I hope the following format isn’t the norm, but after having an illuminating evening with fourty-four pages of Wendell Berry, I feel I must give the three or four of you that read this the sort of snapshot feel of what I saw with my own eyes that degrades the Grand Canyon and the Great Wall. I fear that my connection to this writer, Mr. Berry, will give me the sort of arrogance that he himself seems without, feelling that my own thoughts and concerns are so effortlessly voiced by a man of age, intellect, and moral stature. I should give a bit of background, why this has impacted me so, and then we can proceed, if you wish, though I must warn you that if it touches you with mere fractions of the power it has surged into me, you might not go back to your former self or if you do, you, like me, will be ceaselessly disappointed.
I listened to Wendell Berry give a lecture at a packed auditorium on the University of Montana campus over a year and a half ago. I hadn’t heard of him to that point, but it was required for a class, and my advisor praised this man, and so by default he was of some interest to me. I can’t say my life changed that night. He was forward and I understood, but at that point, most of what he said did anything to affect my mind or habits. Seeds must be able to germinate in years instead of months, at least in this hard heart of mine.
Two nights ago I awoke near three in the morning, as sometimes I do, but I could not fall back to sleep. Thankfully I didn’t decide to shut myself down with medication, as we are instructed to by doctors and drug companies, but that’s a subject for another day. I started thinking about Iran and oil and how our economy runs, completely at every turn, dependant on cheap gasoline and other oil-based products. I became rather scared. I pictured the anarchy that would grip a nation as unruffled as ours given over to the whims of the rich feeding us what we don’t need just to line their pockets. I thought of another Great Depression, and of the fall of Rome, and other stupid history things because they float around in my mind with no other use than to scare me at three-thirty in the morning. I didn’t really think that the next day I could “accidentally” buy a book that would touch on that very issue, and dig beneath it like I couldn’t with my little trowel and scrawny arms of thought. With that as an intro, follow with me and hopefully we both can benefit from this mental exercise.
“We never considered the possibility that we might be trapped in the webwork of communication and transport that was supposed to make us free.”
The idea, as it were, that we have this incredible capability (as I am now exploiting, knowingly in paradox) to communicate with nearly no effort, and travel with, really, no tangible expense, and how we thought that would free us from the world, but how it instead trapped us - this was the idea that kept popping into my head. Everybody lives clumped together, miles from enough land to really feed the populations. If gas became truly expensive, if transportion shut down, think of the powerful repercussions. We are completely reliant not on the natural production of nearby resources to sustain us, but on the ability to transport resources across vast distances with ease and frugility. Berry seems to be pointing out that the system itself is a slavery, but I was feeling the tangible troubles that would be born out of that system losing a single piece. I wasn’t yet to Mr. Berry’s incredible positions and precise reasoning. I was still in the slavery. And I still am. I’ll keep going.
“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.”
I had never thought of peace missing profitability compared to war. The thought scares me, how often I have agreed with war, and how often I have ignored war as an arm of greed rather than hate, and peace as an arm of charity rather than love, or with love. But we’ll get to profit and such here soon enough.
“Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. Its proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible.” (Emphasis mine)
I’ve always wanted to put one of those “emphasis mine” remarks. No, seriously, there are reasons I left grad school, not the least of which is a feeling more vague that is elucidated here, but this is definitely something that I tried to preach on the streetcorner of the college classroom to people that are now salaried while I work a simpleton’s job, though Mr. Berry has made me feel much better about my convictions that I have felt in a long time. Mr. Berry continues at the end of the paragraph, “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.” Now, I read some of Camus’ “Myth of Sisyphus” essay tonight, and it would undercut that premise and its conclusion, but I still prefer it to the general industrial-commercial model that gives education to those wanting specific work, not to those wanting to be simply better. Like I said, this has been on my mind prior to finding Mr. Berry writing about it. Two days ago, while at work, I thought of education and wrote down the following thought: Education should make us good, and it can make us rich, but it cannot do both. I think I would have to be specific about stating that rich means monetarily wealthy, otherwise I’d say I’m not as stupid as my job would show me to be. Or whatever. This blog. Whatever.
“To make too cheap and sell too high has always been the program of industrial capitalism.”
