What Matters?. Wendell Berry

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СКАЧАТЬ mentality of industrial employees, helpless to feed themselves, who are being fed by the tiniest minority of exploited people and from land that is more cruelly exploited than the people.

      If we are destroying both the productive land and the rural communities and cultures, how can we assume that money will somehow attract food to us whenever we need it? If, on the contrary, we should decide to right the economic balance by paying a just price to producers, then money could revert to its proper function of encouraging and supporting both food production and the proper husbanding of the land. This, if it could happen, would solve a number of problems. The right answer to urban sprawl, for example, is to make agriculture pay well enough that farmers and ranchers would want to keep the land in use, and their children would want to inherit it to use.

      To a ground-level observer, it is obvious that the economic failures I have described involve moral issues of the gravest sort. An essentially immoral system of economy-as-finance, or an economy run by the sole standard of monetary profit, has been allowed to flourish to the point of catastrophe by a fairly general consent to the proposition that economy and morality are two professional specialties that either do not converge, or that can be made to converge by a simple moral manipulation, as follows.

      In 1986 the “conservative” columnist William Safire wrote that “Greed is finally being recognized as a virtue . . . the best engine of betterment known to man.” This was not, I think, the news that Mr. Safire thought it was, but was merely a repetition of a time-worn rationalization. What may have been new was the “professional” falsehood that greed is the exclusive motive in every choice—that, for example, the only way to have good teachers or good doctors is to pay them a lot of money.

      Mr. Safire’s error, and that of the people he spoke for, is in the idea that everybody can be greedy up to some limit—that, once you have made greed a virtue, it will not crowd out other virtues such as temperance or justice or charity. The virtuously greedy perhaps would agree to let one another be greedy, so long as one person’s greed did not interfere with the greed of another person. This would be the Golden Rule of greedy persons, who no doubt would thank God for it.

      But that rule appears to be honored entirely in the breach. There are still a good many people who choose or accept a vocation that will not make them rich—many teachers, for instance, and most writers. But for the greedy there appears to be no such concept as greedy enough. The greedy consume the poor, the moderately prosperous, and each other with the same relish and with an ever-growing appetite.

      Part two of Mr. Safire’s error is his assumption that we can restrict the honor of virtuehood to greed alone, leaving the other sins to pine away in customary disfavor: “I hold no brief,” he said, “for Anger, Envy, Lust, Gluttony, Pride . . . or Sloth.” But he was already too late. A glance at magazine advertising in 1986 would have suggested that these sins had been virtues of commerce long enough already to be taken for granted. As we have sometimes been told, the sins, like the virtues, are inclined to enjoy one another’s company.

      Mr. Safire’s announcement was not a moral innovation, but rather a confession of the depravity of what in 1986 we were calling, and are still calling, “the economy”—a ramshackle, propped-up, greed-enforced anti-economy that is delusional, vicious, wasteful, destructive, hard-hearted, and so fundamentally dishonest as to have resorted finally to “trading” in various pure-nothings. Might it not have been better and safer to have assumed that there is no partition between economy and morality, that the test of both is practicality, and that morality is long-term practicality?

      The problem with “the economy” is not only that it is anti-economic, destructive of the natural and human bases of any authentic economy, but that it has been out of control for a long time. At the root of our problem, we now need to suppose, is industrialism and the Industrial Revolution itself. As the original Luddites saw clearly and rightly, the purpose of industrialism from the first has been to replace human workers with machines. This has been justified and made unquestionable by the axiom that machines, according to standards strictly mechanical, work more efficiently and cheaply than people. They answer directly the perpetual need of the greedy to get more for less. This is yet another of our limitless “progressive” ideas: The industrial academics or academic industrialists who subserve the technological cutting edge are now nominating robots as substitutes for parents, nurses, and surgeons. Soon, surely, we will have robots that can worship and make love faster and cheaper than we mere humans, who have been encumbered in those activities by flesh and blood and our old-fashioned ways.

      But to replace people by machines is to raise a difficult, and I would say an urgent, question: What are the replaced people to do? Or, since this is a question not all replaced people have been able to answer satisfactorily for themselves, What is to be done with or for them? This question has never received an honest answer from either liberals or conservatives, communists or capitalists. Replaced people have entered into a condition officially euphemized as “mobility.” If you have left your farm or your country town and found a well-paying city job or entered a profession, then you are said to have been “upwardly mobile.” If you have left the country for the city with visions of bright lights and more money, or if you have gone to the city because you have been replaced as a farm worker by machines and you have no other place to go and you end up homeless or living in a slum without a job, then I suppose you are downwardly mobile—but this is still “progress,” for at least you have been relieved of “the idiocy of rural life” or the “mind-numbing work” of agriculture.

      When replacement leads to “mobility” or displacement, and displacement leads to joblessness or homelessness, then we have a problem as characteristic of the industrialized world as land waste and pollution. To this problem the two political sides have produced nonsolutions that are hopeless and more cynical (I hope) than many of their advocates realize: versions of “Get a job,” job training, job retraining, “better” education, job creation, and “safety nets” such as welfare, Social Security, varieties of insurance, retirement funds, etc. All of these “solutions,” along with joblessness itself, serve the purposes of an economy of bubbling money. And every one of them fails to address the problem of “mobility,” which is to say a whole society that is socially and economically unstable. In this state of perpetual mobility, even the most lucratively employed are likely to be homeless, if “home” means anything at all, for they are endlessly moving at the dictates of their careers or at the whims of their employers.

      To escape the cynicism, heartlessness, and damage implicit in all this mobility, it is necessary to ask another question: Might it not have been that these replaced and displaced people were needed in the places from which they were displaced? I don’t mean to suggest that this is a question easily answered, or that anybody should be required to stay put. I do mean that the question ought to be asked. It ought to be asked if only because it calls up another question that might lead to actual thinking: By what standard, or from what point of view, are we permitted to suppose that the displaced people were not needed in their original places? According to the industrial standard and point of view, persons are needed only when they perform a service valuable to an employer. When a machine can perform the same service, a person then is not needed.

      Not-needed persons must graduate into mobility, which will take them elsewhere to a job newly vacated or “created,” or to job training, or to some safety net, or to netlessness, joblessness, and homelessness. But this version of “not-needed” fits uncomfortably into the cultural pattern by which we define ourselves as civilized or humane or human. It grates achingly against the political and religious traditions that have affirmed for us the inherent worth and even preciousness of individual people. Our mobility, whether enforced or fashionable, has dismembered and scattered families and communities. Politicians and opinion dealers from far left to far right predictably and loudly regret these disintegrations, prescribing for them (in addition to the “solutions” already mentioned) year-round schools, day care, expert counseling, drugs, and prisons.

      And so: Might СКАЧАТЬ