Wendell
Berry is a former professor of English at the
University of Kentucky and a past fellow of the
Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.
He is the author of thirty-two books of essays,
poetry, and novels. Berry lives and works in his
native Kentucky with his wife, Tanya Berry.
The time
will soon come when we will not be able to remember
the horrors of September 11 without remembering also
the unquestioning technological and economic optimism
that ended on that day. This optimism rested on the
proposition that we were living in a "new world
order" and a "new economy" that would
"grow" on and on, bringing a prosperity of
which every new increment would be
"unprecedented."
The dominant politicians, corporate officers, and
investors who believed this proposition did not
acknowledge that the prosperity was limited to a tiny
percent of the world's people, and to an ever smaller
number of people even in the United States; that it
was founded upon the oppressive labor of poor people
all over the world; and that its ecological costs
increasingly threatened all life, including the lives
of the supposedly prosperous.
There was, as a consequence, a growing worldwide
counter-effort on behalf of economic
decentralization, economic justice, and ecological
responsibility. We must recognize that the events of
September 11 make this effort more necessary than
ever.
We did not anticipate anything like what has now
happened. We did not foresee that all our sequence of
innovations might be at once overridden by a greater
one: the invention of a new kind of war that would
turn our previous innovations against us, discovering
and exploiting the debits and the dangers that we had
ignored. We never considered the possibility that we
might be trapped in the webwork of communication and
transport that was supposed to make us free.
Nor did we foresee that the weaponry and the war
science that we marketed and taught to the world
would become available, not just to recognized
national governments, which possess the power to
legitimate large-scale violence, but also to
"rogue nations," dissident or fanatical
groups and individuals, whose violence, though not
worse than that of nations, is judged by the nations
to be illegitimate.
We now have a clear, inescapable choice that we must
make. We can continue to promote a global economic
system of unlimited "free trade" among
corporations, held together by long and highly
vulnerable lines of communication and supply, but now
recognizing that such a system will have to be
protected by a hugely expensive police force that
will be worldwide, whether maintained by one nation
or several or all, and that such a police force will
be effective precisely to the extent that it
oversways the freedom and privacy of the citizens of
every nation.
Or we can promote a decentralized world economy,
which would have aim of assuring to every nation and
region a local self-sufficiency in life-supporting
goods. This would not eliminate international trade,
but it would tend toward a trade in surpluses after
local needs had been met.
One of the gravest dangers to us now, second only to
further terrorist attacks against our people, is that
we will attempt to go on as before with the corporate
program of global "free trade," whatever
the cost in freedom and civil rights, without
self-questioning or self-criticism or public debate.
This is why the substitution of rhetoric for thought,
always a temptation in a national crisis, must be
resisted by officials and citizens alike. It is hard
for ordinary citizens to know what is actually
happening in Washington in a time of such great
trouble; for we all know serious and difficult
thought may be taking place there. But the talk that
we are hearing from politicians, bureaucrats, and
commentators has so far tended to reduce the complex
problems now facing us to issues of unity, security,
normality, and retaliation.
National self-righteousness, like personal
self-righteousness, is a mistake. It is misleading.
Any war that we may make now against terrorism will
come as a new installment in a history of war in
which we have fully participated. We are not innocent
of making war against civilian populations.
It is a mistake- as events since September 11 have
shown- to suppose that a government can promote and
participate in a global economy and at the same time
act exclusively in its own interest by abrogating its
international treaties and standing apart from
international cooperation on moral issues.
And surely, in our country, under our Constitution,
it is a fundamental error to suppose that any crisis
or emergency can justify any form of political
oppression. Since September 11, far too many public
voices have presumed to "speak for us" in
saying that Americans will gladly accept a reduction
of freedom in exchange for greater
"security." Some would, maybe. But some
others would accept a reduction in security (and in
global trade) far more willingly than they would
accept any abridgement of our Constitutional rights.
In a time such as this, when we have been seriously
and most cruelly hurt by those who hate us, and when
we must consider ourselves to be gravely threatened
by those same people, it is hard to speak of the ways
of peace. But we dare not forget that since the
attack of Pearl Harbor, to which the present attack
has been often and not usefully compared, we humans
have suffered an almost uninterrupted sequence of
wars, none of which has brought peace or made us more
peaceable. The aim and result of war necessarily is
not peace but victory, and any victory won by
violence necessarily justified the violence that won
it and leads to further violence. If we are serious
about innovation, must we not conclude that we need
something new to replace our perpetual "war to
end war"?
What leads to peace is not violence but
peaceableness, which is not passivity, but an alert,
informed, practiced, and active state of being. We
should recognize that while we have extravagantly
subsidized the means of war, we have almost totally
neglected the ways of peaceableness. We have, for
example, several national military academies, but not
one peace academy. We have ignored the teachings and
the examples of Christ, Gandhi, Martin Luther King,
and other peaceable leaders.
And here we have an inescapable duty to noticealso
that war is profitable, whereas the means of
peaceableness, being cheap or free, make no money.
The key to peaceableness is continuous
practice. It is wrong to suppose that we can exploit
and impoverish the poorer countries, while arming
them and instructing them in the newest means of war,
and then reasonably expect them to be peaceable.
We must not again allow public emotion or the public
media to caricature our enemies. If our enemies are
now to be some nations of Islam, then we should
undertake to know those enemies. Our schools should
begin to teach the histories, cultures, arts, and
language of the Islamic nations. And our leaders
should have the humility and the wisdom to ask the
reasons some of those people have for hating us.
Starting with the economies of food and farming, we
should promote at home, and encourage abroad, the
ideal of local self-sufficiency. We should recognize
that this is the surest, the safest, and the cheapest
way for the world to live. We should not countenance
the loss or destruction of any local capacity to
produce necessary goods.
We should reconsider and renew and extend our efforts
to protect the natural foundations of the human
economy: soil, water, and air. We should protect
every intact ecosystem and watershed that we have
left, and begin restoration of those that have been
damaged.
The complexity of our present trouble suggests as
never before that we need to change our present
concept of education. Education is not properly an
industry, and its proper use is not to serve
industries, neither by job-training nor by
industry-subsidized research. Its proper use is to
enable citizens to live lives that are economically,
politically, socially, and culturally responsible.
This cannot be done by gathering or
"accessing" what we now call
"information"which is to say facts without
context and therefore without priority. A proper
education enables young people to put their lives in
order, which means knowing what things are more
important than other things; it means putting first
things first.
The first thing we must begin to teach our children
(and learn ourselves) is that we cannot spend and
consume endlessly. We have got to learn to save and
conserve. We do need a "new economy," but
one that is founded on thrift and care, on saving and
conserving, not on excess and waste. An economy based
on waste is inherently and hopelessly violent, and
war is its inevitable by-product.
The above was
initially online at the www.oriononline.org
website... and has been edited by Kay Hays, editor of
Timeline, the Foundation for Global Community (www.globalcommunity.org).
