Awards & Honors: 2012 Jefferson Lecturer
Wendell E. Berry Lecture
“It All Turns On Affection”
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“Because a thing is going strong now, it need not go strong for ever,”
[Margaret] said. “This craze for motion has only set in during the
last hundred years. It may be followed by a civilization that won’t be
a movement, because it will rest upon the earth.
E. M. Forster, Howards End (1910)1
One night in the winter of 1907, at what we have always called “the
home place” in Henry County, Kentucky, my father, then six years old,
sat with his older brother and listened as their parents spoke of the
uses they would have for the money from their 1906 tobacco crop. The
crop was to be sold at auction in Louisville on the next day. They
would have been sitting in the light of a kerosene lamp, close to the
stove, warming themselves before bedtime. They were not wealthy
people. I believe that the debt on their farm was not fully paid,
there would have been interest to pay, there would have been other
debts. The depression of the 1890s would have left them burdened.
Perhaps, after the income from the crop had paid their obligations,
there would be some money that they could spend as they chose. At
around two o’clock the next morning, my father was wakened by a
horse’s shod hooves on the stones of the driveway. His father was
leaving to catch the train to see the crop sold.
He came home that evening, as my father later would put it, “without a
dime.” After the crop had paid its transportation to market and the
commission on its sale, there was nothing left. Thus began my father’s
lifelong advocacy, later my brother’s and my own, and now my
daughter’s and my son’s, for small farmers and for land-conserving
economies.
#
The economic hardship of my family and of many others, a century ago,
was caused by a monopoly, the American Tobacco Company, which had
eliminated all competitors and thus was able to reduce as it pleased
the prices it paid to farmers. The American Tobacco Company was the
work of James B. Duke of Durham, North Carolina, and New York City,
who, disregarding any other consideration, followed a capitalist logic
to absolute control of his industry and, incidentally, of the economic
fate of thousands of families such as my own.
My effort to make sense of this memory and its encompassing history
has depended on a pair of terms used by my teacher, Wallace Stegner.
He thought rightly that we Americans, by inclination at least, have
been divided into two kinds: “boomers” and “stickers.” Boomers, he
said, are “those who pillage and run,” who want “to make a killing and
end up on Easy Street,” whereas stickers are “those who settle, and
love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.”2
“Boomer” names a kind of person and a kind of ambition that is the
major theme, so far, of the history of the European races in our
country. “Sticker” names a kind of person and also a desire that is,
so far, a minor theme of that history, but a theme persistent enough
to remain significant and to offer, still, a significant hope.
The boomer is motivated by greed, the desire for money, property, and
therefore power. James B. Duke was a boomer, if we can extend the
definition to include pillage in absentia. He went, or sent, wherever
the getting was good, and he got as much as he could take.
Stickers on the contrary are motivated by affection, by such love for
a place and its life that they want to preserve it and remain in it.
Of my grandfather I need to say only that he shared in the virtues and
the faults of his kind and time, one of his virtues being that he was
a sticker. He belonged to a family who had come to Kentucky from
Virginia, and who intended to go no farther. He was the third in his
paternal line to live in the neighborhood of our little town of Port
Royal, and he was the second to own the farm where he was born in 1864
and where he died in 1946.
We have one memory of him that seems, more than any other, to identify
him as a sticker. He owned his farm, having bought out the other
heirs, for more than fifty years. About forty of those years were in
hard times, and he lived almost continuously in the distress of debt.
Whatever has happened in what economists call “the economy,” it is
generally true that the land economy has been discounted or ignored.
My grandfather lived his life in an economic shadow. In an urbanizing
and industrializing age, he was the wrong kind of man. In one of his
difficult years he plowed a field on the lower part of a long slope
and planted it in corn. While the soil was exposed, a heavy rain fell
and the field was seriously eroded. This was heartbreak for my
grandfather, and he devoted the rest of his life, first to healing the
scars and then to his obligation of care. In keeping with the
sticker’s commitment, he neither left behind the damage he had done
nor forgot about it, but stayed to repair it, insofar as soil loss can
be repaired. My father, I think, had his father’s error in mind when
he would speak of farmers attempting, always uselessly if not
tragically, “to plow their way out of debt.” From that time, my
grandfather and my father were soil conservationists, a commitment
that they handed on to my brother and to me.
