We have enslaved the earth also by requiring the economic landscapes of farming, forestry, and mining to feed, clothe, and shelter us, warm and cools us, and keep us shopping, without maintenance or recompense or any of the affectionate kindness and care which it requires of us…
~ Wendell Berry ~

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“…and keep us shopping.”

That line comes from Wendell Berry’s The Need to Be Whole. I may be about to hijack Berry’s point, at least in this essay of his, which is about prejudice and human freedom. And though this may not be the best place in Berry’s work from which to take these points, it is part of a larger theme which he has not stopped speaking on for decades. For instance, I am similarly crushed by these lines from Berry’s Mad Farmer Manifesto: “When they want you to buy something/ they will call you.”

Maybe it was just the way that Berry dropped that particular line— “and keep us shopping”—that hit me this afternoon. Maybe it combined with the already-in-place goal of buying absolutely zero clothing this year, which also paired well enough with this year’s (good) riddance of Amazon Prime membership. But Berry, in the same chapter, also makes this deeper point:

Our economy obstructs, actively and purposefully, our still surviving wishes to grant intrinsic and transcendent worth to all the members of the living world as our neighbors, fellow creatures, “the least of these my brethren.”

Granting the primary appeal for fellow creatures, human or otherwise (and granting a dialed-down mode of transcendence), I take this to mean that we do not value most things for what they are, or can be, in themselves, but instead place arbitrary and monetary and fickle values on them. I assume that this applies to all things, and I assume that it will take just as active and purposeful an effort to counter this obstruction.

In this chapter, Berry also describes certain “goods,” the value of which “cannot be inflated.” What he has most directly in mind is knowledge, skill, work. But I feel content in expanding this to include the value placed on material things as well. Money, and any item with its value attached to it, is not only inflatable but “continuously inflatable”—it cannot have a fixed value.

In Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, there is a passage on Ezra Pound that makes a similar point:

Pound’s stock example of an evil bank was the Bank of England. In a book by Christopher Hollis called The Two Nations Pound came across a quote attributed to that bank’s founder, William Paterson. A prospectus written in 1964 for potential investors included this sentence: “The bank hath benefit of the interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing.” Pound repeats this sentence over and over in the Cantos and in his prose. Here value is detached from its root in the natural world; here lies the seed of the dissociation between real and financial credit. Money “created out of nothing” cannot have real value or real increase, but the “hell banks,” through abstraction and mystification, make it appear to have both. Once such false money is at large, it secretly gnaws away at the true value that rests on the growing grass and the living sheep.

I have no particular concern for “evil banks.” And I have no concern in overturning the monetary system. What I am interested in is overturning my own life, and the assumptions that I don’t believe I should be entirely excused for holding. I am only interested in what I should and should not be doing with the things around me and how they are valued, or not valued.

Berry would take this hostile monetary measurement one crucial step further. Not only does it gnaw away at the true value of things, but it blinds us to the remedy, to love:

By this measure, the world contains many things, some essential things, that are unpriced or priceless, and therefore are worthless. By this measure, my talk of a sacred bond of love as a necessary motive becomes nonsense.

It’s going to take me a bit to figure out all that I mean by this—and by what means all that I mean by this will be carried out. Maybe all that I mean is that I want to focus on the things in life which are not easily, or at all, replaceable. Things which, though they have been or may be purchased with a monetary value—I cannot, after all, extricate myself from my time—they nonetheless are not or will not be held with a monetary value. Nor should they be held with an eye to the next best version. All of which means that I should be actively and purposefully finding and determining the irreplaceable, the uninflatable.

There are two ideas that I’ve been thinking about that combine very well with all this. One comes from Charles Baxter in the introduction to Wright Morris’s Plains Song:

The Japanese have a word—sabi—that refers to any object that after many years has acquired a quality of what we might call “noble shabbiness.” This noble shabbiness might be imagined as the weathering of a piece of furniture that has been worn smooth by use and age. Nothing you buy at the mall can possess sabi. Only those objects that have been worked and touched for a long time can have it. Sabi is found not in the beauty of youth but instead in the beauty of wear and tear, the beauty of something that has stood the test of time and is still standing in spite of everything. Sabi is the acquired soul of a created thing as it grows old.

One way to think about what I want for this year is simply to have this possibility in mind—to make room in my life for something, anything, to obtain a noble shabbiness. I want even small things that last and have incalculable, even if untransferable, value.

Of course, things don’t always stand the test of time “in spite of everything” but often stand only because they have been cared for, they have been loved. Hence, the second thing, from Roger Scruton:

Time was when everything usable was also repairable: chairs, sofas, carts, hats, accordions, carpets, all were in a state of flux, as new defects revealed themselves and new patches were affixed to cover them. Objects entered the world of human users only to pass at once from Being to Becoming.

