. Can such an economy be fixed without being radically changed? I don't
think it can.
The Captains of Industry have always counselled the rest of us to be
"realistic". Let us, therefore, be realistic. Is it realistic to assume that the
present economy would be just fine if only it would stop poisoning the air and
water, or if only it would stop soil erosion, or if only it would stop degrading
watersheds and forest ecosystems, or if only it would stop seducing children, or
if only it would quit buying politicians, or if only it would give women and
favoured minorities an equitable share of the loot? Realism, I think, is a very
limited programme, but it informs us at least that we should not look for bird
eggs in a cuckoo clock.
OR WE CAN SHOW the hopelessness of single-issue causes and single-issue
movements by following a line of thought such as this: We need a continuous
supply of uncontaminated water. Therefore, we need (among other things)
soil-and-water-conserving ways of agriculture and forestry that are not
dependent on monoculture, toxic chemicals, or the indifference and violence that
always accompany big-scale industrial enterprises on the land.
Therefore, we need diversified, small-scale land economies that are dependent on
people. Therefore, we need people with the knowledge, skills, motives and
attitudes required by diversified, small-scale land economies. And all this is
clear and comfortable enough, until we recognize the question we have come to:
Where are the people?
Well, all of us who live in the suffering rural landscapes of the United States
know that most people are available to those landscapes only recreationally. We
see them bicycling or boating or hiking or camping or hunting or fishing or
driving along and looking around. They do not, in Mary Austin's phrase, "summer
and winter with the land". They are unacquainted with the land's human and
natural economies. Though people have not progressed beyond the need to eat food
and drink water and wear clothes and live in houses, most people have progressed
beyond the domestic arts - the husbandry and wifery of the world - by which
those needful things are produced and conserved. In fact, the comparative few
who still practise that necessary husbandry and wifery often are inclined to
apologize for doing so, having been carefully taught in our education system
that those arts are degrading and unworthy of people's talents. Educated minds,
in the modern era, are unlikely to know anything about food and drink, clothing
and shelter. In merely taking these things for granted, the modern educated mind
reveals itself also to be as superstitious a mind as ever has existed in the
world. What could be more superstitious than the idea that money brings forth food?
I AM NOT SUGGESTING, of course, that everybody ought to be a farmer or a
forester. Heaven forbid! I am suggesting that most people now are living on the
far side of a broken connection, and that this is potentially catastrophic. Most
people are now fed, clothed and sheltered from sources toward which they feel no
gratitude and exercise no responsibility. There is no significant urban
constituency, no formidable consumer lobby, no noticeable political leadership,
for good land-use practices, for good farming and good forestry, for restoration
of abused land, or for halting the destruction of land by so-called "development".
We are involved now in a profound failure of imagination. Most of us cannot
imagine the wheat beyond the bread, or the farmer beyond the wheat, or the farm
beyond the farmer, or the history beyond the farm. Most people cannot imagine
the forest and the forest economy that produced their houses and furniture and
paper; or the landscapes, the streams and the weather that fill their pitchers
and bathtubs and swimming pools with water. Most people appear to assume that
when they have paid their money for these things they have entirely met their
obligations.
Money does not bring forth food. Neither does the technology of the food system.
Food comes from nature and from the work of people. If the supply of food is to
be continuous for a long time, then people must work in harmony with nature.
That means that people must find the right answers to a lot of hard practical
questions. The same applies to forestry and the possibility of a continuous
supply of timber.
One way we could describe the task ahead of us is by saying that we need to
enlarge the consciousness and the conscience of the economy. Our economy needs
to know - and care - what it is doing. This is revolutionary, of course, if you
have a taste for revolution, but it is also a matter of common sense.
Undoubtedly some people will want to start a movement to bring this about. They
probably will call it the Movement to Teach the Economy What It Is Doing - the
mtewiid. Despite my very considerable uneasiness, I will agree to this, but on
three conditions.
