The Art of Loading Brush. Wendell Berry
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(so proud of their solicitude for “the other”) brought down upon their fellow humans.
As the fellow humans of their fellow humans, perhaps these liberals should be a little less eager to shake hands with themselves. It is hard not to see Mr. Trump as the personification, even the consummation, of the barely divergent “freedoms” espoused by the two sides: a man, by his own testimony, both sexually liberated and fiscally unregulated, the sovereign and autonomous American individual, the very puppet of his own desires. He, more than anybody else so far, is the incarnation of our long aspiration to do individually as we please.
Meanwhile, agrarianism as I have at least partly defined it has managed to survive, to maintain the loyalty and courage of a good many people, and to keep talking. It certainly is nothing like a third political party, or situated anywhere between the present two. At least, it provides a viewpoint from which to observe and measure the effects of those two and their contention upon the actual country. At most, it is an entirely different way of living, thinking, and speaking: the way of what I am obliged to call economic realism, indissolubly mated to ecology, to local ecosystems, and to the traditions of good husbandry and good neighborhood, starting at home and from the ground up.
VI
Finally, I need to say that the word “order,” as in the title of one of the pieces of this book, now seems to me far preferable to “pattern,” as used in my essay “Solving for Pattern” of 1980. “Pattern” signifies a rigidity of form and a mechanical repetitiousness that I don’t see in nature or respect in human work. “Order,” almost on the contrary, signifies the formal integrity by which a kind of creature or workmanship maintains its identity and remains recognizable even as it varies through time, adapting to difference and to change.
The order of loving care is of human making. It varies as it must from place to place, time to time, worker to worker, never definitive or final. It is measurable by the health, the happiness too, of the association of land and people. It is partly an ideal (remembering divine or natural order), partly a quest, always and inescapably a practice.
The Thought of Limits in a Prodigal Age
Is there, at bottom, any real distinction between esthetics and economics?
—Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac & Other Writings on Ecology and Conservation
I want to say something about the decline, the virtual ruin, of rural life, and about the influence and effect of agricultural surpluses, which I believe are accountable for more destruction of land and people than any other economic “factor.” This is a task that ought to be taken up by an economist, which I am not. But economists, even agricultural economists, farm-raised as many of them have been, do not live in rural communities, as I do, and they appear not to care, as I do, that rural communities like mine all over the country are either dying or dead. And so, only partly qualified as I am, I will undertake this writing in the hope that I am contributing to a conversation that will attract others better qualified.
I have at hand an article from the Wall Street Journal of February 22, 2016, entitled “The U.S. Economy Is in Good Shape.” The article is by Martin Feldstein, “chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Ronald Reagan . . . a professor at Harvard and a member of the Journal’s board of contributors.” Among economists Prof. Feldstein appears to be somewhere near the top of the pile. And yet his economic optimism is founded entirely upon current measures of “incomes,” “unemployment,” and “industrial production,” all abstractions narrowly focused. Nowhere in his analysis does he mention the natural world, or the economies of land use by which the wealth of nature is made available to the “American economy.” Mr. Feldstein believes that “the big uncertainties that now hang over our economy are political.”
But from what I see here at home in the watershed of the Kentucky River, and from what I have seen and learned of other places, I know that industrial agriculture is in serious failure, which is to say that it is not sustainable. Projecting from the damages of the comparatively brief American histories of states such as Kentucky and Iowa, one must conclude that the present use of the farmland cannot be sustained for another hundred years: The rates of soil erosion are too high, the runoff is too toxic, the ecological impoverishment is too great, the surviving farmers are too few and too old. To anybody who knows these things, by witness of sight or by numerical measures, they would appear to qualify significantly the “good shape” of the economy. I conclude that Prof. Feldstein does not know these things, but is conventionally ignorant of them. Like other people of privilege for thousands of years, far more numerous now than ever before, he appears to take for granted the bounty of nature and the work that provides it to the human economy.
In remarkable contrast to the optimism of Prof. Feldstein, the New York Times of March 10, 2016, printed an article, “Who’s Killing Global Growth?” by Steven Rattner, “a Wall Street executive and a contributing opinion writer.” Mr. Rattner’s downhearted assessment, like Prof. Feldstein’s upbeat one, is based upon measures that are entirely economic or monetary, quantitative, and abstract: “financial markets,” “projections for future growth,” “wages,” “consumer spending,” “rising supply,” “disappointing demand,” etc. The “global growth” Mr. Rattner has in mind is purely financial and is without reference to the effect of such “growth” upon the health and the welfare of the globe’s actual people and other creatures. Like Prof. Feldstein, Mr. Rattner appears to suppose, consciously or not, that the natural world and human workers will continue to supply their necessary goods without limit and to the allure simply of money.
I have at hand also a sentence from the New York Review of Books, September 24, 2015, by James Surowiecki, another highly credentialed economist. Mr. Surowiecki is reviewing among others a book by Joseph E. Stiglitz and Bruce C. Greenwald, Creating a Learning Society: A New Approach to Growth, Development, and Social Progress. This book, the reviewer says, “is dedicated to showing how developing countries can use government policy to become high-growth, knowledge-intensive economies, rather than remaining low-cost producers of commodities.” I have kept this sentence in mind because of the problems it raises, all relating to my concern about the damages imposed by national and global “economies” upon land and people. Mr. Surowieki’s sentence seems to be highly condensed and allusive, a sort of formula for increasing economic growth—or, as it actually says, for turning countries into economies. The sentence no doubt is clear to economists, but it has put me to some trouble. My interest is not in the analyses and theories of these economists, since they seem mainly to ignore the natural world and the human communities that are my concern. I am interested here in their public language, by which they reveal what they accept, and expect most others to accept, as axioms—what one might call their lore or more accurately their faith.
I assume, then, that by “low-cost producers of commodities” Mr. Surowiecki means “poorly paid producers of cheap commodities,” that these commodities are material goods or raw materials produced from the land, that “knowledge-intensive economies” are based upon the abilities to exploit, trade, add value to, and market the cheaply produced commodities. Apparently it is taken for granted that this improving formula applies to all developing countries, their people, their land, and their natural resources, without regard to differences or distinctions among them. Such disregard of local and personal differences is a major article of this faith. It takes for granted furthermore that a knowledge-intensive economy, by causing growth, development, and social progress, will change a developing country into a developed country, and that this will be an all-around improvement. From the standpoint of industrial economists and their clients, this apparently is self-evident and unquestionable. It becomes immediately and urgently questionable from the standpoint of a dweller in a rural countryside who is bound to the land and the community by ties of history, family, and affection.
Here we arrive at a fundamental division of interest and allegiance, as probably also at the difference between two kinds of mind. The attention of these economists and others like them is directed as a matter of course to the monetary economy and to what, according to their abstract measurements, is good or bad for it. The attention of settled dwellers, at home in their chosen or hereditary places, is directed partially to the monetary economy, of course, and often in fear or sufferance, but their