BACKTRACKING
Wendell Berry – In Search of a Coherent
Community
by
Terry Hogan
You
may not have heard of Wendell Berry.
But that doesnÕt mean that you shouldnÕt have. He is a writer, a poet, a philosopher, a soft-spoken
speaker, and a dreamer of what should be.
I first learned of him as a novelist, writing of a fictitious rural
Kentucky community. Over the
years, he has written about generations of families from the fictitious Port
William.
But
he is also a philosopher, a speaker, and a voice of what should and perhaps,
could, be. His message should have
some resonance in Galesburg and other similar towns victimized by the loss of
good paying industrial jobs. I had
the opportunity to hear him speak and to talk briefly with him recently. He is a kind, gentle, humble, but
thoughtful man who has the habit of closing his eyes to think before he speaks.
Wendell
Berry is the world economistsÕ opponent.
Wendell believes that communities, to stay communities, need to strive
to become more self-sufficient, and less dependent on the Òworld market
place.Ó He believes that local
store owners, who think that they have much in common with the new national or
international stores, are wrong. Wendell believes that all the members of the
community need to think about where the products they buy come from. Who produced the meat? Who baked the
bread? He is an advocate of buying
locally produced goods from local merchants.
Communities
need to be self-sustaining to keep their jobs and to keep their families together. Wendell used the example of a farmersÕ
market. It has local produce for sale,
and being sold by local farmers.
It is more than a transaction. It becomes a meeting of neighbors, making
or renewing acquaintances. It is building community bonds. The same can be said for the local
merchant who sells local goods.
Wendell
is not a friend of the big national or international companies. He doesnÕt use a computer. He cuts as much wood as he can to limit
how much of his money he has to send to the large power company. He supports keeping money working
locally.
In
many ways, the computer is a icon for what Wendell believes is threatening our
communities. He writes, ÒÉif I
am partly a writer, and I am offered an expensive machine to help me write, I
ought to ask whether or not such a machine is desirable. I should ask, in the first place,
whether or not I wish to purchase a solution to a problem that I do not
have. I acknowledge that, as a
writer, I need a lot of help. And
I have received an abundance of the best of help from my wife, from other
members of my family, from friends, from teachers, from editors, and sometimes
from readers. These people have
helped me out of love or friendship, and perhaps in exchange for some help that
I have given them. I suppose I
should leave open the possibility
that I need more help than I am getting, but I would certainly be ungrateful
and greedy to think so. But a
computer, I am told, offers a kind of help that you canÕt get from other
humans; a computer will help you to write faster, easier, and more. For a while, it seemed to me that every
university professor I met told me this.
Do I, then want to write faster, easier, and more? No. My standards are not speed, ease, and
quantity. I have already left
behind too much evidence that, writing with a pencil, I have written too fast,
too easily, and too much. I would like to be a better writer, and for that I
need help from other humans, not a machine. (The Art of the
Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry)
Not
surprisingly, Wendell opposes NAFTA and similar programs. Wendell observes that
by letting products be produced at the least price (least labor cost), it is
reducing labor (peoples lives and their communities) to nothing more that a raw
resource to be tapped like coal or iron. The national and international
companies do not care about the local disruption to Galesburg resulting from a
factory closing and loss of jobs.
It is merely the inevitable outcome of the shifting of labor from one
marketplace to a cheaper marketplace.
Nor do they care about the shredding of the communityÕs bonds of
friendships and structure that result from the loss of jobs.
Wendell
has equal concerns about the loss of the family farm. Agribusiness is just another big business that eliminates
the self sustaining local community.
Large fields of only soybean or only corn do not support a local
communityÕs food needs. Further,
such mono-species fields require more pesticides to avoid weeds and disease,
causing surface and ground water contamination. Wendell holds the Amish community up as an example of the
ideal, but I think he stops short of believing that it is an attainable ideal.
WendellÕs
writings, when it all comes down to it, provide a broader insight and context
for what many of us already know.
The international marketplace doesnÕt care about local labor disruption
and the strain on the local community.
It is the inevitable byproduct of the marketplace seeking least cost
products. It is left to the
unemployed and the embattled community to try to put the pieces back together
again.
If
you used to work at Admirals, or Butlers, or some other place that ÒdownsizedÓ
or Òright-sizedÓ or some other euphemism of the day for putting folks out of work,
you may find his writing all too pertinent.
Relevant
Wendell Berry writings:
What
Are People For? 1990. North Point
Press
Sex,
Economy, Freedom & Community.
1993. New York and San Francisco: Pantheon Books.
A
Continuous Harmony. 1972. Shoemaker and Hoard.
The
Art of the Commonplace: The
Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry.
2002. edited by N. Wirzba.
Jayber
Crow. 2001. Counterpoint Press
(fiction)
tmh
11-14-05