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What Matters?. Wendell Berry
Читать онлайн.Название What Matters?
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isbn 9781582436708
Автор произведения Wendell Berry
Жанр Экономика
Издательство Ingram
But that rule appears to be honored entirely in the breach. There are still a good many people who choose or accept a vocation that will not make them rich—many teachers, for instance, and most writers. But for the greedy there appears to be no such concept as greedy enough. The greedy consume the poor, the moderately prosperous, and each other with the same relish and with an ever-growing appetite.
Part two of Mr. Safire’s error is his assumption that we can restrict the honor of virtuehood to greed alone, leaving the other sins to pine away in customary disfavor: “I hold no brief,” he said, “for Anger, Envy, Lust, Gluttony, Pride . . . or Sloth.” But he was already too late. A glance at magazine advertising in 1986 would have suggested that these sins had been virtues of commerce long enough already to be taken for granted. As we have sometimes been told, the sins, like the virtues, are inclined to enjoy one another’s company.
Mr. Safire’s announcement was not a moral innovation, but rather a confession of the depravity of what in 1986 we were calling, and are still calling, “the economy”—a ramshackle, propped-up, greed-enforced anti-economy that is delusional, vicious, wasteful, destructive, hard-hearted, and so fundamentally dishonest as to have resorted finally to “trading” in various pure-nothings. Might it not have been better and safer to have assumed that there is no partition between economy and morality, that the test of both is practicality, and that morality is long-term practicality?
The problem with “the economy” is not only that it is anti-economic, destructive of the natural and human bases of any authentic economy, but that it has been out of control for a long time. At the root of our problem, we now need to suppose, is industrialism and the Industrial Revolution itself. As the original Luddites saw clearly and rightly, the purpose of industrialism from the first has been to replace human workers with machines. This has been justified and made unquestionable by the axiom that machines, according to standards strictly mechanical, work more efficiently and cheaply than people. They answer directly the perpetual need of the greedy to get more for less. This is yet another of our limitless “progressive” ideas: The industrial academics or academic industrialists who subserve the technological cutting edge are now nominating robots as substitutes for parents, nurses, and surgeons. Soon, surely, we will have robots that can worship and make love faster and cheaper than we mere humans, who have been encumbered in those activities by flesh and blood and our old-fashioned ways.
But to replace people by machines is to raise a difficult, and I would say an urgent, question: What are the replaced people to do? Or, since this is a question not all replaced people have been able to answer satisfactorily for themselves, What is to be done with or for them? This question has never received an honest answer from either liberals or conservatives, communists or capitalists. Replaced people have entered into a condition officially euphemized as “mobility.” If you have left your farm or your country town and found a well-paying city job or entered a profession, then you are said to have been “upwardly mobile.” If you have left the country for the city with visions of bright lights and more money, or if you have gone to the city because you have been replaced as a farm worker by machines and you have no other place to go and you end up homeless or living in a slum without a job, then I suppose you are downwardly mobile—but this is still “progress,” for at least you have been relieved of “the idiocy of rural life” or the “mind-numbing work” of agriculture.
When replacement leads to “mobility” or displacement, and displacement leads to joblessness or homelessness, then we have a problem as characteristic of the industrialized world as land waste and pollution. To this problem the two political sides have produced nonsolutions that are hopeless and more cynical (I hope) than many of their advocates realize: versions of “Get a job,” job training, job retraining, “better” education, job creation, and “safety nets” such as welfare, Social Security, varieties of insurance, retirement funds, etc. All of these “solutions,” along with joblessness itself, serve the purposes of an economy of bubbling money. And every one of them fails to address the problem of “mobility,” which is to say a whole society that is socially and economically unstable. In this state of perpetual mobility, even the most lucratively employed are likely to be homeless, if “home” means anything at all, for they are endlessly moving at the dictates of their careers or at the whims of their employers.
To escape the cynicism, heartlessness, and damage implicit in all this mobility, it is necessary to ask another question: Might it not have been that these replaced and displaced people were needed in the places from which they were displaced? I don’t mean to suggest that this is a question easily answered, or that anybody should be required to stay put. I do mean that the question ought to be asked. It ought to be asked if only because it calls up another question that might lead to actual thinking: By what standard, or from what point of view, are we permitted to suppose that the displaced people were not needed in their original places? According to the industrial standard and point of view, persons are needed only when they perform a service valuable to an employer. When a machine can perform the same service, a person then is not needed.
Not-needed persons must graduate into mobility, which will take them elsewhere to a job newly vacated or “created,” or to job training, or to some safety net, or to netlessness, joblessness, and homelessness. But this version of “not-needed” fits uncomfortably into the cultural pattern by which we define ourselves as civilized or humane or human. It grates achingly against the political and religious traditions that have affirmed for us the inherent worth and even preciousness of individual people. Our mobility, whether enforced or fashionable, has dismembered and scattered families and communities. Politicians and opinion dealers from far left to far right predictably and loudly regret these disintegrations, prescribing for them (in addition to the “solutions” already mentioned) year-round schools, day care, expert counseling, drugs, and prisons.
And so: Might it not be that the displaced persons were needed by their families and their neighbors, not only for their economic assistance to the home place and household, but for their love and understanding, for their help and comfort in times of trouble? Of the Americans known to me, only the Amish have dealt with such questions openly and conscientiously as families, neighbors, and communities. The Amish are Amish by choice. There is no requirement either to subscribe to the religion or to stay in the community. The Amish have their losses and their failures, as one would expect. Lately some of their communities have become involved in the failure of the larger economy. But their families and communities nevertheless have been held together by principle and by the deliberate rejection of economic and technological innovations that threaten them. With the Amish—as once with the rest of us—a family member or a neighbor is by definition needed, and is needed not according to any standard of usefulness or any ratio of cost and price, but according to the absolute standards of kindness, mutuality, and affection. Unlike the rest of us, the Amish have remembered that the best, most dependable, most kind safety net or social security or insurance is a coherent, neighborly, economically sound, local community.
To speak of the need for affection and loyalty and social stability is not at all to slight the need for life-supporting work. Of course people need to work. Everybody does. And in a money-using economy, people need to earn money by their work. Even so, to speak of “a job” as if it were the only economic need a person has, as if it doesn’t matter what the job is or where a person must go in order to have it, is brutally reductive. To speak so is to leave out virtually everything that is humanly important: family and community ties, connection to a home place, the questions of vocation and good work. If you have “a job,” presumably, you won’t mind being a stranger among strangers in a strange place, doing work that is demeaning or unethical or work for which you are unsuited by talent or calling.
When people accept mobility as a condition of work, it means that they have accepted a kind of homelessness. It used to be a part of good manners to ask a person you had just met, “Where are you from?” That question has now become a social embarrassment, for it is too likely to be answered, “I’m not from anywhere.” But to be not from anywhere is part of the definition of helplessness. Mobility is a condition in which you can do little