What Matters?. Wendell Berry
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be the people most likely to help you.
Usury, for example, is “a job.” But it happens to be a job that nobody ought to do. It is a violence against fellow humans who happen to be in need, a violence against work, or against good work, a violence against nature, and therefore (for those to whom it matters) a violence against God. It is a job also that estranges and isolates one from other people, who are perceived by the usurer, not as neighbors, but as potential victims.
To be mobile is not only to be in a new sense homeless. It is also to be in an old sense landless. If you have plenty of money to buy the necessities of life, and the stores are well-stocked with those necessities, then you may not see landlessness as a threat. But suppose you are a poor migrant, black or white, from the cotton or cane fields of the South or the Appalachian coal fields, and you wind up jobless in some “inner city.” You have come from the country, and now, cooped up in a strange and unyielding place, without the mutual usefulness of a functioning neighborhood, you experience a helplessness that is new to you: the practical difficulty or impossibility of helping or being helped by somebody you know. A most significant part of that helplessness is the impossibility of helping yourself, and this is the condition of landlessness. I am not talking here about owning land, but merely of having access to it or the use of it. In your new circumstances of displacement, you have no place to grow a garden or keep a few chickens or gather firewood or hunt or fish. Maybe you were, by the official definition, poor where you came from, but there your abilities to do for yourself and others were given scope and efficacy by the landscape. You have come, in short, to the difference, defined by Paul Goodman a long time ago, between competent poverty and abject poverty. A home landscape enables personal subsistence but also generosity. It enables a community to exist and function.
When country people leave home to find work, even when “jobs” are available, they incur liabilities that cannot easily be discounted. The liabilities of homelessness and landlessness may not be noticeable in times of easy money and lots of stuff to buy. But in a time of economic failure and rising unemployment, as now, the liabilities once again rise undeniably into view.
Now the following sentences by Lowell H. Harrison and James C. Klotter, in A New History of Kentucky, make a different sense than they would have made to most readers a year ago:
Yet [in the 1930s] the commonwealth weathered the drought and the floods and survived the depression better than many places. . . . [The] general absence of industry meant relatively little damage there, the overall lack of wealth left people only a little way to fall, and the rural nature of the commonwealth allowed families to live off the land. In fact, people returned to Kentucky, and the decade of the 1930s saw the state’s population increase faster than the national average. . . . From distant places, those who had migrated in search of jobs that were now gone came home to crowd in with their families . . .
They “came home” because at home they still had families who were growing a garden, keeping a milk cow, raising chickens, fattening hogs, and gathering their cooking and heating fuel from the woods. Now, eighty years and much “progress” later, where will the jobless go? Not home, for there are no 1930s homes to go to.
Since the end of the Great Depression, and even more since the end of World War II, country people have crowded into the cities. They have come because they have attended colleges and been “overeducated” for country life. They have come for available jobs. They have come because television and the movies have taught them to be unhappy in their “provincial” or “backward” or “nowhere” circumstances. They have come because machines have displaced them from their work and their homes. Many who have come were already poor, and were entirely unprepared for a life away from home. Immense numbers of them have ended up in slums. Some live from some variety of “safety net.” Some, the homeless or insane or addicted poor, sleep in doorways or under bridges. Some beg or steal.
In the long run, these surplus people, the not-needed, have over-filled the “labor pool” and so have made labor relatively cheap. If we run short of exploitable poor people in the United States, then we “outsource” our work to the exploitable poor of other countries. Industrial workers and labor unions are having a hard time, and so are farmers, ranchers, and farm workers. People who do the actual work of producing actual products must expect to work cheap, for they are not of the quality of the professionals who “deserve” to charge too much for their services or the financial nobility who sell worthless mortgages. As an exploitable underclass, those who perform actual work have raised a vexing question for their superiors, and they seem to have fallen somewhat short of the right answer: How could they get the cheapest work out of their workers and still pay them enough to afford the products they have made? Though mere workers may be crippled by debt for their houses or farms or their children’s education, they must still be able with some frequency to buy a new car or pickup truck or television set or motorboat or tractor or combine. If they have such things along with an occasional stunt in Outer Space, then maybe they won’t covet a financial noble’s private jet and three or four “homes.”
Decades of cheap labor, cheap energy, and cheap food (all more expensive than has been imagined) have allowed our society to incorporate itself in a material structure that will have to be seen as top-heavy. We have flooded the country, the roadsides and landfills, with shoddy “consumer goods.” We have too many houses that are too big, too many public buildings that are gigantic, too much useless space enclosed in walls that are too high and under roofs that are too wide. We replaced an until-then-adequate system of railroads with an interstate highway system, expensive to build, disruptive of neighborhoods and local travel, increasingly expensive to maintain and use. We replaced an until-then-adequate system of local schools with consolidated schools, letting the old buildings tumble down, replacing them with bigger ones, breaking the old ties between neighborhoods and schools, and making education entirely dependent on the fossil fuels. Every rural school now runs a fleet of buses for the underaged and provides a large parking lot for those over sixteen who “need” a car to go to school. Education has been oversold, overbuilt, over-electrified, and overpriced. Colleges have grown into universities. Universities have become “research institutions” full of undertaught students and highly accredited “professionals” who are overpaid by the public to job-train the young and to invent cures and solutions for corporations to “market” for too much money to the public. And we have balanced this immense superstructure, immensely expensive to use and maintain, upon the frail stem of the land economy that we conventionally abuse and ignore.
There is no good reason, economic or otherwise, to wish for the “recovery” and continuation of the economy we have had. There is no reason, really, to expect it to recover and continue, for it has depended too much on fantasy. An economy cannot “grow” forever on limited resources. Energy and food cannot stay cheap forever. We cannot continue forever as a tax-dependent people who do not wish to pay taxes. Delusion and the future cannot serve forever as collateral. An untrustworthy economy dependent on trust cannot beguile the people’s trust forever. The old props have been kicked away. The days when we could be safely crazy are over. Our airborne economy has turned into a deadfall, and we have got to jack it down. The problem is that all of us are under it, and so we have got to jack it down with the least possible suffering to our land and people. I don’t know how this is to be done, and I am inclined to doubt that anybody does. You can’t very confidently jack something down if you didn’t know what you were doing when you jacked it up.
I do know that the human economy as a whole depends, as it always has, on nature and the land economy. The economy of land use is our link with nature. Though economic failure has not yet called any official attention to the land economy and its problems, those problems will have to be rightly solved if we are to solve rightly our other economic problems. Before we can make authentic solutions to the problems of credit and spending, we have got to begin by treating our land with the practical and effective love that alone deserves the name of patriotism. From now on, if we would like to continue here, our use of our land will have to be ruled by the principles of stewardship and thrift, using as the one indispensable measure, not monetary profit or industrial efficiency or professional success, but ecological health. And so I will venture to propose the following agenda of changes that would amount to a new, long-term agricultural policy:
1.