[Some] people believe … that any community attempt to remove a book from a reading list in a public school is censorship and a violation of the freedom of speech. The situation here involves what may be a hopeless conflict of freedoms. A teacher in a public school ought to be free to exercise his or her freedom of speech in choosing what books to teach and in deciding what to say about them. (This, to my mind, would certainly include the right to teach that the Bible is the word of God or the right to teach that it is not.) But the families of a community surely must be allowed an equal freedom to determine the education of their children. How free are parents who have no choice but to turn their children over to the influence of whatever the public will prescribe or tolerate? They obviously are not free at all. The only solution is trust between a community and its teachers, who will therefore teach as members of the community–a trust that in a time of community disintegration is perhaps not possible. And so the public presses its invasion deeper and deeper into community life under the justification of a freedom far too simply understood. It is now altogether possible for a teacher who is forbidden to teach the Bible to teach some other book that is not morally acceptable to the community, perhaps in order to improve the community by shocking or offending it. It is therefore possible that the future of community life in this country may depend on private schools and home schooling.

-- Wendell Berry, from Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community

I have a new essay on Humane Pursuits this week: "3 Ways to Stay Sane in a Dark Time." The essay discusses the poetry of R. S. Thomas.

I have a new essay up on Humane Pursuits today: "2 Reasons for Doing Manual Work This Summer."

Wendell Berry:

"What is the purpose of this technological progress? What higher aim do we think it is serving? Surely the aim cannot be the integrity or happiness of our families, which we have made subordinate to the education system, the television industry, and the consumer economy. Surely it cannot be the integrity or health of our communities, which we esteem even less than we esteem our families. Surely it cannot be love of our country, for we are far more concerned about the desecration of the flag than we are about the desecration of our land. Surely it cannot be the love of God, which counts for at least as little in the daily order of business as the love of family, community, and country.

"The higher aims of 'technological progress' are money and ease. And this exalted greed for money and ease is disguised and justified by an obscure, cultish faith in 'the future.' We do as we do, we say, 'for the sake of the future,' or 'to make a better future for our children.' How can we hope to make a good future by doing badly in the present, we do not say. We cannot think about the future, of course, for the future does not exist: the existence of the future is an article of faith. We can be assured only that, if there is to be a future, the good of it is already implicit in the good things of the present. We do not need to plan or devise a 'world of the future'; if we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us. . . . We have no need to contrive and dabble at 'the future of the human race'; we have the same pressing need that we have always had--to love, care for, and teach our children."

--"Feminism, the Body, and the Machine," What Are People For?

Another Turn of the Crank by Wendell Berry
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

As a farmer, essayist, novelist, and poet, Wendell Berry has spent a lot of time writing about why human beings exist, and what they are to do with their time on this planet. He also points out huge differences between the original design for human society and the way society functions today.

Berry's essays demonstrate a holistic, Christian vision of God's design for how we should live our lives. He critiques American greed, materialism, and disregard of our land, and he calls us to be good stewards of our communities, our neighbors (including the elderly, children, and the unborn), our families, our land, and ourselves. He shows that when we live in harmony with God's design for human life on earth, it's beneficial not only for ourselves, but also for our community and for creation. Berry shows that the "good life" is much more about quality than it is about quantity. Most Americans, and certainly most American corporations, have it backwards.

Berry points out that love should be the ruling value of our lives: "I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world. I believe that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in the world, summons the world always toward wholeness." Love for God should not be thought of as consisting only in a spiritual realm, but should actually influence everything we do in our day-to-day activities. Love should cause us to care holistically for our families, our fellow man, and for the land God created (and thus to consider its long-term welfare).

I might add that some essays were more interesting than others, at least to me. (I'm not as interested as I should be in some of the details about how forests "work.") In my opinion, "The Conservation of Nature and the Preservation of Humanity" and "Health is Membership" are the best essays here. It would be worth your time to get the book at your local library and read just these two essays.

All in all, this is simply an outstanding book.

View all my reviews

If there is no household or community economy, then family members and neighbors are no longer useful to one another, and . . . family and community fails, and people fall into dependence on exterior economies and organizations. The hegemony of professionals and professionalism erects itself on local failure, and from then on the locality exists merely as a market for consumer goods and as a source of "raw material," human and natural. The local schools no longer serve the local community; they serve the  government's economy and the economy's government. Unlike the local community, the government and the economy cannot be served with affection, but only with professional zeal or professional boredom. . . . This love cannot exist, because it makes no sense, apart from the love of a place and a community.

Wendell Berry, "The Work of Local Culture," from What Are People For?

