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| Amazon Link |
"Here is a human being speaking with calm and sanity out of the wilderness. We would do well to hear him." —The Washington Post Book WorldThe Art of the Commonplace gathers twenty essays by Wendell Berry that offer an agrarian alternative to our dominant urban culture. Grouped around five themes—an agrarian critique of culture, agrarian fundamentals, agrarian economics, agrarian religion, and geobiography—these essays promote a clearly defined and compelling vision important to all people dissatisfied with the stress, anxiety, disease, and destructiveness of contemporary American culture.Why is agriculture becoming culturally irrelevant, and at what cost? What are the forces of social disintegration and how might they be reversed? How might men and women live together in ways that benefit both? And, how does the corporate takeover of social institutions and economic practices contribute to the destruction of human and natural environments?Through his staunch support of local economies, his defense of farming communities, and his call for family integrity, Berry emerges as the champion of responsibilities and priorities that serve the health, vitality and happiness of the whole community of creation.
- Week 1 - 9/9: "A Native Hill," "The Unsettling of America," "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine," "Think Little"
- Week 2 - 9/16: "The Body and the Earth," "Men and Women in Search of Common Ground," "Health is Membership," "People, Land, and Community"
- Week 3 - 9/23: "Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community," "Conservation and Local Economy," "Economy and Pleasure," "Two Economies," "The Whole Horse"
- Week 4 - 9/30: "The Idea of a Local Economy," "Solving for Pattern," "The Gift of the Good Land," "Christianity and the Survival of Creation," "The Pleasures of Eating"
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| Professor Michael Stevens, Ph.D |
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1.1
Unknown 0:00
Thank you everybody for coming to this, I'm not sure if I should look at the
screen or at everybody, or there's many screens to look at here, this is kind
of like a 12 year old kids dream dream room right if you had like video games
hooked up and so on but then there is an irony that was brought up right away
that we're talking about, you know what, one of the source texts are one of the
essays here was his essay Why Why I'm not going to own a computer but we'll
talk about that a little bit. And I even make mention of that because I know
we'd be on computers talking about this and especially for online guests. I
think Wendell might give a little space of like a thumbs up that we're able to
talk about these things meaningfully across boundaries using a computer at
this, at least I'm assuming I'm not going to ask him personally, I'm just going
to make that assumption. So it's really great to be back with the call program
I really love doing it, so far for me it's been all Wendell Berry since I
started doing call, so I was able to do Windows fiction, teaching through a set
of a short stories, a couple of autumns ago. And then this summer, got involved
over Zoom, zoom with Wendell Berry's poetry, which was great. Also, I think I
was sitting in my basement hiding out at that time so it's good to be here. And
it's great to have people coming in on line, it's great to see people in
person. And so, here we go to one of the various essays, I think I made
mentioned, we, my colleague Matt Bonzo and I teach together at Cornerstone for
25 years. We wrote a book about Wendell Berry that was published in 2008 from
the precise stress paper publishing, which was one of our in the cultivation of
life we had a totally different title, and then the publishing the publisher.
One thing I found out was, you don't get to pick your title, or your cover and
the publisher said we're putting Wendell Berry's name in the very beginning of
the title, your names are not really that powerful, his address. Okay, that's
what everyone that one of the things we've done a little book tour out to
Pennsylvania and so whatever a book tour might be a very small book tour, and
we were often asked, Well where would you start reading the various words in
it. We found ourselves often saying, Go to the fiction or to the poetry because
if you go to the essays, he might seem really grouchy, right and he might You
might catch him in a tone or in a mood or on a topic, where he'll step on your
toes right. Not that that doesn't happen at times in the verse, as we found
out, we're in the fiction, but it's certainly, you know, and that's maybe the
nature of genre study that to go to kind of a fictional universe or go to a
poetic sort of sensibility is a lot different than going to an argument. But these
essays or arguments, and there's, there's no way. There's no way around that
and but I think they share, like all of his other writing the lyrical nature,
the command of language. And really, what comes through here is the tremendous
lucid mind of this, this man, I've got to meet him several times and spend time
with him and sit and talk with him. He reminds me if you ever had a grumpy
grandpa farmer who's kind of grumpy you kind of scared of him like a grandpa
farmer who works really hard, who's also the most well read, and intellectually
sharp person that you know, combined in one person, very intimidated to talk
with him, and I'm a grown up and I'm still kind of like oh, and then there's a
little bit of odd in that. But, so this is going to, we're going to we're going
to see him in argument mode, that was a charitable argument. I will always make
that I always make that claim he argues charitably. And he's, he's, logical,
without becoming an rationalist, I think, and so let's see if we can start to sort
that out as we go through these essays and we picked a very deliberate set of
essays. So, we get him in a certain vein of mind about the agrarian issues
right which is very close to his heart. I just had something I wrote out here
that we say the books of essays, but these actually had a lot of different
forums, many of the things we're going to read were either speeches, or
magazine articles, I made mentioned here, love, and dilemma good house which is
ultimately good house which is where native Hill comes from the first one we're
going to talk about 1969, for purposes of disclosure that was here I was born.
So I'm just, I always think what was wonderful during the year I was born, he
was already fully fledged in this a couple of the things in that book are
actually speeches he gave at University of Kentucky, against the war in
Vietnam, and in defense of a guy who had protested being drafted. So there were
some speeches in there. There were magazine articles there. He has written for
a number of magazines, some of my favorite are he's written for Rodale is
Organic Gardening magazine imagine picking that up in the 70s and there's a
Winterberry article in there like an organic gardening. He's written for draft
horse quarterly that's probably the best, you know, and he's for years as
farmed with draft horses.
Unknown 4:55
I'm not sure whoever subscribes to draft horse quarterly really knows what
they're getting into opening up to one of his, you know, I'm not sure I'm not
sure how many people subscribe to but that's a tremendous thing also Orion, a
couple magazines of the Sierra Club. So the reviews and literary magazines, the
whole earth catalog, showing some of his roots and what I would call I grew up
in around Ithaca, New York, I recall it sort of 70s early kind of hippie
organic culture at the food Co Op there, many people kind of early dreadlocks
and people who are in the Old Earth and I always think of my neighbor lady,
Sally spearmint, everything in their house when you go in there to visit kids
was like, to me, like a 12 gross things I'd never want to eat now. I wish that
was my whole everything in my kitchen is like organic things sprouted things.
Probably primitive kombucha and so I was just like, where's the hotdogs, pop in
there no hot dogs in this house, you know, now I'm just like, what, why didn't
I take advantage of that. So in the end so that throughout the 70s It's a lot
of magazine articles very very desilter and diverse. And he's arguing things as
they arise and as they come up. And then in the 80s and 90s he continues that
pattern and I give it a give the names of some of the volumes of essays you can
get your hands on. We're just going to have a sampler in this course. So, in
the 70s, a continuous harmony, essays, cultural and agricultural and then
really his, his most signature volume that kind of launched him as a public
figure and really articulated the environmental movement which was the
Unsettling of America, which again, he calls, culture and agriculture, he likes
to play those two against each other with each other. That's from 1977 that's
been reissued. And those essays. Continue and we're going to look at a few from
that volume continue to just be like holy cow this is still more relevant than
ever and that was someone do the math, 20 to 45 years ago 45 years ago. It
isn't 90s Same kind of pattern. Gift of the good land which is a volume I
really like again further essays cultural and agricultural and then home
economics 14 essays which is a volume of us teaching in my undergraduate classes
from time to time, a teaching undergrads, their short essays, not that long
until the America is really long essays they're short essays, but they're also
essays that are kind of engaging and intriguing to young people, I've often
told Wendell Berry. Do you know that there's a lot of 20 year olds who read
your writing and are just like stunned and shaken by that. And he's like, I'm
glad somebody who's listening right so and so, kind of a sort of lost touch of
my talk, but that's okay we can keep on truckin. So, and then a volume I'm
actually using in my senior capstone class for Humanities, this semester, which
I really love from 1998 is called, what are people for, I think I fell in love
with it just because the title. Were people for question mark. It's like plus
they had really great cover of some paintings of store I can remember the store
courier whoever it was now that change it to a different cover and it's like
not as engaging to me. So yeah, I've kind of lost my PowerPoint, so I'm not
sure if not fully sure where I where I am if I if I advance it. I don't know if
you can restore that and one of the slots on there. And we'll, we'll keep on
going. That's happened before. Okay, let's
Unknown 8:13
go back to the up arrow because everybody was like, Yeah, you're gonna go to
the up arrow here. I'm not sure you can hear me, which is fine, I might have to
bring questions to you go back here to that, up arrow always aim hit your
presentation, and it should pop right back up over you awesome,
Unknown 8:29
but I'll be okay Thanks sister. I need to I need. We got to make sure she's
close by, that's, that's a key element right here. So let me keep going this is
just kind of introductory. The new millennium changed things and especially the
coming of 911 and Windows 10 really changed. It's changed over the last 20
years it's interesting that we're coming right to that moment here this week.
