The World-Ending Fire
Before picking up The World-Ending Fire, the most Wendell Berry I’d ever read was a few poems (all of them gorgeous) and his essay, “A Good Scythe,” which I read because a friend mentioned it in a conversation about homesteading. Berry is an American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer. One of America’s most powerful radical voices, he lives and works in the old ways on his farm in rural Kentucky.
I was inspired to read more of him when, about a month ago, my favorite Zen priest, Edward Espe Brown, mentioned Berry’s book The Unsettling of America in one of his dharma talks. I asked my husband Whitman if he owned that book and he said yes, but suggested that a more comprehensive, official introduction to his work might be The World-Ending Fire, published in 2017, which contained the title essay of The Unsettling of America. I knew I could trust Whitman where Berry was concerned, and I have no regrets. The World-Ending Fire is every bit as bad-ass as its title would suggest. I relished and reveled in every word, and I continue to take great comfort in knowing that Wendell Berry exists. I am going to try, with each new day, to be a little bit more like him.
That being said, it’s worth noting that I am writing this first part of this blog post in the Asheville airport, with another hour and fifteen minutes to wait for a flight to Denver, where my sister lives. I’ve chosen a seat across from a large window, at the end of a row of seats with a wall at my back and a stone column to my right, to give myself the best chance of not having too many people around me. I’ve chosen to wear a face mask even though most of the people here are not. There’s a television screen playing clips of people hurting themselves through high-risk, often stupid behaviors—like Jackass, but not as repulsive, not quite as depressing. A child cries. A little dog trots by between his owners, looking stressed-out and thirsty. People chew on trail mix, chips, sandwiches. Most of them, of course, are looking at their phones. The sound of passing rolly-bags grows louder and more frequent as the seats steadily fill. But I still have this whole lovely row to myself.
On the way here, my husband drove us through the slow construction traffic on New Leicester Highway, past the clots of men in bright orange vests huddled around giant yellow machines on stinky black asphalt. Then down Patton Avenue, past the fast-food restaurants with lines of cars encircling them. And then we sped down I-26, just one drop in a racing river of cars, trucks, and gigantic semis, this river just one of countless in the world.
When I first entered the airport it was eerily empty and quiet. There was no line at the security check. The TSA agent said I’d arrived between rushes. But now more humans have arrived and continue to arrive, and with each new addition I feel a little more claustrophobic. Good practice for the plane, I guess, which offends both my need for personal space, and my moral framework in regards to the environment and the role of human hubris and folly in its destruction. It is testament to how much I love my sister and how much I value family relationships in general that I am getting on this plane. I am not a traveler by nature, and I agree with Berry that air travel in particular is unreliable, uncomfortable, stinky, and scary. Though I know that planes are statistically safer than cars, I do not believe they are safe. I believe they are insane, and that humans are not meant to fly. If we were, we’d be birds. And I believe, as Berry does, that “the air transportation industry exists to free travel from all considerations of place. Air travel reduces place to space in order to traverse it in the shortest time possible. And like gigantic buildings, gigantic airports must destroy their places and become no-places in order to exist.”
The boarding process for flight 458 to Denver has started. As I gather my things a young woman walking by catches a glimpse of my book and says, “Oh Wendell Berry!” She gives me a thumbs-up and a smile. I wave and smile, too, though she cannot see it because of my mask.
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And now I resume my writing from 32,000 feet above the earth, up in the clouds where I do not belong. I wore my mask while we sat on the runway, but upon take-off I had to take it off. I feel claustrophobic and suffocated enough on a plane without a mask, and I heard on NPR that the air circulation is really good while in-flight—not so much while still on the runway—and over half of my fellow passengers are maskless, anyway. It is a full flight. The small child who was screaming at the top of its lungs before we took off has now quieted. My fingers tapping on the keyboard are barely audible over the engine hum. And what a marvel it is to be typing away while hurtling through the sky, above a planet that is itself hurtling through space and all the while spinning, spinning, spinning at a rate of 1,000 miles per hour.
My father recently commented on this phenomenon as we watched the sunset from our anchorage off Cape Lookout, from the flybridge of his boat, Zingara, a 33-year-old forty-foot troller that he purchased with his wife three years ago. Boats are yet another gas-fueled motor-powered machine that humans love, another vehicle that allows us to go where it seems to me we really shouldn’t. If we were meant to cross oceans, we would be fish or whales or dolphins. Which is not to say that I haven’t enjoyed the time—admittedly brief—that I’ve spent on my dad’s boat. And during my most recent visit I gained a new appreciation of the boating life in general, inasmuch as it requires significant co-operation amongst humans. Sitting on Zingara’s fly bridge in Beaufort Yacht Basin, I saw a married couple working together to lower the sail of their boat and tie it up—a job that eventually necessitated the help of their neighbor from one slip over. My dad was watching, too, and he called out, “Do y’all need another hand?” They said they were good, and Dad said, “Okay, I was gonna send Don over,” referring to his next-slip neighbor, who was busy scrubbing down the outer window seals of his boat. Everyone laughed.
