PALABRA Y CARNE
GUERRA Y PAZ
The problems, if we describe
them accurately, are all private and small. Or they are so initially.
The problems are our lives. In
the “developed” countries, at least, the large problems occur because all of us
are living either partly wrong or almost entirely wrong. It was not just the
greed of corporate shareholders and the hubris of corporate executives that put
the fate of Prince William Sound into one ship; it was also our demand that energy
be cheap and plentiful.
The economies of our
communities and households are wrong. The answers to the human problems of
ecology are to be found in economy. And the answers to the problems of economy
are to be found in culture and character. To fail to see this is to go on
dividing the world falsely between guilty producers and innocent consumers.
The planetary versions—the
heroic versions—of our problems have attracted great intelligence. But these
problems, as they are caused and suffered in our lives, our households, and our
communities, have attracted very little intelligence.
(…)
We have failed to produce new
examples of good home and community economies, and we have nearly completed the
destruction of the examples we once had. Without examples, we are left with
theory and the bureaucracy and meddling that come with theory. We change our
principles, our thoughts, and our words, but these are changes made in the air.
Our lives go on unchanged.
For the most part, the
subcultures, the countercultures, the dissenters, and the opponents continue mindlessly—or
perhaps just helplessly—to follow the pattern of the dominant society in its extravagance,
its wastefulness, its dependencies, and its addictions. The old problem
remains: How do you get intelligence out of an institution or an organization?
(…)
The question that must be
addressed, therefore, is not how to care for the planet, but how to care for
each of the planet’s millions of human and natural neighborhoods, each of its
millions of small pieces and parcels of land, each one which is in some
precious way different from all the others. Our understandable wish to preserve
the planet must somehow be reduced to the scale of our competence—that is, to
the wish to preserve all of its humble households and neighborhoods.
(…)
The older love becomes, the
more clearly it understands its involvement in partiality, imperfection, suffering,
and mortality. Even so, it longs for incarnation. It can live no longer by
thinking.
And yet to put on flesh and do
the flesh’s work, it must think.
In his essay on Kipling,
George Orwell wrote: “All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries
are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against
something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist
aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which
those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those
of us who are ‘enlightened’ all maintain that those coolies ought to be set
free; but our standard of living, and hence our ‘enlightenment,’ demands that
the robbery shall continue.”
This statement of Orwell’s is
clearly applicable to our situation now; all we need to do is change a few
nouns. The religion and the environmentalism of the highly industrialized
countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight
against something they do not really wish to destroy. We all live by robbing
nature, but our standard of living demands that the robbery shall continue.
We must achieve the character
and acquire the skills to live much poorer than we do. We must waste less. We
must do more for ourselves and each other. It is either that or continue merely
to think and talk about changes that we are inviting catastrophe to make.
The great obstacle is simply
this: the conviction that we cannot change because we are dependent on what is
wrong. But that is the addict’s excuse, and we know that it will not do.
(…)
Our most serious problem,
perhaps, is that we have become a nation of fantasists. We believe, apparently,
in the infinite availability of finite resources. We persist in land-use
methods that reduce the potentially infinite power of soil fertility to a
finite quantity, which we then proceed to waste as if it were an infinite
quantity. We have an economy that depends not on the quality and quantity of
necessary goods and services, but on the moods of a few stockbrokers. We
believe that democratic freedom can be preserved by people ignorant of the
history of democracy and indifferent to the responsibilities of freedom.
Our leaders have been for many
years as oblivious to the realities and dangers of their time as were George
III and Lord North. They believe that the difference between war and peace is
still the overriding political difference—when, in fact, the difference has
diminished to the point of insignificance. How would you describe the difference
between modern war and modern industry—between, say, bombing and strip mining,
or between chemical warfare and chemical manufacturing? The difference seems to
be only that in war the victimization of humans is directly intentional and in
industry it is “accepted” as a “trade-off.”
(…)
Were the catastrophes of Love
Canal, Bhopal, Chernobyl, and the Exxon Valdez episodes of war or of
peace? They were, in fact, peacetime acts of aggression, intentional to the
extent that the risks were known and ignored.
Wendell Berry
(Word and Flesh. Whole Earth
Review, Spring 1990)
