The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry

by Wendell Berry

The Bible’s aim, as I read it, is not the freeing of the spirit from the world. It is the handbook of their interaction. It says that they cannot be divided; that their mutuality, their unity, is inescapable; that they are not reconciled in division, but in harmony.

The sacrament of sexual union, which in the time of the household was a communion of workmates, and afterward tried to be a lovers’ paradise, has now become a kind of marketplace in which husband and wife represent each other as sexual property. Competitiveness and jealousy, imperfectly sweetened and disguised by the illusions of courtship, now become governing principles, and they work to isolate the couple inside their marriage. Marriage becomes a capsule of sexual fate. The man must look on other men, and the woman on other women, as threats.

Our age could be characterized as a manifold experiment in faithlessness, and if it has as yet produced no effective understanding of the practicalities of faith, it has certainly produced massive evidence of the damage and disorder of its absence.

There is an uncanny resemblance between our behavior toward each other and our behavior toward the earth. Between our relation to our own sexuality and our relation to the reproductivity of the earth, for instance, the resemblance is plain and strong and apparently inescapable. By some connection that we do not recognize, the willingness to exploit one becomes the willingness to exploit the other.

To reduce marriage, as we have done, to a mere contract of sexual exclusiveness is at once to degrade it and to make it impossible. That is to take away its dignity and its potency of joy, and to make it only a pitiful little duty—not a union, but a division and a solitude.

Invariably the failure of organized religions, by which they cut themselves off from mystery and therefore from sanctity, lies in the attempt to impose an absolute division between faith and doubt, to make belief perform as knowledge; when they forbid their prophets to go into the wilderness, they lose the possibility of renewal.

the most dangerous tendency in modern society, now rapidly emerging as a scientific-industrial ambition, is the tendency toward encapsulation of human order—the severance, once and for all, of the umbilical cord fastening us to the wilderness or the Creation. The threat is not only in the totalitarian desire for absolute control. It lies in the willingness to ignore an essential paradox: the natural forces that so threaten us are the same forces that preserve and renew us.

Where there is no possibility of choice, there is no possibility of faith.

To last, love must enflesh itself in the materiality of the world—produce food, shelter, warmth or shade, surround itself with careful acts, well-made things.

maintenance of connections—as one is now said to work “for a living” or “to support

In our industrial society, in which people insist so fervently on their value and their freedom “as individuals,” individuals are seen more and more as “units” by their governments, employers, and suppliers. They live, that is, under the rule of the interchangeability of parts: what one person can do, another person can do just as well or a newer person can do better. Separate from the relationships, there is nobody to be known; people become, as they say and feel, nobodies.

Why should rest and food and ecological health not be the basic principles of our art and science of healing? Is it because the basic principles already are technology and drugs? Are we confronting some fundamental incompatibility between mechanical efficiency and organic health?

Industrial economics has always believed this: abundance justifies waste.

Much of the modern assault on community life has been conducted within the justification and protection of the idea of freedom.

The idea of freedom, as Americans understand it, owes its existence to the inevitability that people will disagree. It is a way of guaranteeing to individuals and to political bodies the right to be different from one another.

A community, when it is alive and well, is centered on the household—the family place and economy—and the household is centered on marriage.

The individual, unlike the household and the community, always has two ways to turn: she or he may turn either toward the household and the community, to receive membership and to give service, or toward the relatively unconditional life of the public, in which one is free to pursue self-realization, self-aggrandizement, self-interest, self-fulfillment, self-enrichment, self-promotion, and so on. The problem is that—unlike a married couple, a household, or a community—one individual represents no fecundity, no continuity, and no harmony. The individual life implies no standard of behavior or responsibility.

Freedom defined strictly as individual freedom tends to see itself as an escape from the constraints of community life—constraints necessarily implied by consideration for the nature of a place; by consideration for the needs and feelings of neighbors; by kindness to strangers; by respect for the privacy, dignity, and propriety of individual lives; by affection for a place, its people, and its nonhuman creatures; and by the duty to teach the young.

People are instructed to free themselves of all restrictions, restraints, and scruples in order to fulfill themselves as individuals to the utmost extent that the law allows.

But there is a paradox in all this, and it is as cruel as it is obvious: as the emphasis on individual liberty has increased, the liberty and power of most individuals has declined. Most people are now finding that they are free to make very few significant choices. It is becoming steadily harder for ordinary people—the unrich, the unprivileged—to choose a kind of work for which they have a preference, a talent, or a vocation, to choose where they will live, to choose to work (or to live) at home, or even to choose to raise their own children. And most individuals (“liberated” or not) choose to conform not to local ways and conditions but to a rootless and placeless monoculture of commercial expectations and products. We try to be “emotionally self-sufficient” at the same time that we are entirely and helplessly dependent for our “happiness” on an economy that abuses us along with everything else. We want the liberty of divorce from spouses and independence from family and friends, yet we remain indissolubly married to a hundred corporations that regard us at best as captives and at worst as prey. The net result of our much-asserted individualism appears to be that we have become “free” for the sake of not much self-fulfillment at all.

if you are dependent on people who do not know you, who control the value of your necessities, you are not free, and you are not safe.

