Wendell Berry - Essays on Thinking Green - Session 2 of 4

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 World

The 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.

Malcolm Gladwell discusses tokens, pariahs, and pioneers

The New Yorker Festival

Nov 7, 2013

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• 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

SESSION 2

WENDELL BERRY'S AGRARIAN ESSAYS

by Michael Stevens

Course: #12-The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, with Michael Stevens, 

Professor Stevens has revised the essays we will discuss this week:

Completing Week 1 - “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine” and “Think Little” from last week’s reading, and then we will go over to Week 2 - “The Body and the Earth” and “Health Is Membership” for this coming week.  We will drop “Men and Women in Search of Common Ground” (not that it’s not an important issue, we all know!), and we’ll push back “People, Land, and Community” to week 3.

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Wendell Berry vs. Earl Butz debate 1977

Jul 8, 2021

Appalshop Archive

00:10 Introduction to Dr. Butz

04:13 Dr. Butz - crisis vs. opportunity, nostalgia vs. progress

31:04 Introduction to Mr. Berry

31:40 Mr. Berry - relationship between society and agriculture

58:59 Dr. Butz - modern health, old vs. new ways of life

1:10:37 Mr. Berry - his own farmland, changing values

1:26:05 Q&A - horse farmers, the Amish, efficiency

1:32:24 Q&A - freedom, production quotas in the Tobacco Program

1:38:52 Q&A - land redistribution, adults learning to farm

1:41:35 Q&A - minimum number of farmers

1:42:54 Q&A - why don't people listen to farmers?

1:45:15 Q&A - how to redistribute land to farmers

1:46:58 Q&A - agriculture strike

1:48:07 Q&A - relationships between farmers, efficiency of big tractors

1:50:52 Q&A - loss of values, young people, Mark Twain

This debate between Wendell Berry and Earl L. Butz (Secretary of Agriculture 1971-76) took place at Indiana’s Manchester College on November 13, 1977.  At the time, Berry had recently published his book The Unsettling of America, which included criticism of Butz and his role in promoting agribusiness. The debate was organized by English teacher Charles Boebel as part of the Life Schools Community Forum — The Crisis in American Agriculture, sponsored by the Indiana Committee for the Humanities.

Contextual information from Spring 1978 issue of Coevolution: Excerpts from this recording were used in the 2017 documentary Look and See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry 

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If any reader wishes to help me by editing the transcription below so that it may be

fitted into-and-around the graphics above it would be appreciated. Once done please 

email me with your work so that it may be published and replace what I have here

transcribed by actual lecture without edit. Thank you. - re slater

TRANSCRIPTION

by Michael Stevens

September 16, 2021

2.1

Unknown 0:12

Definitely I know many are many are happy with the welcome the rate of return of zoom phrases we never knew a couple years ago, preferring zoom over teams is a you know, now it's suddenly you know we're in that world. So welcome everybody out there and take some breaks and be able to allow us to hear from everybody and keep it as much of a dialogue as we can which is really what it's all about the great conversation that he's opening up, and there might be more questions and answers this time around, just based on the nature of the readings and that's okay, that's fine. And at some at some point. If we get totally stumped. Wendell Berry is always open as a correspondent if someone wants to write him a letter and card and so on. I haven't always heard back but sometimes I'll hear back from him and so on and we might need to turn to him to find out the exactly what he was saying. Okay, so I'm going to get to. I'm actually going to switch up mass I'm gonna go this paper mess I was wearing this one but it's hard to talk through the fabric mask. These are the top two the paper mask okay here we go. And we never thought about like mask preferences, two years ago either but here we go okay so switched out. So we're gonna talk a little bit about feminism body and the machine so we didn't get as far as I had laid out and that's just going to be the nature of it right because you know the teacher is always aggressive with the syllabus and we have all kinds of, but it's all about the conversation so. And as some of my undergrads had commented, it feels like everything that Wendell Berry ever wrote kind of is about the same thing I said yeah that's the joy of it right that we can always find our way back to certain things. So hopefully we'll do that so getting to this essay right here, reminisce about in the machine, a way to think about economics is I kind of always like to especially with friends in economics division and so on. Oh you mean household management because like Kostas house and nomos is law so laws of the household, that kind of pulls it away from like gross national product and all those conversations back down to the ground floor. What happened is that went over an essay that's not in our volume called why I'm not going to buy a computer that got a huge amount I think was in Harper's a huge amount of feedback, most of it negative and he talks about that in the essay, feminism body machine right. And what he had what he had said in the, in the first essay was that his wife types all of his manuscripts, on a typewriter. He writes it out by hand on a legal pad and give them to her, and she typed them. So, so he mentioned that a lot of the attack at hand was in just the second quarter the first quarter the second mentioned here, was from, he's using the term, I'm not exactly sure in what fashion somewhat loosely feminist attacks that he is an oppressor of his wife and notice quote here. It is equally regrettable that all feminist attacks in my essay implicitly denied the validity of two decent and probably necessary possibilities, marriage as a state of mutual help, and the household as an economy so obviously he wants to kind of like respond to his critics by suggesting they don't understand something about marriage and they don't understand something about household that they function in a different way than maybe contemporary culture of his moment I think he wrote this particular essay. In the late 80s, early 90s. So if you look at the third quote the couple that is makes around itself a household economy that involves the work of both wife and husband. That gives them a measure of economic independence and self protection, a measure of self employment, a measure freedom, as well as a common ground and a common satisfaction so, but different account of household than is generally offered right which would be the place where we all live and sort of have our meals sometimes together right and everyone parks their cars, their sleeps there and so he's talking about household as deeply interwoven. Obviously his model for that quote is his own household with his lifetime. Right. So, you know, he sort of working from his own rather unique existence, whereby he farms by morning and he writes By evening, afternoon and evening, and they work together on all of the above things both the farming and the writing, and they woven their lives with each other and they make their living, but also find their satisfaction in that sort of complimentary relationship. I'm not sure how many households unless, unless there's like a family business or something. It's, you think about. Does our household economy. Give us a measure of freedom, a measure of self employment, certainly could give come in on time and satisfaction but it seemed like it was a fairly specific understanding of household but still pretty compelling.

Unknown 5:11

And then look at the final thing I know window probes whether emancipation from household doesn't often maybe always turn to its own form of bondage and he asked an interesting question. Why granting the supposition should anyone assume that my wife would increase her freedom or dignity or satisfaction by becoming the employee of a boss who would in turn be a corporate underlaying and in no sense a partner, why would it be better for her to work outside the home for a boss, as a kind of corporate minion that to work in the satisfaction of the household economy right. So, pretty loaded questions and a pretty loaded right response that he offers about the place of, and we have several, several moments in these essays today, where he's talking specifically about the place of women, which is pretty dangerous ground for any man to Walker. In this case, he's making an argument about what he is Tonya shared together. And the fact that they share together the enterprise his writing. He never said it's my he he always says it's not actually my endeavor my writing so much it is me extending to her and then to other people, she always my first reader, she always my first editor. It's actually a mutual process by which I do my writing. Likewise, the way we do the mutually Shared Work mutually shared satisfactions. So, kind of suggesting there could be mutualism and not simply one party command and the other to do some kind of work. It seems kind of common sense right that that would be your reading of what he had said but uh you know he's, he's responding to the criticism that kind of came out of, I put in a Royal Standard. He always talks about the Royal Standard typewriter that's been in their household, like up years and so, so that's the culprit right there, right. So, in terms of looks like something out of the 1920s I'm not sure if that's the year of the one they're using, by the way, all I remember about manual typewriters is that you have to have really strong pinkies. All four of my grandparents actually worked at the Smith Corona factory in New York together, and that's where they give each other before my mom and dad, my mom and dad actually, as a young married couple, Couple of both work there as well. So Smith Corona is deep in our blood, we have a couple of old social My brother likes to collect kind of the old ones in my mom's maiden name is also under what and I have an old under what typewriter as well I have no idea if that's associated to their family line whatsoever but you better strengthen your fingers to type on those things right because they're it's by no simple tests but it's, you know kind of the idea that he would write it up, she would type it out it's not so much the mechanism so much as. Did you tell her to do that, or ask her to do that, is there a way in which what you do together is mutual, rather than almost like, almost like a master and slave or employer and employee relationship. He's like it's nothing like those things. It's it's it's like a shared enterprise. Couple other things from this essay and then we'll stop and maybe talk about this one might be dangerous and stuff and talk about it but. So he's saying that the real problem here isn't just how people are reading my essay, but the whole problem of how we understand home economics, and that we live within an economy, whereby exploitation is the fundamental idea, and what can be gotten in that that's made its way, even into the way we set up our, our households and the way within marriage we function. A lot of his essays going all the way to marriage rate to the fundamental unit that's comprises the household the fundamental communal unit of human society right and keeps coming back there and these essays, like I said the students like the sentencing they're coming around at the same point well yeah I think, I think they do. Undergraduates, a lot of them have their minds on nerds right are longing for it or wish you know so that that topic really kind of like grabs their attention. So he says a broader, deeper criticism necessarily this isn't just about what goes out with my wife typing. The problem is not just the exploitation of women by men. The greater problem is that women and men alike are consenting to an economy that exploits, women and men and everything else. Depending how you felt about his essay you could say okay so he's trying to make this not just about women but about men and I think his point is really like. The economy has made everybody into a kind of like a minion of powers that outside of their own control. He actually says men went to it first when they left the household farm and so on. I'll go work externally and just become a breadwinner right and we separate myself from the household economy, and now it's in the aftermath of that it's like women are doing it as well and it's, it's, it's a complete splintering right where we're all sort of under the illusion that we're free. But we're in fact less way less free than we were a couple of other things about technological process and we're kind of wait let's wait what do we think about what he's saying here.

