Thoughts in the Presence of Fear

I recently learned about this essay by Wendell Berry available on Orion magazine's website. It is also one of three essays in his book In the Presence of Fear and Citizenship Papers which I will be reading posthaste. It is an incredibly thoughtful and prescient essay of 27 points regarding technology, the economy, the environment, education, politics, culture, society, and a way of life. I highly encourage everyone to read it in its entirety. Nevertheless, here are some highlights:

IV: The “developed” nations had given to the “free market” the status of a god, and were sacrificing to it their farmers, farmlands, and communities, their forests, wetlands, and prairies, their ecosystems and watersheds. They had accepted universal pollution and global warming as normal costs of doing business.

VIII: Nor did we foresee that the weaponry and the war science that we marketed and taught to the world would become available, not just to recognized national governments, which possess so uncannily the power to legitimate large-scale violence, but also to “rogue nations”, dissident or fanatical groups and individuals - whose violence, though never worse than that of nations, is judged by the nations to be illegitimate.

XII: Or we can promote a decentralized world economy which would have the aim of assuring to every nation and region a local self-sufficiency in life-supporting goods. This would not eliminate international trade, but it would tend toward a trade in surpluses after local needs had been met.

XIV: This is why the substitution of rhetoric for thought, always a temptation in a national crisis, must be resisted by officials and citizens alike. . . . But the talk that we are hearing from politicians, bureaucrats, and commentators has so far tended to reduce the complex problems now facing us to issues of unity, security, normality, and retaliation.

XV: We are not innocent of making war against civilian populations. The modern doctrine of such warfare was set forth and enacted by General William Tecumseh Sherman, who held that a civilian population could be declared guilty and rightly subjected to military punishment. We have never repudiated that doctrine.

XXI: What leads to peace is not violence but peaceableness, which is not passivity, but an alert, informed, practiced, and active state of being. We should recognize that while we have extravagantly subsidized the means of war, we have almost totally neglected the ways of peaceableness. . . . We have ignored the teachings and the examples of Christ, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and other peaceable leaders.

XXIII: We must not again allow public emotion or the public media to caricature our enemies. If our enemies are now to be some nations of Islam, then we should undertake to know those enemies. Our schools should begin to teach the histories, cultures, arts, and language of the Islamic nations. And our leaders should have the humility and the wisdom to ask the reasons some of those people have for hating us.

XXIV: Starting with the economies of food and farming, we should promote at home, and encourage abroad, the ideal of local self-sufficiency. We should recognize that this is the surest, the safest, and the cheapest way for the world to live.

XXV: We should reconsider and renew and extend our efforts to protect the natural foundations of the human economy: soil, water, and air.

XXVI: Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. Its proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible.

XXVII: The first thing we must begin to teach our children (and learn ourselves) is that we cannot spend and consume endlessly. We have got to learn to save and conserve. . . . An economy based on waste is inherently and hopelessly violent, and war is its inevitable by-product. We need a peaceable economy.