Category: Books

Economic Inequality and Social Division

Arts and Letters Daily links to a Boston Globe story on Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson’s UK book, The Spirit Level. The authors marshall persuasive evidence that in countries where income inequality is high, social conditions and general welfare suffer.

It is economic inequality, not overall wealth or cultural differences, that fosters societal breakdown, they argue, by boosting insecurity and anxiety, which leads to divisive prejudice between the classes, rampant consumerism, and all manner of mental and physical suffering.

The source of this anxiety, they argue, is status disparities and the inability of those of low means to achieve higher status. Ironically, their research shows that increasing wealth disparities lead to a more consumeristic society (and, we might add, increase the destructive pressure on that society):

We want bigger houses and more cars, not because we need them, but because we use them to express our status. Material goods are how we show the world we’re keeping up, and in a more hierarchical society that’s more important. Status competition becomes more intense, and that increases our need to consume.

A challenging and tempering thesis … if only we can heed the warning.

Choose a religion that fits your lifestyle and after-life goals!

Savvy Convert's Guide to Choosing a Religion Stumbled onto this book while browsing in a paper store in San Francisco recently and just had to share. It appears to be a terrific send-up of consumerism in religion carried to an extreme. “Compare and contrast before you commit. 99 religions to choose from.” From the same publisher (Knock Knock Books): How to Procrastinate, How to Get into Debt, How to Get Fat, The Complete Manual of Things that Might Kill You, and many more. Available from Amazon.

Wendell Berry’s Whitefoot

Catherine Falsani, writing on the Sojourners Blog, reviews Whitefoot, a children’s story by Wendell Berry that she calls “a beautiful, subtle book,” surely in part because of Berry’s luminous writing, and also due to the illustrations by Davis Te Selle.

Wendell Berry’s Whitefoot – Cathleen Falsani – God’s Politics Blog.

As compelling as the book seems, based on the review, I was equally taken by the Berry poem, “The Peace of Wild Things,” with which she ends the review:

As I read and re-read Whitefoot, I was reminded of Berry’s famous poem, “The Peace of Wild Things.” In this moment when the foundations of our world economy are trembling (along with our souls), it bears repeating:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Review: Art Instinct by Denis Dutton

Has humans’ esthetic sensibility played any role in their evolution? Is art “merely the by-product of an oversized brain,” as Stephen Jay Gould and others have held, so that it should be “excluded from the natural selection rulebook”? Or is it the case, as author Denis Dutton argues in The Art Instinct, that “aesthetics are linked at the profoundest level to our biological and cognitive prehistory, and that our ‘tastes’  emerged in the Pleistocene, and haven’t changed in essentials since then.”

Brian Morton’s short review of the book sets up this conflict of interpretations, but Morton spends most of his time sketching Dutton’s argument and supporting it. A quote:

Like our remotest ancestors, we take delight in virtuosity, we admire personal expression and novelty, we enjoy intellectual challenges that give pleasure in being mastered, and we benefit immeasurably from the sense of communion and intimacy these experiences bring us. This is art: then, now and always.

Hat tip to Arts and Letters Daily, where I found mention of the review.

Review: Art Instinct by Brian Morton | Books | The Observer .

A bicycle for … the farm?

Our theology reading group is working our way through Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America, a robust and challenging critique of consumer society and industrialized farming. In chapter 3, “The Ecological Crisis as a Crisis of Agriculture,” Berry insists on the critical importance of how land is used, and proposes “kindly use” and “humility” as the touchstones by which our agricultural practices should be measured. (Is it necessary to say that Berry, writing in 1977, finds modern agriculture lacking in both these regards?)

The use of land cannot be both general and kindly—just as the forms of good manners, generally applied (applied, that is, without consideration of differences), are experienced as indifference, bad manners. To treat every field, or every part of every field, with the same consideration is not farming but industry. Kindly use depends upon intimate knowledge, the most sensitive responsiveness and responsibility. As knowledge (hence, use) is generalized, essential values are destroyed. As the householder evolves into a consumer, the farm evolves into a factory—with results that are potentially calamitous for both.

Nolan, whose brother farms a 550-acre area in northwestern Iowa, developed the study questions for this session. They include the following information:

The fields of modern day farms are divided into relatively small grids … soils in the grids are tested for nutritional needs…with the use of GPS and other technologies manure and artificial nutrients are added to the soil in the grids as needed to avoid using too much or too little for peak production.  Wet “sour” areas are tiled for drainage. Much hilly land is contoured or strip-farmed. “Rippers” are used, rather than moeboard plows, to prevent soil compaction from heavy machinery…and to reduce wind erosion. Some farmers are planting this year’s crops between last year’s rows to lessen wind and water erosion. Farmers are paid to plant thick, tall grasses as buffer zones along creeks and waterways. Some small or “marginal” plots of land are seeded and left untilled. When possible many farmers are moving away from the use of petroleum-based fertilizers (probably mostly due to high cost!) toward more use of manures produced by food animals grown in confinement units…etc., etc…you get the point! 