Unknown 10:02

We don't need to plan or devise a world of the future if we take care of the world of the present. Here's another one of his huge themes, right, the place where you are, the time you're in right now, tend and stored those things. Instead of trying to solve these vast abstract problems when you tend to store those things those problems tend to get worked out, or worked on at least. So he says, If we care for the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us a good future is implicit in the soils, forests, grasslands marshes deserts, mountains, rivers, lakes, oceans that we have now. And then the good things of human culture that we have now, the only valid futurology available to us to take care of those things we can't, you know what he can show the future but what can we do about these things, right now, rather than trying to sell him is he's somebody who doesn't like to solve on an abstract level right wants to think from the ground up and, you know, he's been faulted and could be faulted I think for trying to particularize everything but it is, we all dwell in particular. That's the reality. None of us dwell in the universe to play volleyball in a particular place, with particular people with a set of issues we can only control so much, if, if, if much at all. So, are we doing taking care of those things and then it comes back down to the computer says I should ask in the first place, whether or not I wish the purchase of solution to a problem I do not have I don't know if Sonia is feeling that way after going through teams to zoom and the hybrid, if we're all feeling. Computers have created a world that we're not sure more problems than they have sound though we're able to do this and so, as I said, the coolness of being able to do this online or hybrid so it makes me say well, Wendell, hold on a minute. There's also another way to do that, maybe you could zoom in with us sometime Wendell if you wanted to, I don't know if he would do that. He doesn't have a computer so he wouldn't. And I think, I think the idea is, he likes to do things that are hyper efficient. The computer takes away the need for a lot of things editors, if you have Grammarly which by the way is deceptive I tell my students don't think you've solved everything with Grammarly. It's clearly not the case, takes away the need for a type you know everything can be so much can be done here you could you could publish a book off of a laptop, but you've lost the communal nature of the second reader of the editor of handing the manuscript around of talking about it with friends. He even talks about the actual handwriting, right, looking at it as a kind of document of your life. So, do we sometimes get things that are solutions to problems we don't have, probably we do a lot of times right whenever we kind of upgrade for things that the thing we had was already good but you feel I mean that's that's the whole nature of smartphones right is the necessity of the upgrade as things become obsolete and so on. I think this is the last the last slide for this lesson and that's, that's a question and a question what's going on here. The embodiment of writing I mean I'm really into this I write a lot of things by hand at one point I had abandoned giving like sending things to students at all and was like writing out things for assignments for them and so on and then just photocopying what I wrote in it which seems like it's counterintuitive to do that anyway, right, or grading a student's essay by hand and then scanning it and sending it to them so they can look at it on their computer screen with my handwriting right so my little acts of protest which as my children told me, are incredibly inefficient, And why are you doing that. It's okay. And all you have to say is hey I'm not a digital native. That's why I'm doing it this way. So he says the computer apologists have greatly underrated the value of the handwritten manuscripts as an artifact, the handwritten or typewritten page is usually to some degree a palimpsest right so a document that has all kinds of corrections all over it. It contains parts of relative its own history, or ratios passages crossed out and or lineation suggesting that there is something to go back to as well as something to go forward to. So we when we have something you wrote by hand and you marked it up and so on your you. You see the handwriting of a loved enough to think this way as I talk to my students as well. With all these statements about my students,

Unknown 14:12

you know have a love letter from my wife still, this doesn't sound to us like a long time ago but from back in 1990. Before we got married, I keep it in my wallet, it's all shredded and so on, there's like a fragment of it. And I said when I look at her handwriting, I don't think you can even read what it says or look at her handwriting. So with that feeling. I'm not sure you get that looking at like an Instagram from a loved one, right or from your beloved, or a text from somebody, just seeing him or anyone remembers getting a letter from someone you love just seeing the handwriting, even if you like your grandma. My grandma's wrote me faithfully, When they were still alive right and I'd write letters. Plus, you still saw that cursive was alive and well in the world right which seems to have passed away with the pterodactyls and stuff. There's something about the written right but also being able to work on your own stuff by hand rather than editorial software right which there's a, there's a connection to it, that we can abstract and get away from I think that's his anxiety, definitely losing on this side of efficiency. But gaining on the side of maybe intimacy, you might say toward the thing you're working on. Probably something comfortable with like farming but this mule is out there and then farming with a gigantic tractor and, you know, you know, or maybe one of the mega tractors or things on the on the farms of the of the Great Plains, as opposed to farming efficiency versus being in contact with something, and then his finale for everything but I think it gets, he goes into these rhetorical questions which I'm intrigued by. If you're already solving your problem with the equipment you have and a pencil, say, why so that was something more expensive and more damaging. If you don't have a problem why pay for a solution. If you love freedom and elegance of simple tools, why uncover yourselves with something complicated. I mean we've all had to look for a pencil sharpener in our past or use a knife or whatever, that's nothing compared to a computer not better complete technological breakdown or a phone that falls to the ground and, or, you know, or what are the modern car versus a car that your dad would fix. So why and why are we doing that well we feel like we have to it's technology it's, it's progress it's moving. It's moving forward. It's like I don't feel the need to do this, what I'm in touch with. I feel a sense of connectedness to it. And that's why I've chosen, never been on the computer. And I've never been here, I guess, to the extent that we're using this right now, we have to disagree with him or at least say, you know, there might be some surprising surprising usages Wendell that maybe you would agree with or maybe he wouldn't agree with, I think, I think if it's about community which we're trying to build and call. I think you'd agree with this, I don't think you'd agree with teams human agreements, though. Okay, now I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna speak for him and they kind of throw him throw him into the conversation right there. Any thoughts on this particular essay civil kind of stuff and in Sonia you can you can help me chime in with online poker anyone hear about the, it seems like an argument. He doesn't need a lot of arguments or arguments you don't really need to make but if it raises interesting things that you want to think about an essay is a exploration. I keep quoting from montane with that right, the USA or go out and explore, to try to figure something out. Create your argument.

Unknown 17:26

So we're quiet on this end, but as someone in the room has a question Would you repeat it for us.

Unknown 17:32

Thank you.

Unknown 17:34

We talked about all of these pages. And those several essays. Yeah, he talks about an economy that exploits women and men. Does he avoid an industrial economy, capitalism. That's a good question. The question is, is kind of condemns industrial economies that are based on exploitation is he equating that with capitalism. I mean, I think he would say that capitalism beyond a certain fairly local scale will inherently go toward that. And I think he does say that. And when you lose the human scale, and I don't know whether is that I mean, There's a lot of sort of wondering about what that might be I know that the very center that his kids have found it, and his grandkids have they're in. In Northern Kentucky really is into trying to get local small businesses, especially in the food but livestock meat farming to have markets. Now they use the internet to do that, interestingly I don't think grab a Windows about that right he's not a, he's not their webmaster, but I just got to think from the very center. They're selling a lot of farmers who are going out of business in northern Northern Kentucky dairy farmers, because I can't remember who I'm throwing under the bus here or there was Target or Walmart had decided they would create their own dairy operation to stop the milks at their stores. So they were going to buy from over there just a huge dairy foods, dairy kind of factory farm. So when those daughters especially Mary, Mary Smith said let's, let's reinvent ourselves as beet farmers and try to market it as local, organic meats, see if we can build a local market and then see if we can also market, local meats, by the Internet we'll freeze it and send it to you. It was locally raised it was grass bed and so on. That kind of capitalism, I think he sees you could still see the human. At the end of the trail of that right, but at the level where the human being disappears through the, through the layers and through the kind of like paths of the global market. I think he's going to say, there were almost inherently be some exploitive element in that so the haves can have what they not right, have what they have, there's going to be. Is that a sentence the haves can have what they have, I don't know if that was a sentence. I'm slightly off duty as English professor and now just as a conversationalist are here so I'm gonna let them go. Yeah, so but I mean, interestingly I wrote an article you know the updates to tonder Is that is a really a national even international leader in kind of free market capitalism meeting with Christian ethics right the reference to. So I've written for them several times, not really recently, and I wrote a review for religion and liberty, about Wendell Berry and father D'Souza, Who was the editor at the time, wrote a kind of disclaimer. It was pretty nicely written. You might be surprised that in, in a journal where we were talking about the nexus of free market capitalism and Christian ethics, we would feature Wendell Berry, an outspoken critic of the corporation. Right so, but his thought he said a good thing he's like one of those persistent emphasis on the human person. And on human dignity, really fits that side of our mission right because ideally I can institute is trying to get capitalists to think about the human personalism is the philosophy, economic personalism espoused by Pope John Paul the second that they, and on the other hand get churches and religious people to think that capitalism can be okay. You know and not is not inherently evil. So I thought I did something good for. I did some good even you get a disclaimer that's either really good or really bad. It seemed like it was good to say, Yeah, we have to keep pulling it back to the personal level are people being hurt or so on for this market to thrive, being used in the wrong way, it gets a little more tough when you're saying is there other animals being exploited is their land being misused and exploited, air and water because yes, I got an

Unknown 21:38

something that kind of relates with this from Bob ritsema He says I very much appreciate the emphasis on taking care of what we have. It does seem that we have problems that simply doing what's been done before won't resolve though technology as a place to respond to those problems, for example, wind turbines, solar panels and the like, to produce energy with less environmental damage for example, how about thoughtful use of technology, considering all effects, including unintended ones.

Unknown 22:07

That's great question. You guys heard from the computer kind of that question about the fourth place that technology. Yeah, I mean there's a, there's a great statement I think it's in. Maybe. Health is membership one of the one of the ones we do today and I think it's this one. I'm not against technology and for community. And I thought that was kind of one of the various measuring stick. Listen Winterburn, anyone who's lived around a place where they're trying to put a wind farm, can, can have a look there could be a lot of community strife, right, about whether we should have them or not. I remember the argument about whether they should be put a half mile to a mile off the lake Michigan shoreline in the lake right but you can still see it from Ludington state park or something like that, and hence destroy the view and. But in terms of wind energy. When I saw the big film and I drove down through Indiana going down to Purdue, the summer. There's a farm winter and it goes on for miles and miles and it's farmers are farming in the midst of it. It happens there with the farms right and we have to talk about the migratory birds and birds can fly through those things are flying, but it's certainly the case that it's, it's, after you construct it, it's destroying no resources, it's not even destroying the land where it is, it's still usable for. So I thought well yeah that makes sense that there's and I think probably Wendell Berry would just agree with there's use of technology that's at the right scope and scale. It's not even in the same universe as strip mining in Eastern Kentucky which he's lamented for over 50 years in removing the tops of mountains mountaintop removal mining. As far as I know, other than the problems for the birds which I care about birds I like it, there's this is a sign you're getting older when you become like a bird watcher and are looking out your window for like 20 minutes and like what are you looking at, because LBJ. You know I heard of Blue Jays, so the brace that. I think it's the right scope and scale I think it's a great comment, and, and there has to be the way forward is not primitivism. It can't be right because there would be too much human damage to strip it all away would create human catastrophe to find ways to use technology that works with community. Now you're talking. Now you're talking up the lines and I think that's, you know, that's the kind of thing that he, he tries to stress and strive for Mike. Go ahead, keep going.

