The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry

by Wendell Berry

If public education is to have any meaning or value at all, then public education must be supplemented by home education.

Children, no matter how nurtured at home, must be risked to the world.

If we make our house a household instead of a motel, provide healthy nourishment for mind and body, enforce moral distinctions and restraints, teach essential skills and disciplines and require their use, there is no certainty that we are providing our children a ‘better life’ that they will embrace wholeheartedly during childhood. But we are providing them a choice that they may make intelligently as adults.

This is individualism of a kind rugged enough, and it has been authenticated typically by its identification with a communal good.

The tragic version of rugged individualism is in the presumptive ‘right’ of individuals to do as they please, as if there were no God, no legitimate government, no community, no neighbors, and no posterity.

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 the United States’ become instead the representatives and defenders of the corporations.

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.

Conservative individualism strongly supports ‘family values’ and abominates lust. But it does not dissociate itself from the profits accruing from the exercise of lust (and, in fact, of the other six deadly sins), which it encourages in its advertisements. The ‘conservatives’ of our day understand pride, lust, envy, anger, covetousness, gluttony, and sloth as virtues when they lead to profit or to political power. Only as unprofitable or unauthorized personal indulgences do they rank as sins, imperiling salvation of the soul, family values, and national security. Liberal individualism, on the contrary, understands sin as a private matter. It strongly supports protecting ‘the environment,’ which is that part of the world which surrounds, at a safe distance, the privately owned body. ‘The environment’ does not include the economic landscapes of agriculture and forestry or their human communities, and it does not include the privately owned bodies of other people – all of which appear to have been bequeathed in fee simple to the corporate individualists.

‘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.

It seems that we have been reduced almost to a state of absolute economics, in which people and all other creatures and things may be considered purely as economic ‘units,’ or integers of production, and in which a human being may be dealt with, as John Ruskin put it, ‘merely as a covetous machine.’†

The ideal of competition always implies, and in fact requires, that any community must be divided into a class of winners and a class of losers. This division is radically different from other social divisions: that of the more able and the less able, or that of the richer and the poorer, or even that of the rulers and the ruled. These latter divisions have existed throughout history and at times, at least, have been ameliorated by social and religious ideals that instructed the strong to help the weak. As a purely economic ideal, competition does not contain or imply any such instructions. In fact, the defenders of the ideal of competition have never known what to do with or for the losers. The losers simply accumulate in human dumps, like stores of industrial waste, until they gain enough misery and strength to overpower the winners.

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. And for this reason the human economy is pitted without limit against nature.

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.

The idea of the teacher and scholar as one called upon to preserve and pass on a common cultural and natural birthright has been almost entirely replaced by the idea of the teacher and scholar as a developer of ‘human capital’ and a bestower of economic advantage.

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.

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.

The affections, John Ruskin said, are ‘an anomalous force, rendering every one of the ordinary political economist’s calculations nugatory; while, even if he desired to introduce this new element into his estimates, he has no power of dealing with it; for the affections only become a true motive power when they ignore every other motive power and condition of political economy.’ 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.’

We know from childhood that winning is fun. But we probably begin to grow up when we begin to sympathize with the loser – that is, when we begin to understand that competition involves costs as well as benefits.

But a victory over community or nature can be won only at everybody’s cost.

‘This curious world we inhabit is more wonderful than convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used.’

It may be argued that our whole society is more devoted to pleasure than any whole society ever was in the past, that we support in fact a great variety of pleasure industries and that these are thriving as never before. But that would seem only to prove my point. That there can be pleasure industries at all, exploiting our apparently limitless inability to be pleased, can only mean that our economy is divorced from pleasure and that pleasure is gone from our workplaces and our dwelling places.

More and more, we take for granted that work must be destitute of pleasure. More and more, we assume that if we want to be pleased we must wait until evening, or the weekend, or vacation, or retirement. More and more, our farms and forests resemble our factories and offices, which in turn more and more resemble prisons

When I try to identify myself to myself I realize that, in my most immediate reasons and affections, I am less than an American, less than a Kentuckian, less even than a Henry Countian, but am a man most involved with and concerned about my family, my neighbors, and the land that is daily under my feet.

