Wendell Continued

He's blowing me away.

"The social and cultural pluralism that some now see as a goal is a public of destroyed communities...The modern industrial urban centers are 'pluralistic' because they are full of refugees from destroyed communities, destroyed community economies, disintegrated local cultures, and ruined local ecosystems...[Advocates of pluralism] wish to regard liberally and tolerantly the diverse, sometimes competing claims and complaints of a rootless society, and yet they continue to tolerate also the ideals and goals of the industrialism that caused the uprooting.  They affirm the pluralism of a society formed by the uprooting of cultures at the same time that they regard the fierce self-defense of still-rooted cultures as 'fundamentalism,' for which they have no tolerance at all...The tolerance of this sort of pluralism extends always to the uprooted and passive, never to the rooted and active.

"...A culture capable of preserving land and people can be made only within a relatively stable and enduring relationship between a local people and its place.  Community cultures made in this way would necessarily differ, and sometimes radically so, from one place to another, because places differ.  This is the true and necessary pluralism."

-Wendell Berry, in "Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community," The Art of the Commonplace, pp 178-180