The question that we finally come to is a practical one, though it is not one that is entirely answerable by empirical methods: Can a university, or a nation, afford this exclusive rule of competition, this purely economic economy? The great fault of this approach to things is that it is so drastically reductive; it does not permit us to live and work as human beings, as the best of our inheritance defines us. Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy. It is impossible not to notice how little the proponents of the ideal of competition have to say about honesty, which is the fundamental economic virtue, and how very little they have to say about community, compassion, and mutual help.
Wendell Berry, “Economy and Pleasure” from What Are People For?
Tag: Wendell Berry
Kingsnorth and Berry
On Friday, in my final post on Wendell Berry and Huck Finn, I wrote these words:
So, too, our acceptance of these Territories in our own lives is a rejection of our own growth, as people with a place, with a purpose, and with a telos to our lives. Those things – place, purpose, meaning – all require an acceptance of reality as it is, a choice to live in this world, with love and feeling and pathos and tragedy. To escape to a Territory – to despair, or practice self-righteousness, or to abstract all around us – is to refuse reality, to refuse to be a mature people. And this has consequences – for our ability to form relationships and love properly, for our world and our environment, for our cultural and societal structures. To quote again from this essay, a passage I quoted on its own last week: “We want to be free; we want to have rights; we want to have power; we do not yet want much to do with responsibility.”
This is the point of this last week, and why I found this passage in Berry’s essay so interesting, but perhaps I would turn his image on it’s head. I think we are all mostly in the Territories; we need to escape back home. Our lives together and our world depend on us growing up, and not giving in to despair, to self-righteousness, to the tendency to abstract our places and meaning. A key element of life in post-modernity is a crumbling social awareness, and I think Berry identified why that’s happening, more than thirty years ago in an essay about Huck Finn.
Then, earlier this week, I read Paul Kingsnorth’s most recent essay on his excellent Abbey of Misrule newsletter, where he wrote this:
This left hemisphere culture: this is what we call ‘the West’, and the whole of this ‘West’, since at least the eighteenth century, has been a state of permanent revolution. Was this forged by that left hemisphere way of seeing, or was it the other way round? Who knows, but from France to Russia, Germany to America, Marx to Rand, 1789 to 1969, the aim has been the same: bring it all down. Break it all up. Pull it apart, examine the parts, put them back together in a better, more equal, more profitable, more human order. This is the left hemisphere’s way of relating to the world. In the words of Ezra Pound, Modernist poet turned Fascist propagandist (the distance between those stances was always very small) the modern West has always had one purpose: make it new, make it new.
[…]
This is what we do, here in ‘the West’: we break things. We break systems and traditions, cultures and forests. We split atoms and bust through the upper atmosphere. We break the bounds between species and sexes, we blur the lines between life and death. Our great revolution has unleashed untold energy and created miracles, but now we can see where it is going. The modern revolution, the Machine revolution, is the left hemisphere’s work. There is a kind of greatness to it, and a certain tragedy. Most of today’s ‘defenders of the West’ are defending aspects of this revolution. They will defend empire, science, rationality, progress and nuclear fission until the cows come home. They are revolutionaries themselves, even if they call themselves conservatives. But the West’s left-brain revolution will end up destroying us, and the world, if we let it.
This is first another plug by me for Paul’s excellent newsletter, which you should subscribed to and reading regularly if you too are concerned with the culture wars all around us.
But, second, I see so many parallels between the work Wendell Berry was doing in this essay I’ve been reflecting on, and the work Paul is doing in his newsletter. In fact, at several points in this essay, Paul refers to the map we live on, a map of a territory we struggle to see clearly. Both have identified the fact that not only have we done great damage to the world and the society we live in, but that we have created a massive illusion in order to shield ourselves from the damage we are doing to our world and ourselves. For Berry, these are the Territories. For Kingsnorth, it is the Machine. They are the same.
Again, read Paul Kingsnorth if you haven’t, the work he is doing is critically important at this moment.
excerpt #26: the organized church
Organized Christianity seems, in general, to have made peace with “the economy” by divorcing itself from economic issues, and this, I think, has proved to be a disaster, both religious and economic. The reason for this, on the side of religion, is suggested by the adjective “organized.” It is clearly possible that, in the condition of the world as the world now is, organization can force upon an institution a character that is alien or even antithetical to it. The organized church come immediately under a compulsion to think of itself, and identify itself to the world, no as an institution synonymous with its truth and membership, but as a hodgepodge of funds, properties, projects, and office, all urgently requiring economic support. The organized church makes peace with a destructive economy and divorces itself from economic issues because it is economically compelled to do so. Like any other public institution so organized, the organized church is dependent on “the economy”; it cannot survive apart from those economic practices that its truth forbids and that its vocation is to correct. If it comes to a choice between the extermination of the fowls of the air and the lilies of the field and the extermination of the building fund, the organized church will elect – indeed, has already elected – to save the building fund.
Wendell Berry, “God and Country” in What Are People For?
Justin DaMetz 