HAYSEEDS AND STRAW MEN: I just finished reading two articles by Wendell Berry. Someone I respect a lot finds Berry wise and compelling. I have only read one slim book of his essays, and was not convinced; but realized that I didn’t have much to go on. These two essays, though, really got to me, and made me wonder, What is up with this guy? So I will take you on a tour of the essays. They are about globalization, food, 9/11, and localism. I welcome emails about these subjects–[email protected]. I finished the essays with much less respect for Berry; I’ll try to explain why. (You can find two earlier posts about Berry here and here.) I apologize for what will surely be a long and scattershot post.

The first essay is a response to the attacks on our country. I found it via Matt Welch. Here it is. As is traditional, my quotations from Berry are in bold and my replies are in plain text.

“I. 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.”

I wonder why this is the first sentence of Berry’s essay.

I’m serious. There was nothing more important to say than this?

I don’t know when Berry wrote this essay. Perhaps he had written about 9/11 in other contexts. But you know, I don’t see why Berry starts off by focusing on a perceived defeat of American optimism. (“Unquestioning” optimism.) That just seems so… inadequate. I trust his intentions and his Christian convictions enough to feel sure that he is not gloating; but there’s such a strong air here of “September 11 proves my politics were right!!!”–which is a tune that’s played countless times in the past months, but it always sounds tinny and detached from the reality of what happened.

Berry’s analysis is also not true. Neither half of it. Economic and technological optimism had been questioned every minute of every day before 9/11, sometimes rightly; sometimes wrongly. And I also don’t notice a lessening of such optimism. Maybe that will come later. Maybe it’s too soon to tell. But for the moment, I think most people have the mindset of a terrific T-shirt I saw: “I LOVE NEW YORK MORE THAN EVER.” So no, I can’t agree with this.

“IV. The ‘developed’ nations had given to the ‘free market’ the status of a god, and were sacrificing to it their farmers, farmlands, and communities, their forests, wetlands, and prairies, their ecosystems and watersheds. They had accepted universal pollution and global warming as normal costs of doing business.”

I’ll leave most of this to Jonathan Adler. But a couple questions: Is the air better in the USA or the former USSR? Would you rather drink the tap water in DC or Haiti? Is pollution in Los Angeles better or worse than it was in 1982? (And let’s not even start on Victorian London.) Which methods have preserved the environment better–free-market ones or state-controlled ones? Oh, and don’t get me started on whether or not American farmers operate in a “free market.” If only.

“VI. The paramount doctrine of the economic and technological euphoria of recent decades has been that everything depends on innovation. …This of course implied at every point a hatred of the past, of all things inherited and free.”

“Of course”? A standard rhetorical move in these essays: Assert that something is obvious, but actually give no reason for us to believe you. Why should a desire for economic innovation imply a hatred of the past? Does the invention of eyeglasses, or moo shoo pork, or ballpoint pens, imply a hatred of the past? How? Was it OK when people invented eyeglasses, but somewhere in the rush to invent bifocals and contact lenses and thinner lenses (so I no longer deal with coke-bottle glasses) and soft contacts and cat’s-eye frames (why can’t you just be content with poindexter glasses? Why do you have to look different?) and purple frames and purple-blue marbled frames and Lasik surgery our innovations became immoral? When Chinese immigrants invented moo shoo pork, did that mean that they hated traditional dumplings or soups or pot-stickers?

“IX. We had accepted uncritically the belief that technology is only good; that it cannot serve evil as well as good; that it cannot serve our enemies as well as ourselves; that it cannot be used to destroy what is good, including our homelands and our lives.”

So we were attacked because somehow nobody ever thought that hey, wait, sometimes people use technology to do bad things? How dumb does Berry think we are? I mean seriously, even for a straw man this is pretty shabby.

“XI. …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.

“XII. Or we can promote a decentralized world economy which would have the 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.”

More on this later, but for the moment: Don’t build a World Trade Center! Somebody might smash planes into it! Don’t build cities–somebody might blow them up! Don’t produce anything that somebody might want–and then you’ll be safe.

Right.

“XV. National self-righteousness, like personal self-righteousness, is a mistake. …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. The modern doctrine of such warfare was set forth and enacted by General William Tecumseh Sherman, who held that a civilian population could be declared guilty and rightly subjected to military punishment. We have never repudiated that doctrine.”

I’m sure it will come as a shock to every American that the US government has done Bad Things. Again, why on earth is Berry talking down to us like this?

Also, I have to admit that I assumed that the Army would blaze into Afghanistan and wantonly destroy with little regard for civilian life. I don’t trust the government and expected the worst. It didn’t happen. I was wrong. The Army has been extraordinarily careful to avoid civilians wherever possible. Afghanistan could not be further from the March to the Sea.

