What is Wendell Berry for?

Wendell Berry has been getting a lot of renewed attention from writers such as Michael Pollan and blogs, including this one, because his message of local, human-scale economics, especially agriculture, is very current. And he pens a nifty aphorism. Lots of them in fact.

The Drinking and Reading Society dutifully read Jayber Crow this month and What Are People For? last month, but we are left wondering What is Wendell Berry for? Not his purpose on Earth, but what course of action does he recommend? He obviously has in mind some better model than our hyper-speed modern world that crushes whatever or whoever gets in the way of its headlong pursuit of more. But what does he suggest that we do about it? The question perplexed us again last night in our discussion of Jayber Crow.

Jayber Crow presents a world a half step removed from peasant life. No one goes very far, except to war. Most people you see every day you have known all your life. People take their allotted places in society without any apparent questioning and never leave them. The outside world is the enemy – the bringer of death, destruction and baffling change. The local may have its faults (which are generally left unexamined in the book) but it is sustainable and comforting. We didn’t believe it. Not that Berry didn’t capture the rhythms and mores of small town America. He got a lot of details right. It’s the big picture he missed.

I suppose it’s a bane of a writer to be both essayist and novelist because readers search for his philosophy in his fiction. But it seems Berry welcomes that and is using his fiction as just another tool to communicate his vision of slow, small and sustainable. But if that vision is so perfect, why have generation after generation voted with their feet to get out as fast as they can? There’s a darkness at the heart of small town life that Berry doesn’t face either in his fiction or his essays and there is likewise a noble human yearning for completion that drives people to seek a new world.

I guess we were hoping that Berry would provide some answers about how you reconcile those opposites and that’s what has left us wondering, what’s Wendell Berry for?

What is so rare as a day in June?

It's hard not to recall this famous line when we step outside on such a brilliant morning. But who wrote it? Where did it come from? The answer is below from a blogger named Mike at 10000birds.com/what-is-so-rare-as-a-day-in-june.

The quote “What Is So Rare As A Day In June?” may be familiar to most readers (the sentiment certainly is!) but its source is fairly obscure. This line is but a snippet from the most famous work of the poet James Russell Lowell (1819-1891), a member of the gaggle of authors sometimes called the Fireside Poets or the Schoolroom Poets. Some of his more famous colleagues in this group include Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. The Vision of Sir Launfal is an impressively lengthy poem that tells the story of an Arthurian knight’s search for the Holy Grail. This work is very religious in tone overall, but Lowell does fit in some keen observations about the value of natural beauty. The following verse, from which the apt quote is taken, is a portion of the Prelude to Part First of a very lengthy poem.

Earth gets its price for what Earth gives us;
The beggar is taxed for a corner to die in,
The priest hath his fee who comes and shrives us,
We bargain for the graves we lie in;
At the Devil’s booth are all things sold
Each ounce of dross costs its ounce of gold;
For a cap and bells our lives we pay,
Bubbles we earn with a whole soul’s tasking:
‘T is heaven alone that is given away,
‘T is only God may be had for the asking;
There is no price set on the lavish summer,
And June may be had by the poorest comer.

And what is so rare as a day in June?
Then, if ever, come perfect days;
Then Heaven tries the earth if it be in tune,
And over it softly her warm ear lays:
Whether we look, or whether we listen,
We hear life murmur, or see it glisten;
Every clod feels a stir of might,
An instinct within it that reaches and towers,
And, grasping blindly above it for light,
Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers;
The flush of life may well be seen
Thrilling back over hills and valleys;
The cowslip startles in meadows green,
The buttercup catches the sun in its chalice,
And there ’s never a leaf or a blade too mean
To be some happy creature’s palace;
The little bird sits at his door in the sun,
Atilt like a blossom among the leaves,
And lets his illumined being o’errun
With the deluge of summer it receives;
His mate feels the eggs beneath her wings,
And the heart in her dumb breast flutters and sings;
He sings to the wide world, and she to her nest,–

What to read this summer?

Assuming there is any beach left where you vacation, the current issue of Sierra magazine has a few reading suggestions from noted environmentalists and outdoors enthusiasts.

David Quammen recommends Robert Campbell's new book, In Darkest Alaska: Travel and Empire Along the Inside Passage.

Keith Bowden recommends The Secret Knowledge of Water: Discovering the Essence of the American Desert, by Craig Childs.

Paul Hawken suggests The River Why, by David James Duncan because it’s about fishing.

See the entire list at:
http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/200807/mixed-media.asp

Behavioral oilconomics and the politics of emotion

The current political debate about oil drilling in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge and continental shelf areas has reminded me again that humans are not a rational species. Of course, I know from my 25 years in the marketing world that we all feel first and think later. Incidentally, that’s why we feel so angry at advertising. We suspect that we’re being manipulated; we just can’t figure out how. The feeling is perfectly true; good advertising does tug on our emotions in a way that leaves reason far behind and panting to catch up. But don’t blame advertising for that; blame evolution. Our brains developed to feel, not to think.

That’s not just my idea. The Princeton economist Daniel Kahneman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in 2002 for his experimental work in behavioral economics – the science of how humans make irrational decisions in even that most rational of worlds.