Unknown 24:36

Yeah So, Don Vandenberg, I think, is responding, also to what we're talking about now and then I have one that shifts a little bit. So, Dan says. Berries correct, but also to extreme, I certainly need to be more intentional in my daily living in my consumption so that's a statement, and then Thomas post writes, I'm struck by how James Baldwin's argument that racism dehumanizes all human races parallels with Barry's argument that both men and women are dehumanized by the economic system of our age

Unknown 25:10

was great just to the first comment yeah. I mean, it's hard to know the comment about him being extreme I think it's, there's something to it, it's hard to know how do I get my life toward that. Is he is he calling for a model that would require everyone just shift in the direction that he has found and discovered and you get something that he pushes like it can't be mechanical go there, how do we get there so I think that's a, it's right to ask the measure for our own lives of how do we get closer to that, without, without extremism that does does harm as to the James Baldwin man I just was reading, watching some, some great, a great debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley from the citizen YouTube review, YouTube during COVID revealed all kinds of things right as you went to YouTube, and you couldn't go outside or whatever, and you finally found all these old football games from my youth that I vaguely remembered like the old Buffalo Bills from the old days of my childhood. But James Baldwin, such an incredibly articulate just talk, go tell it on the mountain his tremendous novel in African American with us last year. Yeah, he, he brings up something in his account of African American History, which you see all over the literature as I read more deeply, which is that slavery was tremendously dehumanizing to the white people involved. You see that in Frederick Douglass narrative you see that in Uncle Tom's Cabin. You see that in, Harriet Jacobs Diary of a slave girl. That something that's corrosive harms everybody about including those who think that they're benefiting from it and I think that that can also be the case when with economic systems that feel like men were able to kind of get watermelons in Meijer or DFW in like January right or whatever we want them, or you know kiwi fruit or any, anything you want at any time a million reasons a single store not to throw her under the bus that just came into my mind that there's, it's possible that there's harm being done and that does harm to us to demand that right that what harm might be done to the planet or the incredibly expensive fuel to make that possible or to the workers involved, we begin to think about it's like it's not us versus done but we're all in trouble in a certain way right we're all kind of like, Are we all actually under the yoke of this system, to some extent right we all see that there's problems that we all need to kind of help climb out of, so that's a great insight James Baldwin is someone that on the issue of race in America, the guy's 50 and 70 years ahead of the curve in terms of his arguments that he makes. And there's a reason why James Baldwin decided to move to France in the 1960s and just leave the United States altogether because he just felt intractable racial issues. It, it's, it's painful to read as it's painful to read at times, what Wendell is saying right because you're just like, oh, can that really be that bad but I think both of them want people to start to see that so you can begin to move toward health, some measure of health, get great, great comments, great comments great questions and challenging and I think you can't really, I think Wendell Berry kind of wants. He wants to be challenging like these are tough issues. And I think to some extent he wants to kind of bristle a little bit or wrestle us you know and he takes pleasure in that in my in my interactions with him in like personal discourse and talking with him and sitting around dinner with him, you know, there's a, there's a provocate maybe playfully but also deadly earnest there's kind of a provocative edge to the conversation where you're like, Okay, wow. And I think it's appropriate to feel some of those tensions, even as you see yeah but he's putting some things out but it's now that I think about it. Ouch, that comes back in hertz so that's the first essay. See, but we were not concerned about efficiency right because we're listening to no that regard so efficiency no conversation yes so let's let's get into the second one, at least here which is. Let me see no like, Oh, this is my picture I can always read the heading here but my picture is the idea of looking at these in his coveralls, this is wonderful in the 60s young Wendell.

Unknown 29:36

You work by morning, with your horses plowing fields, he had a small at the time, smell tobacco crop later on but they went away from tobacco, and went to sheep, because I think his daughter well phrased it was the very center. We're trying to find economic systems that are as efficient as the old tobacco growing the old Burley tobacco growing system was but don't give people cancer, right, so we're trying to find other things that we can do as well as efficiently as community that are not carcinogenic, so they went away from tobacco, but you do your farming that morning and then after lunch you come down still wearing your coveralls and your work boots, and you get out your yellow pad, and this little long legged house this little shack that he's built up on stilts next to the river, you right, until it's dark. There's no electricity and then right so you, you kind of as he as he says the work of writing alongside the work of the farm right the things that teach him. I think this picture kind of the picture nicely grabs both of them. And I'm not sure if you're supposed to put your feet up on the desk after you've been doing the foreign work in the morning, whatever, but as you know how to work that out. Yes.

Unknown 30:50

In his 50s, in his question, Michael. Yeah, So let's just How old was he when he wrote that essay feminism body and machine I think it's from the late 80s I think he was in his 50s he's born in 1934. So, like I said he would be just in the middle of the pack with the call, that we call students in terms of his age. So yeah, he's already. An interesting figure for him. Almost all of the essays, sound like they're written by an old guy, and are kind of written by an older guy, right, you know, so you're like he felt like I had a little more of a

Unknown 31:27

really, maybe a little bit short sighted, was to talk about people ended up inside China was considered conservative, to a point, it was agreed that a good life was preferred to a more long one. Reading the statement, likely than the lack of perspective. And therefore,

Unknown 31:59

an 87 is another question

Unknown 32:04

for the value for legal cameo work in the fields and like should we provide for it. And should we nurture and who's not really into one second, I think

Unknown 32:20

there's a short story that we read in the short story. When a very class. A long, long, short story sounds like Russian long short stories, where one of the characters burly Coker is old now and he's in the hospital and his, his son goes and kidnaps him out of the hospital. He's on life support there to bring him back, So he can die in the woods, and it's, it's a provocative story and also you're not quite sure what you think, even to the very end of it you're like wait a minute. How am I to think of this right and there's an FBI agent who's a jerk, so it's easy to see the law enforcement or whatever is is seen as kind of a little bit of a straw man character hope Wendell is now listen, I usually don't but I think he did admit that that characters to kind of get to this moment of, there's an ideological speech being made by welcoming their candidate, the lawyer. And then, burly, his friend of 70 years he's dying in the woods, you know 10 miles away, it's kind of a, I don't know what to think of it Yeah, what I do. What I prefer my dad, my dad's passed away so I kind of said but you know what I prefer a loved one to be kept alive and maybe recover or die naturally, you know, as they say a burly curled up behind the fence row where he wanted to die, you know. Yeah, I think some of the, there's some, some things that are provocative and meant to think but I don't know if we're supposed to agree with them right I don't know if you can fully, if you can fully agree with that. And one wonders, I was just reading an essay with students this morning where he mentions this. It's a great volume of water people for, Like I said, my favorite title is an essay, it's a book review of a book. It's an autobiography of an African American guy named shot, that's a pseudonym, who lived from 1885 to like 1950 and lived through Jim Crow window really admires the guy and he's like what I admire most he's he's still willing to go out work at age 86 or 87 So, and I just said to the students well when was 87 Right now, I wonder if he's. I wonder if anybody's getting up and going out to work the garden or whatever it be him, but it feels different when you're 87 I think you wrote that review and he's probably 37 Yeah, that's an interesting kind of you have somebody who's written for so long that you can begin to kind of measure things over against each other. And, and wonder if views change or soften or maybe even harder. Over time, I think that's gonna, we're gonna have some more territory here where we can we can we might be able to cross swords with them a little bit as to go on, let me, let me take it into a big battle here. So, obviously think little this is an early one, we're talking late 60s I think this essay about the environmentalist movement. And I was intrigued by a couple of things here early on just kind of have a cookie so I do want to get the body on earth so we can kind of lock, lock horns in a little. Yeah, civil rights movement, the peace movement, the environmental movement, they're all connected, which kind of what I thought about it like he's right. I believe the separation of these is artificial, they have the same clause and that is the mentality of greed and exploitation. What causes racism and bigotry what causes violence and military, military aggression and so on right. What causes the ravaging of the world so well, so people have an advantage they want to keep advantages that you want to keep right and so you're always like how he tries to dig underneath situations and say what's really at the root cause of these things. He brings the argument home here I've mentioned in the third the third note here. Every time we indulgent or depend on the wastefulness of our economy, our economies first principle is waste we are causing the crisis again i i can talk about ecology in general but what, what is my participation. So someone would say if you recycle or whatever we you know there's there's landfills, the size of like Mount Fuji out there already right what is what are you doing by yourself. But as I said to my kids, we need to do our part, I'm gonna pick we're gonna pick up the garbage and walk to the library, in fact, I think it was burned dealers of Kelvin fame, graduation speech was I think he gave several times, heard at least leave it better than you found it. I always think of our dealers, so my kids would remember that there was a book that went with it may be Marlowe his daughter who works in the GRP L system mentioned it. And so like can we just pick up one thing at least, not something gross. Okay, something that was, you know you can do unless you have. So you do your little part right you're trying to do your small thing to make it work but certainly try to avoid waste a culture of waste.

Unknown 36:59

Again, there's a few essays in a couple of stories about the old farmers and farmhouse old economies. Speaking of his grandparents, nothing was wasted. Not a rag. That wasn't put into a rag box, used for something. There was no waste on the farm that was the, the first time I've ever heard him speak His topic was thrift. The last virtue of thrift right and for some of you it's like I've never lost it, and you're, you're, those around you're just like, look out the coupon, the coupon person right or the person who's gonna pick that thing off about the real estate right but thrift fights against waste. To me, Thrift is the weapon to fight waste. But if you take a look at dumpster diving culture and so on and so you can live off the waste that happens just in Grand Rapids. Now you may be in a lot of Krispy Kreme or whatever and probably not lived that long eating the food out of there but the amount of food thrown away that's still edible grocery stores. I think there's a great article I think it was festival years ago that dumpster diving dumpster diving culture, people living for months on just what they got out of dumpsters that was that was completely edible sellable right, you know, viable food, clothing so on. So there's a, we have to fight against waste and waste is one of those things that's part of that green and eco waste is kind of the, of the flip side of exploitation right. It's chocolate. So, yeah, changes in front of it a ways of living which he says frequently bring always bring it back home and now I'm gonna make a blurb for my colleague Matt bonza. He's not this is not a paid advertisement right he wouldn't pay me anyway so we've talked together for 25 years at Cornerstone he's like my, as I mentioned the Sonia he's like the verbally abusive older brother that I already grew up with, but then I inherited him when he came to work there and he's like my closest friend there, so he has a farm. He's a philosopher Farmer to Farmer Newaygo County, he's taught philosophy for 25 years at Cornerstone, and his. He brings up often, the irony that we often don't really know where you should take this call class.