#
It is not beside the point, or off my subject, to notice that these
stories and their meanings, have survived because of my family’s
continuing connection to its home place. Like my grandfather, my
father grew up on that place and served as its caretaker. It has now
belonged to my brother for many years, and he in turn has been its
caretaker. He and I have lived as neighbors, allies, and friends. Our
long conversation has often taken its themes from the two stories I
have told, because we have been continually reminded of them by our
home neighborhood and topography. If we had not lived there to be
reminded and to remember, nobody would have remembered. If either of
us had lived elsewhere, both of us would have known less. If both of
us, like most of our generation, had moved away, the place with its
memories would have been lost to us and we to it—and certainly my
thoughts about agriculture, if I had thought of it at all, would have
been much more approximate than they have been.
Because I have never separated myself from my home neighborhood, I
cannot identify myself to myself apart from it. I am fairly literally
flesh of its flesh. It is present in me, and to me, wherever I go.
This undoubtedly accounts for my sense of shock when, on my first
visit to Duke University, and by surprise, I came face-to-face with
James B. Duke in his dignity, his glory perhaps, as the founder of
that university. He stands imperially in bronze in front of a
Methodist chapel aspiring to be a cathedral. He holds between two
fingers of his left hand a bronze cigar. On one side of his pedestal
is the legend: INDUSTRIALIST. On the other side is another single
word: PHILANTHROPIST. The man thus commemorated seemed to me
terrifyingly ignorant, even terrifyingly innocent, of the connection
between his industry and his philanthropy. But I did know the
connection. I felt it instantly and physically. The connection was my
grandparents and thousands of others more or less like them. If you
can appropriate for little or nothing the work and hope of enough such
farmers, then you may dispense the grand charity of “philanthropy.”
After my encounter with the statue, the story of my grandfather’s 1906
tobacco crop slowly took on a new dimension and clarity in my mind. I
still remembered my grandfather as himself, of course, but I began to
think of him also as a kind of man standing in thematic opposition to
a man of an entirely different kind. And I could see finally that
between these two kinds there was a failure of imagination that was
ruinous, that belongs indelibly to our history, and that has
continued, growing worse, into our own time.
#
The term “imagination” in what I take to be its truest sense refers to
a mental faculty that some people have used and thought about with the
utmost seriousness. The sense of the verb “to imagine” contains the
full richness of the verb “to see.” To imagine is to see most clearly,
familiarly, and understandingly with the eyes, but also to see
inwardly, with “the mind’s eye.” It is to see, not passively, but with
a force of vision and even with visionary force. To take it seriously
we must give up at once any notion that imagination is disconnected
from reality or truth or knowledge. It has nothing to do either with
clever imitation of appearances or with “dreaming up.” It does not
depend upon one’s attitude or point of view, but grasps securely the
qualities of things seen or envisioned.
I will say, from my own belief and experience, that imagination
thrives on contact, on tangible connection. For humans to have a
responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places
in it. To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a
place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see
it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it. By
imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and
nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we
see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow
members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world. As imagination
enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection
that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving
economy.
Obviously there is some risk in making affection the pivot of an
argument about economy. The charge will be made that affection is an
emotion, merely “subjective,” and therefore that all affections are
more or less equal: people may have affection for their children and
their automobiles, their neighbors and their weapons. But the risk, I
think, is only that affection is personal. If it is not personal, it
is nothing; we don’t, at least, have to worry about governmental or
corporate affection. And one of the endeavors of human cultures, from
the beginning, has been to qualify and direct the influence of
emotion. The word “affection” and the terms of value that cluster
around it—love, care, sympathy, mercy, forbearance, respect,
reverence—have histories and meanings that raise the issue of worth.
We should, as our culture has warned us over and over again, give our
affection to things that are true, just, and beautiful. When we give
affection to things that are destructive, we are wrong. A large
machine in a large, toxic, eroded cornfield is not, properly speaking,
an object or a sign of affection.
#
My grandfather knew, urgently, the value of money, but only of such
comparatively small sums as would have paid his debts and allowed to
his farm and his family a decent prosperity. He certainly knew of the
American Tobacco Company. He no doubt had read and heard of James B.
Duke, and could identify him as the cause of a hard time, but nothing
in his experience could have enabled him to imagine the life of the
man himself.
James B. Duke came from a rural family in the tobacco country of North
Carolina. In his early life he would have known men such as my
grandfather. But after he began his rise as an industrialist, the life
of a small tobacco grower would have been to him a negligible detail
incidental to an opportunity for large profits. In the minds of the
“captains of industry,” then and now, the people of the land economies
have been reduced to statistical numerals. Power deals “efficiently”
with quantities that affection cannot recognize.
