He presented his first two book reports last night - for January and February. We'll share them here for anyone who is interested:
January 2016-The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry
The reading of The Art
of the Commonplace was a long time in coming for me, in that I have admired
Berry’s thinking and writing on the economic, religious, cultural and
agricultural issues surrounding the relationship of humans and their societies
to the land and ecosystems for a long time, but have never pursued a more
comprehensive exposure to his thoughts, logic and views before picking up this
volume. I was looking for a graduation
present for Dylan Bontrager (my mentee from Shalom) who was interested in
economics and politics, and asked Jonathan McRay, who has read far more of
Berry’s work than I have, for a recommendation as to which Berry work would be
most a propos. While I was buying him
one, I got one for me, too.
The book is divided into five parts: The first part orients
us to Berry’s context with the lengthy essay “A Native Hill”, which the editor
Norman Wirzba labels ‘A Geobiography.’
In it Mr. Berry takes us with him literarily while he takes a walk
around his own land, and then the lands of neighbors also…places he has known
and cherished since his earliest memories.
This depiction of an affectionate relationship of a person to a place
lays the foundation for the rest of the collection; the most important element
of all of the essays being that this is a matter of love.
In the second part, “Understanding our Cultural Crisis”,
readers get a primer on Berry’s thinking on a variety of topics, including the
history of European occupancy of this continent, racism, economics, relative
status of the genders, and the effect of industrial machines on our concept of
our bodies. In this section, there is
more of an emphasis on Berry’s notions of the entrenched ills of our society,
and less of a focus on what might be done to correct them, though each of the
essays is a complete set of thoughts on its own and as such they do include
mention of circumstances that would be more favorable.
“The Agrarian Basis for an Authentic Culture”, the third
part, is perhaps the most philosophical of the groupings. The focus is mostly on concepts of human health
in the broadest possible sense, with a sense of belonging to a meaningful and
thriving community being the especial emphasis.
This necessarily means he must touch on a variety of other
topics—nothing in this world exists without connection, ultimately, to
everything else. This is the section of
the book where we learn why we might think there is a different way of living
worth reaching for, and what it might feel like—what it might do for us
individually and collectively—if we were to reorient our culture with gracious
and harmonious relationships in view.
Economics, then (the focus of the fourth section), is more
of the ‘how’ of Berry’s agrarian concept of society. It is the living out of the cultural values
elucidated in the previous part of the collection. Holism, integration, appropriate scale,
pleasure, and justice for all are emphasized.
Cultural philosophies may value members or elements intrinsically, but
economics is how the members of the culture live out their values and show their esteem for those and that
which they love.
Mr. Wirzba finishes out the collection with a few of Berry’s
essays that touch on religion. Not
surprisingly, Berry’s take on religion is quite unconventional. He insists that energy and land and their use
are topics inseparable from religion, that the division between the spiritual
life and the physical life is erroneous and damaging, and that furthermore
Christian scripture (he embraces, in his own way, the tradition he was raised
in) never intends anything other than these assumptions.
There are many of Wendell Berry’s writings that might be
thought of as more practically applicable to a homesteading family like
ours. He has written eloquently about
specifically why and how a person or family might choose a life that relates as
directly to the land as possible, and his poetry celebrates that kind of life
delightfully and intimately. This
collection has a broader focus, with the emphasis being more on what the
harmonious way of life looks like when the whole neighborhood or even the whole
society are involved. Still, the reading
of this collection of essays contributes several things to the Myers-Benner
project here at Tangly Woods. First, it
provides a theoretical context for what we are trying to achieve, legitimizing
our efforts in the face of criticism that this is all fine and good for one
family, but it isn’t practical for everyone.
It helps prepare the rebuttal that everyone doesn’t need to do what we
are…they need to do what they should
be doing, and contribute what they
have to contribute towards a community of peace and wellbeing that goes well
beyond what any of us can do on our own in our one little home. Second, it comforts us that what we feel
compelling us forward is not compelling only us…Mr. Berry has clearly spent his
whole life exploring similar yearnings.
