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Executive Times |
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2006 Book Reviews |
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The Way
of Ignorance by Wendell Berry |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Responsibility For a respite
from the bombast and arrogance from many commentators, enjoy the 19 essays of
Wendell Berry’s latest collection, The Way
of Ignorance. With humility, clarity, and fine prose, The career of rugged
individualism in The tragic version of rugged individualism is in the
presumptive “right” of individuals to do as they please, as if there were no
God, no legitimate government, no community, no neighbors, and no posterity.
This is most frequently understood as the right to do whatever one pleases
with one’s property. One’s property, according to this formulation, is one’s
own absolutely. Rugged individualism of this kind has cost us dearly in
lost topsoil, in destroyed forests, in the increasing toxicity of the world,
and in annihilated species. When property rights become absolute they are
invariably destructive, for then they are used to justify not only the abuse
of things of permanent value for the temporary benefit of legal owners, but
also the appropriation and abuse of things to which the would-be owners have
no rights at all, but which can belong only to the public or to the entire community
of living creatures: the atmosphere, the water cycle, wilderness, ecosystems,
the possibility of life. This is made worse when great corporations are granted the
status of “persons,” who then can also become rugged individuals, insisting
on their right to do whatever they please with their property. Because of the
overwhelming wealth and influence of these “persons,” the elected representatives
and defenders of “the people of the It has become ever more
clear that this sort of individualism has never proposed or implied any
protection of the rights of all individuals, but instead has promoted a
ferocious scramble in which more and more of the rights of “the people” have
been gathered into the ownership of fewer and fewer of the greediest and most
powerful “persons.” I have described so far
what most of us would identify as the rugged individualism of the political
right. Now let us have a look at the left. The rugged individualism of the
left believes that an individual’s body is a property belonging to that
individual absolutely: The owners of bodies may, by right, use them as they
please, as if there were no God, no legitimate government, no community, no
neighbors, and no posterity. This supposed right is manifested in the
democratizing of “sexual liberation”; in the popular assumption that
marriage has been “privatized” and so made subordinate to the wishes of
individuals; in the proposition that the individual is “autonomous”; in the
legitimation of abortion as birth control—in the denial, that is to say, that
the community, the family, one’s spouse, or even one’s own soul might
exercise a legitimate proprietary interest in the use one makes of one’s body.
And this too is tragic, for it sets us “free” from responsibility and thus
from the possibility of meaning. It makes unintelligible the self-sacrifice
that sent Thoreau to jail. The comedy begins when
these two rugged (or “autonomous”) individualisms confront each other.
Conservative individualism strongly supports “family values” and abominates
lust. But it does not dissociate itself from the profits accruing from the
exercise of lust (and, in fact, of the other six deadly sins), which it
encourages in its advertisements. The “conservatives” of our day understand
pride, lust, envy, anger, covetousness, gluttony, and sloth as virtues when
they lead to profit or to political power. Only as unprofitable or
unauthorized personal indulgences do they rank as sins, imperiling salvation
of the soul, family values, and national security. Liberal individualism, on
the contrary, understands sin as a private matter. It strongly supports
protecting “the environment,” which is that part of the world which surrounds,
at a safe distance, the privately-owned body. “The environment” does not
include the economic landscapes of agriculture and forestry or their human
communities, and it does not include the privately-owned bodies of other
people—all of which appear to have been bequeathed in fee simple to the
corporate individualists. Conservative rugged
individualists and liberal rugged individualists believe alike that they
should be “free” to get as much as they can of whatever they want. Their
major doctrinal difference is that they want (some of the time) different
sorts of things. “Every man for himself” is
a doctrine for a feeding frenzy or for a panic in a burning nightclub,
appropriate for sharks or hogs or perhaps a cascade of lemmings. A society
wishing to endure must speak the language of caretaking, faith-keeping,
kindness, neighborliness, and peace. That language is another precious
resource that cannot be “privatized.” (2004) Steve Hopkins,
October 25, 2006 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the November 2006
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
Way of Ignorance.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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