So what’s that got to do with oil? Leaving aside the question of profit motive and the false hope of lower gas prices, the drilling proponents are tugging at our patriotic emotions by setting up false enemies (environmentalists, Government, etc.) and by calling the oil in question “our” oil, as if it belonged to you and me and would be siphoned directly from Alaska into our gas tanks if only the heroic oil companies were freed from the chains of mindless regulation. Of course, it’s not “our” oil. It would be “their” oil. It would belong to the international oil companies and they would be free to sell it to anyone they please – most likely Japan and China in the case of Alaskan oil – at whatever price the market will bear.

A cold-eyed patriot with a long-term concern for American security would instead look at this oil as “our” strategic reserve, to be saved to fuel our F-16s when things really go to hell in the Middle East, or at least not to be sold until oil gets to $1,000 a barrel, which it will eventually, and to be nationalized if necessary.  Let's burn the other guys' oil first.  A patriot would say that the USA should get busy improving the energy efficiency of everything we do. That would create American jobs, reduce us from foreign dependence and spur new technology.

But that doesn’t provide nearly the emotional rush of more drilling, does it?

Levitating the Pentagon

This week, Ken Ham, chief wacko at Answers in Genesis, the folks who believe that the Bible is the only authority on everything, spoke to around 150 people at a prayer breakfast at the Pentagon. These are the people who have their fingers on the triggers and the authority to send Americans into harm’s way. How many of those 150 also believe the “end times” are near and that only the big war against Israel must happen before Jesus comes back? Not familiar with AiG? In their words:

We don’t want to be known primarily as ‘young-Earth creationists.’ AiG’s main thrust is NOT ‘young Earth’ as such; our emphasis is on Biblical authority. Believing in a relatively ‘young Earth’ (i.e., only a few thousands of years old, which we accept) is a consequence of accepting the authority of the Word of God as an infallible revelation from our omniscient Creator. Take out your Bible and look through it. You can’t find any hint at all for millions or billions of years.

Reconsidering Wendell Berry

The Drinking & Reading Society is doing the unusual this month; we’re reading only our second work of fiction, in this case Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry. That was taking a bit of a chance because, honestly, we didn’t have much to say about Berry’s essays when we read What Are People For? It was kind of inspiring to read; I found myself marking passages and saying, “yeah, that’s right!” But when we discussed the book and asked, “so what should we do about the problems?” nobody could say what solution Berry actually had in mind. It was a most unsatisfying discussion because the topic seemed to elude us whenever we tried to address it in practical terms.

That may have given me a jaundiced view of Jayber Crow, but my opinion so far (I haven’t finished yet) is decidedly minority (90% of Amazon reviews give it 5 stars). While the writing is lyrical and the observations keen, the book is suffused with a golden-hued nostalgia for the small-town life of the early 20th Century that reminds me of a former high school jock looking back on his glory days. As someone who has lived in a small town, I have to say it just ain’t that great. Sure, modern life can and does lead to alienation and worse, as Berry and others have pointed out. But how many people have been squelched by the ironclad expectations that small town society so often fixes upon its natives and which only the most determined seem to be able to transcend? Berry’s narrator is looking back from his old age so I would expect him to have acquired a little wisdom and perspective over the years. He sees and reports the damaged characters – himself included – but never asks why or how they were damaged. Never lays the blame on the small time environment or asks how things might have been different.

That’s a fundamentally conservative point of view – the belief that the rules of the game are - ought to be - pretty much fixed, that problems come from people failing to accept those rules, and that the solutions lie in individual action. A liberal believes that problems may be exacerbated or perpetuated by the environment. As we rediscover Wendell Berry and his undoubted insight into the virtues of a life that’s whole, fresh and local, it’s also good to remember that we don’t have to accept Berry’s whole value system. We should be looking at ways to keep the best of both.

The fog of war

Harry Truman is supposed to have said something like, "I pity the man who, having faithfully read the papers every day, believes he has some idea of what has passed in his time." 

This new book by Patrick Cockburn illustrates the point. PZ sends this link to a review in the June 19 London Review of Books of the new book Muqtada Al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n12/cock01_.htmll. 

Here’s an excerpt from The Independent, 
Sunday, 13 April 2008, reviewed by Oliver Poole:

One of the more remarkable aspects of the Iraq war is how, even now, more than five years after it started, there is still a lack of general understanding about what has actually unfolded there. To many people, the conflict is merely an incomprehensible Hobbesian mess of mindless bloodshed and violence largely devoid of internal logic.

The spin, propaganda and lies force-fed by politicians and government officials who should have behaved better has left the general public woefully ill-equipped to understand the Iraqi social forces that have shaped events in Mesopotamia.

The achievement of this book is that, by placing the events of the present Iraq war within the context of the developing history of Iraqi Shias, it illustrates how the events of recent years were in large part merely a continuation of pre-existing social and political developments. America and Britain's failure to appreciate this, Cockburn argues convincingly, is the primary cause of the catalogue of errors which has caused the war to become a "cataclysm" in Iraq's history comparable to the "Mongol invasion of 1258".

See the whole review here: www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/muqtada-alsadr-and-the-fall-of-iraq-by-patrick-cockburn-807432.html