I promised I would keep writing. Eight years ago, I promised myself I would keep writing. I didn't know what else to do. Now, heart-heavy, I stare down at this keyboard, believing, still, that promises should be kept. Even those made to yourself. I find solace in you who feel the same. Many precious things were incinerated this week, but not everything, and we are not alone.
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The best thing I've read since the election is an essay by Wendell Berry (no surprise) written seven years ago (surprise). I'm going to share some pearls from it, amalgamated with a few of my thoughts, the more so for my own healing. This is from "Leaving the Future Behind: A Letter to a Scientific Friend" (The Art of Loading Brush, 2017).
As often happens with Wendell Berry and me, I didn't realize I needed this walk until I was halfway through it. It was then that I glanced again at the title and understood: if we can't forestall the choice we Americans just made about our future, perhaps we can stop our habit of choosing the future over the now.
"I will grant the future enough standing to speak of it as a problem." -WB.
We are living creatures, and so we need life and want it to continue. We want and expect an eternal array of tomorrows. The future is, in fact, eternity itself -- an infinitely vast container for all our hopes and fears. That is natural enough, but problematic. The twin cannons of hope and fear command our mightiest attention. If the future holds both heaven and hell, it becomes impossible to look away.
Obsessed with the future, we constantly try to crack it open with predictions and projections, grasping and grabbing for certainty, never minding that the world is not a machine and does not behave deterministically. No matter: we are seduced by polls, predictions, projections and of course markets to buy or sell in -- we've built an entire economy on these. But the future is a harsh mistress and never arrives where we thought she'd be. She emerges, often, and emergence cannot be predicted, only observed. Living organisms did not arise predictably from lifelessness. Life moves this way and that. Don't bother guessing the date of your next flu. You'll be wrong, flu shot or no.
"Of all our means of preparing for the future, I respect only provision...I don't think we can escape the necessity of provision and providing. Except for that, I think we need to restrain and reduce our presumptions upon the future." -WB.
Privately, we may harbor hopes for the future, but publicly, the fearful future gets all the play. It's the profitable twin. As we just learned again, the fear of threat, attack, defeat, replacement, sickness, death and othering can pay out handsomely. "There's big money in 'knowing' the future, especially if it's 'known' to be bad."
More insidious though is our naïveté. When we cast our gaze on the ever-better future, promised by smarter technology, more precise science, or brighter people, we simultaneously discount the present. It's this cheapening that enables the desecration of people and places today. Rather than a coming time then, we've made the future into a credit card on which we spend and spend, unheeding the limit or balance due. The habit is addictive and necessary for disguising present problems and delaying solutions.
Limitlessness is a fantasy, a game that requires a pretend game board. That's what the future has become: a make-believe place that distracts us from the work of this given day.
"Of all bad motives, none may be worse or more hopeless than fear. Nobody, I think, has ever done good work because of fear."
There are reasons to be afraid. Before climate change doomsdaying there was nuclear holocaust doomsdaying and overpopulation doomsdaying and totalitarianism doomsdaying. The movements each inspired resemble fads in how they rise and dissipate, but any and all might still devastate life on earth. Movements channel our collective anxiety into the much preferred feeling of solidarity, which is worth a lot. But as appeal to political leaders, they are up against a brutal status quo and offer little in the way of instruction for when the protestors go home.
Climate change, for example, is caused by local emissions from actual pipelines, buildings, vehicles and plants. But it should be plain to see by now that policies are not going to stop global warming. It's just the opposite. Policies constructed this overheated world, and policies are the permission frameworks that keep the fires going. Climate change is permitted, just as the right to assemble is permitted.
To Wendell, a staunch and stubborn nature defender as any, it's not climate change we must fight (because how would one do that, exactly?), but waste and pollution which "are wrong in themselves and would be wrong whether they caused climate change or not."
Less than half rural county dwellers believed in climate change in 2016, and more than three quarters voted for Trump in that election. But those same voters stopped a coal-fired power plant in Kansas because they know and fear pollution, regardless of whether they believe in climate change or not. Without nearby threats, it's possible that some in similar places might have voted differently if their only job opportunities weren't in plants like this one -- if their lives weren't actually dependent on climate changing industries.
Climate change is a scientific fact to be believed (or not). But climate polluters are an actual threat to home and health, and are to be defeated. Like in Kansas and other red counties and states, the good fight has been fought and sometimes won. Naomi Klein has visited many of these sacrifice zones in the US and abroad. To stop an evil, Wendell writes, we are unlikely to do so by shouting at the capital. "We have got to meet it on the ground in unglamorous and overlooked places...where it is rooted." We will need to do more of that in the years to come, and please join me in banishing forevermore the phrase "flyover country."
More of these rural residents likely believe in climate change today, but it's possible that they don't believe their politicians, nor the pundits who they know are paid by the opinion, nor the scientists who, like the economists, make magisterial pronouncements from behind a great curtain, Oz-like and bloodless, and sometimes flat wrong.
