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Overview
From the war in Iraq to Hurricane Katrina to the political sniping engendered by Supreme Court nominations—contemporary American society is characterized by divisive anger, profound loss, and danger. Wendell Berry, “the prophet of rural America” (New York Times) and one of the country’s foremost cultural critics, responds with hope and intelligence in a series of essays that tackle the major questions of the day. Whose freedom are we considering when we speak of the free market or free enterprise? What is really involved in our national security? What is the price of ownership without affection? Berry answers in prose that shuns abstraction for clarity, coherence, and passion, giving us essays that may be the finest of his long career. “Everything in the book illumines.” —Booklist
“[Berry’s] poems, novels and essays . . . are probably the most sustained contemporary articulation of America’s agrarian, Jeffersonian ideal.” —Publishers Weekly
“Wendell Berry is one of those rare individuals who speaks to us always of responsibility, of the individual cultivation of an active and aware participation in the arts of life.” —The Bloomsbury Review
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781582439297 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Catapult |
| Publication date: | 08/10/2006 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Random House Publisher Services |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 520 KB |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Secrecy vs. Rights
ON JANUARY 12, 2004, according to David Stout of the New York Times, the Supreme Court refused to reconsider a lower court's ruling "that the Justice Department was within its rights in refusing to identify more than 700 people, most of those Arabs or Muslims, arrested for immigration violations in connection with the attacks" of September 11, 2001. Mr. Stout usefully reduced the case to its gist by writing that it "pitted two fundamental values against each other — the right of the public to know details of how its government operates and the government's need to keep some information secret to protect national security."
The Supreme Court thus decided, in effect, to support the Justice Department's policy of holding prisoners in secret for the sake of national security, but it did not resolve the conflict between "the right of the public to know" and "the government's need" for secrecy.
The first thing we notice, of course, is that secret imprisonment necessarily denies to the prisoner any semblance of due process. But more is involved than that, and I want to try to say what more is involved.
The rights of the people are openly declared (not granted, but affirmed) in the founding documents of our nation. These rights were not understood as given, and therefore retractable, by the government at its discretion; they were understood, rather, as entitlements originating in "the laws of nature and of nature's God." The government's need for secrecy, by contrast, is a need that can be defined only by the government, and only in secret.
A government's wish to rule in secret on its own initiative and authority is perfectly understandable; this is a merely human weakness. Of course government officials would like to keep some information secret for reasons of national security, as well as for many other reasons that may readily be imagined. It is nevertheless true that a government's wish to govern in secret is the same as the wish to govern tyrannically, as we are shown by the secret imprisonment of the seven hundred.
Perhaps it is always the tendency of those in power to wish to rule autocratically, and this is what our founders feared and provided against. Aside from any issue of faith or theory, there is a practical reason for ascribing human rights to "the laws of nature and of nature's God." Rights that originate beyond and above governmental power cannot justly be abridged or revoked by a government.
In the United States the major political dialogue has been about rights: Can the fundamental human rights, set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as belonging equally to all, be justifiably withheld from some? Over the course of our history until now, we have decided that they cannot be. We have not decided this without reason. The most persuasive argument of the Civil Rights Movement, for example, was that you cannot withhold civil rights from some people and still confidently guarantee the same rights to others; the denial turned against one group at one time can, at another time, be turned against another group. Injustices condoned against a native racial minority may with the same impunity be used against Arab and Muslim immigrants, or against dissident white protestants. Governments, the Declaration says, derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed." If the governed accept or allow a government that is arbitrary, self-authorized, and self-justified, then, whatever may be the fate of national security, mere citizens will no longer be secure in their rights.
There is no reason, now or ever, to make light of what we are now calling "national security." People want, naturally enough, "to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects," not only against "unreasonable searches and seizures," but also against violence, whether domestic or foreign in origin. That is why we threw off the arbitrary rule of England and instituted a government of our own; we wished to be secure, which is to say that we wished not to be governed except by our own consent.