Seeing people work together and laugh together like this reminded me of Wendell Berry, who extols again and again in his writing the importance of such communal work, and the pleasure it can bring. In his 1988 essay, “Economy and Pleasure,” he says that our economy is “divorced from pleasure,” that it “completely discounts the capacity of people to be affectionate toward what they do and what they use and where they live and the other people and creatures with whom they live.” A few months ago I had an experience with my step-father that drove home how pleasurable working together can be. He visited when I was in the middle of a room-painting project, and he wound up helping me with it. And it just felt so nice to be doing something together, working toward a common goal—as opposed to what I so often do when visiting with family: namely, talking. And of course, eating. I’ve got nothing against eating, but I so tire of the talking. I very much relate to Elaine Benes in that episode of Seinfeld where she agrees to go get coffee with Jerry if she doesn’t have to talk. The experience of painting a room with my step-dad felt so nice, so simple but so meaningful, and I realized I wanted more of that kind of shared experience in my life. I’d so much rather do something like that for quality time with loved ones—or, say, cook a meal together—than sit around and chit-chat.
Now we’re flying over an endless patchwork of perfect circles and squares—literally as far as my eye can see—mostly varying shades of brown with some green here and there. What are those perfect circles and squares? If they are farmland, they sure don’t look very life-producing.
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While in some respects it’s a bummer that I’m not traveling with my husband right now, I’ve also come to see our tendency to vacation separately as a good thing. Because of our dogs and all the vegetable gardens Whitman is growing, it’s just plain easier to travel separately. This difficulty imposed by leaving home together means that we’ve really put down roots—literal and figurative—where we live, that we have become a part of where we live. The primary function of our home is not just, as Wendell Berry says in his critique of industrialism, “the consumption of purchased goods.” In his 2002 essay, “The Agrarian Standard,” he says, “One of the primary principles of industrialism has always been to get the worker away from home. From the beginning it has been destructive of home employment and home economies.” There’s a great quote in the “Sunbeams” section of this month’s Sun magazine, wherein Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist Ellen Goodman says, “Normal is…getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work, driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for, in order to get to the job that you need so you can pay for the clothes, car, and, especially, the house that you leave empty all day in order to afford to live in it.”
You might say that the ease with which a person, couple, or family can leave home for extended periods is directly proportional to how much they “belong to” a home. In an essay titled “A Few Words On Motherhood,” first published in 1980, Wendell Berry references Henry David Thoreau, who once asserted that people should not belong to farm animals. He says this doctrine has “received amendments to the effect that people should not belong to children, or to each other. But we all have to belong to something, if only to the idea that we should not belong to anything. We all have to be used up by something… I gladly belong to my wife, my children, and several head of cattle, sheep, and horses. What better way to be used up? How else to be a farmer?”
This notion of belonging to something—or multiple somethings—also evokes what Berry has to say about limits and limitlessness in his 2006 essay, “Faustian Economics.” He says that we have tried to define “freedom” as an escape from all restraint. But Berry points out that the word “freedom” has etymological roots in the word “friend.” The words “freedom” and “friend” “come from the same Germanic and Sanskrit roots, which carry the sense of ‘dear’ or ‘beloved.’ We set our friends free by our love for them, with the implied restraints of faithfulness or loyalty. This suggests that our ‘identity’ is located not in the impulse of selfhood but in deliberately maintained connections.” And these “friends” can be beloved fellow humans, or farm animals, or domestic pets, or a house, or the land itself. In that same essay, Berry also comments on how being limited in our ability to roam hither and yon at will is not a confinement, but rather “an inducement to formal elaboration and elegance, to fulness of relationship and meaning… A small place, as I know from my own experience, can provide opportunities of work and learning, and a fund of beauty, solace, and pleasure—in addition to its difficulties—that cannot be exhausted in a lifetime or in generations.”
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Now I am writing this in the Denver airport, on the other side of my Colorado journey, waiting for my flight home to Asheville. The difference between this airport and the Asheville one is absurdly stark. Getting to my gate here required the use of an elevator, an indoor train, an escalator, and multiple moving sidewalks. The Asheville airport doesn’t even have those things. And of course I much prefer it. If our human need to fly creates a need for airports like this one in Denver, then we should look much more critically at our need to fly. But it’s obviously too late for that kind of self-scrutiny. Obscenely massive airports are just one of countless examples of how truly insane the human race has become. I’m actually surprised we’re doing as well as we are, psychologically speaking. I’m surprised, for example, that there aren’t more mass shootings and other instances of people deliberately destroying each other. It’s proof of our truly, truly good hearts that we’re hanging on as well as we are.