Actually, my father in law's in New York City fireman for 35 years, matter 42
in the Bronx, he was toward the end of his career when 911 happened I still
always talking on the phone the other days, there were time that this this
anniversary especially he's just, I don't even want to be down in the city I
don't want to go down there again, can't deal with it so and he's living in
upstate New York now. So, he had just written a book in 2000 called Life is a
miracle an essay against modern superstition, which is actually one of the
first ones very books I ever saw. So I didn't know about him and mica, you
know, and until like end of graduate school into my teaching career. And it's
it's a tremendous, obviously that might not have King Lear that spoken. I think
by Gloucester when he thinks he jumped off a cliff, but he didn't he just fell
down in the field and then he gets up, and it's, it's a great it's a book
length essay. But then what happens is 911 happens and then Wendell begins to
write about what's happening culturally in a much sharper tone right everything
kind of sharpens I think I was just reading something where somebody said, is I
didn't remember the world. Yeah, the world of the 90s when it was like things
were kind of different melts, it's hard to remember a different tone than the
world we live in. So he wrote in the presence of fear three essays for a
changed world right at the end of 2001. He brought up these essays he'd written
really quickly that are actually very great moving and very. I don't know. You
got a feeling. He also feels the banks that the rest of us feels right but
wants to figure out how to how to navigate it based on this long backstory of
his understanding of the world and it was really helpful. And then there's a
full volume that's actually called citizenship papers from 2003, and then I
think one that I've also used with students of volume called The Way of
ignorance and other essays 2005, and they're more. The tone is a little sharper
edge a little dark, you know, we're dealing with things that the dysfunction
within our own culture has become even more apparent in the world at large and
I think that he, you know, it's not that they're worse essays, they're all
quite, quite good but you, you definitely feel the clouds above those essays.
And that has carried through some of his later essays now what matters
economics for renewed Commonwealth, and then his, his Jefferson Lecture he gave
in 2012, he got the award from National Dog for Humanities, called it all turns
on affection. He's put that together with some other essays and their, their,
their critiques, there they are. They're a little bit beleaguered, I guess
would be the tone, you know there's a weariness to that time. Plus he's already
into his late 70s and 80s and saying you know what, what, what has changed in
all my time of doing this, then you can look at some of his more recent, recent
volumes of essays and give you kind of that same same flavor. We're gonna read
a set that actually comes at a weird moment. Norman Where's Bo who taught for
years at Georgetown College of Kentucky. By the way, that's where Wendell
Berry's permanent papers and archive is set, it was at University of Kentucky
where he taught for a long time, and also attended. But after I believe it was
after they put together like a $17 million dollar new basketball arena, he just
became frustrated. If you're a university Kentucky basketball fan, sorry about
that that doesn't. And so he said forget it in a small liberal arts college
right Georgetown Kentucky Northwest but it was a guy who taught there for
years, the guy who was the editor of the volume were meaning put together these
agrarian essays and numbers but actually I came and saw him here in Calvin he
was established through here at Calvin maybe 1015 years ago, and he now teaches
at Duke Divinity School, and I like the tone because it's wonderful. It's the
nexus of agriculture and culture that is kind of his interesting thing right,
it's, it's being a writer and a farmer, it's talking about the land and the
people who dwell in the land right and so the agrarian essays kind of hone in
on that. So all the essays, we're going to look at were written prior to 2002
Actually, the volume was already put together before 911 happened, published in
2002. So we're looking at window of the old world the old Millennium if you
will, and it'd be interesting to maybe kind of I'm not I'm not like trolling
for another call class to look at another set of his more recent essays of the
last 20 years and the different tone but yeah so I, I'm, I'm, I'm happy with
this selection because it's a variety of essays, but they're linked closely enough,
around, look when you say culture and agriculture you can you can stretch that
pretty widely, the range of these essays goes pretty widely, you know, as we're
reading them we're like oh it's kind of it's in the same topic but kind of
going over here and going over here, so it's just enough to kind of enough
critical mass to hold it together. So we're going to get into the first four of
them.
Unknown 13:33
For our class today and see if I can advance I'm not sure if I'm supposed to
push this sideways. You can see that the coming of coming of Microsoft Teams
and so on, struck many of the older faculty members everywhere with great
trepidation and it has not left me. Okay, has not left me. It stays with me at
all times when I'm in the classroom. Thankfully you can have students crying
out to you what to do okay do this sometimes contrary contrary information. So
it's kind of an uphill, it's it's really the lead essay in that first volume
that he collected which is long legged house the lonely good house by the way,
is the shack, like the shaft. It's a little house on stilts that he has on his
property right beside the Kentucky River that he has written, everything is
written in that little building over the course of the last 55 years. It has no
electricity and no plumbing there's a little house next to it, and he stops
writing when it gets dark. So it's full of windows and there's some window
poems that you could read where the wind that he talks at length about being in
that room, you can find pictures of him wearing his coveralls from his day
farming in their writing and he always writes with a pencil and a yellow legal
pad, which is going to be a source of some controversy when we get to one of
these essays has been a little thing for that so I was gonna mention lanes
landing farm where you can write to you can write to him and he responds here,
right, right here and over at Carter letter I sent him a birthday card. Once in
a while. Every last few years, and it's like PO Box One Port Royal. So he got
the first one I guess there's not a lot of competition because he and his
family decided to move up to the pond but I just actually taught before I drove
up here, drove down the BeltLine, I just taught in my American Lit class from
Walden out by the cornerstone pond at a sufficient distance, not to get too
close because you don't have to get close to any campus pond. Right, it's not
Walden Pond where you could see 10 feet down into the Clearwater that's not the
nature of our campus pond by any means. I don't think any campus pond is that
way. But we were close enough there. My only problem was getting back up off
the ground after sitting there with students for like an hour and 15 minutes
and I needed some help to, but with Thoreau famously moved out to his not yet
completed Kevin on July 4 1845 I was interested in Windows, moved with his
family, exactly 120 years later, away from Lexington out to what would, what
had been their weekend retreat and now it was going to be their permanent
dwelling which was this farm so clearly he had that in mind, he's a great,
great fan of Thoreau's work, and he's been working from that farm in that place
ever since. So when he talks about a native Hill, he's talking particularly
about this little piece of 111 acres there along the Kentucky River in Henry
County. He, it's become part of him or he's become part of it, it's not clear
which right that's, that's kind of what rootedness has done for him. I'm just
going to toss out a couple of quotes, this is kind of going to kind of do at
this time and just see what grabs somebody's interest or somebody is like, oh
wait a minute here what Yeah, or I thought that one as well or underline that
as well. These are the ones that struck me. By no means the only important
lines in the thing, but I try to keep the kind of quotes that would carry the
themes through each of the essays. The first thing that struck me in native
Hill is this my own life is inseparable from the history of the place. It is a
complex inheritance and I have been both enriched and bewildered by it.
