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

The normalization of the doctrine of limitlessness has produced a sort of moral minimalism: the desire to be ‘efficient’ at any cost, to be unencumbered by complexity. The minimization of neighborliness, respect, reverence, responsibility, accountability, and self-subordination—this is the ‘culture’ of which our present leaders and heroes are the spoiled children. […]

In our limitless selfishness, we have tried to define ‘freedom,’ for example, as an escape from all restraint. But, as my friend Bert Hornback has explained in his book The Wisdom in Words, ‘free’ is etymologically related to ‘friend.’ These words come from the same Germanic and Sanskit roots, which carry the sense of ‘dear’ or ‘beloved.’ We set our friends free by our love for them, with the implied restraints of faithfulness or loyalty. This suggests that our ‘identity’ is located not in the impulse of selfhood but in deliberately maintained connections.

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

In keeping with our unrestrained consumptiveness, the commonly accepted basis of our present economy is the fantastical possibility of limitless growth, limitless wants, limitless wealth, limitless natural resources, limitless energy, and limitless debt. The idea of a limitless economy implies and requires a doctrine of general human limitlessness: all are entitled to pursue without limit whatever they conceive as desirable—a license that classifies the most exalted Christian capitalist with the lowliest pornographer.

Currently reading: Outgrowing the Ingrown Church by C. John Miller 📚

Wendell Berry, from “The Unsettling of America” (1977):

Is work something that we have a right to escape? And can we escape it with impunity? We are probably the first entire people ever to think so. All the ancient wisdom that has come down to us counsels otherwise. It tells us that work is necessary to us, as much a part of our condition as mortality; that good work is our salvation and our joy, that shoddy or dishonest or self-serving work is our curse and our doom. We have tried to escape the sweat and sorrow promised in Genesis—only to find that, in order to do so, we must forswear love and excellence, health and joy.

Wendell Berry, from “The Unsettling of America” (1977):

Let me outline as briefly as I can what seem to me the characteristics of these opposite kinds of mind [i.e., exploitation and nurture]. I conceive a strip miner to be a model exploiter, and as a model nurturer I take the old-fashioned idea or ideal of a farmer. The exploiter is a specialist, an expert; the nurturer is not. The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The exploiter’s goal is money, profit; the nurturer’s goal is health—his land’s health, his own, his family’s, his community’s, his country’s. Whereas the exploiter asks of a piece of land only how much and how quickly it can be made to produce, the nurturer asks a question that is much more complex and difficult: What is its carrying capacity? (That is: How much can be taken from it without diminishing it? What can it produce dependably for an indefinite time?) The exploiter wishes to earn as much as possible by as little work as possible; the nurturer expects, certainly, to have a decent living from his work, but his characteristic wish is to work as well as possible. The competence of the exploiter is in organization; that of the nurturer is in order—a human order, that is, that accommodates itself both to other order and to mystery. The exploiter typically serves an institution or organization; the nurturer serves land, household, community, place. The exploiter thinks in terms of numbers, quantities, ‘hard facts’; the nurturer in terms of character, condition, quality, kind.

Wendell Berry, from “The Work of Local Culture” (1988):

The loss of local culture is, in part, a practical loss and an economic one. For one thing, such a culture contains, and conveys to succeeding generations, the history of the use of the place and the knowledge of how the place may be lived in and used. For another, the pattern of reminding implies affection for the place and respect for it, and so, finally, the local culture will carry the knowledge of how the place may be well and lovingly used, and also the implicit command to use it only well and lovingly. The only true and effective ‘operator’s manual for spaceship earth’ is not a book that any human will ever write; it is hundreds of thousands of local cultures.

(emphasis mine)

Wendell Berry, from “The Work of Local Culture” (1988):

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.

Wendell Berry, from “The Work of Local Culture” (1988):

When a community loses its memory, its members no longer know one another. How can they know one another if they have forgotten or have never learned one another’s stories? If they do not know one another’s stories, how can they know whether or not to trust one another? People who do not trust one another do not help one another, and moreover they fear one another. And this is our predicament now. Because of a general distrust and suspicion, we not only lose one another’s help and companionship, but we are all now living in jeopardy of being sued. […]

A good community, as we know, insures itself by trust, by good faith and good will, by mutual help. A good community, in other words, is a good local economy. It depends on itself for many of its essential needs and is thus shaped, so to speak, from the inside—unlike most modern populations that depend on distant purchases for almost everything and are thus shaped from the outside by the purposes and the influence of salesman.

Wendell Berry, from “Horse-Drawn Tools and the Doctrine of Labor Saving” (1978):

It is important to remember that ‘labor’ is a very crude, industrial term, fitted to the huge economic structures, the dehumanized technology, and the abstract social organization of urban-industrial society. In such circumstances, ‘labor’ means little more than the sum of two human quantities, human energy plus human time, which we identify as ‘man-hours.’ But the nearer home we put ‘labor’ to work, and the smaller and more familiar we make its circumstances, the more we enlarge and complicate and enhance its meaning. At work in a factory, workers are only workers, ‘units of production’ expending ‘man-hours’ at a task set for them by strangers. At work in their communities, on their own farms or in their own households or shops, workers are never only workers, but rather persons, relatives, and neighbors. They work for those they work among and with. Moreover, workers tend to be independent in inverse proportion to the size of the circumstance in which they work. That is, the work of factory workers is ruled by the factory, whereas the work of housewives, small craftsmen, or small farmers is ruled by their own morality, skill, and intelligence. And so, when workers work independently and at home, the society as a whole may lose something in the way of organizational efficiency and economies of scale. But it begins to gain values not so readily quantifiable in the fulfilled humanity of the workers, who then bring to their work not just contracted quantities of ‘man-hours,’ but qualities such as independence, skill, intelligence, judgment, pride, respect, loyalty, love, reverence.