We may say then that national security has been our concern from the beginning, and that from the beginning the designated purpose of the nation was to secure the rights to which its citizens individually were entitled by the laws of nature and of nature's God. The two kinds of security were understood as one. If the security of the nation ceases to imply the security of all its inhabitants in their God-given rights, then, according to the Declaration of Independence, that nation's government will have delegitimized itself and should be replaced. That is not the wild idea of somebody in the current crop of left-wingers or right-wingers, but merely what the Declaration says, and we have been living with it unobjectingly for going on 228 years.
People's wish to be safe is undoubtedly one of the paramount concerns of politics and government. We want to be safe because we have perceived accurately that we live under threat of many dangers. We expect, rightly, that the government should give us reasonable protections against at least some of those dangers, especially the ones against which we can only be protected collectively. And we have to reckon with the likelihood of circumstances in which these protections may be supplied only selectively and incompletely.
The Bill of Rights was written in anticipation both of the tendency of government to usurp the rights of individuals and of circumstances in which those rights will be hard to preserve. It would always be reasonable to foresee times of stress between the government's obligation to safeguard the lives of people and its obligation to respect their rights. This is the reason for appending a Bill of Rights to the Constitution.
However, the Bill of Rights insists that the rights of individual persons must be unfailingly respected in all circumstances excepting only one, which is set forth in Article V: "No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger ..." This exception is made, apparently, to validate military courts. But Article V expressly disdains to limit its application merely to citizens; it says "No person," not "No citizen." And having stated the exception, it returns promptly to the inclusive language it began with: "nor shall any person ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law ..."
It is clear, then, that secret imprisonment by the government of any person, citizen or immigrant or alien or enemy, is necessarily a denial of due process of law, insofar as no person can at the same time be secretly imprisoned and publicly tried. (We now have only the government's word that the number of prisoners is, or was, seven hundred.)
A further point is somewhat harder to state, but I think it is no less obvious. Terrorism, against which the government without formally declaring war says we are "at war," at the same time that it seeks to circumvent the legal conventions of war, has certainly precipitated a time of public danger. How badly frightened the general public may be by this state of affairs is a question hard to answer. But the federal government and the courts have given evidence that they, as the terrorists intended, are badly frightened. They are so badly frightened as to believe that they have no choice but to sacrifice the rights of persons in deference to the government's need for secrecy. But it is an error to believe that these two "fundamental values" can somehow be justly "balanced" by the government or the courts, or that the people can judge responsibly between their rights, which they can easily know, and a proclaimed "need," which the government so far forbids them to know. The Constitution, anyhow, does not provide for its own suspension by the fearful in a time of war and public danger.
(2004)
CHAPTER 2Contempt for Small Places
NEWSPAPER EDITORIALS deplore such human-caused degradations of the oceans as the Gulf of Mexico's "dead zone," and reporters describe practices like "mountain removal" mining in eastern Kentucky. Some day we may finally understand the connections.
The health of the oceans depends on the health of rivers; the health of rivers depends on the health of small streams; the health of small streams depends on the health of their watersheds. The health of the water is exactly the same as the health of the land; the health of small places is exactly the same as the health of large places. As we know, disease is hard to confine. Because natural law is in force everywhere, infections move.
We cannot immunize the continents and the oceans against our contempt for small places and small streams. Small destructions add up, and finally they are understood collectively as large destructions. Excessive nutrient runoff from farms and animal factories in the Mississippi watershed has caused, in the Gulf of Mexico, a hypoxic or "dead" zone of five or six thousand square miles. In forty-odd years, strip mining in the Appalachian coal fields, culminating in mountain removal, has gone far toward the destruction of a whole region, with untold damage to the region's people, to watersheds, and to the waters downstream.