Repair was not so much a habit as an honoured custom. People respected the past of damaged things, restored them as though healing a child and looked on their handiwork with satisfaction. In the act of repair the object was made anew, to occupy the social position of the broken one. Worn shoes went to the anvil, holed socks and unravelled sleeves to the darning last—that peculiar mushroom-shaped object which stood always ready on the mantelpiece. […]

The truth is that repair, like every serious social activity, has its ethos, and when that ethos is lost, no amount of slap-dash labour can make up for it. The person who repairs must love the broken object, and must love also the process of repair and all that pertains to it.

Which brings me back to Berry, to the maintenance, the recompense, and the affectionate kindness and care that life, and each thing in life, requires of us, of me.

It may seem strange to think that the antidote to continuous shopping is a love of things, but, properly understood, it seems exactly right to me. To love and care for things rather than replace them or bury them behind the new and the more. Berry’s solution to the Menifesto mentioned above was simply this: “everyday do something/ that won’t compute.” And the first thing he lists is love. Nothing in this world is more resistant to computation than love. And if it won’t compute, it won’t inflate.

So, for me, that is the goal of 2023. This is the year of anti-inflation.

Wendell Berry:

If you make your peace, your reconciliation, or even your quarrel, with your life in this world in terms only of what you yourself presently know or can understand, you almost certainly are going to be surprised. “Life,” said Erwin Chargaff, “is the continual intervention of the inexplicable.”

By contrast with the little handful of public or newsworthy sins, the traditional lists of commandments, sins, and virtues have a human and a humanizing amplitude. They serve as a working definition of our species: Here is what is expected of us and what we are to expect of ourselves as human beings, and here are the ways we succeed or fail. The public sins, by proposing one or two things that good people don’t do, make goodness easy. But the traditional lists, by their amplitude, stand resolutely in our way. They have seen us coming. To know them, to take them seriously, measuring ourselves by them and remembering the commandment against lying, is to take a real test that lasts a life time. Honest answers may not come either easily or finally. For example, you yourself may not have killed anybody, you may have nobody’s actual blood on your hands, but to whom may you have given your proxy to do your killing for you? Or if you think you have no prejudice, can you remember that other people’s memories of you may be truer than your own? And which is most important: innocence of prejudice by the standard of political correctness or the ability to do the right thing even if you are prejudiced?

Taking that test is likely to reveal to us that we may recognize sinners less by their sins than by our own. If this doesn’t make us more virtuous or more humble, it ought at least to improve our sense of humor. A sense of humor and what Alexander Pope and Jane Austen called “sense” are in fact ways of knowing and taking seriously our inescapable involvement and complicity in the good and the bad that human beings do.

Wendell Berry:

The “good Samaritan” of Luke 10:30-37 may well have been prejudiced against Jews, but the Jew he saw by the wayside was a man fallen among thieves, who had robbed and beaten him and left him half dead. The Samaritan saw in that man not a Jew but a neighbor. Your “neighbor,” literally, is “somebody who lives near you,” but the word is defined in Luke as “somebody who needs your help.” The Samaritan, then, “had compassion” on this neighbor, “went to him, and bound his wounds . . . and took care of him.”

That prejudice exists in degrees identifies it as a human affliction, and suggests moreover that all humans, to some degree, are afflicted by it. Prejudice, carefully induced, motivated soldiers to kill one another in wars. It also causes some well-meaning people to assume that all who are in some way oppressed would be virtuous, sensible, and responsible if only they were not oppressed. In either case prejudice precludes authentic knowledge, therefore authentic judgement, therefore any appreciable degree of justice. It distorts or counterfeits reality. One enacts the only remedy when, as a neighbor, one looks through one’s prejudice or brushes it aside, to see the face of a neighbor, an actual neighbor, worthy or unworthy, who in any event will have to be dealt with as a person, not as a representative of some category.

Mark Edmundson:

For Rorty there was a clear political implication to the pragmatic view of language. “Competition for political leadership is in part a competition between differing stories about a nation’s self-identity,” he writes in Achieving Our Country. This is an idea that Barack Obama—one of the few contemporary politicians one could imagine being familiar with Rorty’s work—understood well. Obama told a story about American history in which his election was a culmination of imperfectly realized ideals that had been guiding America since its founding. Donald Trump—in a much more instinctual way—likewise understood this idea, and it is no accident that his political career began with the birther movement. He was telling a competing story about what it meant for a black man named Barack Hussein Obama to be elected president. In the political and cultural world we have inhabited ever since, Truth has most certainly gone on vacation.

