The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry

by Wendell Berry

I am objecting to the failure of the rationalist enterprise of ‘objective science’ or ‘pure science’ or ‘the disinterested pursuit of truth’ to prevent massive damage both to nature and to human economy.

We have resisted, so far, a state religion, but we are in danger of having both a corporate state and a state science, which some people, in both the sciences and the arts, would like to establish as a state religion.

The Rational Mind is the lowest common denominator of the government-corporation-university axis. It is the fiction that makes high intellectual ability the unquestioning servant of bad work and bad law.

Now some biologists, who have striven all their lives to embody perfectly the Rational Mind, have become concerned, even passionately concerned, about the loss of ‘biological diversity,’ and they are determined to do something about it. This is usually presented as a merely logical development from ignorance to realization to action. But so far it is only comedy. The Rational Mind, which has been destroying biological diversity by ‘figuring out’ some things, now proposes to save what is left of biological diversity by ‘figuring out’ some more things. It does what it has always done before: it defines the problem as a big problem calling for a big solution; it calls in the world-class experts; it invokes science, technology, and large grants of money; it propagandizes and organizes and ‘gears up for a major effort.’

There are, however, still some married couples who understand themselves as belonging to their marriage, to each other, and to their children. What they have they have in common, and so, to them, helping each other does not seem merely to damage their ability to compete against each other. To them, ‘mine’ is not so powerful or necessary a pronoun as ‘ours.’

My interest is not to quarrel with individuals, men or women, who work away from home, but rather to ask why we should consider this general working away from home to be a desirable state of things, either for people or for marriage, for our society or for our country.

How, I am asking, can women improve themselves by submitting to the same specialization, degradation, trivialization, and tyrannization of work that men have submitted to? And that question is made legitimate by another: How have men improved themselves by submitting to it? The answer is that men have not, and women cannot, improve themselves by submitting to it.

To have an equal part in our juggernaut of national vandalism is to be a vandal. To call this vandalism ‘liberation’ is to prolong, and even ratify, a dangerous confusion that was once principally masculine.

The problem is not just the exploitation of women by men. A greater problem is that women and men alike are consenting to an economy that exploits women and men and everything else.

They assume – and this is the orthodox assumption of the industrial economy – that the only help worth giving is not given at all, but sold.

The various reductions I have been describing are fairly directly the results of the ongoing revolution of applied science known as ‘technological progress.’ This revolution has provided the means by which both the productive and the consumptive capacities of people could be detached from household and community and made to serve other people’s purely economic ends. It has provided as well a glamor of newness, ease, and affluence that made it seductive even to those who suffered most from it.

After several generations of ‘technological progress,’ in fact, we have become a people who cannot think about anything important. How far down in the natural order do we have to go to find creatures who raise their young as indifferently as industrial humans now do? Even the English sparrows do not let loose into the streets young sparrows who have no notion of their identity or their adult responsibilities. When else in history would you find ‘educated’ people who know more about sports than about the history of their country, or uneducated people who do not know the stories of their families and communities?

The higher aims of ‘technological progress’ are money and ease. And this exalted greed for money and ease is disguised and justified by an obscure, cultish faith in ‘the future.’ We do as we do, we say, ‘for the sake of the future’ or ‘to make a better future for our children.’ How we can hope to make a good future by doing badly in the present, we do not say. We cannot think about the future, of course, for the future does not exist: the existence of the future is an article of faith. We can be assured only that, if there is to be a future, the good of it is already implicit in the good things of the present. We do not need to plan or devise a ‘world of the future’; if we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us. A good future is implicit in the soils, forests, grasslands, marshes, deserts, mountains, rivers, lakes, and oceans that we have now, and in the good things of human culture that we have now; the only valid ‘futurology’ available to us is to take care of those things. We have no need to contrive and dabble at ‘the future of the human race’; we have the same pressing need that we have always had – to love, care for, and teach our children.

And so the question of the desirability of adopting any technological innovation is a question with two possible answers – not one, as has been commonly assumed. If one’s motives are money, ease, and haste to arrive in a technologically determined future, then the answer is foregone, and there is, in fact, no question, and no thought. If one’s motive is the love of family, community, country, and God, then one will have to think, and one may have to decide that the proposed innovation is undesirable.

Of course, you could do without an automobile, but to do so you would have to disconnect yourself from many obligations. Nothing I have so far been able to think about this problem has satisfied me.

