The peculiarity of our condition would appear to be that the implementation of any truth would ruin the economy.

Excerpted from Wendell Berry's "Discipline and Hope."

The principle was stated by Thoreau in his journal: “Hard and steady and engrossing labor with the hands, especially out of doors, is invaluable to the literary man and serves him directly. Here I have been for six days surveying in the woods, and yet when I get home at evening, somewhat weary at last… I find myself more susceptible than usual to the finest influences, as music and poetry.” That is, certainly, the testimony of an exceptional man, a man of the rarest genius, and it will be asked if such work could produce such satisfaction in an ordinary man. My answer is that we do not have to look far or long for evidence that all the fundamental tasks for feeding and clothing and housing—farming, gardening, cooking, spinning, weaving, sewing, shoemaking, carpentry, cabinetwork, stonemasonry—were once done with consummate skill by ordinary people, and as that skill indisputably involved a high measure of pride, it can confidently be said to have produced a high measure of satisfaction.

We are being saved from work, then, for what? The answer can only be that we are being saved from work that is meaningful and ennobling and comely in order to be put to work that is unmeaning and degrading and ugly.

In 1930, the Twelve Southerners of I’ll Take My Stand issued an introduction to their book “A State of Principles,” in which they declared for the agrarian way of life as opposed to the industrial. The book, I believe, was never very popular. At the time, and during the three decades that followed, it might have been almost routinely dismissed by the dominant cultural factions as an act of sentimental allegiance to a lost cause. But now it has begun to be possible to say that the cause for which the Twelve Southerners spoke in their introduction was not a lost but a threatened cause: the cause of human culture. “The regular act of applied science,” they said, “is to introduce into labor a labor-saving device or a machine. Whether this is a benefit depends on how far it is advisable to save labor. The philosophy of applied science is generally quite sure that the saving of labor is a pure gain, and that the more of it the better. This is to assume that labor is an evil, that only the end of labor or the material product is good. On this assumption, labor becomes mercenary and servile… The act of labor as one of the happy functions of human life has been in effect abandoned… Turning to consumption as the grand end which justifies the evil of modern labor, we find that we have been deceived. We have more time in which to consume, and many more products to be consumed. But the tempo of our labors communicates itself to our satisfactions, and these also become brutal and hurried. The constitution of the natural man probably does not permit him to shorten his labor-time and enlarge his consuming-time indefinitely. He has to pay the penalty in satiety and aimlessness.”

The outcry in the face of such obvious truths is always that if they were implemented they would ruin the economy. The peculiarity of our condition would appear to be that the implementation of any truth would ruin the economy. If the Golden Rule were generally observed among us, the economy would not last a week. We have made our false economy a false god, and it has made blasphemy of the truth. So I have met the economy in the road, and am expected to yield it right of way. But I will not get over. My reason is that I am a man, and have a better right to the ground than the economy. The economy is no god for me, for I have had too close a look at its wheels. I have seen it at work in the strip mines and coal camps of Kentucky, and I know that it has no moral limits. It has emptied the country of the independent and the proud, and has crowded the cities with the dependent and the abject. It has always sacrificed the small to the large, the personal to the impersonal, the good to the cheap… I see it teaching my students to give themselves a price before they can give themselves a value.

… A better economy, to my way of thinking, would be on that would place its emphasis not upon the quantity of notions and luxuries but upon the quality of necessities. Such an economy would, for example, produce an automobile that would last as least as long, and be at least as easy to maintain, as a horse. It would encourage workmanship to be as durable as its materials; thus a piece of furniture would have the durability not of glue but of wood. It would substitute for the pleasure of frivolity a pleasure in the high quality of essential work…

… The change I am talking about appeals to me precisely because it need not wait upon “other people.” Anybody who wants to do it can begin it in himself and in his household as soon as he is ready—by becoming answerable to at least some of his own needs, by acquiring skills and tools, by learning what his real needs are, by refusing the glamorous and the frivolous. When a person learns to act on his best hopes he enfranchises and validates them as no government or public policy ever will. And by his action the possibility that other people will do the same is made a likelihood.

But I must concede that there is also a sense in which I am tilting at windmills. While we have been preoccupied by various ideological menaces, we have been invaded and nearly overrun by windmills. They are drawing the nourishment from our soil and the lifeblood out of our veins. Let us tilt against the windmills. Though we have not conquered them, if we do not keep going at them they will surely conquer us.




More about this essay later.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

There are, it seems, two muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say "It is yet more difficult than you thought." This is the muse of form. It may be then that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction, to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.

WENDELL BERRY.

How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.

Several times a day, I wish for a sheet of paper as big as a room, and I imagine myself unrolling this paper and starting to fill in a gigantic web of connections. I want to be all on one page. Right now I have too many thoughts on too many subjects rolling loosely in my head. I know every last idea is connected, bound to everything else out of necessity, but I need the neatness of a sketched-out web just once, capturing all those systems and complexes and economies, and the people, animals, plants, ecosystems and assumptions that comprise each, and the thousands of relationships that link anything to everything.

The ability to speak exactly is intimately related to the ability to know exactly.