It has been said many times that Trump was—in his own bizarre fashion—a postmodernist president. Those who say this generally use the term “postmodern” loosely. They mean that Trump cared nothing for tradition, had no regard for truth, that he lied all the time. But Trump is far better understood as our first pragmatist president. Trump knew—and knows—that Truth has gone on vacation; his acolytes know it, too. They are not nihilists, as they are often labeled, for they clearly do value something. And they are not deconstructionists, for they are prepared to latch onto pragmatic truths that will get them what they want.

Trump’s language is, or seeks to be, performative. He speaks to advance his cause and confound his enemies. To achieve this, he will say virtually anything. His followers—disillusioned people who have been stripped of ideals—are responsive to his reckless pragmatism and employ it themselves; they are always ready to use words to “get a gasp.” If Trump ever used words to render reality, I never heard it. Like a committed pragmatist, he uses words to influence his listeners and accomplish his goals. We Americans, natural pragmatists, understand this in a way that no European electorate ever could. His way of using language is all too often ours, which is one of the reasons so many of us are receptive to it.

To be sure, politicians have always wielded language in dishonest ways to serve their agendas. But there is, in general, some articulable and more or less idealistic end—the dictatorship of the proletariat; the creation of God’s kingdom on earth; the dismantling of an unjust social order; the preservation of a just one; liberté, égalité, fraternité—by which the means are justified, even if only cynically. What distinguishes Trump is that he has never claimed—at least not for very long—to have any enduring values in mind. Many voters who were themselves idealists of one kind or another—including, most notably, pro-life Christians—supported his candidacy in explicitly pragmatic terms. Trump invited them to do so not through his half-hearted claims to share their values but through his repeated insistence that he was a winner who would deliver what they wanted. It was this more than anything that made him our first true pragmatist president. […]

Anything can be caught in the pragmatic game and seen for what it is: not a necessary fact, but a contingent one. And if all ideas and morals and institutions are contingent, then we can do away with them through ridicule, the kind that asks, implicitly or overtly: What good are these things? What good are they to you and me, right here, right now? And if they are no good to us—if they do not give us what we want: the nomination, the election, mass applause and allegiance—then let’s dump them immediately.

Kevin Gary:

Borgmann’s emphasis on focal things is as much about a particular way of seeing things as it is about the things themselves.

The problem, notes Borgmann, is that the contemporary world seems to be forgetful of the goods conferred by focal practices and wages war on our capacity to make such commitments. The price of technological convenience, he notes, comes at the expense of focal practices and things. Instead of cooking, we eat out or microwave prepackaged food. Instead of going for a walk, we stare at screens to unwind. Rather than seeking meaningful things to see and attend to, we are surrounded by generic, mass-produced things. Pitchers, cups, books, shoes, and homes are simply facsimiles—replications of an original. Things thus lose their singularity, and there is no reason for us to grant them our singular attention. Objects recede into the background. The tools we use (our keyboard, plastic cups, a disposable pen, a razor) are hardly noticeable, except when they malfunction, in which case they are promptly replaced. Rather than see, appreciate, and experience things, we are conditioned to use them and be done with them. What is at stake is how we are thus conditioned to see and engage with our world. […]

With amusement culture… the thresholds (by design) are minimal, if there at all. I can easily and instantaneously enjoy the pleasure of watching a show or surfing the internet. The bored self is restless, prone to what the Buddhist tradition describes as “monkey mind”—a tendency, both within and without, to flit from one thing to the next. Given this tendency, we are more curious than studious, easily drawn in by gossip and spectacle and all manner of trivial concerns. Rather than one focus of attention, the bored self is captivated by a multitude of interests. While this is not a new condition, the internet has amplified and exacerbated this tendency. The monkey mind within is now greeted by the monkey mind without. Yet the rewards are far less than those that come with a focal practice. Borgmann has identified a key directive for the meaningful pursuit of focal practices: low threshold equals low reward; high threshold equals high reward. Given this, we need accountability—a friend, a partner, a teacher, a community—to develop the necessary practice and discipline that leisure requires.

Karl Barth:

“When he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion” (Mt. 9:36). And the fact that He was moved with compassion means originally that He could not and would not close His mind to the existence and situation of the multitude, nor hold Himself aloof from it, but that it affected Him, that it went right to His heart, that He made it His own, that He could not but identify Himself with them. Only He could do this with the breadth with which He did so. But His community cannot follow any other line. Solidarity with the world means that those who are genuinely pious approach the children of the world as such, that those who are genuinely righteous are not ashamed to sit down with the unrighteous as friends, that those who are genuinely wise do not hesitate to seem to be fools among fools, and that those who are genuinely holy are not too good or irreproachable to go down “into hell” in a very secular fashion.