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Almost an hour has passed now, and we’re forty minutes late to board, and none of the kind people at Allegiant Airlines have said a word to us. Not a single update or explanation as to why they’re running behind schedule. I honestly don’t even care about the reason; I just want someone to acknowledge us all waiting here. I am doing my best to be a good little Buddhist and not get angry. The waiting without any kind of update or acknowledgment would be hard enough, but the fact that I’m surrounded by other people exacerbates my difficulty tenfold. With each thud of my pounding heart and the pain in my constricted throat I feel the truth in Jean Paul Sartre’s famous words: “Hell is other people.” And more specifically, in this moment, hell is other people’s children.
May I be safe, may I be happy, may I be healthy, may I live with ease. And may I never, ever fly again. Except for in August when I’m taking a road trip to Canada with my dad and will have to fly back from Toronto. After that, may I never step foot in an airplane or airport ever again.
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We finally boarded and then sat on the runway for about an hour while waiting for the ground crew to load everybody’s luggage into the plane. I had to go into full-on meditation mode at that point, remembering how Edward Espe Brown once said that even in times of difficulty, one breath continues to follow the next. So I just focused on those breaths. And I remembered that people endure a lot more difficulty than delayed flights and endless taxying. I thought of the people in Ukraine. I thought of the parents whose children were shot to death in school.
Now we’re flying over the same perfect circles and squares from before, only this time they’re obscured by smog. The few clouds that are up here are nestled in a bed of toxic brown air, if you can call it that, partly created by the very machine that’s now flying through it, a machine I’ve paid good money to fly in. 45,000 such machines traverse the U.S. skies every day. 16,405,000 a year. At any given moment during peak operational times, there are 5,400 aircraft in the sky. As Wendell Berry writes in his 1969 essay, “The Rise,” which concludes his anthology, The World-Ending Fire, “We still sing ‘America the Beautiful’ as though we had not created in it, by strenuous effort, at great expense, and with dauntless self-praise, an unprecedented ugliness.” I want so badly to love my fellow man, but in moments like this, when I’m not only subjected to airplane culture but participating in it—contributing to it—such love feels impossible. I hate the world we’ve created. I hate feeling like a victim of what Wendell Berry calls “moral slavery,” meaning that I “have no choice but to do what is wrong.” And in that hatred lies a cold comfort: if this plane crashes and I die, at least I won’t have to be a part of this terrible world anymore.
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And obviously that plane did not crash and I am still alive, and very glad to be so. But my capacity for appreciating life is equal to my capacity for despairing over it, and there’s nothing quite like air travel to tip the scales in the latter direction. To tip them back toward joy usually involves the things that have little to do with any of mankind’s creations. I agree with Wendell Berry that “the events of man are not the great events; the rising of the sun and the falling of the rain are more stupendous than all the works of the scientists and the prophets…the wildflowers silently bloom in the woods, exquisitely shaped and scented and colored, whether any man sees and praises them or not. A music attends the things of the earth. To sense that music is to be near the possibility of health and joy.”
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I’ve yet to provide much biographical info on Wendell Berry, so I will do that now. He was born on August 5th, 1934, in Henry County, Kentucky, where the families of both of his parents had farmed for at least five generations. So it’s not surprising that, after leaving Kentucky for a few years in his twenties, first to study creative writing at Stanford University in California and then to teach English in New York City, with some living abroad in between, that Berry felt pulled back home. Much to the dismay of his colleagues and fellow writers, he quit his New York University gig in 1964—he was thirty years old—and took a job at the University of Kentucky, where he taught creative writing for the next thirteen years, and then for another six between 1987 and 1993, all the while farming on twelve acres called Lane’s Landing, which eventually became a homestead of about 117 acres. Berry has farmed, resided, and written at Lane's Landing ever since purchasing those first twelve acres in 1965. He’s published at least twenty-five books (or chapbooks) of poems, sixteen volumes of essays, and twelve novels and short story collections. And he’s done it all without owning a computer. He writes everything out longhand and then his wife types it up on a typewriter.
I’ll come back to that a little later. For now I’ll just say that Berry’s eschewing of computers is in keeping with his overall disdain for industrialism and technology. That’s why he uses a team of horses instead of a tractor for most of his farm work. And it’s one of many reasons why he is my hero—in good company with Joni Mitchell and Jerry Seinfeld. And as I say that I realize that what Joni, Jerry, and Wendell have in common is a refusal to normalize the many ridiculous, insane aspects of modern society. They continue to point at the absurdities that so many of us have taken for granted and say, “This is not intelligent. Why are we doing this?”
At 87 (almost 88), Wendell Berry is the eldest of these heroes, and he’s still going strong on the writing front, with two books slated for publication later this year—one a short story collection and the other a collection of essays called The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice, which apparently has something in it to offend everyone. And I’m sure he’s going as strong as his body will let him when it comes to the farming. His life continues to reflect his deepest values, which Paul Kingsnorth, in his Introduction to The World-Ending Fire, describes as “simple and pleasingly unoriginal. Slow down. Pay attention. Do good work. Love your neighbors. Love your place. Stay in your place. Settle for less, enjoy it more.”
