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 ~
“…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.