Sweet Old Wendell

"We are bringing up a generation of young people who feel that they are 'free from worry' about fertility.  The pharmacist or the doctor will look after the fertility of the body, and the farming experts and agribusinessmen will look after the fertility of the earth.  This is to short-circuit human culture at its source.  It is, in effect, to remove from consciousness the two fundamental issues of human life.  It permits two great powers to be regarded and used as if they were unimportant."

-Wendell Berry, from "The Body and the Earth" in The Art of the Commonplace, p 128.

The big difficulty I am coming up against with Wendell Berry is that he is the defender of one particular way of life, and I am the defender of a world in which many ways of life can be recognized as equally good and appropriate.  But this quote makes me wonder if most of those ways of life are actually dependent on a system of relating to the earth that is fundamentally destructive, divisive, alienating.  Everything is possible in the modern world.  You want to make up your own moral system, be my guest.  Sky's the limit!  You want to completely abandon any cultural wisdom you may have inherited and transplant the wisdom of a dozen or so other cultures into the circumstances of your own life?  Why not!  But this is only possible because we as a culture have no shared responsibilities, no real challenges we face, or at least, we do not face those most basic challenges that nearly every society on earth has ever had to face - as Wendell Berry puts it, the issues of fertility.  As he says, the doctors will make your body fertile when you want it to be and sterile when you don't, the scientists will keep making chemicals that will allow our land to yield nourishment, all for a profit and with no thought to the actual costs.  And as a result, you will lose any real understanding of the interrelatedness of everything, and of the limits of natural resources.  So that it starts to seem that we as a world have a responsibility to feed every devastatingly adorable little child on the earth, without a thought to where the food will come from, or what we will do when these full-bellied children start making children of their own.

But I still think there is something to be said for a world in which everything is possible.  Of course there are limits to our resources, but must there be limits to our ideas, to our values?  And isn't it nice?  Isn't it nice that we don't have to worry about these things?  Isn't it nice that we can expand what is meant by a "family," by a "marriage," that these institutions are flexible, that they are endlessly customizable, that we can have domestic dads and working moms and double daddies and so on?  The more important question is - is it possible?  Or will we eventually self-destruct?  Not because gayness and feminism threaten the moral fiber of our society, but because these possibilities are dependent on a cultural forgetting that is ultimately destructive.

It is all theoretical anyway, because we can't just undo industrialization or a money-market economy or the division of labor, and we certainly can't turn everyone into farmers.  I don't think that is what Wendell is proposing, of course, but I don't really know how to apply the things he's talking about without us all just becoming farmers.  There is good and bad with everything.  We can't undo all the problems industrialization has caused, so we might as well reap some of the benefits (e.g. pluralism, iPods) and then find a way to move forward that restores an understanding of our interdependence with the earth and with each other.

I am betting this sounds like a rant from nowhere and probably nonsense.  It is early in the morning and I am reading Wendell Berry.  All of these things are related in his mind, but I am probably not communicating the ways they fit together.  That is fine.  Happy Saturday!