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The World-Ending Fire consists of thirty-one essays written between the years 1968 and 2011, and from what I gather it was basically Ireland’s official introduction to Wendell Berry’s nonfiction work. The title is taken from a sentence in the aforementioned 2006 essay “Faustian Economics.” Berry writes, “The world-ending fire of industrial fundamentalism may already be burning in our furnaces and engines, but if it will burn for a hundred more years, that will be fine.” He’s being sarcastic, basically saying that most of us humans don’t care if our lifestyle is destructive, so long as we can keep doing it for a hundred more years. He goes on to ask in all earnestness, “Surely it would be better to intend straightforwardly to contain the fire and eventually put it out?” Surely it would, Wendell.
But this would require that we all—or most of us, anyway—change our lifestyles. In his well-known essay “Think Little,” first published in 1970, Berry writes, “If you are fearful of the destruction of the environment, then learn to quit being an environmental parasite… To be fearful of the disease and not willing to pay for the cure is not just to be hypocritical; it is to be doomed.” And indeed most of us—myself included—are a bunch of doomed hypocrites. I am writing this on a hot and humid day in mid-June, in the comfort of my air-conditioned living room. I shop at grocery stores and order stuff online and drive a car and take hot showers and use a clothes dryer and contribute on a regular basis in many other ways to the destruction of my planet. I try to be moderate in my electricity and water usage, but still. I am totally reliant on the power companies I theoretically despise. Every time there’s a power outage I realize this reliance anew, and some anger always comes with it. I remember that for most of our existence as a species, we haven’t had any electricity. And yet today, at what is at least chronologically our most advanced stage, we can’t live without it.
But one of Berry’s main arguments is that we must learn to live without some of the things we’ve come to believe we need. Yes, we can protest against environmentally destructive industries, but that can’t be all we do. In “Think Little,” he says, “A man who is willing to undertake the discipline and the difficulty of mending his own ways is worth more to the conservation movement than a hundred who are insisting merely that the government and the industries mend their ways.”
Ooh, he used the word “discipline.” That’s one of my favorites. At least when used in the context of what Berry’s talking about, “discipline” makes me feel inspired, because it means that someone really cares about something, enough to put regular, intentional effort into it, and in order to learn—as a disciple would—more about it. Discipline implies self-control—not in an aggressive or self-negating way, but in a self-actualizing way. It means you do a thing even though it’s difficult or you don’t feel like it because (a) that thing simply must be done—it needs to happen, and/or (b) because we believe it matters; it gives our life meaning to take care of that particular activity. This type of discipline does not feel like drudgery. Sometimes difficulty, perhaps, but never drudgery.
And avoiding difficulty is what’s created so many of the problems we now face as humans, both on the individual level and the societal one. We have given up our independence for “freedom,” which, as I mentioned last week, Berry says we’ve mistakenly defined as being free from all constraint, unlimited in what we can do, get, consume, and experience. Independence, on the other hand, means we’re not dependent on anyone but ourselves. Berry says that we “have given up our independence in return for the cheap seductions and the shoddy merchandise of so-called ‘affluence’… We cannot feed or clothe ourselves, or entertain ourselves, or communicate with each other, or be charitable or neighborly or loving, or even respect ourselves, without recourse to a merchant or a corporation or a public service organization or an agency of the government or a style-setter or an expert.”
I’m reminded of a woman named Cornelia Henry, a diarist who lived in what is now the Malvern Hills neighborhood in West Asheville, during the Civil War. In 2008, Rick Russel and Karen Clinard published her diaries in a book called Fear in North Carolina. What stands out to me the most about Cornelia’s writing is how she was always working: cooking, sewing, knitting, mending, dyeing, and more. And not as a hobby or a way to influence people on Instagram, but because she had to do those things, as well as raise a passel of kids—and she was only twenty-five during the time period I’m thinking of. Today most people believe we’re better off because we don’t have to do those things, but is that true? Instead of knitting our own socks, for instance, we have machines that do it for us. Is that better, though? Instead of baking our own bread, we buy it already baked. What is lost in this exchange? I believe a great deal has been lost—the very essence of our humanity—and I know without a doubt that a criminal amount of resources have been wasted. And all because we don’t want to do things for ourselves? How come? Oh, 'cause we have better things to do with our time and energy? Like what? Work forty hours a week for money so we can pay other people to do things for us, and then with our time remaining, have what we call “fun,” be what we call “entertained”?
In his essay, “Economy and Pleasure,” Berry asserts that our current economy is “divorced from pleasure,” and he cites the “pleasure industry” as proof of this sad fact. If people took more pleasure from their work and home lives, we wouldn’t feel the need for things like amusement parks and cruise ships and Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Showtime, Apple TV, etc. He says these industries “exploit our apparently limitless inability to be pleased.” Maybe the fact that we can never seem to get enough of such purchased pleasure means that it’s not the kind of pleasure we actually want or need. Maybe we’d get more satisfaction and delight from knitting our own socks and baking our own bread. Of course I’m just using bread and socks as examples of what could be an endless store of meaningful, potentially pleasing activities to choose from.
