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- Author: Wendell Berry
- Full Title: The Art of Loading Brush
- Category: #books
- The past, Popper says, “is fixed.” But our knowledge of it is incomplete and imperfect. We verify it to some extent by records and numbers, which may remain subject to revision and which also are subject to shifts in perspective as time passes. The present is too brief and fleeting to be captured for study. The future is predictable or foreseeable only by a kind of faith and within narrow limits. This, I think, is a fair description of our condition, our life in time, our tragedy.
- And so we have made of the future, not a coming time, but a limitless vacuity in which we elaborate our fears and fantasies, to which we defer payment of our perhaps unpayable ecological debts, and where we store our most lethal and enduring “wastes.” This cynical and, finally, addictive dependence on the future also works to disguise present problems and to delay solutions. Waste and pollution are everyday problems to which all of us contribute in daily and ordinary ways. To collect them under the heading of “climate change” sensationalizes and enlarges them, assigns the remedies to governments and corporations, and to the future. To sell digital technology, as a solver of problems but not a cause of problems, as it was and is sold, abuses the future in order to abuse the present.
- Because the future is limitless, we can project without limit into it. It is limitless, to us, because we know nothing about it. Because we know nothing about it, we are free to talk endlessly about it. It is hard to imagine why we do this except to distract ourselves from the difficult things we do know about and ought urgently to be talking about. We give up the incarnate life of our living souls, in the only moment we are alive, in order to live in dreams and nightmares of the future of a world we have already diminished and made ill, in no small part by our often mistaken preparations for the future.
- The great question now needing to be asked is how to get from protest, or fear or anger or guilt, to the actual accomplishment of good work. By good work I mean work that is necessary, enduringly valuable, pleasing to the worker, and not infected with the insanity of such a concept as “creative destruction.” Our movements of protest are typically addressed to political leaders, demanding correction or improvement in the future. They always involve crowds in public places, the display of signs and banners, the shouting of slogans, a sort of T-shirt oratory, but never a suggestion of good work that the participants can go home and do.
- the Amish have made themselves different from the rest of us by their obedience to the Gospel’s imperative to love their neighbors as themselves. This means, in practical terms, that they do not compete with their neighbors but instead depend upon them for help, that they do not think of replacing their neighbors with industrial technologies, that their farms are small and powered mainly by teams of (very good) draft horses, that in Holmes County their farms range in size probably between 80 and 125 acres, that they practice the radical neighborliness of the Gospels, and that they live close to their neighbors.