2.2

Unknown 0:08

That is doing called philosophy of food, where he speaks at great length about learning what it means to try to understand food and he's gone from vegetables now he's got pigs and he fell in love with his pigs and it's hard to put your love on it's hard to send them away. Now he's got cows as well. Chicken turkeys he said turkeys are unequivocally the dumbest creature that he has ever dealt with. It doesn't, you don't feel anything when you send the turkeys away. The pigs on the other hand, have personalities. So I have a cute cue up will Wilbur and Fern and Charlotte's Web immediately. So, if you want to take that bet I think that's in the next section of the call program and Matt was just he's just a great person to talk to on that he's really been living it out. He and his wife Dorothy up on their farm. Window says that for this condition we have elaborate rationalizations that we don't know where our food comes from and never will know don't want to know, instructing us that dependence for everything on somebody else's efficient economical and a scientific miracle. I say instead that it is madness mass produced that's interesting, maybe stop with that make up that I mean, food comes from grocery stores you could ask any eight year old kid, where does food come from unless they've been enlightened by a farming relative or gardening grandparent right food comes from a grocery, we don't eat food that grows outside. We don't eat food from off the ground that's you know, apple tree, we go to the store and make sure that it's clean and good for kids say this and you're like, Well, wait a minute, there's a reversal the tablet. And in, it's a good thing right that it's all available it's all scientifically, we don't have to see the animals being slaughtered, we don't, we're not that that's pleasant to see right we don't necessarily want to is that everything is just delivered to us and that's a great act of progress, and he says it's madness. Something else, Barry has said frequently I heard him say in person right is that all of America all the western world is about a one week power outage away from getting back to the Stone Age with people breaking the windows of Meyer with like sledgehammers right and breaking in there and looting. Save a lot to get desperate or something or Dollar Tree. It's not just the know that it's, it's all propped up. It's all propped up on a kind of illusory thing that this just happens automatically and is easily done and so on, but the consequences are that we could all starve really quickly. Unless we have our kitchen garden and canning and stuff in the freezer and so on and so forth. So, that's another issue he said knowing where your food comes from, if you will, coming back to the basics to the soil to the earth, a place he often points us toward is a place to get yourself kind of connected again with right priorities about life. So, take Matt's class he'll talk more about that philosophy of food. He says we need better government, no doubt about it. I was just reading through earlier today civil disobedience with students. I'm not arguing for no government but better government sister Oh, when you finish reading the essays like what sounds more like no government, because there's no way any government's going to match up to this right but you know we need better government Sure, certainly, but we also need better minds, better friendships better marriages better communities. So maybe we need to stop. Like, accusing the government interestingly it say what am I doing in my sphere my household my place, my relationships, to make it to make this better. A man who's willing to undertake the discipline and difficulty of mending his own ways is worth more to the conservation movement than 100, who are insisting merely that the government and industry met their ways I thought that was interesting but what about like you know it's only at a huge level can change be made. But that abstracts things right so how do we reckon with that, yes,

Unknown 4:00

reporter asked me what's wrong with the world and he said I am. Yeah, right. Do you think remember the greatest mystery in the world like Joseph Chesterton said, when robbing the world I remember him also saying, you know, the greatest mystery and adventure is your own street to the people who live on it, you know, the wonderment of one's own neighbor depending on who your neighbors are maybe that's true, really true, you know, but Chesterton as well with his vision of a distributed economy where people owned, locally, and are involved in local economic exchanges, talking about a kind of healing capitalism, I think that was Chestertons really just a kid's brainchild. Yeah, we have to start. I mean, it's interesting Wendell Berry mix, you could say, well, it makes all kinds of accusations and somebody always says, Go start with ourselves. I will start with myself. You start with yourselves, and begin to think about yourself, your marriage, household community neighborhood way of addressing the land you live on the people around you, your watershed, go out from there. It's not that you shouldn't say hey listen, what's going on with like oil spills destroying huge parts of the ocean right it's not but, but you can make the change here. Maybe even as you pray up for the change there or in this to justify, I'm doing what I can here and thus I also want to ask this in this in this group to be accountable. So I appreciate that about what he's what he's saying that the movement begins there I'm going to go down here. Let's. Any other, any other comments, I think a little I think because we're about to jump into the body and the earth and it could get a little frisky wild in there. We don't have anything on line. Okay. Yes. Depending on. Because, yes. Yeah, so, as mentioned is made the window is probably raised in the world war two which is right after, when he was when he came to sort of maturity, and he often writes about the World War Two era, that there were all these Victory Gardens and people really depending upon, raising their own food and I read Oh, I saw a book from the 40s, or a magazine, articulate exactly what a victory garden should look like if you do it this big, and these are the kinds of foods you should have in there that you can preserve and freeze and it was a real. And he talks about he mentions Victory Gardens in his writing, saying that you know there was a sense that everybody at least had some sense of a kitchen garden. And, at least for a part of the year. You didn't have to depend on external sources for some essential things, but that was, That was an exercise in a kind of taking the edge off dependence and taking the edge off the kind of industrialized system of agriculture and stuff. For those who have garden and still done that and we just still don't even know my in the storm, the other day, both my tomato cages came down and I've tried to fight to preserve that it's been. I mean luck struggle with the earth and I'm not sure I'm winning right that's that's Genesis three, it's gonna be ugly, but to be able to, to do that or to, you know, to buy locally, which we all have a chance to do and we're really blessed, we're not. We're in a city that is surrounded by such beautiful agricultural land and just just the urban rural loop, Wendell Berry speaks of that as well, right, that and the very center is his daughter especially is carrying this on cities need farmers, farmers need cities. Right. And that, that look to work well something like a farmers market or she made an argument that I thought was very compelling and another lady that, especially working in the city.

Unknown 8:25

Well, that would require that we be that we'd be sort of like neighbors to where that happens. It might send you toward veganism or vegetarianism immediately if you're working there and see that but you know that just talking about trying to make it more local, and trying to participate in the food system, in more clothes where I've kind of taken the thunder away for probably what Matt's class is going to be about but I think, I think you're right out with the victory gardens and I think mine has been for years that not a defeat garden rather than victory because like the weeds want again at the cost, what Chuck has won many times over and the birds are winning and I've just like a lot and lost the Japanese beetles are winning, but you still, you know you're trying it's, it feels like more of a novelty, but there might be a time when you'd really lean on what you could grow there, it's very important, what's going to be grown there for the health of your household. And so he would say, you know, think about that with seriousness. Beyond that, are we ready for the body of the earth. So I think it's a central essay to understand everything that Wendell Berry is about but I also think it it shows what he has admitted openly. So my colleague and I wrote a book about one of the various documents published in 2008 from Brazos press paper published. When the very the cultivation of life we sent him a copy. We got a note that for him. I would rank that with like a love note you got like eighth grade, putting your locker by somebody who you were like, but you know it's like you read the letter, he said, I'm really appreciative that you said that my work is not philosophic, it was not a philosophical system, because I wouldn't know how to create a system, if I you know and I, I am the furthest thing from a philosopher and so on right. I am somebody who experiments with that might be my phone, and I really apologize. I'm just gonna let it rain I don't know what the, I thought I turned it off. I did hide it away in the bag at least is that. So he's, he was like, I thought the best thing you said in the book was that my work is more like a patchwork quilt. That was the title we wanted for the book, but we found out the editors choose the titles, not the writers. Okay, so patchwork quilt, both on the cover and so on. Instead it was Wendell Berry the competition lighteners rutabaga or something on the cover, we're not sure how to identify maybe a turnip. So he's not, it's not a philosophic system, he's not trying to make a system and this is an essay in the most. In the most basic sense of that phrase, write the essay is that thing that you explore so he's trying to figure out how our bodies, how physical bodily health is connected with, sort of like agricultural health of the land. It seems like it should be obvious that you can make the argument and it's like I think I figured out how those things go together and so, but on the other hand, it's, it's not so obvious. So he goes through a bunch of different iterations here and as you're reading it, I'm certain I know chatted with a few of you already that you felt like going through some wild and weird actions this is like not linear. This is kind of traveling into second and sexuality. This is traveling over into the energy crisis. This is making its move into how men and women and households and fidelity of marriage, and the crisis of like medical community and so on and we ended up in a hospital. This guy ended up in a hospital room. Where did this go. So let's let's look at it as him trying to follow or trace a line like in what way does health and disease. Kind of hold together as a theme, thread The narrative of all the different aspects that were wrestling with in our lives, circa 1977 So, it's an essay that's 45 years ago I was interested in a lot of the crises, not only are not solved but are far worse right I guess I should be surprised by that. And, and there's some new crises that he never even knew about maybe medica even imagined, or maybe it could have. So as we get into the body and the earth, trying to find our way through that threat looking for health and healing and what that means and various aspects of what it will take to get to that place, that's the place we all deserve to be just to be healthy. Switch along for. So, let's take us forward into body in the earth. Let's start with this first connection I tried to follow pretty closely exactly how he's linking things together and I'm not sure I caught all the links and maybe I missed some or jumped over some that you were like hold on a minute, what was going on here, that's fine, we can we can settle into this one.

Unknown 13:20

While we live our bodies are moving particles of the Earth, joined inextricably both to the soil, and to the bodies of other living creatures, it's hardly surprising then that there should be some profound resemblances between our treatments of our body, and the treatment of the earth so I guess that's his grand, if there's a, if there's a framework for the asset. It's like the body, our bodies and then the way we treat the Earth at large Howard those connected sort of like, sort of like particular and and broad right, that this really narrow and this really broad vantage point I'm thinking about health. So he goes back to the ancient art creation provides a place for humans but it is greater than humanity and within it even great men are small. Such Humility is the consequence of inaccurate insight, ecological and it's very, not a pious deference to spiritual value, it's not about being spiritual it's about just saying we are small, we are humble, in the scope of the cosmos. Yet we're also the image bearers of God and He speaks at the creation, right, but that smallness that humility seems really important to him and I think that's maybe one of the grains that he that he holds on to that he that he bears throughout the whole essay, one of the, one of the things he carries with him is that that humility, I got you, I got a visual in here because PowerPoint can be boring when it's all just so he mentioned the cave, or the Lescol cave, so I think I found the one he was talking about I'm not sure. The guy has thrown the spear into the Buffalo and now it's a stick figure like, oh what do I do next, what's going on here, where am I got so, and then he also mentions Chinese art, especially some of the, what we would call our Middle Ages, or of the mountain sides and so on and if you see between the trees, the human figures are tiny. So, in, in ancient art from various human cultures, Windows suggests there's a differentiate ality we are small in the grand scheme of things, that's a good place to start. But that's certainly not where where modern contemporary man starts. So, so he offers those illusions. So when I found a couple of visuals on that. So, goes to King Lear next right, and, and plays around with this and you're like what did what are we doing at King Lear, he's got a whole book actually based on a line from King Lear, that I think is really good. His book is called life. Life's a miracle. An essay against modern superstition, kind of a book length essay. So you can see here, that moment when glocester is being led by an insane man who he doesn't realize is actually his son who he has rejected Gloucester is blind and he tries to kill himself by jumping off a cliff, but he's actually right in the middle of the heath, So he jumps passes out and wakes up, and his son now speaks like he's a fisherman and says You just jumped off a cliff and lift some angels caught you and took you down. I saw devils up on the top of the cliff. Your life is a miracle. And there's this moment of the poignancy of that his son who he hatefully rejected, who is in disguise, afraid of him but also tending to him. There's a lot going on there in King Lear, seeing himself as a tiny member of a world he cannot comprehend or master or an any final sense possess. He cannot possibly think of himself as a god. In, in, that's the danger in King Lear, a lot of characters who think that they are godlike right and then they're they're destroyed by that. Now you realize you're littleness. And now you're in a place where you could kind of reckon with the world. So I think that's why it goes to King Lear because that seems to be the theme of that play, humility, humiliation, which brings humility. Perhaps even more intriguing unexpected openness, I kind of misspelled there I don't know you know I always, I always go back and think that spelling makes sense to me and I'm an English teacher but hey we're gonna leave it there for now. Is this insight by the same token sets he shares in depends on his grace by all of which he is apart. Neither can he become a fiend. He cannot descend into the final despair of destructiveness and the themes are being talked about all over King Lear, people are being attacked by fiends and so on, that you, you're small, but, but, in estimate the value of