But a computer, I am told, offers a kind of help that you can’t get from other humans; a computer will help you to write faster, easier, and more. For a while, it seemed to me that every university professor I met told me this. Do I, then, want to write faster, easier, and more? No. My standards are not speed, ease, and quantity. I have already left behind too much evidence that, writing with a pencil, I have written too fast, too easily, and too much.

All good human work remembers its history.

That question returns me to the bewilderment I mentioned earlier: I am unsure where the line ought to be drawn, or how to draw it. But it is an intelligent question, worth losing some sleep over.

I know how to draw the line only where it is easy to draw. It is easy – it is even a luxury – to deny oneself the use of a television set, and I zealously practice that form of self-denial. Every time I see television (at other people’s houses), I am more inclined to congratulate myself on my deprivation.

It is plain to me that the line ought to be drawn without fail wherever it can be drawn easily. And it ought to be easy (though many do not find it so) to refuse to buy what one does not need. If you are already solving your problem with the equipment you have – a pencil, say – why solve it with something more expensive and more damaging?

And yet, if we are ever again to have a world fit and pleasant for little children, we are surely going to have to draw the line where it is not easily drawn. We are going to have to learn to give up things that we have learned (in only few years, after all) to ‘need.’ I am not an optimist; I am afraid that I won’t live long enough to escape my bondage to the machines. Nevertheless, on every day left to me I will search my mind and circumstances for the means of escape. And I am not without hope. I knew a man who, in the age of chainsaws, went right on cutting his wood with a handsaw and an axe. He was a healthier and a saner man than I am. I shall let his memory trouble my thoughts.

For those of us who have wished to raise our food and our children at home, it is easy enough to state the ideal. Growing our own food, unlike buying it, is a complex activity, and it affects deeply the shape and value of our lives.

How can we preserve family life – if by that we mean, as I think we must, home life – when our attention is so forcibly drawn away from home?

TV and other media have learned to suggest with increasing subtlety and callousness – especially, and most wickedly, to children – that it is better to consume than to produce, to buy than to grow or to make, to ‘go out’ than to stay home.

There is clearly too narrow a limit on how much money can be made from health, but the profitability of disease – especially disease of spirit or character – has so far, for profiteers, no visible limit.

My impression is that the chief, if unadmitted, purpose of the school system is to keep children away from home as much as possible.

Getting rid of the T V, we understand, is not just a practical act, but also a symbolical one: we thus turn our backs on the invitation to consume; we shut out the racket of consumption. The ensuing silence is an invitation to our homes, to our own places and lives, to come into being. And we begin to recognize a truth disguised or denied by TV and all that it speaks and stands for: no life and no place is destitute; all have possibilities of productivity and pleasure, rest and work, solitude and conviviality that belong particularly to themselves.

It is productivity that rights the balance, and brings us home.

What this means, I think, is about what it has always meant. Children, no matter how nurtured at home, must be risked to the world. And parenthood is not an exact science, but a vexed privilege and a blessed trial, absolutely necessary and not altogether possible.

This is most frequently understood as the right to do whatever one pleases with one’s property. One’s property, according to this formulation, is one’s own absolutely.

Rugged individualism of this kind has cost us dearly in lost topsoil, in destroyed forests, in the increasing toxicity of the world, and in annihilated species. When property rights become absolute they are invariably destructive, for then they are used to justify not only the abuse of things of permanent value for the temporary benefit of legal owners, but also the appropriation and abuse of things to which the would-be owners have no rights at all, but which can belong only to the public or to the entire community of living creatures: the atmosphere, the water cycle, wilderness, ecosystems, the possibility of life.

This is made worse when great corporations are granted the status of ‘persons,’ who then can also become rugged individuals, insisting on their right to do whatever they please with their property. Because of the overwhelming wealth and influence of these ‘persons,’ the elected representatives and defenders of ‘the people of th...

It has become ever more clear that this sort of individualism has never proposed or implied any protection of the rights of all individuals, but instead has promoted a ferocious scramble in which more and more of the rights of ‘the people’ have been gathered into the ow...