It may seem plausible to suppose that the head of the American Tobacco
Company would have imagined at least that a dependable supply of raw
material to his industry would depend upon a stable, reasonably
thriving population of farmers and upon the continuing fertility of
their farms. But he imagined no such thing. In this he was like
apparently all agribusiness executives. They don’t imagine farms or
farmers. They imagine perhaps nothing at all, their minds being filled
to capacity by numbers leading to the bottom line. Though the
corporations, by law, are counted as persons, they do not have
personal minds, if they can be said to have minds. It is a great
oddity that a corporation, which properly speaking has no self, is by
definition selfish, responsible only to itself. This is an impersonal,
abstract selfishness, limitlessly acquisitive, but unable to look so
far ahead as to preserve its own sources and supplies. The selfishness
of the fossil fuel industries by nature is self-annihilating; but so,
always, has been the selfishness of the agribusiness corporations.
Land, as Wes Jackson has said, has thus been made as exhaustible as
oil or coal.
#
There is another difference between my grandfather and James B. Duke
that may finally be more important than any other, and this was a
difference of kinds of pleasure. We may assume that, as a boomer,
moving from one chance of wealth to another, James B. Duke wanted only
what he did not yet have. If it is true that he was in this way
typical of his kind, then his great pleasure was only in prospect,
which excludes affection as a motive.
My grandfather, on the contrary, and despite his life’s persistent
theme of hardship, took a great and present delight in the modest good
that was at hand: in his place and his affection for it, in its
pastures, animals, and crops, in favorable weather.
He did not participate in the least in what we call “mobility.” He
died, after eighty-two years, in the same spot he was born in. He was
probably in his sixties when he made the one longish trip of his life.
He went with my father southward across Kentucky and into Tennessee.
On their return, my father asked him what he thought of their journey.
He replied: “Well, sir, I’ve looked with all the eyes I’ve got, and I
wouldn’t trade the field behind my barn for every inch I’ve seen.”
In such modest joy in a modest holding is the promise of a stable,
democratic society, a promise not to be found in “mobility”: our
forlorn modern progress toward something indefinitely, and often
unrealizably, better. A principled dissatisfaction with whatever one
has promises nothing or worse.
James B. Duke would not necessarily have thought so far of the small
growers as even to hold them in contempt. The Duke trust exerted an
oppression that was purely economic, involving a mechanical
indifference, the indifference of a grinder to what it grinds. It was
not, that is to say, a political oppression. It did not intend to
victimize its victims. It simply followed its single purpose of the
highest possible profit, and ignored the “side effects.” Confronting
that purpose, any small farmer is only one, and one lost, among a
great multitude of others, whose work can be quickly transformed into
a great multitude of dollars.
Corporate industrialism has tended to be, and as its technological and
financial power has grown it has tended increasingly to be,
indifferent to its sources in what Aldo Leopold called “the
land-community”: the land, all its features and “resources,” and all
its members, human and nonhuman, including of course the humans who
do, for better or worse, the work of land use.3 Industrialists and
industrial economists have assumed, with permission from the rest of
us, that land and people can be divorced without harm. If farmers come
under adversity from high costs and low prices, then they must either
increase their demands upon the land and decrease their care for it,
or they must sell out and move to town, and this is supposed to
involve no ecological or economic or social cost. Or if there are such
costs, then they are rated as “the price of progress” or “creative
destruction.”
But land abuse cannot brighten the human prospect. There is in fact no
distinction between the fate of the land and the fate of the people.
When one is abused, the other suffers. The penalties may come quickly
to a farmer who destroys perennial cover on a sloping field. They will
come sooner or later to a land-destroying civilization such as ours.
And so it has seemed to me less a choice than a necessity to oppose
the boomer enterprise with its false standards and its incomplete
accounting, and to espouse the cause of stable, restorative, locally
adapted economies of mostly family-sized farms, ranches, shops, and
trades. Naïve as it may sound now, within the context of our present
faith in science, finance, and technology—the faith equally of
“conservatives” and “liberals”—this cause nevertheless has an
authentic source in the sticker’s hope to abide in and to live from
some chosen and cherished small place—which, of course, is the
agrarian vision that Thomas Jefferson spoke for, a sometimes honored
human theme, minor and even fugitive, but continuous from ancient
times until now. Allegiance to it, however, is not a conclusion but
the beginning of thought.
#
The problem that ought to concern us first is the fairly recent
dismantling of our old understanding and acceptance of human limits.