My first condition is that this movement should begin by giving up all hope and
belief in piecemeal, one-shot solutions. The present scientific quest for
odourless hog manure should give us sufficient proof that the specialist is no
longer with us. Even now, after centuries of reductionist propaganda, the world
is still intricate and vast, as dark as it is light, a place of mystery, where
we cannot do one thing without doing many things, or put two things together
without putting many things together. Water quality, for example, cannot be
improved without improving farming and forestry, but farming and forestry cannot
be improved without improving the education of consumers - and so on.
The proper business of a human economy is to make one whole thing of ourselves
and this world. To make ourselves into a practical wholeness with the land under
our feet is maybe not altogether possible - how would we know? - but, as a goal,
it at least carries us beyond hubris, beyond the utterly groundless assumption
that we can subdivide our present great failure into a thousand separate
problems that can be fixed by a thousand task forces of academic and
bureaucratic specialists. That programme has been given more than a fair chance
to prove itself, and we ought to know by now that it won't work.
My second condition is that the people in this movement (the mtewiid) should
take full responsibility for themselves as members of the economy. If we are
going to teach the economy what it is doing, then we need to learn what we are
doing. This is going to have to be a private movement as well as a public one.
If it is unrealistic to expect wasteful industries to be conservers, then
obviously we must lead in part the public life of complainers, petitioners,
protesters, advocates and supporters of stricter regulations and saner policies.
But that is not enough.
If it is unreasonable to expect a bad economy to try to become a good one, then
we must go to work to build a good economy. It is appropriate that this duty
should fall to us, for good economic behaviour is more possible for us than it
is for the great corporations with their miseducated managers and their greedy
and oblivious stockholders. Because it is possible for us, we must try in every
way we can to make good economic sense in our own lives, in our households, and
in our communities. We must do more for ourselves and our neighbours. We must
learn to spend our money with our friends and not with our enemies. But to do
this it is necessary to renew local economies and revive the domestic arts.
In seeking to change our economic use of the world, we are seeking inescapably
to change our lives. The outward harmony that we desire between our economy and
the world depends finally upon an inward harmony between our own hearts and the
originating spirit that is the life of all creatures, a spirit as near us as our
flesh and yet forever beyond the measures of this obsessively measuring age. We
can grow good wheat and make good bread only if we understand that we do not
live by bread alone.
My third condition is that this movement should content itself to be poor. We
need to find cheap solutions, solutions within the reach of everybody, and the
availability of a lot of money prevents the discovery of cheap solutions. The
solutions of modern medicine and modern agriculture are all staggeringly
expensive, and this is caused in part, and maybe altogether, because of the
availability of huge sums of money for medical and agricultural research.
Too much money, moreover, attracts administrators and experts as sugar attracts
ants - look at what is happening in our universities. We should not envy rich
movements that are organized and led by an alternative bureaucracy living on the
problems it is supposed to solve. We want a movement that is a movement because
it is advanced by all its members in their daily lives.
NOW, HAVING COMPLETED this very formidable list of the problems and
difficulties, fears and fearful hopes that lie ahead of us, I am relieved to see
that I have been preparing myself all along to end by saying something cheerful.
What I have been talking about is the possibility of renewing human respect for
this Earth and all the good, useful and beautiful things that come from it. I
have made it clear, I hope, that I don't think this respect can be adequately
enacted or conveyed by tipping our hats to nature or by representing natural
loveliness in art or by prayers of thanksgiving or by preserving tracts of
wilderness - although I recommend all those things. The respect I mean can be
given only by using well the world's goods that are given to us. This good use,
which renews respect - which is the only currency, so to speak, of respect -
also renews our pleasure. The callings and disciplines that I have spoken of as
the domestic arts are stationed all along the way from the farm to the prepared
dinner, from the forest to the dinner table, from stewardship of the land to
hospitality to friends and strangers. These arts are as demanding and
gratifying, as instructive and as pleasing, as the so-called "fine arts". To
learn them is, I believe, the work that is our profoundest calling. Our reward
is that they will enrich our lives and make us glad.
When you consider the successful movements throughout history...social movements, political movements etc. I don't understand how they can be called ineffective. Although Wendell Berry certainly has some good points I'm confused by his idea that movements are generally futile.
Frankly, this opinion is difficult for me to understand. Seems to me that if "movements" are eliminated nothing short of a revolution will fight the corporate and political interests which are now focused on profit at the expense of the community.