Interestingly, the bewilderment has many more interesting than the enrichment
to me and he actually has addressed that if you ever get a chance to read his
book from 1970 called the hidden wound, called by Alan Wolf at Yale, the greatest
book by a white American about racism, it's about it's about his grandparents
who were slave, great grandparents who own slaves on the same property, and
what it means to work land that was once worked by slaves, and your ancestors
and now is worked by you and what, and it's a, it's a tremendous he actually,
Unknown 17:38
when he was at U of Kentucky, he took a semester like a sabbatical out at
Stanford, where he had actually gone to graduate school to study, writing with
Wallace Stegner years before, and he just said he sat in the library and he
just worked on that book and just wrote every day. That book it was like the
thing he had to write about. You know what 5050 years before. This has become
an issue again in our culture, he was, he was addressing I've often pointing
people towards that book to start thinking about issues of race in America
it's, it's tremendous. That's the bewildering part, but the enriching part was
also like to be somebody who's given your whole adult life to a place and reap
the benefits of that and lived in relationship to that, I think that's what
he's after a couple of other quotes just to get it rolling. I noticed how the
his place helps him resist abstraction like let's talk about environmentalism
or whatever, he can't talk about that without talking about his farm right when
I have thought of the welfare of the earth. The problems of its health and
preservation, the care of its life. I have had this place before me, you know,
so like accident. I can't remember think locally or globally. Think globally,
act locally I think is I've totally messed up that bumper sticker, okay, maybe
there's both bumper stickers at this point, I can't think about issues of the
demise of the world without thinking about what's happening right where my feet
are standing where my house is right, right, where this field is right up
behind here, right where we have get get our food get our nourishment. And it
struck me that that was a that was a profound thing you notice these going to
lament in many cases, we've lost touch with place place could be any place, or
no place, and then maybe how well can we think about these broader issues when
they have no actual tangible bearing but are only abstractions, I was kind of
struck by that necessity of being locked in, located somewhere to be able to
make, make a statement that has that has some kind of meaning about the
broadest sort of philosophical quarrels and questions. A couple of other quotes
from this. You guys probably read a lot here when he was at NYU and told the
professor. This is how it works with with people from New York City, right, I'm
going to Kentucky you're going where you're doing work that you know it's like
we're talking about, why don't you ever do that right but why would you go pee
on the border of New Jersey. And I've often thought the people that sitting out
kind of maligning my wife's family who are city dwellers in New York City. I'm
from upstate, the country a country bumpkin. That there's a certain. They claim
the rest of the country is very parochial but there's a certain parochialism in
New York City, some people don't leave their neighborhoods, very often. Don't
leave Queens once every, you know, six months or something. Never get off Long
Island, haven't actually been to the mainland again right, and you're just like
well that's, I mean, so what do you really know about Iowa. I know you know it
exists right maybe but. So, the professor said something really interesting and
the way Wendell took it, you know, in the way you phrase it is striking, where
the guy is like you go there and you're nobody who matters will know you know
where you are, meaning no urban intellectual no urban East Coast intellectual
will will know about your work. So you won't matter anymore. So to go to the
hinterland is to basically abandon mattering. Which is an interesting kind of
take on things in common, we're all, there's probably for all of us someplace
else, even from Grand Rapids that seems like a crazy move, I'm going to the up
I'm just taking off. I'm leaving it all behind for the Porcupine Mountains.
Okay. Are you sure you want to do that. For one thing they're Packer fans up
there. Okay. Somewhere you cross the line and elegant vertical lines you can
kind of understand why. Okay, get ready for lions Pro, but you're in the
Central Time Zone over there as well it really still in Michigan, but it's also
like there's always someplace from here that just seems like you've just gone
off the map you've no one was no one's gonna care, no one's gonna hear from you
anymore. You're gonna lose your relevance and so he got that. But the irony is
that he really found everything he was looking for, only when he returned to
that place. You take a look at this, of final quote from page seven my language
after he got back home and especially when he got that farm, my language,
increased and strengthened imagine how the New York intellectual would feel
about that. Yeah, that can my rural Kentucky, my language increased in
strength. What are you talking about your labor is gonna be destroyed, right,
not just the drawl but just country language right no is better. It had a place
of purpose. It set my set my mind into the place like a live roof system. I
love that. I came to see myself is growing out of the earth like the other
native animals and plants like I'm as much part of this as the hickory tree
over there and my roots are down here, just like the crop that I just put down
in these sheep that I have over here.
Unknown 22:27
So there's a, there's a counter counter cultural obviously countercultural move
at work. This is the system again writing. Just after he really moved back to
that farm. Just after he actually makes very clear member of sat with a group
of people chatting with Wendell, and he was like, I didn't retire from the
university I quit. Just remember that not retire, I quit this but you know it's
like okay, most of us were like university teachers by the way, certainly, you
know that it's I'm, you know, I, it was me making the break from that for this
right you know it's very tough to get fired and I didn't retire. Okay, so you
can see the little bit of the move the move is you have to kind of swim against
the current culturally, this is a guy who we, we talked about him in the other
one of various sessions, if you're from rural Kentucky, granted his dad was a
lawyer right grandparents are both farmers on both sides, but his dad was a
lawyer if you ever in the fiction that's Wheeler Catlett right that's his dad,
John Barry. His dad was a lawyer, he lived in town, but lived on the farms in
the summer and on weekends, got sent away to a military High School at one
point I think he was kind of like a problem he says I was a problem student I
don't know if it's one of those things where you get, they took you out of the
school, let's say you went to military school to whatever, and he wrote, you
know, he learned he said there I learned how to rebel. Okay. He went to the
University of Kentucky but then you went to Stanford during this amazing
program, the creative writing program that Wallace Stegner began right around
the time that the Iowa Writers Workshop began I mean this, there was no such
thing as a creative writing program and the you studied while sticking with him
there was Larry McMurtry the Texan of Lonesome Dove, and the Comanche, the
Comanche and Texas Ranger novels, and Ken kz of one from the Cuckoo's Nest,
then the acid Kool Aid test and taking LSD and driving across the country. He
visited windows for many times by the way, kPZ, even though they're from pretty
different also studying there was Ernest Gaines who has been here at Calvin for
the festival faith and writing the African American writer who wrote a lesson
before dying a tremendous unbelievable novel and really great movie. They're
all there together in the late 50s It was like this amazing Nexus, and then he
got a Guggenheim Fellowship and lived in Italy in France with his young wife
came back and was teaching at NYU. You have arrived. If you're a country kid or
a Kentucky kid. You've arrived if you're teaching at NYU, you just got back
from Europe, you had a novel published when you're 26 years old. It's that that
he felt like he had to leave behind because he felt like he wasn't rooted in
that where it was a world that was just sort of drifting and kind of fabricate
your own identity right, he only found it when he got back to the hardscrabble
farm there. So that's countercultural I mean that's the move I mean that's kind
of what he's getting at right in a lot of different ways showing. That's what
reminds me of the row one of his early inspirations right, you know, that
walking around New York City wherever you know the mass of men lead lives of
quiet desperation. That's what you got to get away from. That's what he found
at the farm. Yes, I think so yeah it's gonna back and forth certainly heard him
Unknown 25:33
expressing regret about time away from him or did he like, feel like that was
important.
Unknown 25:42
I've heard him expressed regret about time away and later on in his life, like
when he, when he traveled to Ireland to his ancestral town of kachelle,
Ireland, or when he went to Peru and studied Inca farming techniques. He is
like I felt this plate get in an airplane and flying far away I felt like I was
just that was after he was already kind of rooted in the farm. Beforehand I
think it's, I mean, I take it to be everybody's got to find their journey to
the place where they belong. And in his journey, taught him that he wanted it.
I think that's you know Ted he just been okay if he's going back there right
after college, or not even going to come just gonna work the farm. It would
have been a different wouldn't have been as cool a story for us but but I think
for him he thinks it would have been a different cuz he, he knew that he wanted
he'd been offered, basically everything else that he wanted, but realize what
he really wanted was that. And so, I will become a writer but not in Greenwich
Village, right, and in the talking with the elites, but after farming in the
morning, you know, writing with my pencil and paper for like organic gardening
magazine. So, choosing to kind of step out of it completely so I don't think
there's regret in that regard I think he looks at it as these are the things
that were told to me this is what you're supposed to do, this is what it means
to go up the ladder. And I don't exactly know what is if you ever read the
fiction, it you know candy caplets relationship with his dad we there is
somewhat fraught and Wheeler is it demanding I don't know if his way stick with
his dad was his dad's a lawyer and somebody who can figure out what you're
doing and do it with your life and go and get, and I don't know if that move
on, everybody has to deal with the parental expectations or then you're on the
other side is the parent where I am now and your kids are growing up and so
what are you doing, what, what, what's your major, or is there a major there
who's this boyfriend or what's going you know so we all we all end up on that
side of things and I sense there was probably some of that within his, you
could, you can, You can kind of figure out what happened with Windows life
because the character of Andy Kevin in the fiction is him in the things that go
on with Andy Catlett seem, often to be thinly veiled experiences that he
himself has had, and then Catlett goes away to become a journalist in San
Francisco, comes back to the farm in one of the novels of Moses his arm in a
farming accident seeming to represent what he's lost by his departure and his
return or something like that and I did try not to read too much symbolism in
but when somebody sets out a character that's clearly themselves you can't you
can't really help it right. So, it seems that I found my way, I made my
pilgrimage and found my way back to this place, this place will be my
sanctuary. If you take a look. I'm going to keep on going a little bit here.