Meatless Mondays on The Center for a Livable Future:

Meatless Monday has the potential to not only improve the populations’ health, but could also reduce unsustainable levels of demand for meat products, particularly industrially-produced meat, which use huge amounts of valuable natural resources and pose significant public health and environmental risks.



And Blackie.

When I was twelve years old, my family ate dinner a friend’s home and midway through the meal, our host commented on our hamburgers – “They’re pretty tough! Blackie was all muscle and he loved to run around in the fields.” And my preteen self was silently mortified—we were eating an animal with a name! Try as I might, I couldn’t force myself to finish my hamburger and hid the last few bites of meat under my napkin. And now—wouldn’t it be something to eat a cow or a pig or a chicken that lived such a full life, been the recipient of such attentive care that it bore a name of its own, that its keeper remembered it fondly and particularly? I've been reading about industrial farm animal production and may never eat anything again, just to be safe...

Eating is an agricultural act.

I spent a few minutes last night appreciating a red onion grown and handled with exquisite care: the weight of it in my palm, the way the skin crackles as it parts from the firm moist flesh, the crispness of the layers sliced by a sharpened knife in a steady hand. Incredible that something you can select for yourself at your neighborhood co-operative at $2.79 a pound can be as magnificent in its own way as an old cathedral.

The possibilities of the life of the body in this world.

"Life is not very interesting," we seem to have decided. "Let its satisfactions be minimal, perfunctory, and fast." We hurry through our meals to go to work and hurry through our work in order to "recreate" ourselves in the evenings and on weekends and vacations. And then we hurry, with the greatest possible speed and noise and violence, through our recreation — for what? … And all this is carried out in a remarkable obliviousness to the causes and effects, the possibilities and the purposes, of the life of the body in this world.



WENDELL BERRY. The Pleasures of Eating.

Practice resurrection.

Oh, I like Choco Rios at the Weary Traveler on a snowy Monday night. It was hot Mexican cocoa + alcoholic banana something + cinnamon, cinnamon, cinnamon. So good. Bernd tasted like grog the rest of the night. Just kissing him with grog on his breath burned MY throat—that’s how strong that drink was! Mine just deepened my feeling of settled, sweetly sleepy contentment.

My stuff moves home today and I move home tomorrow. I walk around campus and feel strange and severed. I was such a good student, and now I need to learn how to be a good somebody else. I don’t know where I go directly from here, but I keep thinking of a Wendell Berry poem:

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.

Yesterday, Adam and I went to see Andrew Bacevich and today Lindsey and I are seeing Wendell Berry at the Overture Center! I love book week in Madison. Even if it were book week every week, it wouldn't ever lose its charm.


Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.



We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us.

But we are thinking not just of the children who are living beneath the bombs.

From "Peaceableness Toward Enemies, 1991."

This latest war has been justified on a number of grounds: that it was a war to liberate Kuwait; that it was a war to defend ‘the civilized world’ against a dangerous maniac; that it was a war to preserve peace; that it was a war to inaugurate a ‘new world order’; that it was a war to defend The American Way of Life; that it was a war to defend our supply of cheap oil. These justifications are not satisfactory, even when one supposes that they are sincerely believed.

...

This war was said to be ‘about peace.’ So have they all been said to be. This was another in our series of wars ‘to end war.’ But peace is not the result of war, any more than love is the result of hate or generosity the result of greed. As a war in defense of peace, this one in the Middle East has failed, as all its predecessors have done. Like all its predecessors, it was the result of the failure, on the part of all of its participants, to be peaceable.

...

A war against the world is helplessly a war against the people of the world. Against everybody. The innocent. The children. Increasingly, as modern militarism builds and brawls over the face of the planet, people of ordinary decency are thinking of the children. What about the children? we ask as our leaders casually acknowledge the inevitability of ‘some civilian casualties’—or ‘collateral casualties,’ as they put it. But we are thinking not just of the children who are living beneath the bombs. We are thinking, too, of our own children to whom someone must explain that some people—including some of ‘our’ people—look on the deaths of children as an acceptable cost of victory.

...

The essential point is the ancient one: that to be peaceable is, by definition, to be peaceable in time of conflict. Peaceableness is not the amity that exists between people who agree, nor is it the exhaustion or jubilation that follows war. It is not passive. It is the ability to act to resolve conflict without violence. In the face of conflict, the peaceable person may find several solutions, the violent person only one.

...

Finally, if we want to be at peace, we will have to waste less, spend less, use less, want less, need less. The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and less wasteful.


WENDELL BERRY

We do not know what is going to happen to it, or to us.

Life, like holiness, can be known only by being experienced. To experience it is not to 'figure it out' or even to understand it, but to suffer it and rejoice in it as it is. In suffering it and rejoicing in it as it is, we know that we do not and cannot understand it completely. We know, moreover, that we do not wish to have it appropriated by somebody's claim to have understood it. Though we have life, it is beyond us. We do not know how we have it, or why. We do not know what is going to happen to it, or to us. It is not predictable; though we can destroy it, we cannot make it. It cannot, except by reduction and the grave risk of damage, be controlled. It is holy. To think otherwise is to enslave life, and to make, no humanity, but a few humans its predictably inept masters.

WENDELL BERRY.