The Virtue Of Prosperity: Finding Values In An Age Of Technoaffluence by Dinesh D'Souza

Author:Dinesh D'Souza [D'Souza, Dinesh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2002-05-10T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

The World We Have Lost

Goodbye Nature, Family, and Community?

Will you tell me how to prevent riches from becoming the effects of temperance and industry? Will you tell me how to prevent riches from producing luxury? Will you tell me how to prevent luxury from producing effeminacy, intoxication, extravagance, vice and folly?

—John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson

“What I’m going to do here,” the poet and farmer Wendell Berry says, surveying a patch of land in the Kentucky River Valley, “is grow an old-growth forest. It will take about two hundred years, and I won’t live to see it, but there will be some nice trees here if somebody doesn’t cut them down.” Berry is accompanied by the journalist Jordan Fisher-Smith, who observes that there are already hundreds of trees on Berry’s land and Berry is able to identify each one: wild cherry, black walnut, ironwood, beech, sugar maple, honey locust, and sycamore. He knows their names, Fisher-Smith reports, “not as a botanist, but the way a country boy who grew up to be a farmer knows trees.”

If you want to interview Berry, the telephone won’t do you much good. Berry doesn’t like using such contraptions. He prefers you to stay with him for a while and join him in chores like milking, cutting wood, and cleaning the animals. (This is why I passed on the opportunity to interview Berry.) Fortunately, Jordan Fisher-Smith, a rancher himself, agreed to Berry’s terms. After their chores they sat around the dining table, sipping coffee, while Berry’s two sheepdogs loitered around the back door. Berry’s wife, Tanya, leaned into the room from the kitchen; she reported from the day’s newspaper that funding for NASA’s space program was being cut. Berry casually remarked that this was excellent news.

Later Berry led Fisher-Smith to a nearby graveyard, where several Civil War soldiers are buried, but also a number of Berry’s relatives and friends: “The women tell stories about the sad things that happened, people who died young, women who died in childbirth.” Berry reflects, “The old have an obligation to be exemplary, if they can, and they also have an obligation to be intelligent about their failings. The young have an obligation to remember these people and live up to them—be worthy of them.” Berry says he wants to live in a world where there are no institutionalized “child care centers” or “homes for the aged.” Young and old should live together and learn from and care for each other.

But that’s not how it is in today’s world, Berry knows. He talks about developing “a relationship with land and with place” that is very rare today. He’s referring to “a settled, thriving, locally adapted community, which we don’t have anywhere.” Why not? Because mobility—what Berry calls “being moved around”—has become America’s dominant social institution. Young people “find themselves living far from where their ancestors are buried, in unfamiliar land that they didn’t grow up with and don’t know much about.” Having no enduring attachment to specific place and specific community, they are unable to develop a consistent moral narrative for their own lives.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.