The solidarity of the community with the world consists quite simply in the active recognition that it, too, since Jesus Christ is the Saviour of the world, can exist in worldly fashion, not unwillingly nor with bad conscience, but willingly and with good conscience. It consists in the recognition that its members also bear in themselves and in some way actualize all human possibilities. Hence it does not consist in a cunning masquerade, but rather in an unmasking in which it makes itself known to others as akin to them, rejoicing with them that do rejoice and weeping with them that weep (Rom. 12:15), not confirming and strengthening them in evil nor betraying and surrendering them for its own good, but confessing for its own good, and thereby contending against the evil of others, by accepting the fact that it must be honestly and unreservedly among them and with them, on the same level and footing, in the same boat and within the same limits as any or all of them. How can it boast of and rejoice in the Saviour of the world and men, or how can it win them—to use another Pauline expression—to know Him and to believe in Him, if it is not prepared first to be human and worldly like them and with them?

[The church] manifests a remarkable conformity to the world if concern for its purity and reputation forbid it to compromise itself with it. The world only too easily sees itself as a community which has no care but for its own life and rights and manner and which thus tries to separate itself from those around. The world itself constantly divides into individual cliques, interested groups, cultural movements, nations, religions, parties and sects of all kinds, each of which is sure of the goodness of its own cause and each anxious within the limits to maintain and assert itself in face of all the rest…. As distinct from all other circles and groups, the community of Jesus Christ cannot possibly allow itself to exist in this pharisaical conformity to the world. Coming from the table of the Lord, it cannot fail to follow His example and to sit down at table with the rest, with all sinners.

Jay Tolson:

In his new book, The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us, cultural critic Adam Kirsch observes that humanists are at an impasse: They must either reject continued progress (and the freedom and moral autonomy bound up with it) or acknowledge, on rational grounds, the merit of transhumanist and posthumanist arguments that a world without human beings is superior to one in which humans exist. The latter view, he suggests, might even be considered the humanistic equivalent of those held by various religious traditions that have “always seen the end of days as both wonderful and dreadful.” If the end of humanity is the consummation of humanism, Kirsch concludes, “there may be no choice but to accept the paradoxical promise that Franz Kafka made a century ago: ‘There is hope, an infinite amount of hope, but not for us.’”

Ian Marcus Corbin:

A thousand times in history—a million, more likely—visionaries, prophets, artists, and philosophers have wandered away from the social world that made them and sat themselves in nature, to see what could be seen when you stop demanding that nature echo back precisely the creeds of your community. We can think here of Elijah or John the Baptist, Muhammad or the Buddha, or Christ. Closer to our own time, Thoreau, Whitman, and Emerson went to nature to find a renewed, energized version of America. Analogous solitudes have been sought and found even in prison cells—think of Martin Luther King Jr. or Fyodor Dostoevsky. As much as all of these men’s cultural formations accompanied them into solitude, shaped what they would see, there is also—in nature, in reality—more than is contained in any philosophy or culture. The main things that are needed are silence and trust—and not just for the would-be prophets among us, but for all of us: teachers, policymakers, clerics, parents, humans of any stripe. Panicked catastrophism will only ensure that our challenged cultures stay brittle and stuck.

The turn to panic has been an immensely frustrating aspect of the past several years. The liberal establishment has gnashed its teeth, shrieked, buried its head in the sand, blamed its comeuppance on omnipotent Russian bots, anything to avoid going back to reality and seeing what it might have missed, how its cultures have been blind, how they could be refreshed. The ongoing advancement of postwar liberalism is not guaranteed by the dictates of nature. That is fine, or it had better be, because it is true. But what should we do with that fact? Here there are infinite options. We have to say it again, and keep saying it: There is always more to see in the world; the process of understanding is unending. There are ways for America to stay America, while gathering back in its various warring factions. One thing we can say for sure is that to keep giving voice to the shouted slogans of yesterday is not one of those ways. If America wants to return to a state of relative social peace, if it wants its various peoples to be at home in its world, it had better dispatch its incumbent prophets from the noisy, contentious town square immediately. New, more capacious visions are needed—great awakenings and reformations and renaissances still to be seen. Thankfully, beautifully, reality is waiting, and reality is never spent.

Tom Nichols (with whom I could not agree more):

“Back then, this kind of partisanship didn’t seem like a problem: In the Before Times, we still argued over politics instead of whether communist Muslims had taken over our Venezuelan voting machines with help from the Italian space program. I felt like it was safe to throw elbows and do some partisan high-sticking; I believed that we were all in a giant bouncy house called the Constitution, a place where we might bump skulls or sprain an ankle now and then but where there were no sharp edges and there were only soft landings.

I don’t believe that anymore.”

Neither do I.

(There’s a similar line of thought for “the church,” but I’m still working even the description of that one out.)