Tag Archives: abstraction

An Ode to Wendell Berry (with quotations adapted mostly from “A Continuous Harmony.”), Dr. Robert Zuber

2 Aug

A person can aspire to heaven with his mind and his heart while destroying the earth, and his fellow humans, with his hands.

We are not humble enough or reverent enough.

I am ashamed and deeply distressed that American government should have become the chief cause of disillusionment with American principles.

Most of us do not know how to produce the best food in the best way.  We don’t know how to produce any kind in any way.

The person who is willing to undertake the discipline and the difficulty of mending his own ways is worth more to the conservation movement than a hundred who are insisting merely that the government and industries mend their ways.

The drastic and incalculably dangerous assumption is that farming can be considered apart from farmers, that the land may be conceptually divided in its use from human need and human care.

Our society is one of undisciplined abundance, which is to say a society of waste. And waste is a hideous concept  making our entire world hideous.

We maintain the  “barbarous abstraction of nationalism” while creating institutions of suspicion.

We are being “saved” from work, then for what?  It is the discipline, not the desire, which is the common ground.

Our kingdom of abstraction, including specialists turning partners into “objects.” Seeing people as “spare parts.”

The hypocrisy of “freedom” at the hands of government which surveils us and tells us what to do.

The present problems of the world are the result not of human stupidity but of human intelligence without adequate cultural controls.

Few stick around long enough to see the effects of their work, including their bad work. What is the impact on our neighbors and on our place in the world from what we do?  The standard of land use is fertility which preserves the interests of the future.

Seeing the land as merchandise and ourselves as its traveling salesmen. For our destruction of paradise there will be hell to pay.

The only genuine morality is concern for the life and health of the world. Such morality is long-term practicality.

There is no benefit without obligation.

Dear All,

This is the latest installment in my romp back through writings which, for better or worse, had an outsized influence on my own thinking and practice, including the way I engage the policy world for better or worse.

As a reminder, the point of this exercise is not only to highlight a path that had been laid out for me and that I did not do enough to cherish, but rather to point out the ways in which our deep contemporary challenges have precedents to which we have paid insufficient attention and which have only grown more challenging as a result.

In other words, what we now experience – the conflicts, the atrocity crimes, the corruption, the environmental degradation, the indifference and misinformation of governments,  the self-deception and willful ignorance of constituents, etc. – have characterized our  collective passage for some time.  This current moment has context-specific elements  which may appear to be unique but they have been predictable, in whole or in part, by thinkers focused on misguided elements of personhood, faith, agriculture and institutional life to which we have too-often offered unreflective and undeserved allegiance and thus are often more resistant to change.

Into this matrix of misery and potential stepped the Kentucky farmer, poet, strip mining critic, and social commentator Wendell Berry, someone who I have so far failed to meet but someone who has had an outsized influence on how I write and, in many instances, how I think about how I write.

While many are attracted to his poetry, many others have been moved by his essays and, more specifically, the place-based rural perspectives he embodies in a genre increasingly dominated, in this and many other societies, by urban voices.  His perspective is about the importance of place but it is even more about belonging – belonging to a community, but also to the rhythms of the natural order beyond domicile walls.  With all due regard for the predilections of the human condition, his view of a life worth living is an important antidote to the abstract and economically-oriented modalities of much of our urban life.  He laments the all-consuming consumerist orientation of much of our societies, consuming goods we do not produce or know how to produce, food we do not grow or know how to grow, preferring to own a neighbor’s farm than have a neighbor, resigning ourselves to predatory economic competition rather than to communion with those of greater and lesser means.

What we know how to do even less well , as Berry laments, is confront our addiction to waste, the incessant compulsion to consume without consequence and discard without concern.  He speaks of a society which continues to, even now, denude mountain tops for coal to light our Christmas trees, a society with many who aspire to heaven while leaving a world more “hideous” in certain aspects s than when they entered, seeing the world (including the land we rely on) as “merchandise” and ourselves as one form or another as “traveling salesmen,” belonging less to a place and a people than to an economic imperative. 

Berry is clear that, in environmental terms, all have “sinned and fallen short”  We have “erred and strayed” from our responsibility to future generations,  and it will be those generation, not mine, who will surely pay for the hell we continue to inflict on our communities, our oceans, our atmosphere. We are all culpable.  I am culpable.  And my culpability is indefensible given my professional choices such that I should know better at this point in life.  And I should also know better how to incarnate what I have come to know in practices which reflect the values I too-cavalierly espouse.