I know that for a century or so many artists and writers have felt it was their duty—a mark of their honesty and courage—to offend their audience. But if the artist has a duty to offend, does not the audience therefore have a duty to be offended? If the public has a duty to protect speech that is offensive to the community, does not the community have the duty to respond, to be offended, and so defend itself against the offense? A community, as a part of a public, has no right to silence publicly protected speech, but it certainly has a right not to listen and to refuse its patronage to speech that it finds offensive. It is remarkable, however, that many writers and artists appear to be unable to accept this obvious and necessary limitation on their public freedom; they seem to think that freedom entitles them not only to be offensive but also to be approved and subsidized by the people whom they have offended.

A public is shockable or offendable only to the extent that it is already uncomplacent and uncorrupt—to the extent, in other words, that it is a community or remembers being one. What happens after the audience becomes used to being shocked and is therefore no longer shockable—as is apparently near to being the case with the television audience? What if offenses become stimulants—either to imitate the offenses or to avenge them?

The trouble with the various movements of rights and liberties that have passed among us in the last thirty years is that they have all been too exclusive and so have degenerated too readily into special pleading. They have, separately, asked us to stop exploiting racial minorities or women or nature, and they have been, separately, right to do so. But they have not, separately or together, come to the realization that we live in a society that exploits, first, everything that is not ourselves and then, inevitably, ourselves. To ask, within this general onslaught, that we should honor the dignity of this or that group is to ask that we should swim up a waterfall.

Always the assumption is that we can first set demons at large, and then, somehow, become smart enough to control them.

The evidence is overwhelming that knowledge does not solve “the human problem.” Indeed, the evidence overwhelmingly suggests—with Genesis—that knowledge is the problem.

The good worker will not suppose that good work can be made properly answerable to haste, urgency, or even emergency. But the good worker knows too that after it is done work requires yet more time to prove its worth.

It is the properly humbled mind in its proper place that sees truly, because—to give only one reason—it sees details.

a culture must be either shapely and saving or shapeless and destructive.

We have exchanged harmony for an interminable fuss, and the work of culture for the timed and harried labor of an industrial economy.

If we want to succeed in our dearest aims and hopes as a people, we must understand that we cannot proceed any further without standards, and we must see that ultimately the standards are not set by us but by nature.

The federal government could do much to help, if it would. Its mere acknowledgment that problems exist would be a promising start.

To push our work beyond that point, invading the Great Economy, is to become guilty of hubris, of presuming to be greater than we are.

What is to be the fate of self-control in an economy that encourages and rewards unlimited selfishness?

The problem seems to be that a human economy cannot prescribe the terms of its own success.

In a time when we wish to believe that humans are the sole authors of the truth, that truth is relative, and that value judgments are all subjective, it is hard to say that a human economy can be wrong, and yet we have good, sound, practical reasons for saying so.

It is only when we think of the little human economy in relation to the Great Economy that we begin to understand our errors for what they are and to see the qualitative meanings of our quantitative measures.

If we see the industrial economy in terms of the Great Economy, then we begin to see industrial wastes and losses not as “trade-offs” or “necessary risks” but as costs that, like all costs, are chargeable to somebody, sometime.

We have assumed increasingly over the last five hundred years that nature is merely a supply of “raw materials,” and that we may safely possess those materials merely by taking them.

The “environmental crisis,” in fact, can be solved only if people, individually and in their communities, recover responsibility for their thoughtlessly given proxies.

But the “free market” idea introduces into government a sanction of an inequality that is not implicit in any idea of democratic liberty: namely that the “free market” is freest to those who have the most money, and is not free at all to those with little or no money.

Perhaps most of us who know local histories of agriculture know of fields that in hard times have been sacrificed to save a farm, and we know that though such a thing is possible it is dangerous. The danger is worse when top-soil is sacrificed for the sake of a crop.

If, like the strip miners and the “agribusinessmen,” we look on all the world as fuel or as extractable energy, we can do nothing but destroy it. The issue is restraint.

The Creator’s love for the Creation is mysterious precisely because it does not conform to human purposes.

The divine mandate to use the world justly and charitably, then, defines every person’s moral predicament as that of a steward. But this predicament is hopeless and meaningless unless it produces an appropriate discipline: stewardship.

To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration.

the culpability of Christianity in the destruction of the natural world and the uselessness of Christianity in any effort to correct that destruction are now established clichés of the conservation movement.

We have the right to use the gifts of nature but not to ruin or waste them.

Religion, according to this view, is less to be celebrated in rituals than practiced in the world.

I don’t think it is enough appreciated how much an outdoor book the Bible is.