The Unsettling of America

A few days ago, I started reading Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. Excellent book. Berry is a prophet for our time, calling into question a culture which can disconnect and insulate itself from every natural process and which encourages the division of every individual from the community of humanity. His principles and perspectives are exceptionally natural, practical and sensible, but that's what you'd expect from a farmer, and that's what he is.

If you find anything I have to say interesting or provocative then you would do well to read Wendell Berry - many of his perspectives seem like much more intelligent, much more experienced, and much more eloquently expressed versions of my own. Here's an excerpt which presents the general thesis of the book (so far as I've gotten):

The modern urban-industrial society is based on a series of radical disconnections between body and soul, husband and wife, marriage and community, community and the earth. At each of these points of disconnection the collaboration of corporation, government, and expert sets up a profit-making enterprise that results in the further dismemberment and impoverishment of the Creation.

Together, these disconnections add up to a condition of critical ill health, which we suffer in common—not just with each other, but with all other creatures. Our economy is based upon this disease. Its aim is to separate us as far as possible from the sources of life (material, social, and spiritual), to put these sources under the control of corporations and specialized professionals, and to sell them to us at the highest profit. It fragments the Creation and sets the fragments into conflict with one another. For the relief of the suffering that comes of this fragmentation and conflict, our economy proposes, not health, but vast "cures" that further centralize power and increase profits: wars, wars on crime, wars on poverty, national schemes of medical aid, insurance, immunization, further industrial and economic "growth," etc.; and these, of course, are followed by more regulatory laws and agencies to see that our health is protected, our freedom preserved, and our money well spent. Although there may be some "good intention" in this, there is little honesty and no hope. [emphasis mine throughout]

Berry wrote these words in the 1970s, and they are ever more true today. He is no conspiracy theorist, nor is he a ranting alarmist—he simply looks at our society from outside of our time, rejects the metanarrative of progress, and discusses what he sees rationally, point by point.