What I am also at this point in life is someone who is committed to simpler living, who acknowledges the almost overwhelming magnetic pull of technology and its promises, including the promise to eventually “free” us from work, one which also implies freedom from the meaning and discipline which are, in my humble view at least, essential to a life of value and purpose. I continue, perhaps  naively, to advocate for lives committed to self-improvement as we enjoin institutions and officials to improve their own practice and encourage our fellow citizens to renounce the “barbarous abstraction of nationalism” which threatened Berry’s earlier years, and which now consumes much of our present political discourse.

It is unreasonable, as Berry himself recognizes, to merely transpose lifestyles across increasingly complex societies.  Not everyone can farm a land.  Not everyone can write for audiences in moving and compelling ways.  Not everyone can critique societies seemingly determined to make “spare parts” out of potential-bearing humans and convince at least some to rethink that depersonalized, abstracted agenda. Berry has made much of his context while encouraging others to make the most of theirs.  He knows where he belongs. He’s not sure that enough of the rest of us do.

And he knows some of what must now be done. Everyone can plant a tree.  Everyone can commit to making private and public green spaces more congenial to butterflies and bees than to litter and waste.  Everyone can make lifestyle changes which increase their connectivity to neighbors, communities and the earth.  Everyone can overcome the worst of their material addictions while calling their more aggressive ideological addictions to fuller scrutiny.  Everyone can ensure that their benefits – privileges and entitlements – are tied to obligations to neighbors, community and the planet.

The benefits to me of this piece is that they are tied to an obligation to confess what I have learned from my long-term engagements with the work of Wendell Berry.  Learning about the importance of considering the consequences of my actions, especially to future generations.  Learning about the importance of incarnating the values and practices in my own life that I look to inspire in other persons and institutions.  Learning that care for the land is a common obligation to our future, one which we can discharge in our own neighborhoods as well as better support in larger contexts for those who care for the land that supplies our food and those who seek to improve what is left of the health of oceans and forests. Learning how to modulate our economic preoccupations in part by refusing to see others as “spare parts” to a larger project to which they are often not invited. Learning that a full life requires discipline as well as leisure, discipline as well as desire.  Learning that humility and reverence are not quaint relics of a bygone time but traits of character which can enrich our own life and all the lives we touch.

These can be hard things, harder than some of us imagine.  But if we don’t make good faith efforts in the direction of the changes we need to make, the messaging and behaviors we need to discard, there will indeed be “hell to pay,” if not by ourselves than by those younger folks who still believe we have their best interests at heart.

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Monster Mash: A Call for Reconnection in Policy and Community, Dr. Robert Zuber

10 Feb
Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed - Scooby-Doo Image (21166023) - Fanpop

Monsters Unleashed – Fanpopfanpop.com

Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom. George Orwell

My biggest fear is of some kind of dystopian future where we’re advanced in every way except in our humanity.  Bryce Dallas Howard

The tortures mankind devises for its amusement will surely render the devil redundant. Reed King

You always get your kicks pointing out defects?” retorted The Drippy Man. Jeff Phillips

We may be monsters, but we are each other’s monsters. L. Grey

Their lies are shrouded in beauty, attractive and believable to the average person. Jessica Scurlock

She was lucky enough to know little enough to fear nothing more than wasps, the dark, and the darker figments of her imagination. Angela Panayotopulos

No one wants to die, said Becka. But some people don’t want to live in any of the ways that are allowed.  Margaret Atwood

For some time now, I’ve been intrigued, at times perplexed, at other times even disgusted at the degree to which dystopian thinking and imagery has influenced – surely infected as well – our social and political life.

What moved me to start writing on this topic and stop procrastinating over it was an image on my twitter feed this past Sunday morning, one of many posts in the post-Musk era full of monstrous venom directed at others, of violence in all its diverse manifestations, of lies and manipulations which represent, among other things, a down-payment on a world of fear and unaddressed longing, of political impotence and resource scarcity, that seem set to bring us down to levels that those who study the human condition have long recognized (and feared) our capacity to descend.

The image I refer to was of a classroom-style space in which sat a group of Russian children wearing masks and listening to a middle-aged woman speak on the topic of war.  These children were perhaps of middle school age, still not so far from those days of being fearful of the dark, of imagining all sorts of monsters under their sleeping places.  Not so far from needing the reassurance and stability of older persons that there really aren’t monsters under the bed, that it is OK to sleep secure in the knowledge that we erstwhile adults are doing all that we can to ensure a brighter, less fearful future for their still young lives.

Such reassurance was not exactly what was communicated through this particular post.  What was “shared” was the view that “War is victory. War is love. War is friend. War is the future of the world”.

Well, if war is the future of the world, then these young lives are doomed to intersect with violence and deprivation which make the monsters under their beds seem like Sesame Street characters in comparison.  If war is not the future of the world, and there are still plenty of us determined to make this so, then this “sharing” takes its place among the most monstrous lies that could be perpetuated on young minds, minds which are able to imagine the carnage to come but can do little or nothing at this point in their lives to divert its impacts.