So doing more things for ourselves is one way to exercise “the discipline and the difficulty of mending [our] own ways” that Berry is talking about, instead of waiting for big corporations and the government to do better. Another method to this end is to simply use fewer resources. If we want to quit being what Berry calls “environmental parasites,” we must stop insisting, as we do through our daily way of life, that energy be cheap and plentiful, and we must “achieve the character and acquire the skills to live much poorer than we do.” That’s what Berry says in his 1989 essay, “Word and Flesh.” In that same essay he also says that “we all live by robbing nature, but our standard of living demands that the robbery shall continue.” So we must change our standard of living. It’s the whole “reduce” part of “reduce, reuse, recycle.” Nobody really talks about “reduce.” Because to really reduce would mean to have less freedom—or less of what we consider as freedom. For example, I believe there should be a limit to how big houses can be; it’s pretty rare these days that people have giant nuclear families, so giant, five-bedroom homes should be equally as rare. I think we should also majorly reduce our use of airplanes, which means we’d have to put limits on the number of flights each person is allowed to take each year. I have no doubt that a lot of people would scoff at that idea. The notion of telling people they can’t fly wherever they want to, whenever they want to! And that they can’t live in a mansion if they have the money to do so! It’s absurd! Well, I’d argue that what’s absurd is “the idea that when faced with abundance one should consume abundantly,” to quote Berry in his 1968 essay “A Native Hill," in which he goes on to say that such a way of life “is neither natural nor civilized, and even from a ‘practical’ point of view it is to the last degree brutalizing and stupid.” And even if it is absurd to suggest that we should put limits on all our forms of consumption (which I don’t believe it is, obviously), maybe we need to do something that feels absurd if we want this planet to be habitable when our current generation of children are adults. This is the timeline we’re working with now. And actually I’m quite sure it wouldn’t make a difference climate change-wise if we stopped all air travel today forever, so this whole blessed argument is moot, but still: does that mean we should continue to rob nature right up to the very end of our relationship with her? Does that mean we should continue to live, as Berry says, “either partly wrong or almost entirely wrong?”
Each of us must make this call for ourselves. We cannot wait for the government and other institutions to do it for us. And we cannot wait for other individuals to make lifestyle changes in order to feel like our own changes are “significant.” In another wonderful essay from 1989, “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine,” Berry references Henry David Thoreau (he himself has been called a modern day Thoreau), saying that H.D. “gave the definitive reply to the folly of ‘significant numbers’ a long time ago: Why should anybody wait to do what is right until everybody does it? It is not ‘significant’ to love your own children or to eat your own dinner, either. But normal humans will not wait to love or eat until it is mandated by an act of Congress.” Whatever line we draw for ourselves, it will almost certainly need to feel like a difficult line to draw, because prioritizing ease is what has gotten us into our current predicament. Berry writes, “We are going to have to learn to give up things that we have learned (in only a few years, after all) to ‘need.’” He talks about a man he once knew who, "in the age of chainsaws, went right on cutting his wood with a handsaw and an axe. He was a healthier and a saner man than I am. I shall let his memory trouble my thoughts.”
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In 1987 Harper’s magazine reprinted Berry’s short essay, “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” and the version in The World-Ending Fire contains four of the letters that readers sent in, and Berry’s response to those letters. He then wrote another, much longer essay inspired by that exchange, called “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine,” which I’ll talk about a little now.
One aspect of his anti-computer essay that readers criticized most was Berry’s disclosure about his wife typing up his handwritten work on a Royal standard typewriter purchased new in 1956. Though he makes it very clear that he cherishes his working relationship with his wife, whom he calls his best critic, and that his use of a computer would force him to “sacrifice an association that I am dependent upon and that I treasure,” a couple of the readers basically accuse him of exploiting his wife and upholding “the traditional subservience of one class to another.” One compares Berry’s wife, whose name is Tanya, to a servant who should be allowed to “seek more meaningful work.” They don’t stop to consider, as Berry points out in his response, that Tanya might actually enjoy the work of typing up and editing his writing, that she might not be doing it for free (as he never explicitly said so, and indeed I’m sure he shares his book earnings with her), and that she might find great meaning in it. In “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine,” Berry elaborates by saying that “more meaningful work” is code for work outside of the home. “If I had written in my essay that my wife worked as a typist and editor for a publisher, doing the same work she does for me, no feminists, I daresay, would have written to Harper’s to attack me for exploiting her… It would have been assumed as a matter of course that if she had a job away from home she was a ‘liberated woman,’ possessed of a dignity that no home could confer upon her.” He continues by implying that his wife has far more freedom in her work at home, with him (and not as his subservient, but his equal partner) than she would if she worked for some corporation, which, like our economy at large, exploits “men and women and everything else.” Berry isn’t trying to argue with people who work away from home; he is simply posing the question, “Why should we consider this general working away from home to be a desirable state of things?”
