I wake up in the morning, fold my hands and pray for rain/ I got a head full of ideas that are driving me insane. – Bob Dylan, Maggie’s Farm
Why “cake”? Because we find ourselves in a very let-them-eat-cake moment in history, originating from within our own culture. I believe we’re all living in the midst of a fog of entitlement and excess. I don’t claim to be immune to it, or even particularly adept at avoiding its trappings at times. What I would like to do is examine how we got here and how we get out.
Conspicuous consumption is now an American value – or at least, a stand-in for what we would once have called a value. It drives much of the world’s economy and has been exported as a cultural norm to civilizations which now complain of ills resulting from their “Westernization”.
Wendell Berry, the writer, cultural and economic critic, farms on the banks of the Kentucky River; living, to my mind, one of the few remaining examples of a well-lived life in America. Through his pursuit of a more pure agrarian lifestyle, Berry has managed to surmount the addiction to compulsive consumerism strangling our country, not to mention teaching by example the principles of fostering a local economy and creating community, vs. depending upon globalism for one’s food and one’s culture.
Below are a handfull of my favorite Berry quotations:
Our model citizen is a sophisticate who before puberty understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato. – Wendell Berry, “Think Little”
The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war, but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and less wasteful. – Wendell Berry, “Peaceableness Towards Enemies”
Today, local economies are being destroyed by the ‘pluralistic,’ displaced, global economy, which has no respect for what works in a locality. The global economy is built on the principle that one place can be exploited, even destroyed, for the sake of another place.
Once plants and animals were raised together on the same farm — which therefore neither produced unmanageable surpluses of manure, to be wasted and to pollute the water supply, nor depended on such quantities of commerical fertilizer. The genius of America farm experts is very well demonstrated here: they can take a solution and divide it neatly into two problems. – Wendell Berry
