Wendell Berry--Thoughts in the
Presence of Fear

The
AGRIBUSINESS EXAMINER
Monitoring Corporate Agribusiness From a Public Interest Perspective
A.V. Krebs Editor\Publisher

Issue #129
October 16, 2001

WENDELL BERRY:
THOUGHTS IN THE PRESENCE OF FEAR

I. The time will soon come when we will not be able to remember the horrors
of September 11 without remembering also the unquestioning technological and
economic optimism that ended on that day.

II. This optimism rested on the proposition that we were living in a "new
world order" and a "new economy" that would "grow" on and on, bringing a
prosperity of which every new increment would be "unprecedented."

III. The dominant politicians, corporate officers, and investors who
believed this proposition did not acknowledge that the prosperity was
limited to a tiny percent of the world's people, and to an ever smaller
number of people even in the United States; that it was founded upon the
oppressive labor of poor people all over the world; and that its
ecological costs increasingly threatened all life, including the lives of
the supposedly prosperous.

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.

V. There was, as a consequence, a growing worldwide effort on behalf of
economic decentralization, economic justice, and ecological responsibility.
We must recognize that the events of September 11 make this effort more
necessary than ever. We citizens of the industrial countries must continue
the labor of self-criticism and self-correction. We must recognize our
mistakes.

VI. The paramount doctrine of the economic and technological euphoria of
recent decades has been that everything depends on innovation. It was
understood as desirable, and even necessary, that we should go on and on
from one technological innovation to the next, which would cause the economy
to "grow" and make everything better and better. This of course implied at
every point a hatred of the past, of all innovations, whatever their value
might have been, were discounted as of no value at all.

VII. We did not anticipate anything like what has now happened. We did not
foresee that all our sequence of innovations might be at once overridden by
a greater one: the invention of a new kind of war that would turn our
previous innovations against us, discovering and exploiting the debits and
the dangers that we had ignored. We never
considered the possibility that we might be trapped in the webwork of
communication and transport that was supposed to make us free.

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.

IX. We had accepted uncritically the belief that technology is only good;
that it cannot serve evil as well as good; that it cannot serve our enemies
as well as ourselves; that it cannot be used to destroy what is good,
including our homelands and our lives.

X. We had accepted too the corollary belief that an economy (either as a
money economy or as a life-support system) that is global in extent,
technologically complex, and centralized is invulnerable to terrorism,
sabotage, or war, and that it is protectable by "national defense."

XI. We now have a clear, inescapable choice that we must make. We can
continue to promote a global economic system of unlimited "free trade" among
corporations, held together by long and highly vulnerable lines of
communication and supply, but now recognizing that such a system will have
to be protected by a hugely expensive police force that will be worldwide,
whether maintained by one nation or several or all, and that
such a police force will be effective precisely to the extent that it
oversways the freedom and privacy of the citizens of every nation.

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.

XIII. One of the gravest dangers to us now, second only to further terrorist
attacks against our people, is that we will attempt to go on as before with
the corporate program of global "free trade," whatever the cost in freedom
and civil rights, without self-questioning or self-criticism or public
debate.

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. It is hard for ordinary citizens to know what is actually happening
in Washington in a time of such great trouble; for we all know, serious and
difficult thought may be taking place there. 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. National self-righteousness, like personal self-righteousness, is a
mistake. It is misleading. It is a sign of weakness. Any war that we may
make now against terrorism will come as a new installment in a history of
war in which we have fully participated. 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.

XVI. It is a mistake also --- as events since September 11 have shown --- to
suppose that a government can promote and participate in a global economy
and at the same time act exclusively in its own interest by abrogating its
international treaties and standing apart from international cooperation on
moral issues.

XVII. And surely, in our country, under our Constitution, it is a
fundamental error to suppose that any crisis or emergency can justify any
form of political oppression. Since September 11, far too many public voices
have presumed to "speak for us" in saying that Americans will gladly accept
a reduction of freedom in exchange for greater "security."
Some would, maybe. But some others would accept a reduction in security (and
in global trade) far more willingly than they would accept any abridgement
of our Constitutional rights.

XVIII. In a time such as this, when we have been seriously and most cruelly
hurt by those who hate us, and when we must consider ourselves to be gravely
threatened by those same people, it is hard to speak of the ways of
peace....

XIX. Even now we dare not forget that since the attack of Pearl Harbor ---
to which the present attack has been often and not usefully compared --- we
humans have suffered an almost uninterrupted sequence of wars, none of which
has brought peace or made us more peaceable.

XX. The aim and result of war necessarily is not peace but victory, and any
victory won by violence necessarily justifies the violence that won it and
leads to further violence. If we are serious about innovation, must we not
conclude that we need something new to replace our perpetual "war to end
war"?

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,
for example, several national military academies, but not one peace academy.

We have ignored the teachings and the examples of Christ, Gandhi, Martin
Luther King, and other peaceable leaders. And here we have an inescapable
duty to notice also that war is profitable, whereas the means of
peaceableness, being cheap or free, make no money.

XXII. The key to peaceableness is continuous practice. It is wrong to
suppose that we can exploit and impoverish the poorer countries, while
arming them and instructing them in the newest means of war, and then
reasonably expect them to be peaceable.

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. We should not countenance the loss or destruction of any
local capacity to produce necessary goods

XXV. We should reconsider and renew and extend our efforts to protect the
natural foundations of the human economy: soil, water, and air. We should
protect every intact ecosystem and watershed that we have left, and begin
restoration of those that have been damaged.

XXVI. The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we
need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly
an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, neither by
job-training nor by industry-subsidized research. It's proper use is to
enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically,
socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or
"accessing" what we now call "information" --- which is to say facts without
context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young
people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more
important than other things; it means putting first
things first.

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. We do need a "new economy," but one that is
founded on thrift and care, on saving and conserving, not on excess and
waste. An economy based on waste is inherently and
hopelessly violent, and war is its inevitable by-product. We need a
peaceable economy.

Wendell Berry is author of The Unsettling of America: Culture and
Agriculture, three novels and several volumes of poetry and essays. He and
his family live and farm in Kentucky.