Fwd: Wendell Berry

[Guest guest]

>

>October 16, 2001

>

>WENDELL BERRY: THOUGHTS IN THE PRESENCE OF FEAR

>

>I. The time will soon come when we will not be able to

>remember the horrors of September 11 without remembering

>also the unquestioning technological and economic optimism

>that ended on that day.

>

>II. This optimism rested on the proposition that we were

>living in a " new world order " and a " new economy " that would

> " grow " on and on, bringing a prosperity of which every new

>increment would be " unprecedented. "

>

>III. The dominant politicians, corporate officers, and

>investors who believed this proposition did not acknowledge

>that the prosperity was limited to a tiny percent of the

>world's people, and to an ever smaller number of people even

>in the United States; that it was founded upon the

>oppressive labor of poor people all over the world; and that

>its ecological costs increasingly threatened all life,

>including the lives of the supposedly prosperous.

>

>IV. The " developed " nations had given to the " free market "

>the status of a god, and were sacrificing to it their

>farmers, farmlands, and communities, their forests,

>wetlands, and prairies, their ecosystems and watersheds.

>They had accepted universal pollution and global warming as

>normal costs of doing business.

>

>V. There was, as a consequence, a growing worldwide effort

>on behalf of economic decentralization, economic justice,

>and ecological responsibility. We must recognize that the

>events of September 11 make this effort more necessary than

>ever. We citizens of the industrial countries must continue

>the labor of self-criticism and self-correction. We must

>recognize our mistakes.

>

>VI. The paramount doctrine of the economic and technological

>euphoria of recent decades has been that everything depends

>on innovation. It was understood as desirable, and even

>necessary, that we should go on and on from one

>technological innovation to the next, which would cause the

>economy to " grow " and make everything better and better.

>This of course implied at every point a hatred of the past,

>of all innovations, whatever their value might have been,

>were discounted as of no value at

>all.

>

>VII. We did not anticipate anything like what has now

>happened. We did not foresee that all our sequence of

>innovations might be at once overridden by a greater one:

>the invention of a new kind of war that would turn our

>previous innovations against us, discovering and exploiting

>the debits and the dangers that we had ignored. We never

>considered the possibility that we might be trapped in the

>webwork of communication and transport that was supposed to

>make us free.

>

>VIII. Nor did we foresee that the weaponry and the war

>science that we marketed and taught to the world would

>become available, not just to recognized national

>governments, which possess so uncannily the power to

>legitimate large-scale violence, but also to " rogue

>nations, " dissident or fanatical groups and

>individuals-whose violence, though never worse than that of

>nations, is judged by the nations to be illegitimate.

>

>IX. We had accepted uncritically the belief that technology

>is only good; that it cannot serve evil as well as good;

>that it cannot serve our enemies as well as ourselves; that

>it cannot be used to destroy what is good, including our

>homelands and our lives.

>

>X. We had accepted too the corollary belief that an economy

>(either as a money economy or as a life-support system) that

>is global in extent, technologically complex, and

>centralized is invulnerable to terrorism, sabotage, or war,

>and that it is protectable by " national defense. "

>

>XI. We now have a clear, inescapable choice that we must

>make. We can continue to promote a global economic system of

>unlimited " free trade " among corporations, held together by

>long and highly vulnerable lines of communication and

>supply, but now recognizing that such a system will have to

>be protected by a hugely expensive police force that will be

>worldwide, whether maintained by one nation or several or

>all, and that such a police force will be effective

>precisely to the extent that it oversways the freedom and

>privacy of the citizens of every nation.

>

>XII. Or we can promote a decentralized world economy which

>would have the aim of assuring to every nation and region a

>local self-sufficiency in life-supporting goods. This would

>not eliminate international trade, but it would tend toward

>a trade in surpluses after local needs had been met.

>

>XIII. One of the gravest dangers to us now, second only to

>further terrorist attacks against our people, is that we

>will attempt to go on as before with the corporate program

>of global " free trade, " whatever the cost in freedom and

>civil rights, without self-questioning or self-criticism or

>public debate.

>

>XIV. This is why the substitution of rhetoric for thought,

>always a temptation in a national crisis, must be resisted

>by officials and citizens alike. It is hard for ordinary

>citizens to know what is actually happening in Washington in

>a time of such great trouble; for we all know, serious and

>difficult thought may be taking place there. But the talk

>that we are hearing from politicians, bureaucrats, and

>commentators has so far tended to reduce the complex

>problems now facing

>us to issues of unity, security, normality, and retaliation.