The rugged individualism of the left believes that an individual’s body is a property belonging to that individual absolutely: the owners of bodies may, by right, use them as they please, as if there were no God, no legitimate government, no community, no neighbors, and no posterity. This supposed right is manifested in the democratizing of ‘sexual liberation’; in the popular assumption that marriage has been ‘privatized’ and so made subordinate to the wishes of individuals; in the proposition that the individual is ‘autonomous’; in the legitimation of abortion as birth control – in the denial, that is to say, that the community, the family, one’s spouse, or even one’s own soul might exercise a legitimate proprietary interest in the use one makes of one’s body. And this too is tragic, for it sets us ‘free’ from responsibility and thus from the possibility of meaning. It makes unintelligible the self-sacrifice that sent Thoreau to jail.

‘Every man for himself’ is a doctrine for a feeding frenzy or for a panic in a burning nightclub, appropriate for sharks or hogs or perhaps a cascade of lemmings. A society wishing to endure must speak the language of caretaking, faith-keeping, kindness, neighborliness, and peace. That language is another precious resource that cannot be ‘privatized.’

Thus even the national executive and our legal system itself must now defer to the demands of ‘the economy.’ Whatever ‘new age’ is at hand at the moment must be heralded in ‘with a rush’ because of the profits available to those who will rush it in.

Surely we would be fools if, having understood the logic of this terrible process, we assumed that it might not go on in its glutton’s optimism until it achieves the catastrophe that is its logical end. But let us suppose that a remedy is possible. If so, perhaps the best beginning would be in understanding the falseness and silliness of the economic ideal of competition, which is destructive both of nature and of human nature because it is untrue to both.

There is no limit to the damage and the suffering implicit in this willingness that losers should exist as a normal economic cost.

The danger of the ideal of competition is that it neither proposes nor implies any limits. It proposes simply to lower costs at any cost, and to raise profits at any cost. It does not hesitate at the destruction of the life of a family or the life of a community. It pits neighbor against neighbor as readily as it pits buyer against seller. Every transaction is meant to involve a winner and a loser.

it is a fact that the destruction of life is a part of the daily business of economic competition as now practiced. If one person is willing to take another’s property or to accept another’s ruin as a normal result of economic enterprise, then he is willing to destroy that other person’s life as it is and as it desires to be. That this person’s biological existence has been spared seems merely incidental; it was spared because it was not worth anything. That this person is now ‘free’ to ‘seek retraining and get into another line of work’ signifies only that his life as it was has been destroyed.

unlimited economic competitiveness proposes an unlimited concentration of economic power.

If it is normal for economic activity to divide the community into a class of winners and a class of losers, then the inescapable implication is that the class of winners will become ever smaller, the class of losers ever larger.

And so the colleges of agriculture, entrusted though they are to serve the rural home and rural life, give themselves over to a hysterical rhetoric of ‘change,’ ‘the future,’ ‘the frontiers of modern science,’ ‘competition,’ ‘the competitive edge,’ ‘the cutting edge,’ ‘early adoption,’ and the like, as if there is nothing worth learning from the past and nothing worth preserving in the present.

the idea of the teacher and scholar as a developer of ‘human capital’ and a bestower of economic advantage. The ambition is to make the university an ‘economic resource’ in a competition for wealth and power that is local, national, and global. Of course, all this works directly against the rural home and rural life, because it works directly against community.

One cannot maintain one’s ‘competitive edge’ if one helps other people.

The advantage of ‘early adoption’ would disappear – it would not be thought of – in a community that put a proper value on mutual help.

The strangest of all the doctrines of the cult of competition, in which admittedly there must be losers as well as winners, is that the result of competition is inevitably good for everybody, that altruistic ends may be met by a system without altruistic motives or altruistic means.

Community, however, aspires toward stability. It strives to balance change with constancy. That is why community life places such high value on neighborly love, marital fidelity, local loyalty, the integrity and continuity of family life, respect for the old, and instruction of the young. And a vital community draws its life, so far as possible, from local sources. It prefers to solve its problems, for example, by nonmonetary exchanges of help, not by buying things. A community cannot survive under the rule of competition.

Can a university, or a nation, afford this exclusive rule of competition, this purely economic economy? The great fault of this approach to things is that it is so drastically reductive; it does not permit us to live and work as human beings, as the best of our inheritance defines us. Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.

Thus, if we are sane, we do not dismiss or abandon our infant children or our aged parents because they are too young or too old to work. For human beings, affection is the ultimate motive, because the force that powers us, as Ruskin also said, is not ‘steam, magnetism, or gravitation,’ but ‘a Soul.’