Unknown 17:47

the human condition. You are frail your dust your smoke your vapor, your life is a vapor and so on right to dust we return where a jar of clay. You are in the image of God the breath of God is in you, your eternal being, you're in essence, trying to find that balancing act, not to despair and to disparage ourselves, nor to make it more dangerous for him right to boast or to boost ourselves up to a kind of divine power, which, which I think he would say technology has I don't know. I don't know if my interaction with technology has made me feel divine or feel like actually over the course of time right so it felt very divine from it but offering that as his insight. Here's a shot from King Lear of stageplay right there's blaster on the ground and Tom bachlin slash his son Edgar, saying Him your life, life is a miracle. And sort of letting him be reborn, and then only off screen off stage, by the way, we never see the two of them reconcile on stage at your comes in at the end it says we reconciled, we spoke for half an hour before he died. So it's interesting that we were kept from the scene of reconciliation, but we see this amazing humiliation that leads to humility that leads to healing for Gloucester, with his eyes torn out right, bloody think, thinking his life has no purpose of meaning. So, looks like a pretty wild stage adaptation right there. So one of those from that starts to talk a little bit about the, the opposite of humility right the sort of pride that has come in the modern world. This quote had a lot more resonance to me after I listened to the radio, last night because the quote here is why after all, should one get excited about a mountain when you can see from the top of a building much further from an airplane. Further still, from a space capsule. We've learned to be fascinated by statistics of magnitude and power, probably all of you heard on the news or NPR, a private spaceflight just wanted to space a billionaire, get a lottery and chose for people to go and be the first civilian astronauts to go out to take pictures from orbit of the world. I think Wendell Berry would say yeah that that direction which everybody's excited about Elan Musk right of Tesla cars is is funding the space company and NASA is excited about private space travel, according to a lady from NASA, which would seem like it would be problematic for them that people just start shooting rockets and beer. Wouldn't what they'll say something like, we do have that and we're interested in what that shows but we don't take care of like the land we live on. We don't, we don't, we don't really care about the nature of a rabbit park or something, but we don't really, everything is sort of like changeable and you can bulldoze it you can change it around and so on. And don't we go out into outer space and spent billions of dollars for a different view of the world where we already have a view right where we are. So that perspectival shift and that's it looks like that's only going to be more so as I don't know how much it cost to pay for a space vacation at this point probably out of our price range. Right, but if you wanted to go into zero gravity. But it's coming right in for Windows variants, why are we doing that. When the world is being kind of destroyed are they laid waste. You don't have to think too far if you've ever watched with grandkids to book a Wally, I think it was mentioned last week. The future is all of us out on a spacewalk somewhere because we ruin the earth and we're all just on a, on a cosmic space, space. Cruise forever. Right, floating around with our big gulps. So take a look at where this goes. So this is kind of this is twisting and turning this argument. I mentioned 45 years later. Have you ever talked with you talk with students where they get wherever they go unless they got pictures of it and posted on social media, it wasn't a real experience. Dude, I went out to the lecture but I didn't get any pictures because the thing that was pointed out was the point of even going to McMaster Park. What about just sitting on the beach, or just like dabbling in the in the lake or watching sunset, well, but I could have posted though, you know, so it's, it's like technology by which we mediate the meaning of that experience rather than the experience itself. So, yeah, here he goes. This is his twist toward mental health issues. So this is one of the twists and turns, where I was just sort of like the next section like where we're gonna get here. I kind of know because health is body but also mind they're related, but that's maybe it's prophetic because that will become the health crisis of our own time, you know, 45 years after his was the mental health crisis. See what he says about it. The body cannot be hold alone persons cannot be home alone.

Unknown 22:39

It is wrong to think that bodily health is compatible with spiritual confusion or cultural disorder, or with polluted air and water, or impoverished soil. Healing is impossible. I think in loneliness. It is the opposite of loneliness, sadness, the word there so it just makes sense. A lot of the crisis of depression and anxiety for young people seems to be associated with feeling lonely. Never Have people been more surrounded with constant stimulus right. Hundreds of people that you can contact immediately on social media and so on. Sometimes you get unfriended or get blocked or whatever and that hurts, but feeling so alone. Right. And, and I think he would, he would say that the failure of community is responsible for the failure of agricultural health right and it just becomes mechanized and affiliate community as well so why bodily and even in our mental health. We find ourselves distraught, right, because we were not meant in any way shape or form we weren't meant to work alone. We weren't meant to be in our household alone we weren't meant to be, to function alone. That's fundamental for him. But we've created lives that are hyper individualized. Hence this crisis, it's interesting, he's saying that's 45 years ago and you just feel that amplified hundredfold hundredfold in our time. And then even going to the question of suicide. The fatal sicknesses despair, a wound that cannot be healed because it's encapsulated in loneliness surrounded by speechlessness past the scale of the human, our works do not liberate us they can find us. So the suggestion that we create a structure that actually kind of drives people towards despair. In the name of, kind of like modern advancement. So again, the twists and turns of health and dystrophy health and disease that are kind of his, his, his language here let's see. I'm going to. So my buttons not quite working right now Sonia so I'm just going to maybe come out of presentation mode briefly. Yeah, go ahead and stop sharing a minute and reshare see if you missed a break in your interviews. So we'll break them. And I'm going to reshare share screen again. Yeah, right down there at the bottom. Yeah. Speaking of technology and scope and scale and all this stuff right. I'm still kind of not getting oh here we go. There we go. So now we're talking about agricultural policy. Okay so, like I said the essay goes right in directions so mental health right agricultural policy I mean they're all. It's more like to be you know, sometimes when you're doing writing construction freshmen you'd be like, Okay, you got some ideas, let's cluster, one idea and then put a bunch of things out, outside of it and then that one leads in a cluster over here. It's kind of like this so it was clustering health was health was the hub, issues of health and disease, all that you see all around you are kind of like the spokes that go off of it. So we get around to this one, and he speaks of his nemesis, you can find on YouTube, it's about two hours long. 1977 also a debate between Wendell Berry and Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz, the young Wendell, that's quite interesting, and you start to see. You see kind of embody like what he's arguing here and you see what he's up against, with the corporate agriculture, kind of the, the man who popularized agribusiness, right, agriculture as a kind of mega, mega Corp industrialized agriculture, the signs of the EveryDollar says Wendell, Big Business fantasy of the Bucks mentality. Speaking of Earl Butz okay this guy, are all present, and this is what he looks around him in Kentucky and this is in his time 45 years ago, absenteeism, temporary and shallow interest of the land renter row cropping of slopes, the lack of rotation the plowed out waterways, the rows running up and down hills, we already read about that in the first essay how he laments that looked at from the fields edge this is ruin criminal folly moral idiocy, looked at from Washington DC from inside the economy, it's called free enterprise and full production. So, when he sees the decay of the land, it's almost like he's,

Unknown 27:24

you know, why am I surprised that the body is decayed with it when we allow the land to be used and abused in these ways and he makes. He makes connections here with the reckless nature of farming and junk food, I mean as which I think was coming into its own in the 70s Right, and just filling yourself with all this stuff and then taking all kinds of pharmaceuticals to kind of make up for it and, and get yourself squared away because you have to digest indigestion or someone or diet pills and so on, that we just instead of approaching in a logical way we approach it with kind of lunatic. The binge purge approach right or just eating all this junk food and then not eating for three days or what have you all the different stratagems of quote unquote health are crazy, but I got a picture Earl Butz in here. There was a picture of him standing with Gerald Ford who he worked for, but I didn't want to throw Gerald Ford under the bus, right, because he's, he's our local guy, I don't know who this guy is in the meeting with him here so it's all the 70s Politicians kind of look similar to each other. So you just kind of leave that. But, Earl Butz was the guy in his suit tied to corporate and the charts its own window I believe was in like a workshop at the debate, and just kind of like two different worlds meet right and I think rhetorically Wendell did that, I mean, he said he wears a suit, tie as well as Professor kind of rhetorically like, I'm going to come from the grassroots, you're going to come from up on high to talk about farming and so on. So I, I don't, I don't know anything else about Earl Butz in an era, except that he gets really roughed up, and it's sort of like the poet Swinburne, so I did my PhD work on TS Eliot. TS Eliot roughs up. Charles Algernon Swinburne in his one essay and like Eliot scholars like Swinburne but he's horrible right. So I went to a TSLA conference and there was an Israeli scholar speaking on Swinburne. And he was like, TS Eliot's essay has done inestimable damage to Swinburne his reputation is like that, because that's all anyone knows about him and everyone in the room was like oh you're right that's all we all we know, but remember, It's really crazy poetry and Elliott says bad you know so I felt, I felt pinpointed but that particular statement so that's all I know about robots you know I've been a nice guy could have been a nice guidance in his private life, I don't know. Take a look here. So this is where we start to get into. We went to mental health, agriculture, this sort of stuff get into gender roles. So help coming to household because you know what's going to come to the household for Wendell Berry eventually. And it's probably going to come to marriage when like if anyone did the poetry unit, many of the poems took it down to marriage right there's all those poems about marriage in the country of marriage, two poems called Marriage poems that seemingly are about metaphorically about marriage right so it's always kind of wants to see where the line of health and disease it is in those fundamental relationships. So we'll do this one that we can kind of maybe stop and and talk a little bit about, you know, to think of the body as separate from the solar as soulless either discover its appetites or to free them is to be made is to make an object of it, the concerns of the body. All that is comprehended in the term nurture are thus degraded denied any respect respected place among the higher things. Here he's talking about the, the farm white the role of the farm life becoming the role of the 70s housewife. Moving from part of the household economy and so on, to being put in a situation where your role has been debased and degraded and and taken, taken from you as a functional part of household economy just quoting what he's saying that I have vague memories of the 70s, you know Novus there and so on and I remember. Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter and so I don't exactly know culturally but I think I think I'm on to kind of what he's saying. The 70s housewife with all the gadgetry and so on and so forth but not really part of the household economy, because there is no hustle the economy. the husband goes out somewhere else is the breadwinner brings it back, there's no it's not, there's no locus in the household of economic production and shared work and so on it's, there's no mutualism anymore. We're all familiar with modern family along those lines. In Windows account women in households thus were forced into roles that were industrialized and streamlined by new innovation and by marketing and so on, but it had a really heavy effect the household was no longer not longer a condition but only a place. It was not no longer a circumstance that required dignified and rewarded the enactment of mutual dependence, but the site of mutual estrangement, your household or just the house you live in. It's, it's the place where we're trying to stay in touch with each other, rather than fundamentally connected right where, where it's a battle to really stay in touch with each other.

