--
BOOKS I READ: The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry (1977). An inspiring yet alarming dissection of the ills that plague the modern world, specifically around the economics of farming, the agribusiness. First published in the late 70s, the edition I read includes an afterword written twenty years later. In it he describes how his arguments have been dismissed and discounted, but they have not been proven wrong, something he wished for after writing the book “out of worry” for the destruction of our land.
In the concluding chapter, “Margins,” Berry lobbies against orthodoxy and the narrow thinking it fosters and promotes, stating, “Whereas the voice of experience, of culture, counsels, ‘Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.’ The experimental intelligence, which behaves strangely like the intelligence of imperialists and religious fanatics, says, ‘This is the only true way.’” (pg.169) He claims that farming at the margins is where true innovation is being practiced, one that takes into account health of the people and the health of the land. The agribusiness promoted by corporations and by land-grant universities studies is no different than the way strip mining works, a defacing of the land that leaves it unhealthy and unusable, a position now taken up by an increasing number of people who worry about the negative impacts of industrial farming on the product and the environment.
He admires the Amish, citing them as exemplary stewards of the land. He calls them, “the last surviving white community of any considerable size in this country,” with emphasis on the full sense of the word community, one that takes care of its neighbors and its land. He outlines reasons why that is so, including one about their understanding of the necessity of limiting technology and technological innovations, by taking into account the social impact that is often not considered when innovations are introduced. “The wholeness or health of the community is their standard.”
I found myself copying numerous quotes from the book into my journal. I share a few of those here:
On the nature of American society and democracy:
There’s nothing more absurd, to give an example that is only apparently trivial, than the millions who wish to live in luxury and idleness and yet be slender and good looking. (pg.12)
… we use [our bodies] only as shipping cartons to transport our brains and a few employable muscles back and forth to work. (pg.108)
Democracy has involved more than the enfranchisement of the lower classes; it has meant also the popularization of the more superficial upper-class values: leisure, etiquette (as opposed to good manners), fashion, every day dressing up, and a kind of dietary persnicketiness. (pg.159)
On culture and how easy it is to corrupt the people:
People whose governing habit is the relinquishment of power, competence, and responsibility, and whose characteristic suffering is the anxiety of futility, make excellent spenders. They are ideal consumers. By inducing in them little panics of boredom, powerlessness, sexual failure, mortality, paranoia, they can be made to buy (or vote for) virtually anything that is “attractively packaged.” The advertising industry is founded upon this principle. (pg.24)
A culture is not a collection of relics or ornaments, but a practical necessity, and its corruption invokes calamity. (pg.49)
My favorite quote from the book:
The modern mind longs for the future as the medieval mind longed for Heaven. (pg. 56)
He has a lot to say about educational institutions:
As soon as educational standards begin to be dictated by “a changing world,” … then one is justified in teaching anything in anyway—after all, one never knows for sure what “a changing world” is going to become. The way is thus opened to run the university as a business, the main purpose of which is to sell diplomas—after a complicated but undemanding four-year ritual—and thereby give employment to professors. (pg.149)
Previous entry on my reading log (or check out a list of all my recent reads):