>

>XV. National self-righteousness, like personal

>self-righteousness, is a mistake. It is misleading. It is a

>sign of weakness. Any war that we may make now against

>terrorism will come as a new installment in a history of war

>in which we have fully participated. We are not innocent of

>making war against civilian populations. The modern doctrine

>of such warfare was set forth and enacted by General

>Tecumseh Sherman, who held that a civilian population could

>be declared guilty and rightly subjected to military

>punishment. We have never repudiated that doctrine.

>

>XVI. It is a mistake also --- as events since September 11

>have shown--- to suppose that a government can promote and

>participate in a global economy and at the same time act

>exclusively in its own interest by abrogating its

>international treaties and standing apart from international

>cooperation on moral issues.

>

>XVII. And surely, in our country, under our Constitution, it

>is a fundamental error to suppose that any crisis or

>emergency can justify any form of political oppression.

>Since September 11, far too many public voices have presumed

>to " speak for us " in saying that Americans will gladly

>accept a reduction of freedom in exchange for greater

> " security. " Some would, maybe. But some others would accept

>a reduction in security (and in global trade) far more

>willingly than they would accept any abridgement of our

>Constitutional rights.

>

>XVIII. In a time such as this, when we have been seriously

>and most cruelly hurt by those who hate us, and when we must

>consider ourselves to be gravely threatened by those same

>people, it is hard to speak of

>the ways of peace....

>

>XIX. Even now we dare not forget that since the attack of

>Pearl Harbor--- to which the present attack has been often

>and not usefully compared--- we humans have suffered an

>almost uninterrupted sequence of wars, none of which has

>brought peace or made us more peaceable.

>

>XX. The aim and result of war necessarily is not peace but

>victory, and any victory won by violence necessarily

>justifies the violence that won it and leads to further

>violence. If we are serious about innovation, must we not

>conclude that we need something new to replace our perpetual

> " war to end war " ?

>

>XXI. What leads to peace is not violence but peaceableness,

>which is not passivity, but an alert, informed, practiced,

>and active state of being. We should recognize that while we

>have extravagantly subsidized the means of war, we have

>almost totally neglected the ways of peaceableness. We have,

>for example, several national military academies, but not

>one peace academy.

>

>We have ignored the teachings and the examples of Christ,

>Gandhi, Luther King, and other peaceable leaders. And

>here we have an inescapable duty to notice also that war is

>profitable, whereas the means of peaceableness, being cheap

>or free, make no money.

>

>XXII. The key to peaceableness is continuous practice. It is

>wrong to suppose that we can exploit and impoverish the

>poorer countries, while arming them and instructing them in

>the newest means of war, and then reasonably expect them to

>be peaceable.

>

>XXIII. We must not again allow public emotion or the public

>media to caricature our enemies. If our enemies are now to

>be some nations of Islam, then we should undertake to know

>those enemies. Our schools should begin to teach the

>histories, cultures, arts, and language of the Islamic

>nations. And our leaders should have the humility and the

>wisdom to ask the reasons some of those people have for

>hating us.

>

>XXIV. Starting with the economies of food and farming, we

>should promote at home, and encourage abroad, the ideal of

>local self-sufficiency. We should recognize that this is the

>surest, the safest, and the cheapest way for the world to

>live. We should not countenance the loss or destruction of

>any local capacity to produce necessary goods

>

>XXV. We should reconsider and renew and extend our efforts

>to protect the natural foundations of the human economy:

>soil, water, and air. We should protect every intact

>ecosystem and watershed that we have left, and begin

>restoration of those that have been damaged.

>

>XXVI. The complexity of our present trouble suggests as

>never before that we need to change our present concept of

>education. Education is not properly an industry, and its

>proper use is not to serve industries, neither by

>job-training nor by industry-subsidized research. It's

>proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are

>economically, politically, socially, and culturally

>responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or " accessing "

>what we now call 'information " --- which is to say facts

>without context and therefore without priority. A proper

>education enables young people to put their lives in order,

>which means knowing what things are more important than

>other things; it means putting first things first.

>

>XXVII. The first thing we must begin to teach our children

>(and learn ourselves) is that we cannot spend and consume

>endlessly. We have got to learn to save and conserve. We do

>need a " new economy, " but one that is founded on thrift and

>care, on saving and conserving, not on excess and waste. An

>economy based on waste is inherently and hopelessly violent,

>and war is its inevitable by-product. We need a peaceable

>economy.

>

>Wendell Berry is author of The Unsettling of America:

>Culture and Agriculture, three novels and several volumes of

>poetry and essays. He and his family live and farm in

>Kentucky.