I’ve already touched on that topic, so I’ll move on by addressing Berry’s response to all the people who told him that a computer would enable him to write faster and with more ease, and therefore to write more. He says he does not want to writer faster, easier, and more; he wants to write better. And in order to do that, he doesn’t need help from a machine, but from other humans, including his wife. He also humorously points out that he’s already written “too fast, too easily, and too much” with a pencil and paper, and this was in 1989. As of this year, he’s written fifty-two books that way. Which is far more than most of us computer-owners will likely be able to claim by the time we’re eighty-seven.
Berry also explores how machines ultimately degrade the body and make it obsolete, calling this “the danger most immediately to be feared in ‘technological progress.’” He says he doesn’t want to use a computer because then he’d lose the pleasure of “bodily involvement” in his work. He acknowledges that writing isn’t the most physical of activities, but nonetheless asserts that the body plays an invaluable role. I’d agree that handwriting is an extension of one’s body and brain in a way that computer screen text can never be. When I type in Times New Roman font it looks exactly the same as anyone else’s typing in that font. When I write by hand, what emerges is wholly unique. As Berry puts it, “The body characterizes everything it touches.” And of course there are many other, more potent examples of how machines sever the connection between body and mind. Bread machines, for instance, mean we don’t “have” to knead the dough with our hands, which means our hands don’t get to be hands. We could say the same of dishwashers, washing machines, food processors, etc. When we consider all of the machines we use on a regular basis, we see the extreme extent to which not only our hands don’t get to be hands, but our bodies don’t get to be bodies. And I think that’s a huge contributor to modern-day mental illness and malaise. I find it especially tragic that we as a society force children to sit in classrooms for the majority of their young lives. Children, who have so much physical energy and a natural inclination to move their bodies as a basic form of self-expression and communication—not to mention their primary way for learning about the world around them and their places in it.
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Berry mentions children in his essay “Family Work,” first published in 1980. He asserts that our primary reason for sending them to school is to keep them away from home and out of their parents’ hair as much as possible. I was surprised to learn that he and his wife sent their own children to school, rather than home-schooling them. But I guess in order to write dozens of books—in the daytime, mind you, so as not to need electric light—and to maintain a thriving farm, Berry needed his son and daughter out of the house like most other parents do. He bemoans the fact that a regular school day for his kids “counting from the time they went to catch the bus until they came home—was nine hours. An extracurricular activity would lengthen the day to eleven hours or more. This is not education,” he says, “but a form of incarceration. Why should anyone be surprised if, under these circumstances, children should become ‘disruptive’ or even ‘ineducable’?” I’d add, why should be we surprised when they bring guns to school and otherwise end up behaving in ways that get them incarcerated, once they’re adults? I say if we want to eliminate school shootings, we should eliminate school. Drastic, I know. But people are walking into classrooms and shooting children with assault rifles. Desperate times, to say the least. Let’s talk about desperate measures.
Another flaw in our education system that Berry points out in “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine,” is that the long school days prevent children from seeing their parents at work, in the act of working. He asserts that children need to not only see their parents at work, but also “to play at the work they see their parents doing, and then they need to work with their parents. It does not matter so much that this working together should be what is called ‘quality time,’ but it matters a great deal that the work done should have the dignity of economic value.” It’s no doubt safe to assume that Berry is specifically referring to physical labor here. I’m sure many children do see their parents work these days, given how much more common working from home has become, but what those children witness is probably their mom or dad looking at a laptop or smart phone, or taking phone calls. It is work in the abstract, and not the kind of work children can play at. I suppose they could pretend to type or push buttons, but I don’t think that’s what Berry is talking about when he refers to children “playing” at work. I think he means they’re basically doing the work in question, but not in any sustained way, and perhaps not very well. They are nonetheless, though, getting a taste of the actual work—not just pretending to do it.
Most of the work that the young members of this society do is what we call “chores.” And while I believe it is important for kids to contribute to a home’s upkeep and cleanliness, and that this is an essential way for them to acquire self-discipline and grow up with enough self-respect to maintain a proper order in their own home, it doesn’t exactly have what Berry calls the “dignity of economic value.” You can go weeks without scrubbing the toilet or sweeping and still put food on the table and pay your bills. But if your household economy depends, say, on your growing, harvesting, and processing a bunch of tobacco, then that particular type of work cannot be shirked. I use tobacco as an example because Berry writes about it in his essay “Economy and Pleasure.” He talks about the yearly work of cutting tobacco with his neighbors, and how the small, non-industrialized scale of that operation “permits margins both temporal and spatial that accommodate the play of children”—as opposed to more industrialized types of work, whose “haste and danger” exclude children, which he says is one of the most regrettable things about that type of work. While the adults work with the tobacco, the children come and go, playing at the work they observe their parents doing, and also playing at their own play. In this intermingling of working adults and playing children, the latter not only learn how to work, but the former re-learn how to play. Which touches on something so important that I know most individuals would whole-heartedly agree with, but that we as a society seem to have become oblivious to: children are not merely creatures in need of teaching. They themselves are teachers. We adults have as much to learn—or at least re-learn—from them as they have to learn from us.
