Sex, Economy, Freedom, & Community

by Wendell Berry

[jamiereadthis]

However you must judge me— if you must judge me— for being 100% behind this book, for the unapologetic endorsement of it, by all means. Please do. I ate it up like I was starved for a fat steak dinner.

It’s the subject I’ve been obsessed with: community. (Preoccupied, absorbed, obsessed— none are quite the right word. Maybe wrestling. But I digress.) Community, as in the whole-scale failure of world to protect them, the tattered, battered remnants of the ones that remain. Mr. Berry writes this from the hills of Kentucky, the ground zero of the fight for the tattered and battered, where the wounds of it are so obvious and raw. We’re monstrously out of kilter, he says. Yet, he says: here’s what we can do. And here’s the peace of it too.

Berry says himself in the preamble: if you agree with him completely, “I must suspect one or both of us of dishonesty. I must reserve the right, after all, to disagree with myself.” But I agree, I agree. Even where I think I disagree, I agree. It’s not this revelation that makes me a newly converted proselyte of some dew-eyed order. It’s a dialogue. A conversation. An affirmation of some of the things that have been growling in my stomach and the places where I disagree, it makes me engage with why? instead of dismiss the ideas altogether. There’s muscle here to wrestle back and forth.

Ever-so-fittingly, I read this via Rick Bass. Ever-so-fittingly, it’s Rick Bass quoting Terry Tempest Williams quoting D.H. Lawrence that sums up the conviction here: “This is what is wrong with us. We are bleeding at the roots.” But, again Mr. Berry: “to give up illusory hope is not to be hopeless.” Here’s what to value, to fight for, to fix. Community. It has to be our context for the world.

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July 2013: On second reading, this is a cool glass of water to the face as well as a fat steak dinner. The chapter on tobacco especially hits home, having grown up in tobacco country myself. Berry is the only one I’ve read to wrestle the appropriate amount of complexity in the “moral” argument— and he does that over and over with all the subjects here. I’ve got more of his books to read, but I keep getting drawn back to this one.

From that chapter on tobacco, pointing out the red herring of the tobacco controversy, one of the many pages I keep going back to in the book:

“You’re against addiction, then?”
“I’m against addiction to all things that are dangerous and unnecessary.”
“Like what?”
“Speed, comfort, violence, usury.”