Unknown 32:24

A place of estrangement rather than neutral so let's step back so help for the body health for land and agriculture, mental health, health within the household, what do we. Any thoughts on what's binding it all together the theme or thesis that there's a thread to it. Is it making sense do you find it a little too, sort of, scattershot in his approach, we thought at this juncture was like it's happening to us. We have no seconds. Yes, no, no one decided. I mean one of the, that's interesting so that the idea that, that we didn't really have say in the better and it's happening and we're just kind of swept along in the wave of it I mean, when he talks about agricultural changes after World War Two, Especially the coming of tractors mechanization of farms and so on the dispersal of people out of the farms toward the cities and so on. Nobody planned it right it's not, it's not planned. You didn't. And we feel this way as well like nobody planned to be in a room with all these computer screens and so many teams and hyper technology with iPhones ringing and so we're in that world that worked well in it. It's not clear who designed it right and they often have the question, who's in charge of what's going right, what, what, how did this all happen, what's it Steve Jobs or Bill Gates and

Unknown 33:53

it's not clear exactly how it'll happen but we've kind of got there. And so how do we address that like,

Unknown 33:58

can we actively, rather than acquiesce Can we can we actively say okay, hold on. This brings health and this brings disease. So there I've got my scale of measuring. I think that's what he's kind of doing in this essay in every turn. Okay, health and disease as scale with regard to this situation with regard to what's going on like kids with their diet with regard to technology with regard to my, my addressing of agriculture as a food, eating person which we all are health and disease scale get more active in measuring it and, and figuring out what our role is good, bad or ugly. And, and so, but, but there's a lot of forces pushing us in the other direction of just like being swept up in it swept away by it right. And actually, that'd be a lot easier. Life would kind of just you wouldn't, you wouldn't push up streaming it's like because everything, you know, efficiency and so on, is there in the modern system, but you'll have the other effects that our culture feels all the time now right which is loneliness, anxiety, feelings of depression feelings of disconnectedness. We're not even getting to like guilt about agricultural disasters right we're just, we're starting to exist actually how we feel sure why, Right. So yeah, to get more active. There is something really to be said for young people who we worry about a lot right who are often with screens and live in daughters babysitting a kid the other day. Little kid, Three brothers, and he's like, seven, eight years old man dies like I need screens I need screens I need strength I need screens, she's like it freed me up. He just kept saying, and it's great to any experience, almost like another kid would do what it said in the old days, I want some candy or something I don't know what, whatever we put out for but I wanna watch TV or something like that, I need screens. I can't rest without them. So, we need to keep asking ourselves questions about for young people, I read a great book note, you know, No Child Left Behind, I'm not talking about that, that political thing. No Child Left Inside about kids being outdoors. You can read at length and I've studied, and I'm pretty interested in trying to get some of my former students to think about doing this a married couple, especially I can think of for schools, really big in England, and Northern Europe, Western Europe, schools where kids are outside all the time throughout the whole year. Now granted, England's a little more mild in January than it is here. They do have warming sheds, they some of them are in Germany that warming sheds the kids go into those for like half an hour, maybe eat a snack or lunch, go back out. I'm not exactly sure what they learned math. Listen, my family it was we homeschool their kids, English professor family math was a fringe element. I apologize to all my kids when they went to take the LSAT, I'm really sorry. It's not about how much math you know it's about how you take the test or I try to my daughter afterwards was like it's a good thing you apologize yeah this is good though. I just said score really well on the verbal score really well on verbal. So, this sense of like being outside, being in nature these kids thrive and I have the spot, you know, it's mostly upper, upper scale kids right from families that can afford this. What about kids with disabilities so the one, my one former student is a special ed teacher. The husband is, is a guy who has some mental health issues himself that he is really open about but also works with adults with disabilities, but not at Forest School for kids with disabilities. You can make it accessible to them, let them be outside, or kids from underprivileged backgrounds right who you know are kids from low income neighborhoods, but come out to the woods. Kids for urban kind of urban core, settings which are often pretty, pretty rough, in terms of the physical environment to the forest. It doesn't heal everything but it gives us something pretty fundamental for window right. Yeah, the healthy. The Healthy mechanisms that are part of the natural world when we, when we don't mess with it. We can learn from them and actually they actually help us

Unknown 38:06

with our health. Yes. Household work or to work in unison factory right out there right Rosie the Riveter, yeah, yeah. So, talk about that. Yeah so mentioning World War Two being an emancipatory time for women getting out of the household working defense industry and seeing good good and bad, but those possibilities were again,

Unknown 38:42

I think. I think the economically, way more women work than men right now in the economy. What the effect of that and there's all kinds of things going on and who knows that that's gonna get really wild to start opening that up there I think that said like one in four adult men of working age does not work, not just unemployment does not work for variety reasons, what you just said what, what's going on and there's, you know, there's some dystrophies underneath that so weird stuff going on. When you just think about the structure of families, household now window is like it's not women going to work per se, it's, it's the world of exploitive economy where men had already left the home right and there was no household economy and then women are drawn out of that. And in a world of externalized economic forces because we, how else would we eat, we're not farmers anymore and I live on a small lot the safeguard route you know a quarter acre lot or whatever, how would, how would you, they can grow a lot and a quarter acre. As it turns out, and what Chuck's can get love as well on a quarter of Acre and they can do a lot of harm, and raccoons get involved as well in rabbits. So you're like you're in the city there's plenty of animals in the city, ready to do harm to your, your dwelling, that's what I found out that there has to be more raccoons and possums and skunks, it within a mile of where I live than in the forest itself I think in terms of what I've seen. So here we are we're at a moment and I think this is a great moment, we're gonna have to kind of call it right here in the middle of the body notes so we can we can wrestle through the rest of this and then get into some of our other essays next week. Talk someone mentioned extremes one. Now granted England's a little more mild in January than it is here. They do have morning shifts, they some of them are in Germany that morning shifts the kids go into those for like half an hour, maybe eat a snack or lunch, go back out. I'm not exactly sure how they learned math. Listen, my family it was we homeschool their kids in English professor family

2.3

Unknown 0:06

For a different view of the world. We already have a view right where we are. So that perfect title shifts and looks like that's only going to be more so as I don't know how much it cost to pay for a space vacation at this point probably out of our price range. Right, but if you wanted to go into zero gravity. But it's coming right in for window variances, why are we doing when the world is being kind of destroyed or they leave waste. You don't have to think too far if you've ever watched with grandkids the movie Wally, I think it was mentioned last week. The future is all of us out on a spacewalk somewhere because we ruined the earth and we were all just on a cosmic space space. Cruise forever. Right, playing around with our big goals. So take a look at where this goes. So this is kind of this is twisting and turning this argument. I mentioned 45 years later. Have you ever talked with students where they get wherever they go unless they've got pictures of it and posted on social media. It wasn't a real experience. After the lecture but I didn't get any pictures or anything that was pointed out was the point of even going to mcmaster carr very much is sitting on the beach. Just like dabbling in the lake or watching sunset. But I could have posted that. And so, it's, it's like technology by which we mediate the meaning of that experience rather than the experience itself.

Unknown 1:32

So,

Unknown 1:35

yeah, here he goes. This is his twist toward mental health issues. So this is one of the twists and turns, where I was just sort of like the next section like where I think I kind of know because health is body but also mind they're related, but that's maybe it's prophetic because that will become the health crisis of our own time, you know, 45 years after his was the mental health crisis. He says about it. The body cannot be whole alone persons cannot be all alone. It is wrong to think that bodily health is compatible with confusion disorder, polluted air and water and proper. Healing is impossible. I think in loneliness. It is the opposite of loneliness and it's the words there so it just make sense. A lot of the crisis of depression and anxiety for young people seems to be associated with feeling lonely. Never Have people been more surrounded with constant stimulus right. Hundreds of people that you can contact immediately on social media, and so on. Sometimes you get unfriended or get blocked or whatever that hurts, but feeling so alone. Right. And, and I think he would, he would say that the failure of community is responsible for the failure of agricultural health right and it just becomes mechanized and affiliative community as well so why otterly and needed, mental health, we find ourselves distraught, right, because we were not meant in any way shape or form we weren't meant to work. We weren't meant to be in our household alone we weren't meant to be, to function alone. That's fundamental for him. But we've created lives that are hyper individualized, as this crisis comes out it's interesting, he's saying that's 45 years ago and you just feel that amplified 100 400 fold in our time. And then, even go into the question of suicide. The fatal sicknesses despair, a wound that cannot be healed because it's encapsulated in loneliness surrounded by speechlessness caps the scale of the human. Our works do not liberate us they can find us. So the suggestion that we create a structure that actually kind of drives people towards despair. In the name of kind of like advancement. So again, the twists and turns of health and district health and disease that are kind of his, his, his language here let's see. So my buttons not quite working right now so maybe come out of presentation mode briefly.

Unknown 4:26

Yeah, go ahead and stop sharing a minute and reshare see if you take a break in your interest.

