"To lose the scar of knowledge is to renew the wound" (7).
"It is despair that sees the work failing in one's own failure.
This despair is the awkardest pride of all" (13).
Quoting the 1928 Book of Common Prayer: "Deliver us, we beseech thee, in our several callings, from the service of mammon, that we may do the work which thou givest us to do, in truth, in beauty, and in righteousness, with singleness of heart as they servants, and to the benefit of our fellow men."
"What is astonishing about this prayer is that it is a relic. Throughout the history of the industrial revolution, it has become steadily less prayable. The industrial nations now are divided,almost entirely, into a professional or executive class that has not the least intention of working in truth, beauty, and righteousness, as God's servants, or to the benefit of their fellow men, and an underclass that has no choice in the matter. Truth, beauty, and righteousness now have, and can have, nothing to do with the economic life of most people. This alone, I think, is sufficient to account for the orientation of most churches to religious feeling, increasingly feckless, as opposed to religious thought or religious behavior" (101).
"The truth is that we Americans, all of us, have become a kind of human trash, living our lives in the midst of a ubiquitous damned mess or which we are at once the victims and the perpetrators. We are all unwilling victims, perhaps; and some of us are even unwilling perpetrators, but we must count ourselves among the guilty nonetheless. IN my household we produce much of our own food and try to do without as many frivolous 'necessities' as possible--and yet, like everyone else, we must shop, and when we shop we must bring home a load of plastic, aluminum, and glass containers designed to be thrown away, and 'appliances' designed to wear out quickly and be thrown away" (127).
"I think that we must learn to see the trash on our streets and roadsides, in our rivers, and in our woods and fields, not as the side effects of 'more jobs' as its manufacturers invariably insist that it is, but as evidence of good work not done by people able to do it" (128).
"'This curious world we inhabit is more wonderful than convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used.' Henry David Thoreau said that to his graduating class at Harvard in 1837... When he uttered it, he may well have been remembering Romans 4:11: 'Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.' That God created 'all things' is in itself an uncomfortable thought, for in our workaday world we can hardly avoid preferring some things over others, and this makes it hard to imagine not doing so. That God created all things for his pleasure, and that they continue to exist because they please him, is a formidable doctrine indeed, as far as possible from the 'anthropocentric' utilitarianism that some environmentalist critics claim to find the Bible and from the grouchy spirituality of many Christians" (138).
"It may be argued that our whole society is more devoted to pleasure than any whole society ever was in the past, that we support in fact a great variety of pleasure industries and that ehse are thriving as never before. But that would seem only to prove my point. That there can be pleasure industries at all, exploiting our apparently limitless inability to be pleased, can only mean that our economy is divorced from pleasure and that pleasure is gone from our workplaces and our dwelling places. Our workplaces are more and more exclusively given over to production, an dour dwelling places to consumption. And this accounts for the accelerating division of our country into defeated landscapes and victorious (but threatened) landscapes.
"More and more, we take for granted that work must be destitute of pleasure. More and more, we assume that is we want to be pleased we must wait until evening, or the weekend, or vacation, or retirement... We are defeated at work because our work gives us no pleasure. We are defeated at home because we have no pleasant work there. We turn to the pleasure industries for relief from our defeat, and are again defeated, for the pleasure industries can thrive and grow only upon our dissatisfaction with them" (140).
"The industrial farm is said to have been patterned on the factory production line. In practice, it looks more like a concentration camp" (151).
"To have everything but money is to have much" (159).
"In such ways as this, the nuclei of home and community have been invaded by the organizations, just as have the nuclei of cells and atoms. And we must be careful to see that the old cultural centers of home and community were made vulnerable to this invasion by their failure as economies. If there is no household or community economy, then family members and neighbors are no longer useful to one another. When people are no longer useful to one another, then the centripetal force of family and community fails, and people fall into dependence on exterior economies and organizations. The hegemony of professionals and professionalism erects itself on local failure, and from then on the locality exists merely as a market for consumer goods and as a source of 'raw material,' human and natural. The local schools no longer serve the local community; they serve the government's economy and the economy's government. Unlike the local community, the government and the economy cannot be served with affection, but only with professional zeal or professional boredom. Professionalism means more interest in salaries and less interest in what used to be known as disciplines. And so we arrive at the idea, endlessly reiterated in the news media, that education can be improved by bigger salaries for teachers--which may be true, but education cannot be improved, as the proponents too often imply, by bigger salaries alone. There must also be love of learning and of the cultural tradition of excellence--and this love cannot exist, because it makes no sense, apart from the love of a place and a community. Without this love, education is only the importation into a local community of centrally prescribed 'career preparation' designed to facilitate the export of young careerists.