For a long time we knew that we were not, and could never be, “as
gods.” We knew, or retained the capacity to learn, that our
intelligence could get us into trouble that it could not get us out
of. We were intelligent enough to know that our intelligence, like our
world, is limited. We seem to have known and feared the possibility of
irreparable damage. But beginning in science and engineering, and
continuing, by imitation, into other disciplines, we have progressed
to the belief that humans are intelligent enough, or soon will be, to
transcend all limits and to forestall or correct all bad results of
the misuse of intelligence. Upon this belief rests the further belief
that we can have “economic growth” without limit.
Economy in its original—and, I think, its proper—sense refers to
household management. By extension, it refers to the husbanding of all
the goods by which we live. An authentic economy, if we had one, would
define and make, on the terms of thrift and affection, our connections
to nature and to one another. Our present industrial system also makes
those connections, but by pillage and indifference. Most economists
think of this arrangement as “the economy.” Their columns and articles
rarely if ever mention the land-communities and land-use economies.
They never ask, in their professional oblivion, why we are willing to
do permanent ecological and cultural damage “to strengthen the
economy?”
In his essay, “Notes on Liberty and Property,” Allen Tate gave us an
indispensable anatomy of our problem. His essay begins by equating,
not liberty and property, but liberty and control of one’s property.
He then makes the crucial distinction between ownership that is merely
legal and what he calls “effective ownership.” If a property, say a
small farm, has one owner, then the one owner has an effective and
assured, if limited, control over it as long as he or she can afford
to own it, and is free to sell it or use it, and (I will add) free to
use it poorly or well. It is clear also that effective ownership of a
small property is personal and therefore can, at least possibly, be
intimate, familial, and affectionate. If, on the contrary, a person
owns a small property of stock in a large corporation, then that
person has surrendered control of the property to larger shareholders.
The drastic mistake our people made, as Tate believed and I agree, was
to be convinced “that there is one kind of property—just property,
whether it be a thirty-acre farm in Kentucky or a stock certificate in
the United States Steel Corporation.” By means of this confusion, Tate
said, “Small ownership . . . has been worsted by big, dispersed
ownership—the giant corporation.”4 (It is necessary to append to this
argument the further fact that by now, owing largely to corporate
influence, land ownership implies the right to destroy the
land-community entirely, as in surface mining, and to impose, as a
consequence, the dangers of flooding, water pollution, and disease
upon communities downstream.)
Tate’s essay was written for the anthology, Who Owns America? the
publication of which was utterly without effect. With other agrarian
writings before and since, it took its place on the far margin of the
national dialogue, dismissed as anachronistic, retrogressive,
nostalgic, or (to use Tate’s own term of defiance) reactionary in the
face of the supposedly “inevitable” dominance of corporate
industrialism. Who Owns America? was published in the Depression year
of 1936. It is at least ironic that talk of “effective property” could
have been lightly dismissed at a time when many rural people who had
migrated to industrial cities were returning to their home farms to
survive.
In 1936, when to the dominant minds a thirty-acre farm in Kentucky was
becoming laughable, Tate’s essay would have seemed irrelevant as a
matter of course. At that time, despite the Depression, faith in the
standards and devices of industrial progress was nearly universal and
could not be shaken.
#
But now, three-quarters of a century later, we are no longer talking
about theoretical alternatives to corporate rule. We are talking with
practical urgency about an obvious need. Now the two great aims of
industrialism—replacement of people by technology and concentration of
wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy—seem close to fulfillment.
At the same time the failures of industrialism have become too great
and too dangerous to deny. Corporate industrialism itself has exposed
the falsehood that it ever was inevitable or that it ever has given
precedence to the common good. It has failed to sustain the health and
stability of human society. Among its characteristic signs are
destroyed communities, neighborhoods, families, small businesses, and
small farms. It has failed just as conspicuously and more dangerously
to conserve the wealth and health of nature. No amount of fiddling
with capitalism to regulate and humanize it, no pointless rhetoric on
the virtues of capitalism or socialism, no billions or trillions spent
on “defense” of the “American dream,” can for long disguise this
failure. The evidences of it are everywhere: eroded, wasted, or
degraded soils; damaged or destroyed ecosystems; extinction of
species; whole landscapes defaced, gouged, flooded, or blown up;
pollution of the whole atmosphere and of the water cycle; “dead zones”
in the coastal waters; thoughtless squandering of fossil fuels and
fossil waters, of mineable minerals and ores; natural health and
beauty replaced by a heartless and sickening ugliness. Perhaps its
greatest success is an astounding increase in the destructiveness, and
therefore the profitability, of war.