During my recent experience of being on my dad’s boat, something we saw while cruising around (or maybe it was right there in the marina) was a boat called “C Student.” The implication was that the owner of the boat was giving a playful middle finger to anyone who ever suggested or believed that, because of his mediocre grades, he’d never be successful. (And yes, I’m assuming the boat-owner was male.) “Yeah,” he seemed to say, "I was a C student, but look at me now!” The deeper implication here is that we as a society equate good grades with financial—and therefore material— wealth. If you’re on the honor roll, one day you’ll have a boat! If this isn’t disturbing to you, consider it thusly: we are forcing children to “learn” reading, writing, arithmetic, science, history, etc. so that they can eventually make a lot of money. If that doesn’t disturb you, maybe you can at least see the absurdity in it. Because what does one thing really have to do with the other?
And then of course there’s the massive flaw in thinking that one is “successful” because one can afford a boat—or any other expensive object. True success has nothing to do with money or material possessions. In his 1970 essay, “In Defense of Literacy,” Berry says that schools “are following the general subservience to the ‘practical,’ as that term has been defined for us according to the benefit of corporations. By ‘practicality’ most users of the term now mean whatever will most predictably and most quickly make a profit.” And yet look at all the truly impractical things we as humans have done in the name of profit! We justify causing permanent ecological damage because it makes good economic sense. And we harbor the delusion, as Berry points out in his 2011 essay, “The Future of Agriculture,” that “the damages done by industrialization can be corrected by more industrialization.” Being ever practical, we strive to make “informed decisions,” forcing ourselves “into a thicket of facts, figures, studies, tests, ‘projections,’ [and the] long and uneasy pondering of ‘cost-benefit ratios’… Once the risk of harm is appraised as ‘acceptable,’ the result often is absurdity: we destroy a village in order to save it; we destroy freedom in order to save it; we destroy the world in order to live in it.”
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In the title essay of The World-Ending Fire, Berry implicates every single one of us in the environmental destruction so many of us claim to despise. He says it would be foolish to pretend that we don’t all bear the stamp of our exploitive society. Some of us are more conscientious than others, of course, but unless we’re living totally off-grid with no electricity or gas-powered machines, fending entirely for ourselves, we are contributing to harmful and destructive systems. He says that one of the beliefs that’s kept “the exploiters’ revolution” going on this continent is that work—especially any form of hand work—is beneath human dignity. I already talked about this a few minutes ago—how we create machine after machine after machine to do our hand work for us—but I want to emphasize another insight Berry shares in this same vein. He says that in our “overriding ambition to escape work…[we] have debased work until it is only fit to escape from.”
That’s brilliant. I interpret it to mean that in escaping physical labor, through what Joni Mitchell would call our “stupid inventions,” we have left ourselves with a kind of labor that is much worse, by which I mean much less satisfying and fulfilling and in line with our human need to move and create and interact with our physical world. I’m thinking of factory line work, or cubicle work, or anything overly mechanized and rote and described as “soul sucking.” And something that we have to do for eight hours a day, five days a week. Is there any genuinely life-sustaining work that would require such punching of the clock? Which is a sadly apt phrase, if you think about it, as such work does make one want to punch time itself right in the face. I think of Scott and Helen Nearing, authors of The Good Life, considered by many to be the homesteader’s bible. What struck me about their almost entirely self-sustaining way of life—including the building of their own stone house—was that only four hours out of each day were spent doing physical labor. They had ample, regular time for rest, recreation, and community involvement—far more than most people who work “conventional” jobs do. So in avoiding the kind of physical labor that Berry and the Nearings extol as essential to humans feeling human, we’ve wound up doing more of the work that makes us feel inhuman. And so of course we count down the days till Friday, and we mourn the all-too-quick arrival, yet again, of Monday.
Now I know that there are many people, myself included, whose jobs are not soul-sucking and are actually, at least some of the time, quite fulfilling. Their way of making money aligns with their values and is not worthy of dread or escape. But I’d be very surprised if the majority of Americans could say that. I consider myself extremely lucky and privileged to make a comfortable living by studying people’s psyches and helping them talk through their struggles and come to know themselves better, and, ideally, love themselves. While my time is often characterized, to quote Berry, “by the abuse and waste of fossil fuel energy,” I can at least say that it isn’t characterized by the abuse and waste of my own human energy. This is not something I could have said in regards to any of my former jobs, including the five years I spent as a community college teacher. The handful of student lives I might have touched did not ultimately compensate for the overall waste of time and energy that was teaching English to a bunch of people who did not want to learn it. And as for the role of physical labor in my life, it will probably never compare to Berry’s or the Nearings’, but I do experience on a regular basis the satisfaction of working with my hands. I might not grow my own food (although my husband grows a good bit of it), but I do cook it, and this regular cooking practice is, I believe, essential to my overall well-being, not only because it results in nourishing meals, but also because the process itself is nourishing.
