A Continuous Harmony by Wendell Berry

Author:Wendell Berry
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619020801
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2018-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

4

THE KINGDOM OF CONSUMPTION

The results have become too drastic to be concealed by our politicians’ assurances that we have built a “great society” or that we are doing better than India. Official pretense has begun to break down under the weight of the obvious. In the last decade we have become unable to condition our children’s minds to approve or accept our errors. Our history has created in the minds of our young people a bitter division between official pretense and social fact, and we have aggravated this division by asking many of them to fight and die in support of official pretense. In this way we have produced a generation whose dissidence and alienation are without precedent in our national experience.

The first thing to be said about this rebelliousness is that it is understandable, and that it deserves considerate attention. Many of this generation have rejected values and practices that they believe to be destructive, and they should do so. Many of them have begun to search for better values and forms of life, and they should do so. But the second thing to be said is that this generation is as subject as any other to intelligent scrutiny and judgment, and as deserving of honest criticism. It has received much approbation and condemnation, very little criticism.

One of its problems is that it has been isolated in its youthfulness, cut off from the experience and the counsel of older people, as probably no other generation has ever been. It is true that the dissident young have had their champions among the older people, but it is also true, I think, that these older people have been remarkably uncritical of the young, and so have abdicated their major responsibility to them. Some appear to have joined the younger generation, buying their way in by conniving in the notion that idealistic youth can do no wrong—or that one may reasonably hope to live without difficulty or effort or tragedy, or that surfing is “a life.” The uncritical approval of a band of senior youth freaks is every bit as isolating and every bit as destructive as the uncritical condemnation of those who have made hair length the foremost social issue of the time.

And so a number of the problems of the young people now are problems that have always attended youthfulness, but which isolation has tended to aggravate in the present generation: impetuousness, a haste to undertake work that one is not yet prepared for; a tendency to underestimate difficulty and overestimate possibility, which is apt, through disillusionment, to lead to the overestimation of difficulty and the underestimation of possibility; oversimplification, as when rejection takes the place of evaluation; and, finally, naive prejudice, as when people who rightly condemn the use of such terms as “nigger” or “greaser” readily use such terms as “pig” and “redneck.”

Another of its problems, and a much larger one, is that the propaganda both of the “youth culture” and of those opposed to it has inculcated

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