It All Turns on Affection by Wendell Berry

Author:Wendell Berry
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619020979
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2018-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

Increasingly until the Civil War, and ever more rapidly after that, industrialism provided a second option for the unsettled. They could move laterally westward, or they could “move up” to a city job, better wages, or a salary and a white shirt. For Kentuckians, moving up has often required moving out, and the state’s education system has in general subserved and encouraged the impulse of movement. Kentucky schools have functioned somewhat as factories, processing young people for export from country to city and from Kentucky to other states.

Our educational system has educated least of all for settlement, or for what Wes Jackson has called homecoming. Often explicitly, almost always by implication, the theme of education in Kentucky has been “You don’t want to be just a farmer” or “You can’t amount to anything by staying here.” There has never been much likelihood that a student in Kentucky schools, from grade one through college, would learn anything of local history or local geography or local biology and ecology. The idea of growing up to a life’s work on a family farm, or in a family profession or trade in a hometown, might come from your family or a friend; you were not likely to learn it at school. Because we have seen no virtue in education for settlement, we have drifted easily into job training in service to the industrial corporations, most of which have been by principle dislocated and without loyalty to any place.

So displacing an idea of education with its cult of science and technology did not come about by chance. Its way was prepared by the displacing religion that we brought with us—a religion already long divorced from even the biblical concerns with economy and economic behavior, the daily “housekeeping” by which we make our livings and our lives. The history of religion in Kentucky is impossible to make sense of. Along with our eagerness to secure earthly places for ourselves—deeded boundaries that would belong to us, our heirs, and assigns forever—we brought along this juiceless and desiccating Protestantism (mostly) that deferred all sanctity and worth to Heaven. It was a strictly “spiritual” religion that made a rule of despising the earth and earthly life. The odd result of this religion was to make our earthly life and economy strictly materialistic. The materialist force of the industrial economy has thus been able to exploit a territory in effect abandoned by religion. The history of materialism in Kentucky, as elsewhere, is also impossible to make sense of. For how could this modern materialism, resting upon its supposedly enlightened sciences and ascribing ultimate value to matter, have become so utterly destructive of the material world?

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