Maybe I need another cup of coffee.
Edited to add that my comment was sincere, not intended to be negative or combative. I have a great deal of respect for Profe who posted the article and although I've enjoyed reading some of Berry's poetry this essay just made my head spin. I find myself asking ...Is Berry a reactionary conservative?
posted on January 12, 2008 08:25:44 PM new
Perhaps the true farmers who understand the land and have the utmost respect for it dedicate their lives to taking care of it and don't have the time left in a day to be involved in major movements that become a huge job to make others aware, such as their knowledge of organic farming that they've gained from experience.
Movements take money and those most dedicated to a cause usually aren't the wealthy, whereas those with the money are sometimes the most uninformed about the cause. And those that jump on the bandwagon around the ones with the money may have good intentions but may be equally uninformed. So on the surface it may look like a big movement but there is no real substance to it.
(I know what I'm thinking but not sure if I'm saying it right - I live with a coffeeholic and think I've had too much of it and my brain has been fuzzy from paint lately so I haven't been posting here, just reading when I find time)
posted on January 12, 2008 09:52:34 PM new
This is scary,considered so many of us have nothing to do with the food on the table or clothes on our back,except we have that money to buy them.
Money as a store of value??
I am beginning to wonder whose value are we storing?and what do I do each day to deserve holding that store of value??
A rude awakening will come when we are trapped in a situation where store of value cannot be used to acquire food or shelter,say we are in a desert,or after a huge storm like some Katrina victims who are trapped in their attic with no food or water,or worse,an earthquake or flood which wipes out most civilisations and how many of us know how to start from scratch ?
Grow some crop,how?spear a fish,but how do we make a spear?Start a fire?
I bet it has happened in the past.
One day I was wondering why some cultures rever the older folks,may be once upon a time,a natural castrophe wiped out most inhabitants and the remaining ones who remember how to do this and do that or be able to tell stories of glorous days gone by are the older ones.
*
Lets all stop whining !
posted on January 12, 2008 11:30:32 PM new
It is scary, Hwahwa. I was just sitting here thinking that I may have had better survival skills when I was a small child than I do now because of the way we lived then.
I. The time will soon come when we will not be able to remember the horrors of September 11 without remembering also the unquestioning technological and economic optimism that ended on that day.
II. This optimism rested on the proposition that we were living in a “new world order” and a “new economy” that would “grow” on and on, bringing a prosperity of which every new increment would be “unprecedented”.
III. The dominant politicians, corporate officers, and investors who believed this proposition did not acknowledge that the prosperity was limited to a tiny percent of the world’s people, and to an ever smaller number of people even in the United States; that it was founded upon the oppressive labor of poor people all over the world; and that its ecological costs increasingly threatened all life, including the lives of the supposedly prosperous.
IV. The “developed” nations had given to the “free market” the status of a god, and were sacrificing to it their farmers, farmlands, and communities, their forests, wetlands, and prairies, their ecosystems and watersheds. They had accepted universal pollution and global warming as normal costs of doing business.
V. There was, as a consequence, a growing worldwide effort on behalf of economic decentralization, economic justice, and ecological responsibility. We must recognize that the events of September 11 make this effort more necessary than ever. We citizens of the industrial countries must continue the labor of self-criticism and self-correction. We must recognize our mistakes.
VI. The paramount doctrine of the economic and technological euphoria of recent decades has been that everything depends on innovation. It was understood as desirable, and even necessary, that we should go on and on from one technological innovation to the next, which would cause the economy to “grow” and make everything better and better. This of course implied at every point a hatred of the past, of all things inherited and free. All things superseded in our progress of innovations, whatever their value might have been, were discounted as of no value at all.
VII. We did not anticipate anything like what has now happened. We did not foresee that all our sequence of innovations might be at once overridden by a greater one: the invention of a new kind of war that would turn our previous innovations against us, discovering and exploiting the debits and the dangers that we had ignored. We never considered the possibility that we might be trapped in the webwork of communication and transport that was supposed to make us free.