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Another concept that Berry address is limitlessness. In his 2006 essay, “Faustian Economics,” he calls humanity out on upholding a “credo of limitlessness.” We want limitless possessions, knowledge, science, technology, and progress. Barry says this must all necessarily lead “to limitless violence, waste, war, and destruction.” The way we do anything is the way we do everything. A people that ravages the land will ravage each other.
But what is wrong, you might ask, with limitless progress? We are ever-evolving creatures, after all, so why should we stop progressing? I guess we need to define “progress.” Does “progress” mean that we’re always getting better at taking care of one another and living in harmony with nature? If so, then we should definitely not stop progressing. Let us be limitless in that arena. But if “progress” means more, easier, faster, then we need to stop. And that is what it means, isn’t it? The “progress” I’m thinking of is exemplified by, among many other man-made phenomena, roads and highways. We seem to think we can be limitless in our building and expanding of them. And the notion of roads in general reminds me of what Berry says in his essay “A Native Hill.” Comparing paths to roads, he writes, “A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape… A road, on the other hand, even the most primitive road, embodies a resistance against the landscape. Its reason is not simply the necessity of movement, but haste.” Haste is not our friend. We need to stop wanting things to be faster, which in many ways equates to easier, which in many ways equates to more. More, easier, faster has got to stop being what dictates how we live, both as individuals and as a species. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have what we need to live comfortably, or that everything we do should be difficult, or that we should always move slowly. I’m just saying that a lot of us could have a lot less and be living comfortably, and that too much ease makes us lazy and ungrateful and too much in our heads, and that too much speed makes us impatient, and it makes our lives go by in a blur. And of course there cannot be limitless growth. At some point, for instance, we won’t be able to build more roads, because pretty much everything will already be a road.
If I were Queen of the World, all road construction would cease. We’d just have to figure out how to deal with the resulting traffic jams. Maybe people would drive less. It might help that I’d also stop all car manufacturing. And all smart phone manufacturing, too. And all technological “updates.” And to borrow an idea from my friend Leif, the internet would consist of Wikipedia…and that’s it. People would have to resist the urge to do more, faster, easier and see what happens when we stop doing things just because we can do them, and learn to work within the limits of what we have, right where we are. I believe it is generally better for us to have fewer choices, not more. As Berry says in “Faustian Economics,” “If we always have a theoretically better substitute available from somebody else or someplace else, we will never make the most of anything.” He then quotes someone he describes as one of his best teachers, who said of people in general, “They’ll never be worth a damn as long as they’ve got two choices.”
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In conclusion, I want to go back to what Wendell Berry has to say about violence. Recall how he said that our credo of limitlessness inevitably results in there being no limits on anything we humans do—including our violent behavior. Much earlier in his writing career, in a brilliant essay from 1968 titled “Some Thoughts on Citizenship and Conscience in Honor of Don Pratt,” he wrote something that could have been written this morning, it is so relevant: “I am struggling, amid all the current political uproar, to keep clearly in mind that it is not merely because our policies are wrong that we are so destructive and violent. It goes deeper than that, and is more troubling. We are so little at peace with ourselves and our neighbors because we are not at peace without our place in the world, our land… Until we end our violence against the earth…how can we hope to end our violence against each other?” Now, in all the news stories you’ve consumed about recent mass shootings—and for that matter, the war in Ukraine—how often have reporters addressed this part of the equation? Yes, of course, we need more restrictive gun laws. And yes, of course we need to provide more accessible support to people with mental health issues. But both of those measures would be Band-aids. We need to be talking about why so many people have mental health issues, and why so many people feel so passionately about guns that even the slaughter of children is not enough to change how they feel.
If someone is living a fundamentally unhealthy life in which they are severed from any sense of purpose, sense of self and sense of true community, no amount of therapy or psychopharmaceuticals will help. That person must change how they are living. And this applies on the macro level too: we as a society—and a species, though our American society seems especially bad off, psychologically—must change how we are living. And we don’t do this primarily by insisting that legislative bodies their ways. As Berry says, “The problems of violence cannot be solved on public platforms, but only in people’s lives. And to give the matter over to the process of public rhetoric is to forgo the personal self-critical moral intelligence that is essential to any hope for peace, and that can only function in the daily life of individuals.”
We must first and foremost examine our own households—not to mention our own minds and hearts. Do we carry peace within us, or are we generally in some sort of conflict? And what about our relationships? Are we passive-aggressive, aggressive, dishonest, manipulative, withholding, hurtful, reacting from fear and anger? Then we are contributing to violence in the world. Berry says, “I must attempt to care as much for the world as for my household. Those are the poles between which a competent morality would balance and mediate: the doorstep and the planet.” And we must remember that our households are not ultimately dependent on the government, but the earth: on soil, rain, air, and sunlight. “No matter how sophisticated and complex and powerful our institutions, we are still exactly as dependent on the earth as the earthworms.” So we should try and get to know it, and understand how it works, because, as Berry points out in “Think Little," “people inevitably destroy what they do not understand.”
