I had been meaning to read Wendell Berry for a while as he lives less than 30 minutes away. Without much research I chose ‘The Unsettling of America’ which is his critique of modern agricultural and its effects on society. Written in 1977 it seems like not much has changed. To me Wendell Berry sounds like a modern-day Jeremiah. It was really coincidental to have read Grapes of Wrath just prior to starting this book, as it deals with similar content. The central theme of the book is that modernity has up-ended the natural patterns and cycles and replaced them with destructive and exploitative practices. The book opens with:
“One of the peculiarities of the white race’s presence in America is how little intention has been applied to it. As a people, wherever we have been, we have never really intended to be. The continent is said to have been discovered by an Italian who was on his way to India. The earliest explorers were looking for gold, which was, after an early streak of luck in Mexico, always somewhere farther on” “Once the unknown of geography was mapped, the industrial marketplace became the new frontier, and we continued, with largely the same motives and with increasing haste and anxiety, to displace ourselves’no longer with unity of direction, like a migrant flock, but like the refugees from a broken ant hill. In our own time we have invaded foreign lands and the moon with the high-toned patriotism of the conquistadors, and with the same mixture of fantasy and avarice.”
Now that there is nowhere left to ‘displace’ we must displace ourselves by reducing the amount of labor required to live:
“What caused these divisions? There are no doubt many causes, complex both in themselves and in their interaction. But pertinent to all of them, I think, is our attitude toward work. The growth of the exploiters’ revolution on this continent has been accompanied by the growth of the idea that work is beneath human dignity, particularly any form of hand work. We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from. We have debased the products of work and have been, in turn, debased by them. Out of this contempt for work arose the idea of a nigger: at first some person, and later some thing, to be used to relieve us of the burden of work. If we began by making niggers of people, we have ended by making a nigger of the world. We have taken the irreplaceable energies and materials of the world and turned them into jimcrack ’labor-saving devices.’ We have made of the rivers and oceans and winds niggers to carry away our refuse, which we think we are too good to dispose of decently ourselves. And in doing this to the world that is our common heritage and bond, we have returned to making niggers of people: we have become each other’s niggers. But is work something that we have a right to escape? And can we escape it with impunity? We are probably the first entire people ever to think so. All the ancient wisdom that has come down to us counsels otherwise. It tells us that work is necessary to us, as much a part of our condition as mortality; that good work is our salvation and our joy; that shoddy or dishonest or self-serving work is our curse and our doom. We have tried to escape the sweat and sorrow promised in Genesis only to find that, in order to do so, we must forswear love and excellence, health and joy.”
Perhaps this motivation is one of the root causes of modern anxiety and depression? There are two types of approaches to harvesting resources from the earth. One is a nurturer signified by the idyllic farmer, while the other is an exploiter signified by a strip mine. One works in renewing cycles while the other deals in a one-way transaction. Farming used to be almost completely reliant natural ‘renewable’ energy. That is horses, mules, manpower. This energy has now been mechanized and the energy comes almost solely from fossil fuels and chemicals. As a result, farming has shifted from being a nurturing activity to an exploitative one. At the time of writing farms were losing topsoil at similar rates to the dust bowl due to a focus on profit margins. The farms have become so big, the machinery so expensive, that all pressure is directed towards bringing the crops in as quickly as possible. Bigger mono crops make the plants more vulnerable to diseases and insects which, in turn requires the use of more pesticides and fertilizers which then must be artificial due to the fact that livestock and crops are seldom grown together. Farming has been turned into an equation instead of an organic operation based on local peculiarities. He goes into a fair bit of detail around the social implications of this division which I am tempted to quote at length, but this is already getting too long. By the end of it the question naturally arises ‘Oh Wendell Berry, what must I do to be saved?’ while he has suggestions for agricultural solutions, the broader societal answers seem elusive.
There is no use pretending that the contradiction between what we think or say and what we do is a limited phenomenon. There is no group of the extra intelligent or extra-concerned or extra-virtuous that is exempt. I cannot think of any American whom I know or have heard of, who is not contributing in some way to destruction.
A great read, Wendell Berry is so conservative that he comes out as a liberal on the other side.
People/Wendell Berry