VIII. Nor did we foresee that the weaponry and the war science that we marketed and taught to the world would become available, not just to recognized national governments, which possess so uncannily the power to legitimate large-scale violence, but also to “rogue nations”, dissident or fanatical groups and individuals - whose violence, though never worse than that of nations, is judged by the nations to be illegitimate.
IX. We had accepted uncritically the belief that technology is only good; that it cannot serve evil as well as good; that it cannot serve our enemies as well as ourselves; that it cannot be used to destroy what is good, including our homelands and our lives.
X. We had accepted too the corollary belief that an economy (either as a money economy or as a life-support system) that is global in extent, technologically complex, and centralized is invulnerable to terrorism, sabotage, or war, and that it is protectable by “national defense”
XI. We now have a clear, inescapable choice that we must make. We can continue to promote a global economic system of unlimited “free trade” among corporations, held together by long and highly vulnerable lines of communication and supply, but now recognizing that such a system will have to be protected by a hugely expensive police force that will be worldwide, whether maintained by one nation or several or all, and that such a police force will be effective precisely to the extent that it oversways the freedom and privacy of the citizens of every nation.
XII. Or we can promote a decentralized world economy which would have the aim of assuring to every nation and region a local self-sufficiency in life-supporting goods. This would not eliminate international trade, but it would tend toward a trade in surpluses after local needs had been met.
XIII. One of the gravest dangers to us now, second only to further terrorist attacks against our people, is that we will attempt to go on as before with the corporate program of global “free trade”, whatever the cost in freedom and civil rights, without self-questioning or self-criticism or public debate.
XIV. This is why the substitution of rhetoric for thought, always a temptation in a national crisis, must be resisted by officials and citizens alike. It is hard for ordinary citizens to know what is actually happening in Washington in a time of such great trouble; for all we know, serious and difficult thought may be taking place there. But the talk that we are hearing from politicians, bureaucrats, and commentators has so far tended to reduce the complex problems now facing us to issues of unity, security, normality, and retaliation.
XV. National self-righteousness, like personal self-righteousness, is a mistake. It is misleading. It is a sign of weakness. Any war that we may make now against terrorism will come as a new installment in a history of war in which we have fully participated. We are not innocent of making war against civilian populations. The modern doctrine of such warfare was set forth and enacted by General William Tecumseh Sherman, who held that a civilian population could be declared guilty and rightly subjected to military punishment. We have never repudiated that doctrine.
XVI. It is a mistake also - as events since September 11 have shown - to suppose that a government can promote and participate in a global economy and at the same time act exclusively in its own interest by abrogating its international treaties and standing apart from international cooperation on moral issues.
XVII. And surely, in our country, under our Constitution, it is a fundamental error to suppose that any crisis or emergency can justify any form of political oppression. Since September 11, far too many public voices have presumed to “speak for us” in saying that Americans will gladly accept a reduction of freedom in exchange for greater “security”. Some would, maybe. But some others would accept a reduction in security (and in global trade) far more willingly than they would accept any abridgement of our Constitutional rights.
XVIII. In a time such as this, when we have been seriously and most cruelly hurt by those who hate us, and when we must consider ourselves to be gravely threatened by those same people, it is hard to speak of the ways of peace and to remember that Christ enjoined us to love our enemies, but this is no less necessary for being difficult.
XIX. Even now we dare not forget that since the attack of Pearl Harbor - to which the present attack has been often and not usefully compared - we humans have suffered an almost uninterrupted sequence of wars, none of which has brought peace or made us more peaceable.
XX. The aim and result of war necessarily is not peace but victory, and any victory won by violence necessarily justifies the violence that won it and leads to further violence. If we are serious about innovation, must we not conclude that we need something new to replace our perpetual “war to end war?”
XXI. What leads to peace is not violence but peaceableness, which is not passivity, but an alert, informed, practiced, and active state of being. We should recognize that while we have extravagantly subsidized the means of war, we have almost totally neglected the ways of peaceableness. We have, for example, several national military academies, but not one peace academy. We have ignored the teachings and the examples of Christ, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and other peaceable leaders. And here we have an inescapable duty to notice also that war is profitable, whereas the means of peaceableness, being cheap or free, make no money.