There is not a more exemplary history of our contempt for small places than that of Eastern Kentucky coal mining, which has enriched many absentee corporate shareholders and left the region impoverished and defaced. Coal industry representatives are now defending mountain removal — and its attendant damage to forests, streams, wells, dwellings, roads, and community life — by saying that in "10, 15, 20 years" the land will be restored, and that such mining has "created the [level] land" needed for further industrial development.
But when you remove a mountain you also remove the topsoil and the forest, and you do immeasurable violence to the ecosystem and the watershed. These things are not to be restored in ten or twenty years, or in ten or twenty hundred years. As for the manufacture of level places for industrial development, the supply has already far exceeded any foreseeable demand. And the devastation continues.
The contradictions in the state's effort "to balance the competing interests" were stated as follows by Ewell Balltrip, director of the Kentucky Appalachian Commission: "If you don't have mining, you don't have an economy, and if you don't have an economy you don't have a way for the people to live. But if you don't have environmental quality, you won't create the kind of place where people want to live."
Yes. And if the clearly foreseeable result is a region of flat industrial sites where nobody wants to live, we need a better economy.
(2004)
CHAPTER 3Rugged Individualism
THE CAREER OF RUGGED INDIVIDUALISM in America has run mostly to absurdity, tragic or comic. But it also has done us a certain amount of good. There was a streak of it in Thoreau, who went alone to jail in protest against the Mexican War. And that streak has continued in his successors who have suffered penalties for civil disobedience because of their perception that the law and the government were not always or necessarily right. 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. This is most frequently understood as the right to do whatever one pleases with one's property. One's property, according to this formulation, is one's own absolutely.
Rugged individualism of this kind has cost us dearly in lost topsoil, in destroyed forests, in the increasing toxicity of the world, and in annihilated species. 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.
It has become ever more clear that this sort of individualism has never proposed or implied any protection of the rights of all individuals, but instead has promoted a ferocious scramble in which more and more of the rights of "the people" have been gathered into the ownership of fewer and fewer of the greediest and most powerful "persons."
I have described so far what most of us would identify as the rugged individualism of the political right. Now let us have a look at the left. 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. This supposed right is manifested in the democratizing of "sexual liberation"; in the popular assumption that marriage has been "privatized" and so made subordinate to the wishes of individuals; in the proposition that the individual is "autonomous"; in the legitimation of abortion as birth control — in the denial, that is to say, that the community, the family, one's spouse, or even one's own soul might exercise a legitimate proprietary interest in the use one makes of one's body. And this too is tragic, for it sets us "free" from responsibility and thus from the possibility of meaning. It makes unintelligible the self-sacrifice that sent Thoreau to jail.
The comedy begins when these two rugged (or "autonomous") individualisms confront each other. 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.
Conservative rugged individualists and liberal rugged individualists believe alike that they should be "free" to get as much as they can of whatever they want. Their major doctrinal difference is that they want (some of the time) different sorts of things.
"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 care-taking, faith-keeping, kindness, neighborliness, and peace. That language is another precious resource that cannot be "privatized."
(2004)
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Way of Ignorance"
by .
Copyright © 2005 Wendell Berry.
Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
| Preface | ix | |
| Part I | ||
| Secrecy vs. Rights | 3 | |
| Contempt for Small Places | 7 | |
| Rugged Individualism | 9 | |
| We Have Begun | 13 | |
| Some Notes for the Kerry Campaign, If Wanted | 17 | |
| Compromise, Hell! | 21 | |
| Charlie Fisher | 29 | |
| Part II | ||
| Imagination in Place | 39 | |
| The Way of Ignorance | 53 | |
| The Purpose of a Coherent Community | 69 | |
| Quantity vs. Form | 81 | |
| Renewing Husbandry | 91 | |
| Agriculture from the Roots Up | 105 | |
| Local Knowledge in the Age of Information | 113 | |
| The Burden of the Gospels | 127 | |
| Part III | ||
| Letter to Daniel Kemmis | 141 | |
| Daniel Kemmis Replies | 151 | |
| The Working Wilderness: A Call for a Land Health Movement, by Courtney White | 159 |