When I read his writing on agrarianism, I feel a deep and clear
resonance in my mind. ‘That,’ I think to myself, ‘makes sense to me. That is the way I want to relate to my
neighbors. That is the world I want to
live in.’ Third, it is helpful to
have someone explain why choosing to go a different way from the norm is so
hard. His explanations of how our whole
economy has been arranged to favor dislocation, dependence, and extraction
helped me to deepen my understanding of the forces we are contending with as we
turn and make our way against the current.
On the whole, I would have to say that the effect of the
book on me (besides delighting me with many beautifully crafted nuggets of
wisdom) was to encourage me that there is critical value in what we are
attempting to do; that the logical extensions of this way of life have
implications for the healing of our community’s deepest sicknesses and
discontents. But it also sobers me
deeply if I take his depictions of society’s ills to heart, not least because
many of these essays were written thirty or forty years ago, and the trouble he
describes has largely worsened, and the predictions he has made have largely
been borne out. The solutions he proposes,
though, have the wonderful property of being decentralized. That is to say that although he calls for the
changing of some large-scale policy problems, he also calls for an economy
based on many small towns surrounded by many small farms all thriving in the
places they love. And this can’t be
built any other way than one community—or even one family—at a time.
Some especially worthwhile quotes from the text:
From Racism and the
Economy (1988)
p. 56: “But surely we must go further and say that a market
will be degenerative if it is not under the rule of the virtues. The most obvious lesson of slavery, one that
we have never learned, is about the limits of a mere market. A mere market cannot adequately recognize or
protect the full value of a creature, as seller or as buyer or as
merchandise. We now call a market “free”
to the extent that buyers and sellers are able to ignore this limitation. But it was a limit not ignorable by slaves or
by the enemies of slavery. To them it
was plain that the market was inevitably reductive: it treated people as
bodies, not as souls.”
p. 60: “People who wish to be free to pay no attention to
anybody who knows them are not going to accept the constraints or pursue the
freedoms of community life.”
p. 63: “Neither teachers nor students feel themselves
answerable to the community, for the school does not exist to serve the
community. It exists to aid and abet the
student’s escape from the community into “tomorrow’s world,” in which community
standards, it goes without saying, will not apply.”
p. 63: “A true and appropriate answer to our race problem,
as to many others, would be a restoration of our communities—it being
understood that a community, properly speaking, cannot exclude or mistreat any
of its members. This is what we forgot
during slavery and the industrialization that followed, and have never
remembered.”
p. 64: “We must be aware too of the certainty that the
present way of things will eventually fail.
If it fails quickly, by any of several predicted causes, then we will
have no need, being absent, to worry about what to do next. If it fails slowly, and if we have been
careful to preserve the most necessary and valuable things, then it may fail
into a restoration of community life—that is, into understanding of our need to
help and comfort one another.”
From Feminism, the
Body, and the Machine (1989):
p. 72: “But in general, apart from its own highly
specialized standards of quantity and efficiency, “technological progress” has
produced a social and ecological decline.
Industrial war, except by the most fanatically narrow standards, is
worse than war used to be. Industrial
agriculture, except by the standards of quantity and mechanical efficiency,
diminishes everything it affects.
Industrial workmanship is certainly worse than traditional workmanship,
and is getting shoddier every day. After
forty-odd years, the evidence is everywhere that television, far from proving a
great tool of education, is a tool of stupefaction and disintegration. Industrial education has abandoned the duty
of passing on the cultural and intellectual inheritance in favor of
baby-sitting and career preparation.”