“XVI. It is a mistake also — 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.”

I wonder what this cryptic item means. We should sign Kyoto? We should stop fighting against the UN crusade to make abortions available to every woman on earth? No, probably not. So what then?

“XXI. 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 notice also that war is profitable, whereas the means of peaceableness, being cheap or free, make no money.”

I am intrigued, and would learn more about this. What response would Gandhi, King, or a peace academy graduate propose? What response would they propose for England in World War II? For us, in the same war? Why does Berry reject the comparison of 9/11 and Pearl Harbor (as he does in an item above)? Why do I suspect that Berry’s answers to these questions would be, “Do nothing”? Suicide is painless….

“XXIII. 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.”

I’m all for teaching about Islam. But I have a handle, I think, on why they hate us. Part of it has to do with the fact that I walked to work today in pants and a blouse, with my long hair and my dark devilish eyes exposed for all to see–no? Part of it has to do with the fact that the Middle East is a disaster area (partly our fault for supporting some of its florid tyrannies) and it’s easier to attack us than to actually set up a working government. So?

The rest of the essay deals with matters that are dealt with in more depth here: “On the Idea of a Local Economy.” So let’s look there.

“Our methodologies of land use have strayed from our old sympathetic attempts to imitate natural processes, and have come more and more to resemble the methodology of mining, even as mining itself has become more technologically powerful and more brutal.”

This is over-broad at best. Slash-and-burn agriculture mimics natural processes far more than orderly tilling of the soil does; would Berry praise it? Or are some natural processes not, actually, so great? And is mining today actually more brutal than in the days when half-naked women spent their days dragging wheelbarrows of coal through tunnels in which they could not stand up?

“What has happened is that most people in our country, and apparently most people in the ‘developed’ world, have given proxies to the corporations to produce and provide all of their food, clothing, and shelter. Moreover, they are rapidly giving proxies to corporations or governments to provide entertainment, education, child care, care of the sick and the elderly, and many other kinds of ‘service’ that once were carried on informally and inexpensively by individuals or households or communities.”

Two different types of question leap to mind: First, why is it wrong that I live in an apartment (within five minutes’ walk from several of my friends, by the way), wear polyester clothes I bought at a thrift store and occasionally splurge on Italian boots, and grow no food? Second, if I do all those things, why may I not continue to sing, play an instrument badly, home-school my (hypothetical) children (and would it be wrong of me to send them to public school/local private school/boarding school? If I homeschool, should I eschew online curriculum providers like K12–and why? Can I buy textbooks?), and care for my folks? What’s the connection here? Berry constantly assumes that if you think some things should be determined by the market most of the time (like whether Sally should go into candymaking or cabinetmaking, say), you must think all things should be determined by the market all of the time. What? Why? How many free-market advocates has he actually met who believe that? (This is actually one of my biggest problems with Berry: He almost never uses proper nouns. It’s a lot easier to construct free-marketeering straw men when you don’t have to quote anyone or cite their works by name.)

“Sentimental capitalism holds in effect that everything small, local, private, personal, natural, good, and beautiful must be sacrificed in the interest of the ‘free market’ and the great corporations, which will bring unprecedented security and happiness to ‘the many’ — in, of course, the future.”

Proper nouns please. Who thinks this??? And I don’t mean, Who has explicitly stated these goals and beliefs? I just mean, Who is Berry talking about? Who is he psychoanalyzing? If he is right, what should we look at to see that he is right?

Small: The Burger King owned by someone who would not have been able to open a successful business without the assistance and support given by a corporation.

Local: The Tastee Diner. Ben’s Chili Bowl. The tiny deli across the street from the Burger King.

Private: All of the above.

Personal: All of the above.

Beautiful: The smile on the BK owner’s face. The cleanliness that shows that the BK is important to the owner. The prints that he chose for the walls. His daughter, who’s going to private school on the BK profits and works at the BK after school. Not beautiful, by the way: The ideology that a BK is a “dead-end job” worthy of scorn, that the owner is an oppressor and his daughter is a dupe.

“But one knows, in the first place, that ‘efficiency’ in manufacture always means reducing labor costs by replacing workers with cheaper workers or with machines.”

Which then makes it possible for the manufacturer to make more stuff, then open more factories, then hire more workers (who often are doing less mechanical tasks, since the more mechanical ones are–hey, what a coincidence–mechanized). Henry Hazlitt has a great example in Economics in One Lesson–I think it’s the English silk industry, but I don’t have the book with me. Basically, weaving machines displaced workers. That sucks. But the weaving machines also allowed such a great expansion of the silk (?) manufacturing that within a short time (maybe two decades, maybe less) there were far more workers employed in the industry than there had been before.

