Brad Littlejohn and Clare Morell, making a conservative argument for government regulation of smartphones:

A world in which smartphones are more difficult for children to access, in which burgers and concert tickets are easier to purchase without this device, need not be a big-government dystopia. It is unlikely to come into being, however, without prudent government action. Some problems are simply too widespread, have gained too much momentum, or are too nearly inescapable for individual families, community institutions, or businesses to overcome them on their own. The soft tyranny of the smartphone is one such problem. In these situations, the state’s role is to step in and protect the traditions, institutions, and values of society that new technologies threaten to erode and supplant.

Finished reading: The World-Ending Fire by Wendell Berry 📚

Didn’t read every single essay (came due at the library), but covered enough to see the broad contours of Berry’s thought. What impressed me most: his deep conviction and clarity of thought.

Wendell Berry, from “Family Work” (1980) [NB: substituting “internet” for “TV” or “television” provides added resonance to our situation]:

We can try to make our homes centers of attention and interest. Getting rid of the TV, we understand, is not just a practical act, but also a symbolical one: we thus turn our backs on the invitation to consume; we shut out the racket of consumption. The ensuing silence is an invitation to our homes, to our own places and lives, to come into being. And we begin to recognize a truth disguised or denied by TV and all that it speaks and stands for: no life and no place is destitute; all have possibilities of productivity and pleasure, rest and work, solitude and conviviality that belong particularly to themselves. These possibilities exist everywhere, in the country or in the city, it makes no difference. All that is necessary is the time and the inner quietness to look for them, the sense to recognize them, and the grace to welcome them. They are now most often lived out in home gardens and kitchens, libraries, and workrooms. But they are beginning to be worked out, too, in little parks, in vacant lots, in neighborhood streets. Where we live is also a place where our interest and our effort can be. But they can’t be there by the means and modes of consumption. If we consume nothing but what we buy, we are living in ‘the economy,’ in ‘television land,’ not at home. It is productivity that rights the balance, and brings us home. Any way at all of joining and using the air and light and weather of your own place—even if it is only a window box, even if it is only an opened window—is a making and a having that you cannot get from TV or government or school.

Wendell Berry, from “Family Work” (1980):

The upbringing we give our children is not just for their childhood but for all their lives. And it is surely the duty of the older generation to be embarrassingly old-fashioned, for the claims of the ‘newness’ of any younger generation are mostly frivolous. The young are born to the human condition more than to their time, and they face mainly the same trials and obligations as their elders have faced.

one could do worse than be a swinger of birches

Wendell Berry’s standards for technological innovation, from “Why I am Not Going to Buy a Computer” (1987):

1. The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces.
2. It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces.
3. It should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces.
4. It should use less energy than the one it replaces.
5. If possible, it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body.
6. It should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence, provided that he or she has the necessary tools.
7. It should be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible.
8. It should come from a small, privately owned shop or store that will take it back for maintenance and repair.
9. It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.

Wendell Berry, from “Word and Flesh” (1989):

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 we are dependent on what is wrong. But that is the addict’s excuse, and we know that it will not do.

How dependent, in fact, are we? How dependent are our neighborhoods and communities? How might our dependences be reduced? To answer these questions will require better thoughts and better deeds than we have been capable of so far.

Wendell Berry, from “Word and Flesh” (1989):

The question that must be addressed…is not how to care for the planet, but how to care for each of the planet’s millions of human and natural neighborhoods, each of its millions of small pieces and parcels of land, each one of which is in some precious way different from all the others. Our understandable wish to preserve the planet must somehow be reduced to the scale of our competence—that is, to the wish to preserve all of its humble households and neighborhoods.

What can accomplish this reduction? I will say again, without overweening hope but with certainty nonetheless, that only love can do it. Only love can bring intelligence out of the institutions and organizations, where it aggrandizes itself, into the presence of the work that must be done.

Love is never abstract. It does not adhere to the universe or 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 compelled to be. It exists by its willingness to be anonymous, humble, and unrewarded.

The older love becomes, the more clearly it understands its involvement in partiality, imperfection, suffering, and mortality. Even so, it longs for incarnation. It can live no longer by thinking.

Wendell Berry, from “Faustian Economics” (2006):

To recover from our disease of limitlessness, we will have to give up the idea that we have a right to be godlike animals, that we are at least potentially omniscient and omnipotent, ready to discover ‘the secret of the universe.’ We will have to start over, with a different and much older premise: the naturalness and, for creatures of limited intelligence, the necessity of limits. We must learn again to ask how we can make the most of what we are, what we have, what we have been given. If we always have a theoretically better substitute available from somebody or someplace else, we will never make the most of anything. It is hard enough to make the most of one life. If we each had two lives, we would not make much of either. One of my best teachers said of people in general: ‘They’ll never be worth a damn as long as they’ve got two choices.’

Wendell Berry, from “Faustian Economics” (2006):

Our human and earthly limits, properly understood, are not confinements, but rather are inducements to formal elaboration and elegance, to fullness of relationship and meaning. Perhaps our most serious cultural loss in recent centuries is the knowledge that some things, though limited, can be inexhaustible. For example, an ecosystem, even that of a working forest or farm, so long as it remains ecologically intact, is inexhaustible. A small place, as I know from my own experience, can provide opportunities of work and learning, and a fund of beauty, solace, and pleasure—in addition to its difficulties—that cannot be exhausted in a lifetime or in generations.