The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry

by Wendell Berry

The first principle of the exploitive mind is to divide and conquer. And surely there has never been a people more ominously and painfully divided than we are – both against each other and within ourselves. Once the revolution of exploitation is under way, statesmanship and craftsmanship are gradually replaced by salesmanship.* Its stock in trade in politics is to sell despotism and avarice as freedom and democracy. In business it sells sham and frustration as luxury and satisfaction. The ‘constantly expanding market’ first opened in the New World by the fur traders is still expanding – no longer so much by expansions of territory or population, but by the calculated outdating, outmoding, and degradation of goods and by the hysterical self-dissatisfaction of consumers that is indigenous to an exploitive economy. This gluttonous enterprise of ugliness, waste, and fraud thrives in the disastrous breach it has helped to make between our bodies and our souls. As a people, we have lost sight of the profound communion – even the union – of the inner with the outer life. Confucius said: ‘If a man have not order within him / He can not spread order about him …’ Surrounded as we are by evidence of the disorders of our souls and our world, we feel the strong truth in those words as well as the possibility of healing that is in them. We see the likelihood that our surroundings, from our clothes to our countryside, are the products of our inward life – our spirit, our vision – as much...