This is also from this first essay native Hill. I just, I just noted up here at
the top, along with his joy at returning came to bewilderment of what mankind
has done in the place coming back to Kentucky he became a reader of Kentucky
history, and I've read a couple of the books on Kentucky history that he talked
about or mentioned, I lived in Kentucky briefly when my dad was in the army at
Fort Campbell, Kentucky when I was like five or six years old. We lived off
base at a bolt plantation setting, I have no idea what we were doing there. My
dad has passed away I can't really ask him, I don't know why, why didn't we
live on the base, I'm not. But we lived in Kentucky and listen as a Yankee,
you're like, What am I doing here, what who are, who am I here and it was kind
of, There's a lot of tension about that. But when he got to Kentucky he
realized Kentucky exemplifies it was the first frontier right from the, from
the colonists. Kentucky is the first frontier over the mountains. So, beyond
the original colonies, it's the place where you could actually see the, the
young republic of America, how it's going to work, and he speaks of it as, as
you guys were reading along here, the early settlers of Kentucky use violence
to set up their place in the world that was one of the goats. The idea was that
when faced with abundance once it consume abundantly, an idea that has survived
to become the basis of our present economy, remember that guys just went
through and chop down every tree to build the road in burn bonfires of trees,
and it's, it's kind of like
Unknown 29:49
the smorgasbord or the feast where you are the buffet where you get all these
plates and half of them right you can't even eat the rest of it and you just
like it's got too much there's just so much there, and you haven't gone to the
dessert. Dessert place right or whatever dangerous thing that still remains
there. I think Golden Corral would be the primary example of that, the dark
side of whatever that consumptive nothing against that corporate Vegas but it's
a scary place. We only been there once. Probably for our own health, you should
visit but but briefly and rarely to that place. So it's like that but with that
set the tone Kentucky settlers going in, let's cut the road through and burn
away through there. Let's cut down all the trees that set up, that, that's
still what runs the economy, he would suggest you just consume resources
recklessly. It now we're in the age of fossil fuel. So the age of fossil fuel
as you consume recklessly until it starts to run out so and then and then you
sort of scramble okay what are we going to do now. So I think a lot of the
things that he, a lot of the things he noticed are simply observing patterns
that are the same and have been the same for several 100 years that no one's
bothered to change. Right, it's a lot easier just to roll with it until
cataclysm. And, and that's, that's one of Wendell Berry's in a lot of his
writings, just like, this is the way things have always been well hold on a
minute. Is this the way things should be. Or just the way things have always
been, we can kind of feel that a little bit in here, as he suggests, it occurs
to me it's no longer possible to imagine how this country looked in the
beginning but for the way people drove their claws into it. What was it like
everywhere in Michigan, the place got clear cut by the lumber industry, or
white pine trees all over the place, especially the northern half. If you go to
the Warren Woods state park down by Warren dunes, you can see the guy who
preserved the Eastern hardwood forest, and was told by his neighbors, he was a
lunatic. But there's like 10 acres of the old forest still remaining and it's
like what is this doing here, Hickory trees and all kinds of crazy, you know,
things that you didn't know, we're still around not that second growth for us
is okay. I'm glad we have it, but you can even imagine. The Grand River side
with Potawatomi folk in there really is it's just hard to fathom it. It's it's
been changed, changed utterly if I want to quote gates right. I don't know if a
terrible beauty was born either right or whatever has been born by that. So,
you try, you try to restore. But your work becomes work, restorative work with
both, both literally with land but also with a sense of place, you can't go
back to the past, we all know that, Right, we can't, you can't just tell the
rollback time but can you act restoratively and reductively going forward. I
think that becomes a challenge for him on his Hill on his on his little rich,
rich line set of land, he says a lot of times in that so remember how many
people farmed it recklessly and eroded the entire deck they planted up the
ridge, ridge line. Listen, I grew up in upstate New York, people farming
hillsides, going up to the, you know you have cows who stand like that their
entire lives. The dairy cows, or they stand this way right, they don't stand on
any straight ground ever. My, my brother in law, my sister have a beef cattle
farm near skinny Atlas lake. They live along the rubber the road that goes
through and then both sides he owns land and goes like that. Very scary drug
chapter by the way, you've got to be careful when you're driving tractors there
and these poor cows are just kind of like, but it's, it's, you can do things,
you know plant all that you want but land, You know, the way water runs on
land, it's not, it's, you're going to do harm, very easily, and many people
have done harm even on his own land he spoke of the harm that was done by the
people they planted before and he's trying to restore the love how it goes for
solutions and again this is, it's not all negative right so you're looking for
the positive he does, he does go for that each of the essays. There used to be
a book that was preachers have reached the level of consciousness as men have.
They must become conscious of the creation, they must learn how they fit into
it, in what its needs are and what it requires of them borrowed to pay a
terrible penalty is a striking mind to me, because we don't actually, we don't
actually have to do that in the short term, you can pull those everything in
view and just pave everything and you wouldn't see but the penalty will come eventually
right. When all the water runs off in all kinds of directions and floods things
out or whatever happens with an ill conceived housing development right or
whatever had not I'm not talking about poltergeists where they buried a tub or
a graveyard and they get haunted but just, just things you could do the land
and property. And I love the phrase, what do you make of this brace. What its
needs are and what it requires them. Suddenly flipped it on its head, like,
okay I can, what are the needs of a place and land, you can think about your
own yard.
Unknown 34:40
But what does it require of you, in one sense it doesn't require anything right
it's just going to be there and if you're like me, it just grows until the
neighbors seem to be a little banker that has been mowed lately and then mode
and then you go back out there you know it's not requiring a whole lot of
upkeep care. What is, what is our place require of us, that becomes a becomes a
question that kind of steps back right kind of cuts both ways and you're like,
Okay, wait a minute I. The word that comes to our mind as biblical echoes is
stewardship, right, that he would tend or take care of it in a way, I guess
that's one of my arguments for not putting chemicals in the lawn and Alonzo
fall and there's no, the grass is all like beans and so until I can always, I
can use the term stewardship there or I could use a term of this like
negligence, I guess. But, you know, trying to do. Trying to take care of a
place both the tangible place and the human beings, the people in that place.
You can be passive and we often can be, since I got involved in my neighborhood
association on the northeast side of Grand Rapids, you realize wow there's
11,000 people in this neighborhood association, some tiny percentage of them
actually even know each other, and we all live in like a two mile radius. Why
don't people even know each other I mean but the first step toward helping to
take care of each other is that I would know this person to know that there's a
need, rather than just knowing what their dog is and what car they drive out of
the driveway, you know, I never really haven't. So, I was struck by that and
also challenged by that that there's something required of me to be a neighbor
rather than just like living here and other people live on each side. So, I got
a lesson in no rush is out there probably so we attempted rush we attempted our
beekeeping again my oldest son has been beekeeping for a couple of years, we
got two hives this year brought up they drove him up from Florida or Georgia.