In 1936, moreover, only a handful of people were thinking about
sustainability. Now, reasonably, many of us are thinking about it. The
problem of sustainability is simple enough to state. It requires that
the fertility cycle of birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay—what
Albert Howard called “the Wheel of Life”—should turn continuously in
place, so that the law of return is kept and nothing is wasted. For
this to happen in the stewardship of humans, there must be a cultural
cycle, in harmony with the fertility cycle, also continuously turning
in place. The cultural cycle is an unending conversation between old
people and young people, assuring the survival of local memory, which
has, as long as it remains local, the greatest practical urgency and
value. This is what is meant, and is all that is meant, by
“sustainability.” The fertility cycle turns by the law of nature. The
cultural cycle turns on affection.
#
That we live now in an economy that is not sustainable is not the
fault only of a few mongers of power and heavy equipment. We all are
implicated. We all, in the course of our daily economic life, consent
to it, whether or not we approve of it. This is because of the
increasing abstraction and unconsciousness of our connection to our
economic sources in the land, the land-communities, and the land-use
economies. In my region and within my memory, for example, human life
has become less creaturely and more engineered, less familiar and more
remote from local places, pleasures, and associations. Our knowledge,
in short, has become increasingly statistical.
Statistical knowledge once was rare. It was a property of the minds of
great rulers, conquerors, and generals, people who succeeded or failed
by the manipulation of large quantities that remained, to them,
unimagined because unimaginable: merely accountable quantities of
land, treasure, people, soldiers, and workers. This is the sort of
knowledge we now call “data” or “facts” or “information.” Or we call
it “objective knowledge,” supposedly untainted by personal attachment,
but nonetheless available for industrial and commercial exploitation.
By means of such knowledge a category assumes dominion over its parts
or members. With the coming of industrialism, the great
industrialists, like kings and conquerors, become exploiters of
statistical knowledge. And finally virtually all of us, in order to
participate and survive in their system, have had to agree to their
substitution of statistical knowledge for personal knowledge.
Virtually all of us now share with the most powerful industrialists
their remoteness from actual experience of the actual world. Like
them, we participate in an absentee economy, which makes us
effectively absent even from our own dwelling places. Though most of
us have little wealth and perhaps no power, we consumer–citizens are
more like James B. Duke than we are like my grandfather. By economic
proxies thoughtlessly given, by thoughtless consumption of goods
ignorantly purchased, now we all are boomers.
#
The failure of imagination that divided the Duke monopoly and such
farmers as my grandfather seems by now to be taken for granted. James
B. Duke controlled remotely the economies of thousands of farm
families. A hundred years later, “remote control” is an unquestioned
fact, the realization of a technological ideal, and we have remote
entertainment and remote war. Statistical knowledge is remote, and it
isolates us in our remoteness. It is the stuff itself of unimagined
life. We may, as we say, “know” statistical sums, but we cannot
imagine them.
It is by imagination that knowledge is “carried to the heart” (to
borrow again from Allen Tate).5 The faculties of the mind—reason,
memory, feeling, intuition, imagination, and the rest—are not distinct
from one another. Though some may be favored over others and some
ignored, none functions alone. But the human mind, even in its
wholeness, even in instances of greatest genius, is irremediably
limited. Its several faculties, when we try to use them separately or
specialize them, are even more limited.
The fact is that we humans are not much to be trusted with what I am
calling statistical knowledge, and the larger the statistical
quantities the less we are to be trusted. We don’t learn much from big
numbers. We don’t understand them very well, and we aren’t much
affected by them. The reality that is responsibly manageable by human
intelligence is much nearer in scale to a small rural community or
urban neighborhood than to the “globe.”
When people succeed in profiting on a large scale, they succeed for
themselves. When they fail, they fail for many others, sometimes for
us all. A large failure is worse than a small one, and this has the
sound of an axiom, but how many believe it? Propriety of scale in all
human undertakings is paramount, and we ignore it. We are now betting
our lives on quantities that far exceed all our powers of
comprehension. We believe that we have built a perhaps limitless power
of comprehension into computers and other machines, but our minds
remain as limited as ever. Our trust that machines can manipulate to
humane effect quantities that are unintelligible and unimaginable to
humans is incorrigibly strange.
As there is a limit only within which property ownership is effective,
so is there a limit only within which the human mind is effective and
at least possibly beneficent. We must assume that the limit would vary
somewhat, though not greatly, with the abilities of persons. Beyond
that limit the mind loses its wholeness, and its faculties begin to be
employed separately or fragmented according to the specialties or
professions for which it has been trained.