Unknown 4:33

So we'll break down and I'm going to reshare your screen again. Yeah, right down there at the bottom. Yeah. Terminology and scope and scale and all this stuff right. I'm still kind of not getting oh here we go, there we got it. So, now we're talking about agricultural policy. Okay so, like I said the essay goes right to direction so mental health right agriculture policy I mean they're all. It's more like to be you know sometimes when you're doing writing instruction with freshmen you'd be like, Okay, you got some ideas, let's cluster, one idea and then put a bunch of things outside of it and that leads in that cluster over here. It's kind of like this essay was clustering health was health was the hub, issues of health and disease, all that you see all around you are kind of like the spokes that go off a bit, so we get around to this one, and he speaks of his nemesis, you can find on YouTube, it's two hours. 1977 also a debate between Wendell Berry and Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, the young Wendell, that's quite interesting, and you start to see. You see kind of embodied like what he's arguing here and you see what he's up against, with the corporate agriculture. The man who popularized agribusiness right agriculture as a kind of mega, mega industrialized agriculture, the signs of the EveryDollar says Wendell, big business fantasy of the Bucks mentality. Speaking of Earl Butz okay this guy, are all present. This is what he looks around him in Kentucky, this is in his time 45 years ago, absenteeism, temporary and shallow interests of the land renter row cropping of slopes, the lack of rotation the plowed out waterways, the rows running up and down hills, we already read about that in the first essay how he lived next that looked at from the fields edge this is ruin criminal folly moral idiocy, looked after Washington DC from inside the economy, it's called free enterprise and full production. So, when he sees the decay of the land, it's almost like he's, you know, why am I surprised that the body has decayed with it when we allow the land to be used and abused in these ways and he makes. He makes connections here with the reckless nature of farming, and junk food I mean as which I think is coming into the 70s Right, and just filling yourself with all this stuff and then taking all kinds of pharmaceuticals to kind of make up for it and then get yourself squared away because you have to digest digestion or someone or diet pills and so on, that we just instead of approaching in a logical way we approach it with kind of limited the binge purge approach right or just eating all this junk food and not eating for three days or what have you all the different stratagems of quote unquote healthy are crazy, but I got a picture URL button. There was a picture of him standing with Gerald Ford who he worked for, but I didn't want to throw Gerald Ford under the bus right because he's, he's our local guy. I don't know who this guy is in the meeting with him here so it's all the 70s Politicians kind of look similar to each other. So you just kind of leave them, but Earl Butz was the guy in his suit and tie the corporate and the charts its own window I believe was in like a workshop at the debate, and just kind of like two different worlds meet right and I think we rhetorically went to did that and he says he wears a suit and tie as well. Kind of rhetorical, Like, I'm going to come from the grassroots, you're going to come from on high, to talk about farming and so on. So I, I don't, I don't know anything else about Earl Rukhsana era except that he gets really roughed up and sort of like the poet Swinburne, so I did my PhD where TS Eliot. TS Eliot roughs up. Charles Algernon Swinburne in his one essay and like Elliot scholars from Swinburne but he's horrible right. So I went to a TSLA conference and there was an Israeli scholar speaking on Swinburne. And he was like, TS Eliot's essay has done inestimable damage to Swinburne his reputation is like what, because that's all anyone knows about him and everyone in the room was like, Oh, you're right, that's all we all know, really crazy poetry and Elliot said it's bad, you know, so I felt, I felt pinpointed with that particular statement so that's all I know about robots you might have been a nice guy. Got a nice guy and take a look here. So this is where we start to get into. We went to mental health, agriculture, this sort of stuff get into gender roles. So help coming to household because you know what's going to come into the household for Wendell Berry adventure. And it's probably going to come to marriage when, if anyone did the poetry unit, many of the poems took it down to marriage right there's all those poems about marriage in the country of marriage to poems called Marriage

Unknown 9:33

poems that seemingly are about metaphorically about marriage, Right, so it's always kind of wants to see where the line of health and diseases, is the most fundamental relationships. So we'll do this one that we can kind of maybe stop and and talk a little bit about, you know, to think of the body as separate from the solar as soulless either discover its appetites are to free them is to be made is to make an object of it, the concerns of the body. All that is comprehended in the term nurture are thus degraded denied any respect respected place among the higher things. Here he's talking about the, the farm Why'd the role of the farm life becoming the role of the 70s housewife. Moving from part of the household economy and so on, to being put in a situation where your role has been debased and degraded and and taken, taken from you as a functional part of postal economy just quoting where he's saying that I have vague memories of the 70s, you know, no it was there and so on and I remember. Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter and so I don't exactly know culturally but I think I think I'm on to kind of what he's saying. The 70s housewife with all the gadgetry and so on so forth but not really part of the household economy, because there isn't a household economy. The husband goes out somewhere else is the breadwinner brings it back, there's no it's not, there's no locus in the household of economic production and shared work and so on it's, there's no mutualism anymore. We're all familiar with the modern family along those lines. And when those account, women in households thus were forced into roles that were industrialized and streamlined by new innovation and by marketing and so on, but it had a really heavy effect the household was no longer not longer a condition but only a place. It was not no longer a circumstance that required dignified and rewarded the enactment of mutual dependence, but the sight of mutual estrangement. Your household is just the house you live in. It's It's the place where we're trying to stay in touch with each other, rather than fundamentally connected right where, where it's a battle to really stay in touch with each other. A place of estrangement rather than neutral so let's step back so health for the body health for land and agriculture, mental health, health within the household, what are we any thoughts on what's binding it all together the theme or thesis as there's a thread to it. Is it making sense do you find it a little too, sort of, scattershot in his approach, and the thoughts at this juncture was like it's happening to us. We have no savings. Yeah, it's no, no one decided. I mean one of the, that's interesting. So that's the idea that I've seen happening and we're just kind of swept along in the wave of that I mean, when he talks about agricultural changes after World War One of farms and so on the dispersal of people out of the farms toward the cities and so on. Nobody planned it right it's not, it's not the plan. You didn't. In we feel this way as well like nobody planned to be in a room with all these computer screens and.

Unknown 15:21

How's your living. It's It's the place where we're trying to stay in touch with each other rather than fundamentally connected right where, where it's a battle to really stay in touch with each other. A place of estrangement rather than neutral so let's step back so health for the body health for land and agriculture, mental health, health within the household, what are we any thoughts on what's binding it all together the theme or thesis if there's a thread to it. Is it making sense do you find it. Little two sort of scattershot in his approach or thoughts at this juncture, which just means like it's happening to us. We have no sense. Yeah, it's no, no one decided. I mean one of the, that's interesting so that the idea that, that we didn't really have say in the veteran it's happening and we're just kind of swept along in the wave of that I mean, when he talks about agricultural changes after World War Two, especially the coming of tractors mechanization of farms and so on the dispersal of people out of the farms toward the cities and so on. Nobody planned it right it's not, it's not planned. You didn't. And we feel this way as well like nobody planned to be in a room with all these computer screens and zoom and teams and hyper technology with iPhones ringing and so we're in that world and we well in it. It's not clear who designed it right now the question, who's in charge what's going right what what and this all happened, what's it Steve Jobs or Bill Gates in charge, it's not clear exactly how it'll happen. We've kind of got there. And so how do we address that like, can we actively, rather than acquiesce Can we can we actively say okay, hold on. This brings health and this brings disease. So there I've got my scale of measuring. I think that's what he's kind of doing in this essay in every turn. Okay, health and disease as scale with regard to this situation with regard to what's going on with my kids with their diet with regard to technology with regard to my addressing of agriculture as a food, eating person which we all our health and disease scale get more active in measuring it and figuring out what our role is good, bad or ugly. And, and so, but, but there's a lot of forces pushing us in the other direction of just like being swept up in it swept away by it right. And actually, that'd be a lot easier. Life would kind of just you wouldn't, you wouldn't push up streaming its life because everything, you know, efficiency and so on, is there in the modern system, but you'll have the other effects that our culture feels all the time now right which is loneliness, anxiety, feelings of depression feelings of disconnectedness. We're not even getting to like guilt about agricultural disasters right we're just, we're starting to exist actually how we're not sure why, right. So yeah, to get more active. There is something really to be said for young people who we worry about a lot right who are often with screens and limits daughters babysitting a kid the other day. Little kid, Three brothers, and it's like seven, eight years old. Eight screens on the screen to any screen to any screen, but it freaked me out. And it's pretty tiny screens, almost like another kid, but you know what I said in the old days, I want some candy or something I don't know what, whatever we put out for but I wanna watch TV or something like that I need. I can't rest of it. So, we need to keep asking ourselves questions about for young people, I read a great book No, you know, No Child Left Behind, I'm not talking about that, that political thing. No Child Left Inside about kids being outdoors. You can read at length and I've studied, and I'm pretty interested in trying to get some of my former students to think about doing this a married couple, especially I can think of forest schools really big in England, and Northern Europe, Western Europe, schools where kids outside all the time throughout the whole year. Now granted, England's a little more mild in January that this year. They do have morning shifts, they some of them are German morning shifts the kids go into those for like half an hour, maybe eat a snack or lunch, go back out. I'm not entirely sure whether or not. My family was the ultimate English professor family. Math was a French element. I apologize to all my kids when they went to take the PSAT. I'm really sorry. It's not about how much math you know it's about how you take the test stretch. My daughter afterwards was like it's a good thing you apologize to her. This is what I just said score really well on the verbal score really well.