They were too vigorous. Suddenly, you couldn't go into the backyard area that
one hive especially very vigorous lots of honey but people getting stung, had
the kid mowing in his bee suit. And then my neighbor came over to me and said,
I don't think you're in, you're in keeping with the Grand Rapids ordinance
about beekeeping, by the way, I don't think there's 100 yards or 100 feet
between it I was like, I think you're right I really apologize I didn't look
around, ironically, I'm the Neighborhood Association representative but I
didn't look at the neighborhood and look at the city ordinance. So we had to
move, living beehives, right in the middle of the summer. Do not try this
unless you really have to do this okay this is, there must be a better way, but
the way that I read about and studied involves staple guns and duct tape, and
lots of angry bees. Thankfully my foot returned to its normal size and my
forehead and so on and so he also find out they can find ways inside your bee
suit, they're very crafty. I don't blame the bees, they're just protecting
their queen but, but my stewardship to the place I thought we got pollinators
in here and so on and so forth but I wasn't really starting my neighborly
relationship and it got and I usually want to be the good neighbor and we're
you know, okay we're gonna be the best neighbors and so on. I had to say to my
kids I really screwed this up. I really messed this up and, and he's angry at
us and he has a right to be. So give them a couple of gift cards to restaurant
and hope all as well right and you're not bribing them, you're just like, I'm
really sorry, and you guys go out to eat or something like that so stewardship
is, it's what's required of me is more than just my idea of things but a
thought for the broader whole people to place the future, it, it's more than
just this season or this moment right where you just shoot roundup and
everything and kill everything you had out there and so on. I've been
cultivating a large patch of poison ivy for quite some time that I've
unsuccessfully tried to fight back and I've just surrendered, surrender that
area. So, this is suggesting we live by the assumption that what was good for
us would be good for the world and this has been based on the flimsier
assumption that we can know with any certainty what was good, even for
1.2
Unknown 0:00
You know that. So, that was a bit of a frustrating claim what do you think's
behind that anybody. You felt paralyzed that reading that like where do I go
from there because I read that, I read that ignorant that we make decisions
that destroy ourselves as well as everything around us. But I thought about
some of my dietary choices, okay. You don't want to go too far down that alley,
especially if you've been involved in any kind of fast food setting recently or
on the road, going on the road to New York and back you know you're sort of
forced to eat what is available like gas stations and. So, you, you, you, your
idealism gets flooded a little bit out the window right if you're trying to and
then you're just like, and you get done and you're just like I, I feel so gross
from this road trip and when I got to detox and so on and so maybe he's right
that we really struggled to even know what's best. Start with. Oh my gosh. Just
the future of, I don't know what they have they'll have big gulps or something
like that or giant gulps. And yet, we are just going to become in our own pods
floating around. That was the ideal that had been built for them. They were
constructed around after you destroy the world we have a way for you to kind of
enjoy a long cruise, where you just interesting I was telling my students or my
kids like Don't, don't you ever speak against this cartoon movie where two
robots fell in love and I had like tears in my eyes. That's how well they
affected me to ever speak against them. It's like it's robots that are cartoons
that okay, I get that. Alright, but just you know it's the concept. I think
it's interesting what do we, what are we aiming for what is what is health
going to mean he's got a couple of he's got a great essay called Health his
membership with a community that there's no health outside of that and you find
yourself you have a meal with a bunch of people you care about and it's not
just about binge eating a ton but when you're driving through Burger King on
your own. It's just sort of I got it right and there's a whole different
experience, Is it even the same experience. It's both, putting calories in,
Burger King, especially putting calories in, but it's not really the same
experience. I did when I, when
Unknown 2:18
he is the true American pioneer permutate this in this assumption that he is
the first and the last few years and take this place with everything.
Unknown 2:27
Right. Yeah, I mean it's, there's so many I was just reading throughout today
there's so much to say about like American individualism, they can the concept
of like my freedom to do as I want, please. It's such a, such a double edged
sword. Yeah, I mean, you wouldn't want the opposite thing have no freedom, no
one's looking to move into, you know, North Korea, or something like that and
leave this culture for a different. On the other hand, it teases its way out
into such a kind of like autonomous existences, where everybody and then you
have, you know, people like who's your dog stepped into my yard and my, the way
I do my yard is the right and yours is horrible and stuff you're just like what
is going on here. You not only you're not being neighborly it's like become
enemies. So But everyone's kind of right in their own eyes, there's all kinds
of sincere Wisdom literature of the Scripture kind of our you know, echoing and
articulating that like it's still, that's still around. I think I, when the
bear is declarative but there's a humility right he starts with himself, trying
to figure it out for himself. That's his grand experiment of his life and
that's why I find it helps me because he's actually tried to live the
experiment for 50 plus years and admits that it's a failed venture in many ways
he says several times enough is this so but one of them. One of the other ones.
He's never found a way to get getting past having a pickup truck, you know like
how do you how do you get past having a vehicle and like petroleum. If you live
in the country you know the pickup truck and you got cheap or whatever and if
you're in trouble like you. I guess you could go to like an electric pickup
truck are now available. But where do you go to like zip that up, that's still
the question. So, and you could do a donkey car and so on but it's going to
take you all day to go from one place to another so that there are frustration
but at least he invents those. And we all have those, but trying to live. I
used to roast I was trying to live more deliberately I see that happening for
him and it, it compels me to think it could be done in some fashion my own
life. Yes,
Unknown 4:40
banners that are wrong. For the boulders until at some point one of them. Yes,
you might lose the swag for. Right. Individuals on
Unknown 4:54
neighborliness, sometimes you think if, depending on how things are going to
their neighbors that good fences make good neighbors might hear, depending on
how it's going or what if they have like a pit ball or something like that or
kind of nothing on pitbulls if you, as long as they're over there, but I think
it's right, it's like why, why is our only commute to work to separate
ourselves from each other. That's that seems kind of quirky and to make sure
that we don't get in each other's territory or turf. I have three teenagers
emerging into like college age adulthood, so you get a lot of feelings that
people just trying to separate themselves from you and just like get into my
space, and yet you're right you're living in my house by the way, that's my car
you're driving away but so what's going on here so anyway that's that's the
point I am in life and like, wait, wait, okay, am I not allowed to ask like,
who that guy is who you're talking to there. So that's a little bit of my story
coming up. Let's take a look here, let's jump over to some possible answers
that he offers and it's interesting that he's, he's down on religion, and yet
here Wendell Berry has a querulous relationship with Christianity. He seems to
be a confessing Christian that finds a lot of problems with Christianity,
especially as it's practiced in rural America. He calls himself a grudging
bathrobe Baptist, because his, I think his granddaughter was like youth
director at the local Baptist Church and his wife Tanya is involved there so
he, like I'll come sit in the back row and leave immediately. Okay. Often
wanting to take his walks and write his Sabet poems on Sunday morning walking
his land and writing poems instead. So that you can understand some of the
problem when you read the fiction and in the small town church has a pastor
that comes every two years and tries to get out of there as soon as possible to
get to a bigger parish right and there's no real connection, and the clergy
have nothing to do with the work of the land, and it just feels totally
displaced right you can understand. Here he says something really painful. The
Heaven bent have abused the earth thoughtlessly by inattention and their
negligence has permitted and encouraged others to abuse it deliberately is a
certain theology this world's going to burn anyway, right. So just, whatever,
it doesn't really matter, it's a heaven, you know, this is this earth is not my
home I'm just passing through, you can think of some Christian songs have a
little bit of a dualistic sort of Platonic dualism tied into the theology that
what do you eat, and he's just like to do that is to just not really
participate in the world that God gave us, which he calls the creation
persistently. You've, you've missed something and it just allows people who
don't care at all to just abuse and do whatever they want right in the church
abdicating its ruler which we've all heard that narrative and it's just like
and it's frustrating. What can God's people do about that. Then there are some
amazing things that have been done to ever go to the ASA Savile Institute's
which I think Kelvin said students their Cornerstone Desmond, and the work
that's been done.
1.3
Unknown 0:21
Testing, testing, testing, but they're all the chemicals, most of the world is
not the same as when you throw out your compost pile, it's all kinds of
vegetable waste and all kinds of crazy stuff and you dig it out at the end and
plant tomatoes leap out of it again. What's going on here. That's, that's a
mystery to us.
Unknown 0:42
That's humility but you could try to control and mechanize in, ultimately, I
mean he brings up agriculture in the in the Great Plains Midwest, the top
soils, almost been fully eradicated. For over farming erosion herbicide and
pesticide usage and so on the modes of farming. What used to be two feet of
topsoil in like Iowa or Nebraska you could put your arm down into the humerus
alone has become just a couple of inches or less than that. A lot of that
research is done by his good friend at the Land Institute of Kansas named Wes
Jackson who's, who's kind of like keeps is kind of a watchdog and Burke dog
watching industrial agriculture and it's, it's out working.
Unknown 1:25
We had a student at Cornerstone to her, her mom and dad had gone to Hope
College did like I mentioned how college here, but his or her dad got a PhD and
he was a teacher at Kansas State in agriculture. I was like holy cow well Kent
has ever heard of land. Land Institute of Kansas and she's like, don't mention
that to him, he teaches like industrial agriculture large state school that places
like a gadfly like I was like okay I'm gonna be careful who you mentioned to
him like oh you know my, so yeah, whatever, you know, so that's two different
ways to approach one life giving and one just sort of like control.
