Over the years, Wendell Berry has sought to understand and confront the financial structure of modern society and the impact of developing late capitalism on American culture. There is perhaps no more demanding or important critique available to contemporary citizens than Berry’s writings — just as there is no vocabulary more given to obfuscation than that of economics as practiced by professionals and academics. Berry has called upon us to return to the basics. He has traced how the clarity of our economic approach has eroded over time, as the financial asylum was overtaken by the inmates, and citizens were turned from consumers — entertained and distracted — to victims, threatened by a future of despair and disillusion.
For this collection, Berry offers essays from the last twenty–five years, alongside new essays about the recent economic collapse, including “Money Versus Goods” and “Faustian Economics,” treatises of great alarm and courage. He offers advice and perspective as our society attempts to steer from its present chaos and recession to a future of hope and opportunity. With urgency and clarity, Berry asks us to look toward a true sustainable commonwealth, grounded in realistic Jeffersonian principles applied to our present day.— Book promo @ goodreads.com
I selected a few quotes but every essay had one offered. I want to strongly recommend the last essay The Total Economy, originally written in 2000 but nothing has changed except to get worse.
[T]he era of cut-and-run economics ought to be finished. Such an economy cannot be rationally defended or even apologized for. The proofs of its immense folly, heartlessness, and destructiveness are everywhere. Its failure as a way of dealing with the natural world and human society can no longer be sanely denied. That this economic system persists and grows larger and stronger in spite of its evident failure has nothing to do with rationality or, for that matter, with evidence. It persists because, embodied now in multinational corporations, it has discovered a terrifying truth: If you can control a people’s economy, you don’t need to worry about its politics; its politics have become irrelevant. If you control people’s choices as to whether or not they will work, and where they will work, and what they will do, and how well they will do it, and what they will eat and wear, and the genetic makeup of their crops and animals, and what they will do for amusement, then why should you worry about freedom of speech? In a totalitarian economy, any “political liberties” that the people might retain would simply cease to matter. If, as is often the case already, nobody can be elected who is not wealthy, and if nobody can be wealthy without dependence on the corporate economy, then what is your vote worth? The citizen thus becomes an economic subject.
The category of things sold that are not needed now includes even legally marketed foods and drugs. This involves the art (taught and learned in universities) of lying about products. A friend of mine remembers a teacher who said that advertising is “the manufacture of discontent.” And so we have come to live in a world in which every brand of painkiller is better than every other brand, in which we have a “service economy” that does not serve and an “information economy” that does not distinguish good from bad or true from false.
The manufacturing sector of a financial system, which does not or cannot distinguish between needs and induced wants, will come willy-nilly into the service of wants, not needs. So it has happened with us. If in some state of emergency our manufacturers were suddenly called upon to supply us with certain necessities—shoes, for example—we would be out of luck. “Outsourcing” the manufacture of frivolities is at least partly frivolous; outsourcing the manufacture of necessities is entirely foolish.
If you can read and have more imagination than a doorknob, what need do you have for a “movie version” of a novel?
But our waste problem is not the fault only of producers. It is the fault of an economy that is wasteful from top to bottom—a symbiosis of an unlimited greed at the top and a lazy, passive, and self-indulgent consumptiveness at the bottom—and all of us are involved in it. If we wish to correct this economy, we must be careful to understand and to demonstrate how much waste of human life is involved in our waste of the material goods of Creation. For example, much of the litter that now defaces our country is fairly directly caused by the massive secession or exclusion of most of our people from active participation in the food economy. We have made a social ideal of minimal involvement in the growing and cooking of food. This is one of the dearest “liberations” of our affluence. Nevertheless, the more dependent we become on the industries of eating and drinking, the more waste we are going to produce. The mess that surrounds us, then, must be understood not just as a problem in itself but as a symptom of a greater and graver problem: the centralization of our economy, the gathering of the productive property and power into fewer and fewer hands, and the consequent destruction, everywhere, of the local economies of household, neighborhood, and community.
Last Thursday when I was getting ready to leave Desert Oasis Campground the basement door came off in my hand. I messed with it for 15 minutes or so and knowing that it was not attached correctly but hoping it wouldn’t fall off I drove to this new camp. When I got here I opened the door and it fell off, tried for about a half hour and could not get it reattached.
Explained my problem to the left side neighbor and he said he would help me with it. Part of the problem was the upper attachment is a metal strip that runs the length of the coach that has a partially open tube that matches an opposing tube on the door. When the door tube is inside the fixed one it operates like a hinge. That upper metal strip is attached with pop rivets and a couple of them had pulled loose. My neighbor had a good supple of pop rivets and a drill to remove those that had pulled out. We got that fixed rather easily after I pulled off the rubber molding that covered those rivets.
However, when I was pulling of that molding I tripped on something, perhaps my own feet. I don’t know. All I know is I fell forward and on my left side taking the impact on my left palm, left elbow and left hip. No blood, no foul. I had a very small bruise on the elbow with a sore palm and some stiffness in the left leg. Got up the next morning and did my usual 2.5 mile walk with only some slight soreness. It is not good for us old farts to be falling down but I managed to do it with no serious after effects.
We then continued to try and get the door rehung. There were two rubber ‘stops’ that we found mounted inside the strip that we took out but my neighbor tried repeatedly to put them back in while I was holding the rehung door in an up position. He is as old as I am so I can not find any fault with him not being able to get it done. After a few failures he went to solicit some help from a younger fellow that was able to complete the job in a matter of minutes.
I do have to replace the molding. I think I have some, just need to find it and then get it squeezed into the channel that covers the rivet heads. Maybe get to that in the next few days.