[Today's] schools are no longer oriented to a cultural inheritance that it is their duty to pass on unimpaired, but to the career, which is to say the future, of the child. The orientation is thus necessarily theoretical, speculative, and mercenary. The child is not educated to return home and be of use to the place and community; he or she is educated to leave home and earn money in a provisional future that has nothing to do with place or community. And parents with children in school are likely to find themselves . . . made useless to them, by the intervention of new educational techniques, technologies, methods, and languages. School systems innovate as compulsively and as eagerly as factories. It is no wonder that, under these circumstances, "educators" tend to look upon the parents as a bad influence and wish to take the children away from home as early as possible. And many parents, in truth, are now finding their children an encumbrance at home, where there is no  useful work for them to do, and are glad enough to turn them over to the state for the use of the future.

Wendell Berry, "The Work of Local Culture," from What Are People For?

When a community loses its memory, its members no longer know one another. How can they know one another if they have forgotten or have never learned one another's stories? If they do not know one another's stories, how can they know whether or not to trust one another? People who do not trust one another do not help one another, and moreover they fear one another. And this is our predicament now. Because of a general distrust and suspicion, we not only lost one another's help and companionship, but we are all now living in jeopardy of being sued.

. . . A good community, as we know, insures itself by trust, by good faith and good will, by mutual help. A good community, in other words, is a good local economy. It depends on itself for many of its essential needs and is thus shaped, so to speak, from the inside--unlike most modern populations that depend on distant purchases for almost everything and are thus shaped from the outside by the purposes and the influence of [advertising].

Wendell Berry, "The Work of Local Culture," from What Are People For?

The nearly intolerable irony in our dissatisfaction [in our lives] is that we have removed pleasure from our work in order to remove "drudgery" from our lives. If I could pick any rule of industrial economics to receive a thorough re-examination by our people, it would be the one that says that all hard physical work is "drudgery" and not worth doing. . . .

That [harvest] can be drudgery is obvious. . . . But for me, and I think for most of the men and women who have been my companions in this work, it has not been drudgery. None of us would say that we take pleasure in all of it all of the time, but we do take pleasure in it, and sometimes the pleasure can be intense and clear. Many of my dearest memories come from these times of hardest work.

The [harvest] is the most protracted social occasion of our year. Neighbors work together . . . There is much talk. . . There is much laughter . . . And there are memories.

The crew to which I belong is the product of kinships and friendships going far back. . . As we work we have before us not only the present crop and the present fields, but other crops and other fields remembered. . . . Old stories are retold; the dead and the aabsent are remembered. . . . Such talk in barns and at row ends must go back without interruption to the first farmers. How long it may continue is an uneasy question; not much longer perhaps, but we do not know. We only know that while it last it can carry us deeply into our shared life and the happiness of farming.

On many days we have had somebody's child or somebody's children with us, playing in the barn or around the patch while we worked, and these have been our best days. One of the most regrettable things about the industrialization of work is the segregation of children . . . [But] the small scale and handwork of our [harvest accomodates their play]. In their play, the children learn to work; they learn their elders and their country. And the presence of playing children means invariably that the grown-ups play too from time to time.

No individual can lead a good or satisfying life under the rule of competition. . . . No community can succeed except by limiting somehow the competitiveness of its members. One cannot maintain one's "competitive edge" if one helps other people. . . . [Competitive advantages are] not thought of by people intent on loving their neighbors as themselves. And it is impossible to imagine that there can be any reconciliation between local and national competitiveness and global altruism. The ambition to "feed the world" or "feed the hungry," rising as it does out of the death struggle of farmer with farmer, proposes not the filling of stomachs, but the engorgement of "the bottom line."

Wendell Berry, "Economy and Pleasure," from What Are People For?

It is hardly a "free-market economy" that the Bible prescribes. Large accumulations of land were, and are, forbidden because the dispossession and privation of some cannot be an acceptable or normal result of the economic activity of others, for that destroys a people as a people; it destroys the community. Usury was, and is, forbidden . . . for that is contrary to neighborliness; it destroys the community. And the greed that destroys the community also destroys the land. What the Bible proposes is a moral economy, the standard of which is the health of properties belonging to God.

The life of [community] has been very little regarded in American literature. Our writers have been much more concerned with the individual. . . . From Thoreau to Hemingway and his successors, a great deal of sympathy and interest has been given to the individual as pariah or gadfly or exile. In Faulkner, a community is the subject, but it is a community disintegrating, as it was doomed to do by the original sins of land greed, violent honor, and slavery. . . .

Wendell Berry, "Writer and Region," from What Are People For?