After using Wendell Berry as my example earlier of being “long on diagnosis, short on cure”, I was delighted find him admit this straight-up on the one of the last pages of The Unsettling of America.
And so we come to the question of what, in a public or governmental sense, ought to be done. Any criticism of an established way, if it is to be valid, must have as its standard not only a need, but a better way. it must show that a better way is desirable, and it must give examples to show that it is possible.
This should be obvious, right? Practical examples? But as I mentioned in earlier posts, there is a great dearth of them.
This was followed by two pages of self-admittedly brief and vague solutions. They did include numbered bullet points though! What more could you ask for? I’ll try to summarize them here with a few comments. Remember, this was published in 1977.
1. “Withdrawal of confidence from the league of specialists, officials, and corporation executives who for at least a generation have had almost exclusive charge of the problem and who have enormously enriched and empowered themselves by making it worse.” Wow. And he is talking about the department of agriculture and the food industry here, but he could be talking about anybody. Wall Street? The housing bubble? City planners? The military overseas. You name it, this could be point #1 on just about anybody’s list. Stop trusting the people in charge. This isn’t a call to rebel against them, but to simply no longer believe what they say without thinking about it first. Very good advice.
2. Using some of his philosophical language about “energy” he ask us to learn self-restraint in our consumption, and to learn to enjoy working hard.
3. Return to the U.S. founder’s philosophy about government protecting the small and weak from the great and powerful through negative law. That is, by stopping bad stuff from happening, not by throwing lots of money at allegedly “good” stuff.
4. Make very low-interest loans available to those wishing to become small farmers and buy small pieces of farm land.
5. Price controls to protect farmers and prevent waste. (Yikes!)
6. Promote fresh local food to reduce dependence on distant imports.
7. Make every town and city operate an organic waste depot for converting sewage, garbage, etc. to fertilizer to be used on local farms. This will break our expensive and dangerous dependence on mined fossil fertilizers.
8. Reform sanitation laws and get rid of the ones that are killing small farmers and ranchers by making it too hard and expensive to meet FDA standards.
9.1 Encourage technological and genetic diversity for conserving soil.
9.2 Forbid state-funded university professors from simply being the R&D departments of private corporations, yielding no public benefit.
10. Force agriculture professors to spend 50% of their time operating a small farm. Half their salary must from practical experience.
11. Some more philosophy. This time advocating a more moral and humble anthropology. Self-restraint.
12. “Having exploited “relativism” until, as a people, we have no deeply believed reasons for doing anything, we must now ask ourselves if there is not, after all, an absolute good by which we must measure ourselves and for which we must work.” He goes on. The final point is a condemnation of relativism and thinly veiled support for, essentially, theism.
This is an interesting mix of solutions! Some of them are very conservative, pushing for less government involvement. Others are just the opposite (price controls and farm loans) which call for more legislation and enforcement. (By the way, I think history makes a strong case that price controls almost always backfire). The bulk of the points are moral though and for moral arguments to work, you need his last point, which is theism. Berry is a fervent Christian, though he seems to be going out of his way not to mention it in this work so as not to alienate his secular audience. Nevertheless, he can’t help quoting the Bible about every third page. What I see this meaning is that, more than anything else, the church needs to be aware of these issues. We have denounced consumerism from time to time, but we are so caught up in it, we are usually unable to denounce it near enough. Instead we have the prosperity gospel. Even in most orthodox American churches, how many in the congregation are chained to high mortgages and credit card debt? A heck of a lot. It’s part of the same root trouble that has also led to the exploitation of the land that Berry draws attention to in this book.
I need to track down some follow-up material from Berry to see what he thinks of the situation now in 2011. For example, in one chapter he advocates organic food and local farming. That dimension has exploded since he wrote this in the late seventies. As far as I can tell, soil conservation practices, such as crop rotation, are in a healthier state than three decades ago too. Other sides of the coin are quite a bit worse though. I would guess that he continues to be dismayed at his conservative Christian colleague’s allergic reactions to environmentalism. On the other hand, I can imagine him being equally frustrated with environmentalists who do not fear God and dream of left-wing fascism.
Ultimately, I enjoyed Berry’s book, despite the doom and gloom, especially the material related to work/life balance, generalist work, vocation, and fatherhood.