Unknown 2:00
I was interested in what he says here and this seemed to be his version of how
to approach maybe the word humility is the best word. Speaking about flowers.
It's a privilege in labor of the apprentice of creation to come with his
imagination into the unimaginable, and with his speech into the unspeakable of
what a great phrase. I'm an apprentice of creation. As a farmer.
Unknown 2:23
And I'll always be an apprentice, I'm never going to be the master.
Unknown 2:28
Voice field like that with like teacher of a teacher like poetry but I've
never, I'm not going to be eights or TSLA right I'm. I like being the
apprentice of that and just like bringing people that and trying to tinker with
it myself and learn it and and celebrate the, the mastery, but with the
creation, even more so if you think you're the Master of Creation.
Unknown 2:48
You don't understand what's really at stake in creation right, but that's,
that's not supposed to be our role is mastery.
Unknown 2:57
So, you know, it's just jumping down I'm really interested in these phrases
that seem to follow up this note, what's their proper religious humility here
so here's humility in this quote, how having a consciousness and intelligence a
human spirit. All the vaunted equipment of my race can I humble myself before a
mere mere piece of Earth, and speak myself as it's pregnant but that's what you
need to do. I'm an incredibly gifted human being. Armed with all kinds of
technology.
Unknown 3:26
How can I humble myself before topsoil, dirt, and say, I'm just gonna let you
be what you are and not screw around with you mess with you saturate you
eviscerate you to make you better.
Unknown 3:40
The best thing you can do as far as I know from growing up in dairy farming
country just just throw the manure on there. And there's the circle of life and
there's all kinds of metaphors in that right. The Circle of Life. How's it
going, yeah. So I think you can hear us, which is fine so I'm going to. Yes.
Unknown 3:55
Christina trees and bird. She said, I really love this essay because it
encourages us to treat the places that are closest to us as holy places that
require our love intending rather than places that we can exploit in some way,
is descriptions of itself as a pilgrim lovingly exploring his own acres in
Kentucky, encouraged us to do the same to become as enchanted with our own
natural spaces as Wendell is with his that's from Christie, amazing content.
Well, that's really good Christina I'm sorry I could hear those. I'd love that
notion. Okay, I mean, as I read His Sabbath poems which he's composed over the
course of like 40 years while walking around on Sundays on his property. It's a
it's a, it's a perpetual pilgrimage to his own farm. He doesn't go anywhere
else to write those poems. He just walks his farm and all seasons and I think
you're just right on it's, it's, you don't have to, that's your shrine, that's
your sanctuary, that's a place where you'll discover everything there is that
needs to be discovered about the glorious created order of things right, it's not
bad to visit Niagara Falls, which is pretty cool right or to go to the Rocky
Mountains or wherever the rain forest is not bad.
Unknown 5:08
But what there is to know your engagement with the mystery is available like
right where you are. Anyone who's walked the Kelvinator Preserve. It's like I
love this place.
Unknown 5:19
Plus if you get older, I can walk it without collapsing right with some of
these trails and so on. It's like I get halfway, how can I get well I'd be
alive and I get back.
Unknown 5:27
So that's great. I think that's right on Christina it's, it's, it's a, he's a
pilgrim, but he lives on his own. Trying right and others have pilgrimages to
here, to their to his place. And that's that's a metaphor that I've tried to
use talking to my students a lot it's like your, your life vocation is your
pilgrims yeah but you're trying to find yourself to back to a place where you
can be rooted not just wandering forever though that sounds attractive when
you're 21 it's just kind of wandering around.
Unknown 5:57
But coming back around and seeing that that reverence everywhere. I think just
jump in. I'm just gonna go I believe the next one is actually just looking at
the world is still the first essay here that tells you how it's going to go for
me. Here's the sad Unsettling of America which is the lead essay by 1977, that
sort of made him famous as the spokesperson of the kind of environmentalist, or
ecological crisis which was becoming apparent and there was the gas crisis
everyone remembers from the journal quarter that's, they kind of stretched out
Gerald Ford's 20 months in office, so he was a huge thing on the grass gas
crisis at the Ford museum, there's the disco room okay. You know, it's, he's
probably, you had to fudge it a little bit to fill that entire museum with this
brief, brief time in office, but you know that it became clear that like cheap
fuel cheap, that was, that was the first time people realize oh that's a
problem, gas isn't like 515 cents a gallon anymore. What's going on in somebody
else controls it and also we're doing, I think that was exactly the same time
that the Cuyahoga River outside Cleveland caught on fire from the chemical
catalyst port I know there's the burning River and so on, like what, wait What
is this, and Long Island to the medical wastes washing up on the shore of all
these syringes and things that have been just thrown into the Long Island Sound
right by by hospitals and you're just like you're not supposed to go swimming,
why is there a shark, no there's like needles out there.
Unknown 7:14
So that's something of America as an essay is pretty interesting because he's
talking about American history and he seems to be really down on it but then it
comes around at the end and said there's promise there.
Unknown 7:26
So it's not like a total trashing of American history, but he does say that the
settling of America was haphazard and accidentally you can read the whole first
part of it.
Unknown 7:36
A mixture of fantasy and avarice, I've read quite a bit about like, search for
trapping for trading. Early American and Canadian exploration and so on. Right.
Talk about people playing the lotto. Today, look at my are scratching up like
what are those people doing so many ventures tied in I'm into gold trying to
find the gold for you know for the Spanish and Portuguese settlements in South
and Central America, the fur trade whatever just get rich quick schemes
everywhere, with a few people saying hey this is a really nice place that we
could actually farm right, of course, the native indigenous peoples caught in
between and really ravaged by disease and all kinds of other things right
along, along the way. So, generally speaking the Unsettling of America is, is a
playful but deadly earnest phrase right, we have unsettled this place by
suddenly here.
Unknown 8:31
So the counterpoint of the native peoples now you can read a lot about sort of
Native American anthropology and it is the case that it wasn't perfect. What
happened, like in a lot of cases, native peoples everywhere right, Did some
hard to change the environment did those control burns for the bison and so on.
But generally speaking, I think, Wendell is right in saying the indigenous
peoples, at least they were forced to live in some harmony with the natural
world, they couldn't manipulate it all that much. If they despoiled it and
destroyed it, they would starve to death.
Unknown 8:58
That was never a thought for them right so the hunter gatherer lifestyle has
its perils, believe me, certainly, but it wasn't despoiling a continent, as was
the literal, it's almost unbelievable that 50 million bison got annihilated.
And that's the from Saskatchewan to Texas 50 million but except for the 10
number left or whatever. And now I think those bison herds around and so on and
you can, you can still see them but how did you do and that was just the big
creature, the biggest most obvious creature with all the other things so here's
what he says it's interesting.
Unknown 9:37
Each group in historical economic sequence seems to get absorbed by the by the
next one right as this this company like consumes itself. But then he said, and
I was struck with this because I've actually given some talks on the fur trade
that happened, especially right after Lewis and Clark Expedition and the fur
trapping for traders, or something my dad was really into the history of in the
lore of that and so I've kind of followed up on that Jedediah Smith from Afton
New York actually Bainbridge New York near where my in laws live now, was the
famous mountain man who went out to you know, discover the Great Salt Lake,
etc.
Unknown 10:11
But he says that the economy right now is not really advanced since defer
trading days and I was like, What are you talking about, that was really
exploitive right and really destructive the poor beavers didn't have much of a
chance right they got almost annihilated as well, nobody says here, the economy
is still substantially better the third trade still based on the general
concept general kinds of commercial items technology weapons ornaments
novelties and drugs, and you're just like waiting, modern economy right now.
Unknown 10:37
Yeah technology weapons we know that a lot I mean a lot that goes on
economically socio politically to sustain our economy as involved with violence,
military and otherwise novelties ornaments and drugs.
Unknown 10:51
I mean, we have this, you're talking about giving alcohol to the native peoples
and trying to like, you know, wipe them out or whatever, get them, you know,
manipulate them for different stuff. Now it's opioids. Right now it's a heroin
epidemic in rural America not in the inner cities but in rural America.
Unknown 11:07
I just talked to a girl who's my neighbor girl suddenly she's all grown up, she
got married, she's gonna have a baby, she's like I thought you were still 12
What's going on here but the kids grew up so quickly. She was an EMT her senior
husband living out in Hastings Michigan barre County.
