Another Turn of the Crank

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Author: Wendell Berry
Full Title: Another Turn of the Crank
Category: #books

Highlights

The “conservatives” believe that an economy that favors its richest and most powerful participants will yet somehow serve the best interest of everybody. The “liberals” believe just as irrationally that a merely competitive economy, growing always larger in scale and controlled by fewer and fewer people, can be corrected by extending government charity to the inevitable victims: the dispossessed, the unrepresented, and the unemployed. No agrarian or community member could look kindly upon or wish to serve either belief.
A democratic government fails in failing to protect the integrity of ordinary lives and local communities. By now it should be pretty obvious that central planning is of a piece with absentee ownership and does not work. But to say as much is not to say that there is no proper role for government. The proper role of a government is to protect its citizens and its communities against conquest—against economic conquest just as much as conquest by overt violence.
I am convinced that the present concentration of the best educated and most able people in centers of power, industry, and culture is a serious mistake. I believe that for many reasons—political, ecological, and economic—the best intelligence and talent should be at work and at home everywhere in the country.
They think that the summit of human achievement is a high-paying job that involves no work.
We can’t go on too much longer, maybe, without considering the likelihood that we humans are not intelligent enough to work on the scale to which we have been tempted by our technological abilities. Some such recognition is undoubtedly implicit in American conservatives’ long-standing objection to a big central government. And so it has been odd to see many of these same conservatives pushing for the establishment of a supranational economy that would inevitably function as a government far bigger and more centralized than any dreamed of before. Long experience has made it clear—as we might say to the liberals—that to be free we must limit the size of government and we must have some sort of home rule. But it is just as clear—as we might say to the conservatives—that it is foolish to complain about big government if we do not do everything we can to support strong local communities and strong community economies.
What we have before us, if we want our communities to survive, is the building of an adversary economy, a system of local or community economies within, and to protect against, the would-be global economy.
If an accounting is ever done, we will be shocked to learn how much ecological capital this kind of farming required for an almost negligible economic return: thousands of years of soil building were squandered on a few crops of corn or tobacco.
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In a time of economic adversity, the community and the forest will be sacrificed before the factory will be. The ideal of such operations is maximum profit to the owners or shareholders, who are not likely to be members of the local community. This means what it has always meant: labor and materials must be procured as cheaply as possible, and real human and ecological costs must be “externalized”—charged to taxpayers or to the future.
But the peculiarity of our history, so far, is that we have not had to learn the lesson. When the Old World races settled here, they saw a natural abundance so vast they could not imagine that it could be exhausted or ruined. Because it was vast and because virtually a whole continent was opening to the west, many of our forebears felt free to use the land carelessly and to justify their carelessness on the assumption that they could escape what they ruined. That early regardlessness of consequence infected our character, and so far it has dominated the political and economic life of our state. So far, for every Kentuckian, like Harry Caudill, willing to speak of the natural limits within which we have been living all along, there have been many who have wished only to fill their pockets and move on, leaving their ecological debts to be paid by somebody else’s children.
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From the point of view of the community, it is not an improvement when the number of employed workers is reduced by the introduction of laborsaving machinery.
We now can see that what we have traditionally called “sins” are wrong not because they are forbidden but because they divide us from our neighbors, from the world, and ultimately from God. They deny care and are dangerous to creatures.
The present age is an age of superstition, and some of our shallowest superstitions have the authorization of our hardest-headed rationalists and realists. The modern ambition to control nature, for instance, is an ambition based foursquare on a superstition: the idea that what we take nature to be is what nature is, or that nature is that to which it can be reduced. If nature is to be controlled, then it has to be reduced to that which is theoretically controllable. It must be understood as a machine or as the sum of its known, separable, and decipherable parts.
Our mistreatment of children is not mitigated by our interest in “reforming” the institutions into which we put them. We will not have better children by having better day care centers, schools, and jails.
To see better what a mind is (or is not), we might consider the difference between what we mean by knowledge and what the computer now requires us to mean by “information.” Knowledge refers to the ability to do or say the right thing at the right time; we would not speak of somebody who does the wrong thing at the wrong time as “knowledgeable.” People who perform well as musicians, athletes, teachers, or farmers are people of knowledge. And such examples tell us much about the nature of knowledge. Knowledge is formal, and it informs speech and action. It is instantaneous; it is present and available when and where it is needed.
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