#
In my reading of the historian John Lukacs, I have been most
instructed by his understanding that there is no knowledge but human
knowledge, that we are therefore inescapably central to our own
consciousness, and that this is “a statement not of arrogance but of
humility. It is yet another recognition of the inevitable limitations
of mankind.”6 We are thus isolated within our uniquely human
boundaries, which we certainly cannot transcend or escape by means of
technological devices.
But as I understand this dilemma, we are not completely isolated.
Though we cannot by our own powers escape our limits, we are subject
to correction from, so to speak, the outside. I can hardly expect
everybody to believe, as I do (with due caution), that inspiration can
come from the outside. But inspiration is not the only way the human
enclosure can be penetrated. Nature too may break in upon us,
sometimes to our delight, sometimes to our dismay.
As many hunters, farmers, ecologists, and poets have understood,
Nature (and here we capitalize her name) is the impartial mother of
all creatures, unpredictable, never entirely revealed, not my mother
or your mother, but nonetheless our mother. If we are observant and
respectful of her, she gives good instruction. As Albert Howard, Wes
Jackson, and others have carefully understood, she can give us the
right patterns and standards for agriculture. If we ignore or offend
her, she enforces her will with punishment. She is always trying to
tell us that we are not so superior or independent or alone or
autonomous as we may think. She tells us in the voice of Edmund
Spenser that she is of all creatures “the equall mother, / And
knittest each to each, as brother unto brother.”7 Nearly three and a
half centuries later, we hear her saying about the same thing in the
voice of Aldo Leopold: “In short, a land ethic changes the role of
Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and
citizen of it.”8
We cannot know the whole truth, which belongs to God alone, but our
task nevertheless is to seek to know what is true. And if we offend
gravely enough against what we know to be true, as by failing badly
enough to deal affectionately and responsibly with our land and our
neighbors, truth will retaliate with ugliness, poverty, and disease.
The crisis of this line of thought is the realization that we are at
once limited and unendingly responsible for what we know and do.
#
The discrepancy between what modern humans presume to know and what
they can imagine—given the background of pride and
self-congratulation—is amusing and even funny. It becomes more serious
as it raises issues of responsibility. It becomes fearfully serious
when we start dealing with statistical measures of industrial
destruction.
To hear of a thousand deaths in war is terrible, and we “know” that it
is. But as it registers on our hearts, it is not more terrible than
one death fully imagined. The economic hardship of one farm family, if
they are our neighbors, affects us more painfully than pages of
statistics on the decline of the farm population. I can be heartstruck
by grief and a kind of compassion at the sight of one gulley (and by
shame if I caused it myself), but, conservationist though I am, I am
not nearly so upset by an accounting of the tons of plowland sediment
borne by the Mississippi River. Wallace Stevens wrote that
“Imagination applied to the whole world is vapid in comparison to
imagination applied to a detail”9—and that appears to have the force
of truth.
It is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without
interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and
destruction that ought to break our hearts or scare us out of our
wits. This brings us to an entirely practical question: Can we—and,
if we can, how can we—make actual in our minds the sometimes urgent
things we say we know? This obviously cannot be accomplished by a
technological breakthrough, nor can it be accomplished by a big
thought. Perhaps it cannot be accomplished at all.
#
Yet another not very stretchable human limit is in our ability to
tolerate or adapt to change. Change of course is a constant of earthly
life. You can’t step twice into exactly the same river, nor can you
live two successive moments in exactly the same place. And always in
human history there have been costly or catastrophic sudden changes.
But with relentless fanfare, at the cost of almost indescribable
ecological and social disorder, and to the almost incalculable
enrichment and empowerment of corporations, industrialists have
substituted what they fairly accurately call “revolution” for the
slower, kinder processes of adaptation or evolution. We have had in
only about two centuries a steady and ever-quickening sequence of
industrial revolutions in manufacturing, transportation, war,
agriculture, education, entertainment, homemaking and family life,
health care, and so-called communications.
Probably everything that can be said in favor of all this has been
said, and it is true that these revolutions have brought some increase
of convenience and comfort and some easing of pain. It is also true
that the industrialization of everything has incurred liabilities and
is running deficits that have not been adequately accounted. All of
these changes have depended upon industrial technologies, processes,
and products, which have depended upon the fossil fuels, the
production and consumption of which have been, and are still,
unimaginably damaging to land, water, air, plants, animals, and
humans. And the cycle of obsolescence and innovation, goaded by crazes
of fashion, has given the corporate economy a controlling share of
everybody’s income.