"Our children are educated, then, to leave home, not to stay home, and the costs of this education have been far too little acknowledged. One of the costs is psychological, and the other is at once cultural and ecological.
"The natural or normal course of human growing up must begin with some sort of rebellion against one's parents, for it is clearly impossible to grow up if one remains a child. But the child, in the process of rebellion and of achieving the emotional and economic independence that rebellion ought to lead to, finally comes to understand the parents as fellow humans and fellow sufferers, and in some manner returns to them as their friend, forgiven and forgiving the inevitable wrongs of family life. That was the old norm.
"The new norm, according to which the child leaves home as a student and never lives at home again, interrupts the old course of coming of age at the point of rebellion, so that the child is apt to remain stalled in adolescence, never achieving any kind of reconciliation or friendship with the parents. Of course, such a reconciliation cannot be achieved without the recognition of mutual practical need. In the present economy, however, where individual dependences are so much exterior to both household and community, family members often have no practical need or use for one another. Hence the frequent futility of attempts at a purely psychological or emotional reconciliation.
"And its interposition of rebellion and then of geographical and occupational distance between parents and children may account for the peculiar emotional intensity that our society attaches to innovation. We appear to hate whatever went before, very much as an adolescent hates parental rule, and to look on its obsolescence as a kind of vengeance. Thus we may explain industry's obsessive emphasis on 'this year's model,' or the preoccupation of the professional 'educators' with theoretical and methodological innovation. Similarly, in modern literature we have had for many years an emphasis on 'originality' and 'the anxiety of influence' (an adolescent critical theory), as opposed, say to Spenser's filial admiration to Chaucer, or Dante's for Virgil.
"But if the new normal interrupts the development of the relation between children and parents, that same interruption, ramifying through a community, destroys the continuity and so the integrity of local life. As the children depart, generation after generation, the place loses its memory of itself, which is its history and its culture. And the local history, if it survives at all, loses its place. It does not good for historians, folklorists, and anthropologists to collect the songs and the stories and the lore that make up local cultures and store them in books and archives. They cannot collect and store--because they cannot know--the pattern of reminding that can survive only in the living human community in its place. It is this pattern that is the life of local culture and that brings it usefully or pleasurably to mind. Apart from its local landmarks and occasions, the local culture may be the subject of curiosity or of study, but it is also dead" (166).
"Women have complained, justly, about the behavior of 'macho' men. But despite their he-man pretensions and their captivation by masculine heroes of sports, war, and the Old West, most men are now entirely accustomed to obeying and currying the favor of their bosses. Because of this, of course, they hate their jobs-- they mutter, 'Thank God it's Friday' and 'Pretty good for Monday'--but they do as they are told. They are more compliant than most housewives have been. Their characters combine feudal submissiveness with modern helplessness...These men, moreover, are helpless to do anything for themselves or anyone else without money, and so for money they will do whatever they are told. They know that their ability to be useful is precisely defined by their willingness to be somebody else's tool. Is it any wonder that they talk rough and worship athletes and cowboys? Is it any wonder that some of them are violent?" (185).
"A broader, deeper criticism is necessary. The problem is not just the exploitation of women by men. A greater problem is that women and men alike are consenting to an economy that exploits women and men and everything else" (185).
"The economies of our communities and households are wrong. The answers to the human problems of ecology are to be found in economy. And the answers to the problems of economy are to be found in culture and in character. To fail to see this is to go on dividing the world falsely between guilty producers and innocent consumers" (198).
"Love is never abstract. It does not adhere to the universe or to the planet or the nation or the institution or the profession, but to the singular sparrows of the street, the lilies of the field, 'the least of these my brethren.' Love is not, by its own desire, heroic. It is heroic only when it is compelled to be. It exists by its willingness to be anonymous, humble, and unrewarded" (200).
"We must achieve the character and acquire the skills to live much poorer than we do. We must waste less. We must do more for ourselves and each other. It is either that or continue merely to think and talk about changes that we are inviting catastrophe to make.
"The great obstacle is simply this: the conviction that we cannot change because are dependent on what is wrong. But that is the addict's excuse, and we know that it will not do" (201).
No comments:
Post a Comment