Book Review: Art of the Commonplace, Home Economics, etc.

Although I don't often overtly pick fights, I am a bit of a contrarian, if subtly so. This tendency comes out often when I'm reading nonfiction: "but what about . . . ? ", "Hey, you've forgotten . . . ! " , "No, damn it, that's just wrong."

Imagine my surprise, then, when two or three years ago I plucked a book off a friend's shelf and found myself several chapters in before encountering any ideas I didn't find myself nodding in agreement at. The book was a collection of Wendell Berry's nonfiction essays ("Home Economics"), the ideas I wasn't entirely enthusiastic about no doubt something to do with feminism or marriage. (Which ideas are still unsettled for me, but that's a different topic for a different time.)

Berry writes about land, and he writes about community, and he writes about the relationship between the two. At first, what struck me most about his essays is how grounded they were. With many authors who claim to speak of ethics, I am left with the sense that their theories are too complex for me to really grasp; that they trade in markets too big for me to handle. Berry, on the other hand, quite intentionally limits his writings to lessons he's learned from decades of living on and farming 125 acres in Henry County, Kentucky:

• If you take out more than you put back in, eventually your system will collapse. (Your topsoil will be gone, your local economies will be subsumed by multinational corporations, your old-growth forest will be turned into napkins)
• Rely on external sources of energy and you'll be in trouble when those sources vanish.
• A person who lives and works on a piece of land for a long time, and who gets their livelihood from it, will steward it better than a person who lives far away, a person who controls more land than they can know deeply, or (lord help us) a committee or corporation.
• A person cannot be healthy if they do not live in a healthy community. People eat food, drink water, breathe air; if the food, air, or water is poisoned the people will suffer. If the landbase that provides the food, the water, the air is poisoned, the people (the animals, the community) will be poisoned too.
• If you can't solve small problems, why should you be trusted to solve big ones?
• It is easier to trust in the safety and health of food if you see where it is grown, or help grow it.

These are things that I believe, and things that I can hardly imagine not believing. Things that, to be honest, seem nearly too obvious to even bother saying. Sure, we can argue specifics -- Is he against progress? Does he really want us all to be farmers? Doesn't he realize that the problems are systemic, that they're too big to be solved by one man on 125 acres deciding not to use chemical fertilizers? But cut it down to bare bones and it seems intractable: our society does not steward our land wisely, and as we depend on the land, sooner or later we will come to regret our carelessness.

This simplicity is, in fact, where I start to be astounded.

Because Wendell Berry has been saying this same thing, these things that go without saying, ever eloquently and ever context-aware, since at least 1971:

". . . as a nation we no longer have a future that we can imagine and desire . . . We have become the worshipers and evangelists of a technology and wealth and which surpass the comprehension of most of us, and for which the wisest of us have failed to conceive an aim. And we have become, as a consequence, more dangerous to ourselves and to the world than we are yet able to know." (http://www.wholeearth.com/issue/1160/article/329/wendell.berry)

Let's take a moment to think about that. Seventy-one was fifteen years before I was born. It was before they started teaching global warming in schools. Before Reagan's "morning in America". Before the obesity epidemic. Before Jimmy Carter tried to put solar panels on the White House. Before Al Gore made an Oscar-winning powerpoint about climate change. Before Detroit died. Back when Wal*Mart was only in eight states. Before McDonalds had a drive-thru window.

Berry certainly wasn't the first to speak out against mindless consumption and limitless growth, and he's been joined by more and more authors and activists as eco-everything has come in vogue of late. But he was early, and he's been both persistent and consistent with a bibliography of poetry, novels, and essays over the past forty years.

I'm not sure I could have done it. I would struggle with self-doubt and questioning -- what am I missing, to think so differently from the rest of the world? I'd probably get rather tired of the tediousness of it as well, parenting an America-sized toddler through a four decade tantrum. And the last resort of misplaced motivation, that sense of vindication when one turns out to be right after all, is somewhat less victorious when what one is right about is so terribly destructive. I am thankful to have found somebody writing down the things I think about; it makes me feel a bit less crazy. But it's not a particularly hopeful situation: if nearly half a century of oh-so-patient, oh-so-direct explanations, assignments, sermons, essays, poems, fables, critiques, polemics, discussions, debates, and discourses haven't caught hold, what in the world is there to do next?