I’m in the middle of this capitalism, making sandwiches for people, profiting off their expensive tastes and billowing bank accounts. And it’s not even that we make too cheap at all, it’s the process that goes into this construction, and the fact that I had yet to seriously question it that gave me worry last night. But that sums up what we do in our culture - we make cheap and sell high so that we can profit most from doing least. Instead of simply making what we need, and profit is not necessary in a world where needs are met, we make to excess and fail to use our excesses to any degree of responsiblilty - I’m getting ahead of myself and Mr. Berry’s quotes. Actually, I’ll just add it on right here, because it’s a good end to where I was going anyway. “Low prices encourage overproduction as producers attempt to make up their losses ‘on volume.’” We do this very thing in our store, and I never thought of its unnatural absurdity (compared to Camus rational one) until last night.
“What could be more superstitious than the idea that money brings forth food?”
And this is my job. Taking money. “Making” food, or merely repackaging it for ease in consumption and appeal to tastes. Our food is made in places like Venezuela and California, and packaging comes to us from Asia, and it just keeps going, and it all just arrives at the store with a seamless precision that affords no room for questions about the why let alone the how of the whole apparatus. And the final quote I think it the best for me to hear, and companies like Exxon, and Quiznos, and Microsoft.
“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.”
It’s a powerful thing to look at Jesus story about the Rich Man and Lazarus. You can be comforted now, or later, and sometimes you don’t get to pick, but it seems like when you do pick, you’re the worse for your decision. I think its because comfort now is an illusion. We are cursed to toil for our food, and we don’t do that anymore. We (but not we, more you if you’re a girl, and at that, I apologize if my emphathy is nothing but trite and insensitive) are cursed to have pain in childbirth, and we fear to reproduce or do things not to feel it (not that I really have any say in such things). Why my mind comes back to Jesus, it is just grace and something of a bit of wonder that I have yet to understand or fully appreciate, but Jesus - born of the pain of a woman, died in the pain of the cross. It’s like life isn’t but a muddy mess without pain to clear the windshield, to feel the why instead of know the how. The Rich Man felt little pain until life was over and he had fooled himself into Hell. Lazarus (you wouldn’t believe that I just teared up thinking of a character in a story that Jesus told, but such is the case) lived the shitty life, the begging and hurting and broken life, and so he was comforted that the real here was the illusion there, and so it must be with us all. Why are the poor in spirit blessed? And why are they beside the peacemakers and those who suffer for Jesus, and why are the woes to the religious and the rich and the powerful? This is not good for us, I don’t think. The only Americans that will get into heaven, it seems, are either on the streets pushing around shopping carts, or are in the slums of some bloated city gorged on the flesh of mankind. I feel very lucid in all this, but I also feel that my thought train skipped some cars there to get where I was going, and I’ll try to make the connections here. We need to be poor to need cheap solutions, and since the elusive expensive solutions just give us a greater greed, I must listen carefully to Jesus, if he will ask me to give up the illusion of money, of wealth, and get the free solution that starts with him but doesn’t stop at this evangelical idea of personal salvation, but instead flows into economy and sustainability and… Ryan asked me if Wendell Berry was a Christian, and I said I didn’t think so. He does seem to know about Jesus (not a determaning factor), and mentions him even in just the few essays that I read, but I’d say Mr. Berry follows Jesus better than many shepherds of our country’s flock.
Remind me to talk about how I wondered what it must be like to end up being a false prophet, because I realized how nobody really goes down the path of evil for the sake of evil, not even Satan. I guess you have not way to remind me to do anything. I’ll just try to remember. Sorry this is disjointed (not a drug reference).
You are on the right track. Christianity, I think, is intended to change the whole system, social and economic just as much as theological and ethical. While I believe that, I can’t seem to see how it can do that from within some of those systems. As a political agnostic, I have trouble seeing how the people of Christ can be true to his image, while making compromises on almost everything in which we believe (as I’ve heard a certian Oregon Senator say is necessary for a life in politics). I’m just throwing this out there, but maybe we’re supposed to work and slave for political change and never compromise on important matters, and therefore “never get anywhere,” as far as anyone can see. Curt Niccum wrote in his blog entry, The Macedonian Call that sometimes the apparent gains are not the significant ones. I also remember Lynn Anderson, in an article in Wineskins about ten years ago (how random is my memory) refrencing Isaiah’s call (”Then said I, Lord, how long? And he answered, Until cities be waste without inhabitant, and houses without man, and the land become utterly waste . . .” -Is 6.11) to say that sometimes God calls us to minister to people (or, in this case, a system) that will never change to meet his desires.
BTW I’ve really enjoyed reading your challenging blog entry.
I caught up on your last few days of entrys last night at 1am something… I had some comments for this particular post but those have since been lost… suffice it to say, Berry has some interesting thoughts if rather left of center. Like Ty above, I too have enjoyed reading your blog, through all of its twists and turns.