XXII. The key to peaceableness is continuous practice. It is wrong to suppose that we can exploit and impoverish the poorer countries, while arming them and instructing them in the newest means of war, and then reasonably expect them to be peaceable.
XXIII. We must not again allow public emotion or the public media to caricature our enemies. If our enemies are now to be some nations of Islam, then we should undertake to know those enemies. Our schools should begin to teach the histories, cultures, arts, and language of the Islamic nations. And our leaders should have the humility and the wisdom to ask the reasons some of those people have for hating us.
XXIV. Starting with the economies of food and farming, we should promote at home, and encourage abroad, the ideal of local self-sufficiency. We should recognize that this is the surest, the safest, and the cheapest way for the world to live. We should not countenance the loss or destruction of any local capacity to produce necessary goods
XXV. We should reconsider and renew and extend our efforts to protect the natural foundations of the human economy: soil, water, and air. We should protect every intact ecosystem and watershed that we have left, and begin restoration of those that have been damaged.
XXVI. The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It’s proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or “accessing” what we now call “information” - which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.
XXVII. The first thing we must begin to teach our children (and learn ourselves) is that we cannot spend and consume endlessly. We have got to learn to save and conserve. We do need a “new economy”, but one that is founded on thrift and care, on saving and conserving, not on excess and waste. An economy based on waste is inherently and hopelessly violent, and war is its inevitable by-product. We need a peaceable economy.
posted on January 13, 2008 06:22:37 AM newSeems to me that if "movements" are eliminated nothing short of a revolution will fight the corporate and political interests which are now focused on profit at the expense of the community.
I think that's at least part of Barry's point:
But if we are concerned about land abuse, we have begun a profound work of economic criticism. Study of the history of land use (and any local history will do) informs us that we have had for a long time an economy that thrives by undermining its own foundations. Industrialism, which is the name of our economy, and which is now virtually the only economy of the world, has been from its beginnings in a state of riot. It is based squarely upon the principle of violence toward everything on which it depends, and it has not mattered whether the form of industrialism was communist or capitalist or whatever; the violence toward nature, human communities, traditional agricultures and local economies has been constant. The bad news is coming in, literally, from all over the world. Can such an economy be fixed without being radically changed? I don't think it can.
[ edited by profe51 on Jan 13, 2008 06:47 AM ]
posted on January 13, 2008 08:26:29 AM new
Kiara,
as a child,my brothers and I made apple fritters ,caught tadpoles and one even turned into a FROG and lived in our backyard,raised chickens and ducklings,unfortunately we overfed them with earthworms and they all died.
Then we moved on to guinea pigs and goldfish and pigeons ,then we ran out of money to buy food for the guinea pig family,the pigeons and the goldfish.
We caught small garden snakes,cicadas and even trapped birds with our homemade trap!
We have pomegranites in our backyard and a papaya tree .
There was a rumour going around in our circle that the excrete of a certain beetle which eat mostly herbal leaves and nuts fetch 40 dollars per oz,so we started with 2 beetles in a tin can and soon we have enough to take to the local herbal pharmacy.
The clerk wanted to know where did this rumor come from and called the owner to throw us out !
As we get older,we lose our creativity and imagination,all we want is a bigger allowance,watch more movies and hang out with our friends in coffee shops and shopping centers!
*
Lets all stop whining !
posted on January 13, 2008 10:45:19 AM new "But if we are concerned about land abuse, we have begun a profound work of economic criticism. Study of the history of land use (and any local history will do) informs us that we have had for a long time an economy that thrives by undermining its own foundations. Industrialism, which is the name of our economy, and which is now virtually the only economy of the world, has been from its beginnings in a state of riot. It is based squarely upon the principle of violence toward everything on which it depends, and it has not mattered whether the form of industrialism was communist or capitalist or whatever; the violence toward nature, human communities, traditional agricultures and local economies has been constant. The bad news is coming in, literally, from all over the world. Can such an economy be fixed without being radically changed? I don't think it can."
Today I read that schools in France, Germany and other countries are beginning to spread the word. In one textbook, for example it's pointed out that any future prosperity depends on the regulation of capitalism on a planetary scale.