“The law of competition is a simple paradox: Competition destroys competition. The law of competition implies that many competitors, competing on the ‘free market’ will ultimately and inevitably reduce the number of competitors to one. The law of competition, in short, is the law of war.”

Huh? Where’s he getting this? Burger King does not cause McDonalds to close. BK does not cause Tastee to close. Thai Chef does not cause Thai Phoon to close. (In fact, the first Thai restaurant often piques the local appetite, making it easier for later Thai places to open up.) Berry is competing with other authors to sell his books, yet when his sales go up theirs do not go down. In fact, theirs usually go up, since he draws readers’ attention to other authors. Similarly, Ann Taylor (shudder) does not cause the Discount Dress Shack to go out of business; CVS does not destroy Target; Barnes and Noble does not cause Book Haven or Atticus or BookTraders to close. (Obviously that does happen sometimes, but it is not the rule.)

I’m not going to deal with Berry’s list of the “principles” of free-marketeers, since it doesn’t even bother to come close to any free-market claims that might challenge Berry’s position. It’s basically a list meant to show how everyone who disagrees with Berry about economics is greedy.

“AWARE OF INDUSTRIALISM’S potential for destruction, as well as the considerable political danger of great concentrations of wealth and power in industrial corporations, American leaders developed, and for a while used, the means of limiting and restraining such concentrations, and of somewhat equitably distributing wealth and property. The means were: laws against trusts and monopolies, the principle of collective bargaining, the concept of one-hundred-percent parity between the land-using and the manufacturing economies, and the progressive income tax. And to protect domestic producers and production capacities it is possible for governments to impose tariffs on cheap imported goods. These means are justified by the government’s obligation to protect the lives, livelihoods, and freedoms of its citizens.”

AKA the right of the government to pick winners and losers, to aid some businesses and some workers at the expense of others, and to protect existing jobs in its country while destroying livelihoods in other countries and barring the creation of new jobs in its own country. No thanks. For so much more on this, click here.

“I assume that the first thought may be a recognition of one’s ignorance and vulnerability as a consumer in the total economy. As such a consumer, one does not know the history of the products that one uses. Where, exactly, did they come from? Who produced them? What toxins were used in their production? What were the human and ecological costs of producing them and then of disposing of them? One sees that such questions cannot be answered easily, and perhaps not at all. Though one is shopping amid an astonishing variety of products, one is denied certain significant choices.”

First of all, there are organizations that certify that goods were made under “worker-friendly” (as defined by the organization) conditions. Similarly, it should surprise no one that I support journalism that seeks to expose abuses of workers. Second, why note only that we do not know the costs? We rarely know the benefits of our consumer choices, but those benefits are equally real–and probably harder to discover, actually. And finally, what about when people in other countries want me to buy their products? Why should I assume that my trade hurts them?

“Perhaps one also begins to see the difference between a small local business that must share the fate of the local community and a large absentee corporation that is set up to escape the fate of the local community by ruining the local community.”

I also see the difference between a small local business or farm that is unable to withstand weather, temporary economic crises, big losses at the beginning of an enterprise that promises to show profit later, etc., and a corporation that can make up for temporary downturns and fluctuations. Are farming economies actually stable? Are “self-sufficient” economies stable? Well, not if there’s a blight. Not if there’s a famine–try early modern England for a few examples. There are reasons people want to trade, to tie their fortunes to an outside corporation, and these reasons cannot be gotten around simply by labeling them “greed.”

“A viable community, like a viable farm, protects its own production capacities. It does not import products that it can produce for itself. And it does not export local products until local needs have been met.”

…Why not? Why is it acceptable (if it is acceptable) to import arithromycin and ibuprofen and hypodermic needles, books and records and record players, computers? electric appliances? toasters?–but not food? Why is it wrong to get food from other people? Because you might starve if someone cuts off your food supply? It’s very hard to stop people from trading–as we’ve learned with Cuba and Iraq–and it’s not like self-sufficiency will prevent natural disasters or other forms of devastation of the food supply. Moreover, if that’s the justification, it’s a polemic against all risk–What if someone attacks you? If the justification is that food is symbolic, and we need some kind of symbolic independence… well, I need more than that before I’m willing to accept the reduction in our ability to feed people, the rise in the cost of food, and the attendant suffering that a switch to a “self-sufficient” local economy would produce. It’s harder to feed the world’s population now than it was four centuries ago. Methods of production that were appropriate to an earlier time may be inadequate now, and we’d need a good argument to convince us to go back. I don’t think Berry has come close to providing that argument in anything I’ve read by him so far–I’ve found him dismissive, unwilling to address the claims made against his position.