The cost of this has been paid also in a social condition which
apologists call “mobility,” implying that it has been always “upward”
to a “higher standard of living,” but which in fact has been an
ever-worsening unsettlement of our people, and the extinction or
near-extinction of traditional and necessary communal structures.
For this also there is no technological or large-scale solution.
Perhaps, as they believe, the most conscientiously up-to-date people
can easily do without local workshops and stores, local journalism, a
local newspaper, a local post office, all of which supposedly have
been replaced by technologies. But what technology can replace
personal privacy or the coherence of a family or a community? What
technology can undo the collateral damages of an inhuman rate of
technological change?
The losses and damages characteristic of our present economy cannot be
stopped, let alone restored, by “liberal” or “conservative” tweakings
of corporate industrialism, against which the ancient imperatives of
good care, homemaking, and frugality can have no standing. The
possibility of authentic correction comes, I think, from two
already-evident causes. The first is scarcity and other serious
problems arising from industrial abuses of the land-community. The
goods of nature so far have been taken for granted and, especially in
America, assumed to be limitless, but their diminishment, sooner or
later unignorable, will enforce change.
A positive cause, still little noticed by high officials and the
media, is the by now well-established effort to build or rebuild local
economies, starting with economies of food. This effort to connect
cities with their surrounding rural landscapes has the advantage of
being both attractive and necessary. It rests exactly upon the
recognition of human limits and the necessity of human scale. Its
purpose, to the extent possible, is to bring producers and consumers,
causes and effects, back within the bounds of neighborhood, which is
to say the effective reach of imagination, sympathy, affection, and
all else that neighborhood implies. An economy genuinely local and
neighborly offers to localities a measure of security that they cannot
derive from a national or a global economy controlled by people who,
by principle, have no local commitment.
#
In this age so abstracted and bewildered by technological
magnifications of power, people who stray beyond the limits of their
mental competence typically find no guide except for the supposed
authority of market price. “The market” thus assumes the standing of
ultimate reality. But market value is an illusion, as is proven by its
frequent changes; it is determined solely by the buyer’s ability and
willingness to pay.
By now our immense destructiveness has made clear that the actual
value of some things exceeds human ability to calculate or measure,
and therefore must be considered absolute. For the destruction of
these things there is never, under any circumstances, any
justification. Their absolute value is recognized by the mortal need
of those who do not have them, and by affection. Land, to people who
do not have it and who are thus without the means of life, is
absolutely valuable. Ecological health, in a land dying of abuse, is
not worth “something”; it is worth everything. And abused land
relentlessly declines in value to its present and succeeding owners,
whatever its market price.
But we need not wait, as we are doing, to be taught the absolute value
of land and of land health by hunger and disease. Affection can teach
us, and soon enough, if we grant appropriate standing to affection.
For this we must look to the stickers, who “love the life they have
made and the place they have made it in.”
By now all thoughtful people have begun to feel our eligibility to be
instructed by ecological disaster and mortal need. But we endangered
ourselves first of all by dismissing affection as an honorable and
necessary motive. Our decision in the middle of the last century to
reduce the farm population, eliminating the allegedly “inefficient”
small farmers, was enabled by the discounting of affection. As a
result, we now have barely enough farmers to keep the land in
production, with the help of increasingly expensive industrial
technology and at an increasing ecological and social cost. Far from
the plain citizens and members of the land-community, as Aldo Leopold
wished them to be, farmers are now too likely to be merely the land’s
exploiters.
I don’t hesitate to say that damage or destruction of the
land-community is morally wrong, just as Leopold did not hesitate to
say so when he was composing his essay, “The Land Ethic,” in 1947. But
I do not believe, as I think Leopold did not, that morality, even
religious morality, is an adequate motive for good care of the
land-community. The primary motive for good care and good use is
always going to be affection, because affection involves us entirely.
And here Leopold himself set the example. In 1935 he bought an
exhausted Wisconsin farm and, with his family, began its restoration.
To do this was morally right, of course, but the motive was affection.
Leopold was an ecologist. He felt, we may be sure, an informed sorrow
for the place in its ruin. He imagined it as it had been, as it was,
and as it might be. And a profound, delighted affection radiates from
every sentence he wrote about it.
Without this informed, practical, and practiced affection, the nation
and its economy will conquer and destroy the country.