Unknown 20:16

So,

Unknown 20:18

this sense of like being outside, being in nature these kids thrive and I have this thought, you know, it's mostly upper, upper scale kids right from families that can afford this. What about kids with disabilities so the one my one former student is a special ed teacher. The husband is, is a guy who has some mental health issues himself that he is really open about but also works with adults with disabilities, but about a forest school for kids with disabilities. We can make it accessible to them, let them be outside for kids from underprivileged backgrounds right who you know are kids from low income neighborhoods, but come out to the woods. Kids come urban kind of urban core settings which are often pretty, pretty rough, in terms of the physical environment, up to the forest. It doesn't heal everything but it gives us something pretty fundamental for window right. The healthy. The Healthy mechanisms that are part of the natural world when we, when we don't mess with it. We can learn from them, actually, they actually help us with our health. Yes. We're going to need to work in means in factories, right, right Rosie the Riveter. Yeah. Yes. Yeah so mentioning where tubing emancipatory time for women getting out of the household working defensive history and seeing good, good and bad, but those possibilities were again, I think. I think the economically, way more women work than men right now in the economy. What the effect of that and there's all kinds of things going on and who knows if that's gonna get really wild start opening that up there I think it sounded like one in four adult men of working age does not work, not just as unemployment does not work for variety reasons, but she just said, what's going on and there's, you know, there's some dystrophies underneath that some weird stuff going on. When you just think about the structure of family's household now he wonders like it's not women going to work per se, it's, it's the world of exploitive economy where men had already left the home right and there was no possible economy and then women are drawn out in a world of externalized economic forces because we, how else would we eat, we're not farmers anymore and I live on a small lot, say a quarter acre lot, or whatever, how would, how would you like a girl out on a quarter acre. As it turns out and what Chuck's can get a lot as well. On a quarter acre they can do a lot of harm, and records get involved. So you'd like you're in the city there's plenty of animals in the city, ready to do harm to your, your dwelling, that's what I found out that there has to be more raccoons and possums and skunks, if within a mile of where I live than in the forest itself, I think. So here we are we're at a moment, and I think this is a great moment, we're gonna have to kind of call it right here in the middle of body notes so we can we can wrestle through the rest of this and get into some of our other essays next week. He talks someone mentioned extreme someone mentioned where does Wendell draw the line, are all these connections valid. I think he's trying to do the measuring stick of health and disease. And he doesn't want us to delude ourselves that things that seem healthy. Hey, that seems like it's really healthy, that we would go forward with something that actually is diseased and so he wants to look behind the curtain, right, so what are we entering into that's why, that's why he says that his wife would be better for her to go work in a corporate job than to help me with my writing, and work for a boss and so let's, let's make sure we actually figure out what each of those situations is before we judge one over the other. It's, it's that kind of measuring judgment we're talking to an undergraduate or reading this, she's just like, I can't think that I would have to think about everything, every decision. It's freaking me out. I can't, like, yeah, it kind of problematizes daily life right but in a good way. Because you want to think about things and wonder about things and, And not necessarily just to be in lockstep with Wendell Berry because we all desire health for ourselves for those we love for everybody, for everybody, whatever, whatever health would have we measure that for them. And we want to be a part of that part of the healing. So, I figured we'd probably make it to the middle of body and earth and be. We're not a bad place we're not in a rancorous place right now, so we can pick up the last the last half of this, go into health is membership, and I'll give Sonia the cue of maybe like trim out I put in quite a few shorter essays in the last two weeks, maybe trim and prune those out a little bit, Try to try to get those that are kind of carrying this theme of health and healing forward

Unknown 25:18

for next week, and I can't promise we'll go quickly and efficiently but we will continue to engage with the kind of the essentials here any questions here or Sonia anybody.

Carl Glen Henshaw - Simple Acts of Kindness

Simple Acts of Kindness

by Carl Glen Henshaw

The worst college class I ever took was a literature class on short stories. One notable memory from that class was a story we read about a group of kids who conspire to destroy the house of an old man. They befriended the man so they could get into the house, and while there slowly cut through the beams holding the walls up. They did this for weeks and weeks; when they were done, they ran a cable around the house, got the man into the yard, and pulled it down with him watching.

The instructor asked us to write a piece on the story with the topic of “creative destruction”.

At the time, this struck me as deeply wrong, and I refused to write the report the way the instructor wanted and got marked down as a result, which is representative of my entire undergraduate experience. But I didn’t have the wisdom or skill to really say *why* it was wrong.

Now I do.

Shortly after 9/11, Stephen Jay Gould wrote a column about the day drawing on his background as a biologist who studied complex systems. Complex systems tend to be interconnected and somewhat fragile. In order for a complex system to function, nearly all of the parts have to do their jobs. If the system suffers a significant injury, all of its parts have to work in unison to knit it back together.

Society, Gould said, is a complex system, and had just suffered a significant injury. Offsetting this injury took the collective efforts of many. Gould wrote:

“Good and kind people outnumber all others by thousands to one. The tragedy of human history lies in the enormous potential for destruction in rare acts of evil, not in the high frequency of evil people. Complex systems can only be built step by step, whereas destruction requires but an instant. Thus, in what I like to call the Great Asymmetry, every spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by 10,000 acts of kindness, too often unnoted and invisible as the ''ordinary'' efforts of a vast majority. We have a duty, almost a holy responsibility, to record and honor the victorious weight of these innumerable little kindnesses, when an unprecedented act of evil so threatens to distort our perception of ordinary human behavior...

I will cite but one tiny story, among so many, to add to the count that will overwhelm the power of any terrorist's act. And by such tales, multiplied many millionfold, let those few depraved people finally understand why their vision of inspired fear cannot prevail over ordinary decency. As we left a local restaurant to make a delivery to ground zero late one evening, the cook gave us a shopping bag and said: ''Here's a dozen apple brown bettys, our best dessert, still warm. Please give them to the rescue workers.'' How lovely, I thought, but how meaningless, except as an act of solidarity, connecting the cook to the cleanup. Still, we promised that we would make the distribution, and we put the bag of 12 apple brown bettys atop several thousand face masks and shoe pads.

Twelve apple brown bettys into the breach. Twelve apple brown bettys for thousands of workers. And then I learned something important that I should never have forgotten -- and the joke turned on me. Those 12 apple brown bettys went like literal hot cakes. These trivial symbols in my initial judgment turned into little drops of gold within a rainstorm of similar offerings for the stomach and soul, from children's postcards to cheers by the roadside. We gave the last one to a firefighter, an older man in a young crowd, sitting alone in utter exhaustion as he inserted one of our shoe pads. And he said, with a twinkle and a smile restored to his face: ''Thank you. This is the most lovely thing I've seen in four days -- and still warm!''”

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I also study complex systems. Unlike Gould, my systems aren’t natural; they’re engineered. But my experience mirrors Gould’s. Engineered systems are even more fragile than natural ones. Every piece has a part to play.

Gould’s point, and mine, is that we do not counteract immense acts of evil through immense acts of good. We counter them through hundreds, thousands, millions of small acts. Bringing someone grieving a hot dinner. Comforting a child. Helping someone change a flat. Planting a garden and giving away the produce.

Those of us who try to follow Jesus of Nazareth should understand this, although too often we act like we don’t. Goodness doesn’t lie in enormous sacrifices (although those do occur). It lies in the small things, in how you live your everyday life.

Because this is not rare, it is often thought of as banal. But it isn’t. Destruction, evil, no matter how grand the scale, no matter how carefully planned, is not creative. It cannot be. Destruction is the ground state of the universe. Entropy gets everything in the end. No matter how it is carried out, it is evil that is banal. All evil does is speed up what the universe will do sooner or later anyway.

It is quiet acts of goodness and kindness that are transgressive, revolutionary. It is loving your neighbor as yourself, it is visiting the sick, tending to the injured, being a peacemaker, showing your love of God through seeing His image in the countenance of the guy in front of you in the grocery store, or the immigrant the next street over, or the screaming toddler kicking your seat on the airplane.

We often mark 9/11 by tipping our caps to the first responders, to the kids who signed up at the Marine recruiting office and went off to fight terrorism overseas, to the passengers who fought back. And this isn’t wrong, but it’s far from complete. We must also remember every kind act, every apple brown betty baked and given away, every hug, every phone call checking in on loved ones — and every one of the million, billion, trillion caring acts since. Because it is those acts that build and rebuild society, that fight against the dying of the light. So when you think about how to best commemorate the day, consider:

The act most alien to evil is kindness.

- Carl Glen Henshaw

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“In the Resurrection, the power of Love overcomes all evil."
Easter Letter of the Minister General, 2017

The Power of Love Overcomes All Evil

https://ofm.org/blog/easter-letter-2017/

Posted at April 15, 2017 in

Featured, Letters, Letters & Homilies,

Minister General, News

“If, then, we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him. We know that Christ, raised from the dead, dies no more; death no longer has power over him” (Rom 6: 8-9)

My dear Brothers and friends,

Alleluia! In our Easter commemoration, we celebrate the events of the life, suffering, death, and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. Like the faithful women who stood by Jesus in death and who were the first witnesses to the resurrection, we too recognize in these paschal events the dawning of a new hope for the life of the world, a world torn apart by divisions and conflicts, a world God has chosen to love unconditionally (Jn 3:16). In the resurrection, the power of love overcomes all evil.

We stand as believers and followers of Jesus giving witness to an alternative vision of life, an alternative way of living in this world, guided by the Spirit of God. We recall that it is this same Spirit of God who is present at the moment of the creation of the world. This same Spirit is present in the events of the annunciation of the birth of the Messiah to Mary, the Mother of Jesus. It is the Spirit who accompanies Jesus throughout his life on earth, inspiring his preaching and teaching, his simple acts of kindness and love. It is the Spirit who accompanies Jesus along the road to Golgotha, witnessing Jesus’ suffering and humiliating death on the cross. It is the Spirit of God who remains with Jesus through death and burial, demonstrating unwavering love for the only beloved Son who gives his live in love in order that the world might be reconciled to itself and to God. And it is the Spirit who raises the Son to life anew (Rom 8:11).

This Holy Spirit who was present in every moment in the life of Jesus, from life to death and to new life, is also present in our world today. The resurrection is the definitive sign of God’s fidelity to the Son, to each of us, and to all of creation. We have need of this message today more than ever: God loves us, is walking with us, healing our wounds, calling us to live reconciled lives with all people, called to be messengers of love, mercy, and peace.

The Spirit of God who raised Jesus from the dead continues to carry on the work of the Father and the Son, reminding us that divisions, violence, hatred, destruction, and death do not have the final word; they are not the victors. In the resurrection of Jesus, we receive the final confirmation that love and only love is the final victor, and the ultimate vocation to which we are called. I witnessed this in the lives of our brothers and sisters living in Damascus, Aleppo, and Latakia in Syria these past days. In the midst of death and destruction on a cataclysmic scale, the Christians of Syria who have lost loved ones, homes, and livelihood refuse to submit to the temptation of abandoning God, their faith, and their commitment to pursue a path towards reconciliation and reconstruction. They stand with Mary Magdalene before the empty tomb; they search for meaning in the total absence of all that might seem rational and human; they run to the community of faith where they share stories of discouragement and despair, hope and love, and where in the Eucharist they discover, as did the disciples of Emmaus, the presence of the risen Lord Jesus who never abandons them, never abandons those who have been called into relationship with Him.

My dear brothers and friends, let us take to heart the words from the Sequence, Victim paschali laudes:

“Christians, to the Pascal Victim offer sacrifice and praise. The sheep are ransomed by the Lamb and Christ the undefiled, hath sinners to his Father reconciled. Death with life contended: combat strangely ended! Life’s own Champion, slain, yet lives to reign. Tell us Mary: say what thou didst see upon the way. The tomb the Living did enclose; I saw Christ’s glory as he rose! The angels there attesting; shroud with grave-clothes resting. Christ, my hope, has risen: he goes before you in Galilee. That Christ is truly risen from the dead we know. Victorious king, thy mercy show! Amen! Alleluia!”

He is truly risen! His love and mercy are victorious!

A blessed and joy-filled Easter to all!

Fraternally,

Bro. Michael A. Perry, OFM

Minister General and Servant

Rome, 15 April 2017

Vigil of Easter