Unknown 11:21
I was like, do you have to have the antidote for heroin overdoses I can't use
it. That's one of the most frequent things we use is that remember the name of
the drug use when somebody has an overdose of opioids or heroin you can you can
revive them. It's almost a, it's almost a scary power because people know that.
And so is afraid of using the drugs, It's like, it's like a catch 22 So, it's
not different than it was at like Fort Laramie in like 1822. Same economy of
using sort of facile things, entertaining things and zoning out things to
persuade people of, but these are what they gate straightaway they're lovely
but their life's work. For those things because I'm not watching TV or taking
drugs or things like why they can't be the same economy. And I think when I
went to a point throughout these essays it's yeah, it's the same mechanism at
work right it's just masked in different kinds of ways that people are still
getting kind of trampled underfoot by it.
Unknown 12:26
You think right here.
Unknown 12:29
The statement that I was super struck by the statement anybody else build this
one once in a while it just needs to short sentences, commercial conquest is
far more thorough than military defeat.
Unknown 12:40
Can I get you to just buy what we want and get you in a trade I don't have to,
I don't have to send an army.
Unknown 12:47
You're just totally under the yoke of the system now. Right. You'll buy into it
you will use your surrender without being told you have to surrender, you'll
just surrender, for the sake of this, this commerce probably good, you don't
need that. Maybe you're going to do harm to you long term.
Unknown 13:10
Yeah.
Unknown 13:12
Americans when it comes to get them essentially 70 Kind of like density
Unknown 13:20
dependence, which ironically they had survived with without rather for however long
you know 1000s years or hundreds of 1000s of years it's arrived without So, how
can they be necessities, they become necessities like the iPhone has become a
necessity to a 14 year old kid,
Unknown 13:36
or a 67 year old kid okay so we did we wanted to go, let's, let's just, let's
just maligned the teenagers right now and not bring it back to ourselves too
closely.
Unknown 13:43
At least we can say we're still somewhat inept with them right but the 14 year
old kid right it's right before you get a phone, and even my own students will
admit to me. Yeah, I used to read books I'd read like 100 500 page books we
read Harry Potter or whatever and read all these books, and then we got an
iPhone. I don't really read that much anymore. You spend your time, you know,
and you can read, can't remember her name is.
Unknown 14:04
Her book on reading Well, she's a professor wasn't liberty, the occurrence well
prior yeah so, and just that students don't read anymore and you just have to
assign a chapter rather than a book now I listen I taught my Russian lit
several times, your steps, you know, we have 3000 pages of reading in a
semester the students were into it and going for, I would have Erickson for
quick Calvin come up and lecture on social needs and and do his Juris Doctor
this you know Eric cynic. And no, it's I can't get him to sign up for it,
because it's the even one novel is it's Russian right the novels are 800 pages
to 1000 the short stories are 100 pages long, you got problems there. Yes,
Unknown 14:41
versus.
Unknown 14:43
No,
Unknown 14:47
I was thinking about, Perhaps.
Unknown 14:56
Perceiving or experiences and little soundbites.
Unknown 15:01
Great, that's a great and very scary connection that you've made right there
because, talk about the mystery at the top so it is a mystery of the human
mind, human intellect human imagination and so on. What if that gets sort of
just laid waste.
Unknown 15:14
And then we do it to ourselves in the name of the goods such as such as let me
let me herbicide and pesticide and completely dominate and control this corn
field which there never should have been a cornfield that was like 70,000 acres
long haul of corn right I've written, but it all is right every year.
Unknown 15:33
Likewise, what we do what we do volitionally to our own lives, just different
levels.
Unknown 15:41
So the battles you have to fight with your, with your kid and when you have
kids telling you, yeah, my life was great until you know I got a phone or
something that's like I can't think like wait, but it's like, sounds like I get
your drugs or something. Right. So that's where you do your battles and try to
kind of and then you're, then you're the parent who like doesn't do anything
for your kid you know everyone's been through that as well.
Unknown 16:01
Nobody lives like we do and no one wants to come to our house we don't have a
TV or whatever it's stupid it's boring in here and kind of like he didn't seem
to be bored when he broke it.
Unknown 16:10
So we can all talk about the trauma of raising teenagers and hold hands here at
some point or therapy session. You guys have teenage grandkids maybe and it's
like okay, at least their grandkids, it's going to next generation removed, did
you see it even amplified. Take a look here at what he also says that was
striking, there's, I think he lays out.
Unknown 16:30
I like how he lays out the terms of exploiters and nurtures. So, you know,
except because I'm my mind I'm just like, I want to okay what's, what are the
sides here, that makes sense to me. There are many exploiters trying to get
whatever they can out of things, and they're probably fewer, who want to
nurture. Right, nurturing is more boring, right, it's not as exciting, it
doesn't offer the great return on, you know, work it does, as he phrases it in
this other one here, the competence of the exporter is organization could get
you know getting everything sorted out so we can kind of figure out in the
nurture is order when I first heard that I was like what's in between
organization and order they sound similar to me and then as he as he proceeds,
a human order that is that accommodates itself, both to other order, and to
mystery and that coming back to humility and mystery. It keeps coming back up
against that right, you're just like, Okay.
Unknown 17:21
I believe that I not in full control of what's going on I see that there's
mystery here that's bad. That's a bad sign right there okay so let me get up my
while I'm talking, I'm just gonna get on my power cable here.
Unknown 17:37
Don't worry. Sonia, I also have a small extension cord I carry in old times.
Unknown 17:42
From classrooms where you can't reach the like you're here, so I'm gonna wander
behind the white truck.
Unknown 17:51
It's likely on my trip that I was in a room, we had to, we had to change our
classrooms during COVID Right, so I was teaching in the, in the music hall
Recital Hall.
Unknown 18:06
That's something I don't know maybe you know it kiss the soil is an excellent
documentary on Nick Netflix that highlights the richness of soil. Yeah. Kiss
the soil, there's, there's another one I've put along with it and I think it's
just called Seed, it's about seed saving this one kid because the soil. Okay so
it's supposed to eat a pound of dirt in your life anyway right accidentally or
whatever you might as well just go down and kiss it and just like take care of
it. And but if you're eating dirt suppose we have like a calcium deficiency or
something you want to get that checked out if you want to eat dirt. But yeah,
kiss the soil of the winter seed saving, which is something that has become a
big thing for us is trying to seed save and use the same seeds again in the
next year and so on and you know there's the place near the Arctic circle that
has many of the seats that are preserved in case there's a big Wipeout event,
it was not happy on the grocery food or whatever and there's a, there's some
other seed saving places around it's quite a, it's quite an amazing thing
because the soil yeah topsoil, to be able to make compost and turn it into
tubs, that's been the best thing, I'm not sure if that's according to Grand
Rapids city ordinances either. Maybe you should check out some of the
ordinances before my whole composting operation, but that you haven't had to
buy any soil for any garden center for like 15 years but you just figure it out
of the bottom of the thing and everything's growing it feels really good, you
know, you start to queue up circle of life, but I'm not really sure what that
songs about in The Lion King but you start to feel like you're doing something
the right way.
Unknown 19:37
Yeah, you still got to get the peach pits, we have a peach tree there's peach
pits everywhere and you got to, you know, there's like rappers in there and who
threw in the top of the can or whatever somehow if you, if you go through the
screen. There it is. It's it's topsoil, it's, it's humans it's, it's living,
worms, the better, right, the bigger the worms, the better. And it's doing
something that keeps us alive, which is growing our food.
Unknown 20:03
So it's worth kissing dirt right first because it's not dirt, soil right what's
it soil, not dirt anything like really embrace it. Now that's a great, that's a
great word. Thank you for though.
Unknown 20:13
Just go into some of Windows solutions, I think when he says here, we must I
think, be prepared to see it. Stand by the truth that the land should not be
destroyed for any reason, not even for any apparently good reason now that gets
you in trouble if you work at an institution like a college like a Calvinist,
you might say hey I don't think we should go those, all those trees or that
Grove over there to create this new thing right okay there's cost benefit
analysis. It's good to be somebody who has no power because you can protest, no
one will listen anyway you're not really going to necessary no one really cares
what I say, you know, it's when you destroy land.
Unknown 20:46
You don't get that back I think he says at Forest windows, one of the novels I
think it's at the end of Jaber crow when Troy chapter cuts down the nest egg.