From Think Little
(1970):
p. 87: “A man who is trying to live as a neighbor to his
neighbors will have a lively and practical understanding of the work of peace
and brotherhood, and let there be no mistake about it—he is doing that work. A couple who make a good marriage, and raise
healthy, morally competent children, are serving the world’s future more
directly and surely than any political leader, though they never utter a public
word. A good farmer who is dealing with
the problem of soil erosion on an acre of ground has a sounder grasp of that
problem and cares more about it and
is probably doing more to solve it than any bureaucrat who is talking about it
in general. A man who is willing to
undertake the discipline and difficulty of mending his own ways is worth more
to the conservation movement than a hundred who are insisting merely that the
government and the industries mend their
ways.”
p. 87: “In other words, if you are fearful of the
destruction of the environment, then learn to quit being an environmental
parasite. We all are, in one way or
another, and the remedies are not always obvious, though they certainly will
always be difficult. They require a new
kind of life—harder, more laborious, poorer in luxuries and gadgets, but also,
I am certain, richer in meaning and more abundant in real pleasure.”
From Health is
Membership (1994):
p. 154: “A body, love insists, is neither a spirit nor a
machine; it is not a picture, a diagram, a chart, a graph, an anatomy; it is
not an explanation; it is not a law. It
is precisely and uniquely what it is. It
belongs to the world of love, which is a world of living creatures, natural
orders and cycles, many small, fragile lights in the dark.”
From Sex, Economy,
Freedom, and Community (1992):
p. 166: “…if you are dependent on people who do not know
you, who control the value of your necessities, you are not free, and you are
not safe.”
p. 167: “To this economy, democracy and the values of the
religious traditions mean absolutely nothing.
And those who wish to help communities to survive had better understand
that a merely political freedom means little within a totalitarian economy.”
From People, Land, and
Community (1983):
p. 192: “Perhaps it is only when we focus our minds on our
machines that time seems short. Time is
always running out for machines. They
shorten our work, in a sense popularly approved, by simplifying it and speeding
it up, but our work perishes quickly in them too as they wear out and are
discarded. For the living Creation, on
the other hand, time is always coming.
It is running out for the farm built on the industrial pattern; the
industrial farm burns fertility as it burns fuel. For the farm built into the pattern of living
things, as an analogue of forest or prairie, time is a bringer of gifts. These gifts may be welcomed and cared
for. To some extent they may be
expected. Only within strict limits are
they the result of human intention and knowledge. They cannot in the usual sense be made. Only in the short term of industrial
accounting can they be thought simply earnable.
Over the real length of human time, to be earned they must be deserved.”
From Conservation and Local Economy (1991):
p. 201: “If we want to succeed in
our dearest aims and hopes as a people, we must understand that we cannot
proceed any further without standards, and we must see that ultimately the
standards are not set by us but by nature.
We must see that it is foolish, sinful, and suicidal to destroy the
health of nature for the sake of an economy that is really not an economy at
all but merely a financial system, one that is unnatural, undemocratic,
sacrilegious, and ephemeral. We must see
the error of our effort to live by fire, by burning the world in order to live
in it.
From Economy and Pleasure (1988):
p. 218: “Ultimately, in the
argument about work and how it should be done, one has only one’s pleasure to
offer. It is possible, as I have learned
again and again, to be in one’s place, in such company, wild or domestic, and
with such pleasure, that one cannot think of another place that one would
prefer to be—or of another place at all.
One does not miss or regret the past, or fear or long for the future. Being there is simply all, and is
enough. Such times give one the chief
standard and the chief reason for one’s work.”
From The Gift of Good Land (1979):
p. 304: “That is not to suggest
that we can live harmlessly, or strictly at our own expense; we depend upon
other creatures and survive by their deaths.
To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of
Creation. When we do this knowingly,
lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily,
destructively, it is a desecration. In
such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and
others to want.”
From Christianity and the Survival of Creation (1992):
p. 315: “How we take our lives
from this world, how we work, what work we do, how well we use the materials we
use, and what we do with them after we have used them—all these are questions
of the highest and gravest religious significance. In answering them, we practice, or do not
practice, our religion.”
From The Pleasures of Eating (1989):
p. 326: “Eating with the fullest
pleasure—pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance—is perhaps the
profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate
our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from
creatures we did not make and from powers we cannot comprehend.”
by Jason Myers-Benner January 2016
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