People in movements too readily learn to deny to others the rights and privileges they demand for themselves.

Parents who grow hysterical at the thought that their son might not cut his hair are glad to have him taught, and later employed, to lie about the quality of an automobile or the ability of a candidate.

‘Read not the Times. Read the Eternities,’ Thoreau said.

The highest moral behavior is not obedience to law, but obedience to the informed conscience even in spite of law.

Slowly America wakens to the tragedy of her history, the unquieted ghosts of her martyrs brooding over her in the night, her forfeited visions, the plundered and desecrated maidenhood of her lands and forests and rivers.

There is, as Thoreau said, a great shame in going free while good men are in jail because of their goodness.

To be a peaceable man is to be the hope of the world.

Until we end our violence against the earth – a matter ignored by most pacifists, as the issue of military violence is ignored by most conservationists – how can we hope to end our violence against each other?

To corrupt or destroy the natural environment is an act of violence not only against the earth but also against those who are dependent on it, including ourselves.

If one deplores the destructiveness and wastefulness of the economy, then one is under an obligation to live as far out on the margin of the economy as one is able: to be economically independent of exploitive industries, to learn to need less, to waste less, to make things last, to give up meaningless luxuries, to understand and resist the language of salesmen and public relations experts, to see through attractive packages, to refuse to purchase fashion or glamour or prestige.

If conservationists hope to save even the wild lands and wild creatures, they are going to have to address issues of economy, which is to say issues of the health of the landscapes and the towns and cities where we do our work, and the quality of that work, and the well-being of the people who do the work.

Sooner or later, governments will have to recognize that if the land does not prosper, nothing else can prosper for very long.

If we believe, as so many of us profess to do, that the Earth is God’s property and is full of His glory, how can we do harm to any part of it?

For the sake of ‘job creation’ in Kentucky, and in other backward states, we have lavished public money on corporations that come in and stay only so long as they can exploit people here more cheaply than elsewhere. The general purpose of the present economy is to exploit, not to foster or conserve.

It is commonly understood that governments are instituted to provide certain protections that citizens individually cannot provide for themselves. But governments have tended to assume that this responsibility can be fulfilled mainly by the police and the military services.

Acts of economic aggression can destroy a landscape or a community or the center of a town or city, and they routinely do so.

There are such things as economic weapons of massive destruction. We have allowed them to be used against us, not just by public submission and regulatory malfeasance, but also by public subsidies, incentives, and sufferances impossible to justify.

As the poor deserve as much justice from our courts as the rich, so the small farmer and the small merchant deserve the same economic justice, the same freedom in the market, as big farmers and chain stores. They should not suffer ruin merely because their rich competitors can afford (for a while) to undersell them.

We need to build the local economies of our communities and regions by adding value to local products and marketing them locally before we seek markets elsewhere.

I bid you to a one-man revolution – The only revolution that is coming.

The men of old wanting to clarify and diffuse throughout the empire that light which comes from looking straight into the heart and then acting, first set up good government in their own states; wanting good government in their states, they first established order in their own families; wanting order in the home, they first disciplined themselves; desiring self-discipline, they rectified their own hearts; and wanting to rectify their hearts, they sought precise verbal definitions of their inarticulate thoughts [the tones given off by the heart]; wishing to attain precise verbal definitions, they set to extend their knowledge to the utmost.

the ability to change oneself is the first fact of hope, then the second surely must be an honest assessment of the badness of our situation.

I think the great problems call for many small solutions.

Scientists and artists must understand that they can honor their gifts and fulfill their obligations only by living and working as human beings and community members rather than as specialists.

we must give up the notion that we are too good to do our own work and clean up our own messes. It is not acceptable for this work to be done for us by wage slavery or by enslaving nature.

Eternity is always present in the animal mind; only men deal in beginnings and ends.