The hardwood forest of 200 year old trees, is if you're going to cut those down
to sell those at the plant that with corn, you won't get that cut back for
another 200 years. So you better think long and hard before you harvest that
crop, because that's gone several lifetimes. So to think about those
consequences, and choose not to because frankly we could expand it definitely
and build interesting things out of concrete stone, glass, steel, kind of,
definitely ever seen Star Wars Coruscant, the planet that's one of them city.
That seems pretty grim though when you look at that right, like, you know, not
saying anyone want to live in downtown Chicago or the or Manhattan or something
like that but it's, I mean, there's a reason why Central Park endures and they
haven't they haven't gone over that thing and plotted over 130 years since it
was planned, right, it's you need that.
Unknown 21:48
So don't go jogging at night right and don't go there by yourself and a lot of
other things about Central Park, be careful right, But you need that It's
extraordinary to me. Every inch of Central Park is probably worth, worth more
than my house, right, in terms of land property value, but it's preserved.
Shockingly, I think people just, just understand, you've got to have something
like that. Or it's or we lose something really essential.
Unknown 22:13
So, he's, he goes along that line.
Unknown 22:19
Here's another statement alongside that think about for trading that was just
striking to me that constantly expanding markets. First opened in the New World
by the for traders is still expanding, no longer so much by expansions of
territory and population, but by calculated outdating up moding and degradation
of goods, I just thought of like every iPhone that goes out of, hey, that's
what are you doing, that's gonna say, wait a minute, it was incredibly
functional like five months ago. Why does it feel like a piece of junk now
you're told that in the new car, the new computer which I was just giving to a
computer but the old one was okay for me. Why was it taken from me when I don't
understand it was given to me, with features that don't comprehend, I don't
know but that's just the way you go. So you know that it's the cycle is everything
is outmoded outdated Come on you got to keep that that actually still runs the
company has since the days of like giving you beads and trinkets or whatever,
at least in the new world. And, you know, things that you thought you did. Now
you think you need that you did you do you need an iPhone 12 or 14 or 15 or
whatever, probably not, you could probably go keep going with like a five.
Yeah, that's as far back as you want to go to use the place to draw your line.
So we get to the end, let me just finish up on settling here and then we'll set
up for next time I have to make up some ground, as I always do.
Unknown 23:31
This is, I believe the finale of unsettling I just finished with this slide and
set us up, so we'll have to, we'll have to cover a few extra ones but that's
fine. I like it on my net.
Unknown 23:41
He's revisioning what it might look like to climb out of that, he always seems
to be to come to some kind of possible solution or at least some hope. I mean
that's that's one of the reasons, even though he's grouchy, he goes there,
almost always, he says here is a problem that the growth has exploded
revolution means that work has been in human dignity, but he said that's not
wise. This also from theological music, we've tried to escape the sweat and
sorrow promised in Genesis, only to find that in order to do so we must
courseware love and excellence health and joy to swear off work, is to create a
world that we don't actually really enjoy.
Unknown 24:18
That's, that's dangerously structured and constructed.
Unknown 24:22
So just this for now being here and then I give a little, give a little insight
reading got a couple of videos we can watch. Here's a side reading.
Unknown 24:30
He finds he finds a possible solution in another strand of American history now
the exploiters strand. But the other strand which he brings to like the
Homestead Act of 1862, one of Lincoln's great domestic policies, actually,
besides the war.
Unknown 24:45
The idea that as many as possible should share an ownership of land and thus be
bound to it by economic interests by the investment of love and work by family
loyalty by memory and tradition. I was just struck by that.
Unknown 24:58
Everybody knew, it brings up the image of Thomas Jefferson, all small landholders
about, you know, it didn't work out that way. The Federalist one, but he also
brings up the idea of the Homestead Act or he brings up, If you remember from
the essay, the Freedmen's Bureau during Reconstruction 40 acres in a Jenny meal
right for every free African American family 40 acres from the Alabama trust,
and one one Dyneema which is a sterile female meal, or however they did it. So
I guess all meals are staring female. So, but I was struck by the, by how much
that sounds like something I'm really interested in which is GK Chesterton's
notion he did, he kind of invented it, of distributed distributed ism is a
middle way between socialism and capitalism, just attended Hillary, Hillary
Bullock who's also a Catholic writer of the early 20th century British writer
with a very friendly sounding name.
Unknown 25:54
They wrote about Distributism, and it's, it's really interesting, one of the
chief tenants of it is that every person should have some private property.
Unknown 26:03
And people tend, that it's that right and good for people to have property,
there's actually a couple of outbreaks of distributors and one is one is in
Spain, where workers actually own a whole factoring industry together, there's
a little bit of this in like King Arthur Flour, where all the workers own the
bone the actual operation right and there's a, there's an investment of
everybody and they're all owners of it, they all care really deeply about it.
But one of the ideas is that every person should have some, some measure of land
or property even a small plot and so on, that they could call their own and
that they will tend to it in a different way when they own it, how they get
ownership and so on is another conversation which I don't think just started
works the way out of right and you could have a lot of conversations about that
I think there are ways to do that some Catholic theorists done at St Mary's
College in South Bend continue to think and ponder this really closely. I'm
very intrigued by that because I think windows onto something ownership of
land, intending to land changes your relationship to it can in a really
powerful and redemptive it doesn't make you better.
Unknown 27:08
It really humbles you. It certainly helps you to own a house, everybody knows
that right the first time there's a sewage backup or whatever like well, he's
almost you are making very poor. Probably both things right once you have to
pay the butter, but it also suggests stewardship, to me, and, and what
ownership when I didn't realize about honors My parents never owned a home.
When I finally had a house, we got a house in Grand Rapids, it was like it's,
it's pleasing and also it's a lot like parenting right here they are pleased by
it but also like Man, there's a lot of responsibility here and so on. And I
think that there's something there that he that he aims people toward and you
know he says one of the other essays, the best thing we could all do is garden.
Unknown 27:49
And by that means in some way take a role in our food production, even in a
small way, which by the way, my garden, the way I do it you know some tomatoes
are growing, what, how did this get here I didn't plant this this year. What
are these doing over here and how did this happen, but it's, it's a small
participation in something that teaches us stewardship, we understand it as
Christ followers, it's really stewarding our relationships to other people that
can grow out of that and learning what that means and caring for the other
loving the neighbor as ourself and offering Christ's hope Kingdom hope to other
people, right, that can grow out of that sensibility.
Unknown 28:24
And without that in a tangible level it's hard to get there and it kind of
soulful level, right when you don't have any of that storage of that a tangible,
physical level.
Unknown 28:33
I'll stop right there and we still got to make a run at think level one. I like
that title as well. Take a little, and also make a little run at feminism the
body and the machine which I did, I wasn't avoiding on purpose, by the way I
will start there quickly through those two and then we've got four more for
next week. So instead of an intro I'm going to go quickly into those two.
Unknown 28:55
And then we'll jump to that next next set of essays, there's a lot, a lot of reading,
it's a it's an intense, there's no exams, no quizzes. That's the one. But lots
of reading, so get caught up on the next four, I think, Sonia sent to sent the
list around, and I won't ignore these two but I'm gonna just touch, touch them
on the run, you had a chance to read you can see how they kind of fit in with
the other two we just talked about.
Unknown 29:19
In I don't know if there's any questions from anybody, or of Sonia if there's
any questions that have come in over the pipeline. We can either take those now
if people have to go we can we can save those and just lead off with some of
those next time. I think the questions will not.
Unknown 29:33
If, if I'm reading this right or not. The answers will not count up but the
questions will count up right that's kind of what they suggest so I'm
comfortable with that.
Unknown 29:44
Between the next time that we made this work, I'm running and I don't know you
put in your mileage.
Unknown 29:52
So there is a there is a, we go to the chat, you can go to the chat here now,
Since you're not in PowerPoint and you can see that rest later has a link for
you. Oh yes.
Unknown 30:07
Let's see why can't you see it.
Unknown 30:10
How you can't see it.
Unknown 30:13
That's interesting. Anyway, there was a link, it'll be in the recording. not
sure what it involves. But no additional questions on our side.
Unknown 30:22
Had a great first class, thanks for hanging in there and this, this was a she
was amazing. Like, I don't even know what just happened but she made it happen
on a number of different levels.
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