#
In thinking about the importance of affection, and of its increasing
importance in our present world, I have been guided most directly by
E. M. Forster’s novel, Howards End, published in 1910. By then,
Forster was aware of the implications of “rural decay,”10 and in this
novel he spoke, with some reason, of his fear that “the literature of
the near future will probably ignore the country and seek inspiration
from the town. . . . and those who care for the earth with sincerity
may wait long ere the pendulum swings back to her again.”11 Henry
Wilcox, the novel’s “plain man of business,” speaks the customary
rationalization, which has echoed through American bureaus and
colleges of agriculture, almost without objection, for at least sixty
years: “the days for small farms are over.”12
In Howards End, Forster saw the coming predominance of the machine and
of mechanical thought, the consequent deracination and restlessness of
populations, and the consequent ugliness. He saw an industrial
ugliness, “a red rust,”13 already creeping out from the cities into
the countryside. He seems to have understood by then also that this
ugliness was the result of the withdrawal of affection from places. To
have beautiful buildings, for example, people obviously must want them
to be beautiful and know how to make them beautiful, but evidently
they also must love the places where the buildings are to be built.
For a long time, in city and countryside, architecture has disregarded
the nature and influence of places. Buildings have become as
interchangeable from one place to another as automobiles. The
outskirts of cities are virtually identical and as depressingly ugly
as the corn-and-bean deserts of industrial agriculture.
What Forster could not have foreseen in 1910 was the extent of the
ugliness to come. We still have not understood how far at fault has
been the prevalent assumption that cities could be improved by pillage
of the countryside. But urban life and rural life have now proved to
be interdependent. As the countryside has become more toxic, more
eroded, more ecologically degraded and more deserted, the cities have
grown uglier, less sustainable, and less livable.
#
The argument of Howards End has its beginning in a manifesto against
materialism:
It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think
that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than
one square mile . . . That is not imagination. No, it kills it. . . .
Your universities? Oh, yes, you have learned men who collect . . .
facts, and facts, and empires of facts. But which of them will
rekindle the light within?14
“The light within,” I think, means affection, affection as motive and
guide. Knowledge without affection leads us astray every time.
Affection leads, by way of good work, to authentic hope. The factual
knowledge, in which we seem more and more to be placing our trust,
leads only to hope of the discovery, endlessly deferrable, of an
ultimate fact or smallest particle that at last will explain
everything.
The climactic scene of Forster’s novel is the confrontation between
its heroine, Margaret Schlegel, and her husband, the self-described
“plain man of business,” Henry Wilcox. The issue is Henry’s
determination to deal, as he thinks, “realistically” with a situation
that calls for imagination, for affection, and then forgiveness.
Margaret feels at the start of their confrontation that she is
“fighting for women against men.”15 But she is not a feminist in the
popular or political sense. What she opposes with all her might is
Henry’s hardness of mind and heart that is “realistic” only because it
is expedient and because it subtracts from reality the life of
imagination and affection, of living souls. She opposes his refusal to
see the practicality of the life of the soul.
Margaret’s premise, as she puts it to Henry, is the balance point of
the book: “It all turns on affection now . . . Affection. Don’t you
see?”16
In a speech delivered in 2006, “Revitalizing Rural Communities,”
Frederick Kirschenmann quoted his friend Constance Falk, an economist:
“There is a new vision emerging demonstrating how we can solve
problems and at the same time create a better world, and it all
depends on collaboration, love, respect, beauty, and fairness.”17
Those two women, almost a century apart, speak for human wholeness
against fragmentation, disorder, and heartbreak. The English
philosopher and geometer, Keith Critchlow, brings his own light to the
same point: “The human mind takes apart with its analytic habits of
reasoning but the human heart puts things together because it loves
them . . .” 18
#
The great reassurance of Forster’s novel is the wholeheartedness of
his language. It is to begin with a language not disturbed by mystery,
by things unseen. But Forster’s interest throughout is in
soul-sustaining habitations: houses, households, earthly places where
lives can be made and loved. In defense of such dwellings he uses,
without irony or apology, the vocabulary that I have depended on in
this talk: truth, nature, imagination, affection, love, hope, beauty,
joy. Those words are hard to keep still within definitions; they make
the dictionary hum like a beehive. But in such words, in their
resonance within their histories and in their associations with one
another, we find our indispensable humanity, without which we are lost
and in danger.
No doubt there always will be some people willing to do anything at
all that is economically or technologically possible, who look upon
the world and its creatures without affection and therefore as
exploitable without limit. Against that limitlessness, in which we
foresee assuredly our ruin, we have only our ancient effort to define
ourselves as human and humane. But this ages-long, imperfect,
unendable attempt, with its magnificent record, we have virtually
disowned by assigning it to the ever more subordinate set of school
subjects we call “arts and humanities” or, for short,