Lest we insert my post into some dynamic of now-rampant superpower confrontation wherein the evildoers are conspiring to “educate” their own next generation, we don’t have to look far within our own contexts for those monsters we choose over and over to feed instead of tame.  In my own country, the media is saturated with trailers for films and other accessible video that feature more shootings and explosions in a sixty-second commercial than any child needs to see in a lifetime.  We have proven ourselves ready to believe anything about the world (or each other) that we feel could strengthen our hand while we enthusiastically project into the universe the evil that we refuse to acknowledge within ourselves.  We set up schools to reinforce white privilege and glorify figures such as Adolf Hitler, run by people who are otherwise categorically opposed to the “indoctrination” of schools.  We use the machinery of politics to divide and deny, and we use the language of religion to win assent from people who don’t seem to recognize (or perhaps care) that their economic and spiritual pockets have yet again been picked.

The characteristics of societies given over to dystopian worldviews are more common than we might otherwise think, people who have come to expect so little of others or themselves, people who have accommodated themselves  to levels of violence and inequity which undermine prospects for caring and reconciled communities, people who believe fervently in the presence of monsters lurking in their sleeping spaces but who have also largely scorned  the rhetorical reassurances of those in authority who themselves have too-often failed the more important test of reassuring actions.

It is commonplace in social commentary to reflect on our “advances” as a civilization, clever as we surely are, but less to acknowledge the degree to which many of these advances create new obstacles to access by most of the world’s peoples, obstacles which take many forms and which are more often protected than challenged, sometimes at the tip of a firearm.   In my own country, but not my country alone, we continue to innovate in ways that both solve problems and create new ones without careful scrutiny of the gaps which our innovations are more likely to widen, the gaps which serve the interests of some but stoke the grievances of many, the genies which we so willingly let out of their bottles with not a clue in the world as to how to get them back in should that be required.

It is difficult for me at times to grasp what precisely we are up to as a species, why we find so much comfort in what are demonstrably our more troubling human impulses, why we insist on turning difference into occasions for hatred, why we take umbrage at the things others do and the ideas they hold without investing a single moment trying to understand the common complexities of people, their fears and loathings, their opinions and failings, their aspirations and dreams.   I don’t know that I have ever lived through a time when people presumed to know more about their political, cultural or religious adversaries based on assumptions, caricatures, stereotypes – none of which could stand at face value the test of evidence generated from direct, human interaction. We have literally become adept at creating monsters with little or no corroboration regarding what exactly people have done (or thought, or believed) to warrant this unseemly designation.

Last week, I indulged a “538” podcast with Robert Waldinger, a Harvard professor who has been chronicling – and lamenting – the gradual but consistent demise of human connection which has had – and is having —  grave impacts on our politics, our religious faith, even our personal health.  Waldinger describes a society of increasingly isolated and lonely individuals, people who report having few friends of any quality, fewer and fewer trusting bonds, fewer too of the complex human connections that can contextualize our overly muscular, abstracted and increasingly digitally-enabled  condemnations of others we do not know, have little interest in knowing, and to whom we seem content to posit  as existential threats rather than as life and health-saving ties that bind. 

Clearly we have decided in too many instances, as the great Wendell Berry once noted, that we would prefer to own a neighbor’s farm than have a neighbor.  Consumption, acquisition, doubling down on the “beautiful” words that obfuscate more than illuminate and that we simply “need to believe,” getting our “kicks” by condemning all that we fail to understand, projecting evil into the world that we haven’t yet had the courage to confront within ourselves.   These lines are hardly inevitable, but they are trending in directions that may well at some point make monsters of us all.

As one strategy for getting beyond my deep procrastination regarding this piece, I listened to a rendering of “Monster Mash,” a fun tune from long ago that got many in its day off the couch, away from the television, and on to the dance floor.   It was a “graveyard smash,” we were told, so much so that even corpses were ostensibly inspired to leave the cemetery for an evening and join the fun.  I fear that the next version of Monster Mash will be less about playful music and more about words which foment hatred and mistrust, words which signify our generalized intent, if that Russian woman prophesies correctly, to put “others” in their graves rather than invite them out for some genuine human interaction on a dance floor, real or metaphorical.  

More and more, some quite powerful thinkers are coming around to the view that our nations are only as healthy as the bonds which connect us to one another.  This is important work that has the potential to contextualize our policy, improve our personal and social health, and overcome the abstractions that serve only to increase populations of monsters, real and imagined.

For the sake of ourselves and the sake of our world, let’s reconnect.

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