"I feel no discomfort in saying that to 'require people to believe in climate change' as a test of their human worth is both a pointless snobbery and a meaningless distraction. The language rests implicitly...upon an authoritarian society of scientific hierarchs who know and underlings who believe." -WB
Why, Wendell asks, are scientists trained and expected to be skeptical whereas the rest of us are expected to "trust science?" The underlings are told to believe because the anointed knowers know. "Trust science" seems a generally safe prescription to me, but like all prescriptions, there are risks. Might a healthy public skepticism have saved us from believing the climate denialism of the corporate oil scientists in the 1970s and on? William Shockley was an award-winning physicist who advocated for eugenic policies and argued for innate differences in intelligence between the races. Think we've moved past that? Cancer researchers in Boston earlier this year appear to have falsified data images in 37 studies on the behavior of cancer cells.
It's not science that people rise up for, and the "experts" aren't motivating anyone either. People fight for their homes and their health. Period. To hell with whatever officialdom has to say about anything. That's one thing the once-and-future-president figured out before so many of us. It doesn't matter what you say. People everywhere will fight for their homes, and we live in a regime where more places and more homes are actually under threat -- not from the scapegoated "others," but from an colonizing economy that siphons everything: "the produce of the land, the work of the people, the young people," and gives back nothing.
Here's Wendell in his full-throated condemnation of the whole spectrum of officialdom, with so much blood on its hands:
Under the rule of "get big or get out" and the so-called free market, a lot of people, inevitably if not calculatedly, have become dispossessed and poor: jobless, homeless, hopeless and unhealthy. Industrial system, technologies and values remaining in place, small farmers can't compete with big farmers, who can't compete with bigger farmers; small locally owned stores can't compete with chain stores; small tradespeople can't compete with corporate services. This is undemocratic, sacrilegious and inhuman, which has not mattered a tinkers damn to the makers of policies, Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative.
Wendell has lived long enough to see the climate change, but not long enough to see change that would actually help small rural places prosper. It is little wonder that the chickens have come home.
"When job creation comes in at the door, vocation long ago has flown out the window." -WB
Into these hurting places what's always offered, in words and not always in deeds, is the distant, abstract and uncomprehending promise of job creation. A job is something you do for money. As Wendell is using it, vocation means work done for pleasure. But no one uses the word that way any more. There are jobs, vocational jobs (non academic or trade jobs) and avocations (hobbies). But we ought to follow his lead, because there's an inherent problem with jobs: they belong to industry and corporations. As such, they owe no fidelity to anyone or anyplace. Jobs aren't coming to town, if they're coming at all, for the sake of the town's children. They're coming because the accounting says they'll be good for shareholders and executives. Until they aren't. At which time, we all know, they will leave.
Imagine if vocations were on offer instead -- work that could be done by an individual, from start to end, in keeping with her talent and training, and in service to people known and loved. Imagine this at scale, and it becomes quite conceivable that townships and rural cities, currently bleeding, could anchor their children in place, with work that is satisfying, healthful and sustaining. Imagine what these places would look like if they offered work that people were happy to do all their lives. You don't need to imagine it actually. Just pick up any work of fiction by Wendell Berry and you'll be holding it in your hands.
What would this new/old vocational work be? Violin making? Wine tasting? Cabinet building? Perhaps. But not only. Surely, to have an old-fashioned local economy there would need to be an equally old-fashioned distribution of physical labor. I've written about this before, though not nearly as much as Wendell has. "No machine will ever take loving care of the living membership of the living world," he says. That's it -- that's the work. "Responsible, plentifully rewarding, beautiful in its ways and ends, diverse, difficult, tiring, surprising, frustrating, messy, bloody, muddy and dusty."
We've learned that physical work is better done by others, usually immigrants, who are ooked down upon and despised for doing what we refuse to do, but need done. Perhaps this is going to change now. Perhaps more of us will suddenly want or need these hard jobs in the coming years. Perhaps more fruits of this labor will stay put, and this necessary work will constellate into the vocational callings of a new generation of small farmers and makers and shopkeepers. But it's better not to predict, after all.
"If you truly understand, as the Shakers did, that the world may end at any moment, there is no need to be in a hurry." -WB
It is a privilege to live in an unpredictable world. Only in that world -- non-deterministic, non-mechanized, non-digitized, can craft and care and quality enter the conversation. If you're not on a line, give thanks for your freedom and do your best possible work. Do not plan your escape into Futureland. Escapism is our heritage and our legacy, and we're all prone to it as Americans who've still never settled the land underneath our feet.
Even to look at the clock, to wish to be done, is to indulge this unsettled itch we have, this proclivity to escapism. To wish for the weekend, for the screen, for the better future, is to separate from the moment -- from an echo of vocation and place-care that we may still be able to summon. Do your work well, whatever it may be and whatever it may be, do it honorably.
Being alive to your work is to be alive to the present -- which is the only time we are alive. Let the future come and find you at home, at your work, with the people and creatures you know and love. That's our calling. No matter what happens in the capitals and the boardrooms, in the atmosphere and on the screens, we can still answer that call.
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