So, Nolan asked us, “[D]o these types of behaviors meet Berry’s criteria for ‘intimate knowledge,’ ‘sensitive responsiveness,’ and ‘responsibility’ in land use?”

Somehow, one suspects that Berry would not be in agreement. Yet the juxtaposition of modern farming assisted by sophisticated technology with Berry’s injunction to kindly use somehow brought to mind Steve Jobs’ notion that a personal computer is “a bicycle for the mind.” In the same way that a bicycle multiplies human accomplishment through the creative application of simple machines, a personal computer multiplies human mental accomplishment by “leveraging” our ability to organize and adapt.

Jobs said this in 1981, four years after Berry published the first edition of The Unsettling of America. It seems highly unlikely that, even had Berry experienced personal computers, he would have grasped their transformative potential or believed them to be a force for good. Similarly, the earliest deployment of satellite navigation technology, which eventually became GPS technology, happened in 1979, after Berry’s book came out.

I wonder, though, whether the availability of cheap, powerful, ubiquitous information-processing technology combined with satellite navigation and software to manage the two offers the possibility for something like Berry’s “kindly use” of the land, but on a much larger scale than Berry can have imagined. If so, it would mean that large-scale, rationalized approaches to farming need not inevitably become exploitative, as Berry seems to assume. What Nolan describes as his brother’s approach to large-scale farming seems to recognize that exploitation is inevitably self-destructive, as Berry charges. So it takes an approach that is much more like nurture that can be seen at first blush.

Berry is surely right that an approach to agriculture that ignores the destructive effects of exploitation will lead in time to the ruin of the environment and the impossibility of human life on this planet. At the same time, small-scale farming of the sort that Berry seems to favor cannot feed the planet.

But perhaps a technology-mediated “kindly use”—a bicycle for the farm—where the nurture of the land is aided by the application of science and technology, offers hope for both preserving our planet and feeding our people.

Eagles and Wendell Berry

Our theology book group met today, at the Atlas Coffee Mill on the Fox River in Appleton. We’ve just started reading Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture, and our discussion today was on the first chapter. First published in 1977, but still in print and in demand, the book sets out the basis for Berry’s passionate view that Western industrialized society reflects the triumph of exploitation over nurture, to the great detriment of our planet’s, and therefore our own, well-being. Here’s a typical summation (pp. 12-13):

Thus we can see growing out of our history a condition that is physically dangerous, morally repugnant, ugly. Contrary to the blandishments of the salesmen, it is not particularly comfortable or happy. It is not even affluent in any meaningful sense, because its abundance is dependent on sources that are rapidly being exhausted by its methods.

By the end of our discussion, many of us were feeling the weight of Berry’s critique and confessed to a certain sadness, even despair, as a result.

On leaving the meeting, I walked east on Water Street toward its intersection with Olde Oneida. On my right was the Fox River, glittering in the crisp sun and reflecting the bright blue sky overhead. The winter moon had already risen and could be seen ahead of me as I walked. In the water, ducks swam idly, presumably enjoying today’s warmer temperatures.

As I watched, I noticed shrill, shrieky calls from birds circling the river above the ducks. Expecting gulls, I looked more closely and noticed their great size, white heads, and variegated deep-gray bodies. Not gulls, but a trio of eagles! They’ve become much more common along the Fox in recent years after a decades-long hiatus caused by deteriorating water quality, and thus diminished fish populations, in the Fox. As steps have been taken by the citizens of Wisconsin to redress the abuse of the Fox River that occurred during the industrialization of the area, a better balance of nuture in relation to exploitation (to use Berry’s terms) has been restored.

In watching the eagles circle and swoop, come to rest in a few trees on a small island, then launch themselves again over the water, and in remembering a time when there were no eagles to be found along the Fox from Neenah to Green Bay, I felt my spirits lift again.  And I recalled the words with which the chapter ends (p. 14):

But the care of the earth is our most ancient and most worthy and, after all, our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it, and to foster its renewal, is our only legitimate hope.

In the story of the eagles’ return to the Fox River, I find testimony that the ancient, worthy, and pleasing responsibility of caring for the earth and its creatures still may lift us out of our complacent lethargy and set us on our true way again.

Words to live – and die – by

In its August 26, 2008 issue, the Christian Century reviewed Forrest Church’s book Love and Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow. It’s a brief review and the reviewer is anonymous, but we come away wanting to read the book, all the more because Church wrote it in the last months of his life after having been diagnosed with terminal esophageal cancer. One quote from the book – characterized as Church’s mantra – stood out for me: “Do what you can, want what you have, and be who you are.” That quote is going on our refrigerator, along with this one, from an Amazon review:

Life is filled with danger. That’s just the way it is. Finally, the Titanic always hits the iceberg. Hence this simple, if imprudent bit of advice: Before it does, pick up the phone. Pick up the gauntlet. Do whatever it takes. Take a few chances. Dare to live before you die.