Thoughts in the Presence of Fear
by Wendell Berry, author
I. The time will soon come when we will not be able to remember the
horrors of September 11 without remembering also the unquestioning
technological and economic optimism that ended on that day.
II. This optimism rested on the proposition that we were living in a
"new world order" and a "new economy" that would
"grow" on and on, bringing a prosperity of which every new
increment would be "unprecedented".
III. The dominant politicians, corporate officers, and investors who
believed this proposition did not acknowledge that the prosperity was
limited to a tiny percent of the world's people, and to an ever smaller
number of people even in the United States; that it was founded upon
the oppressive labor of poor people all over the world; and that its
ecological costs increasingly threatened all life, including the lives
of the supposedly prosperous.
IV. The "developed" nations had given to the "free market"
the status of a god, and were sacrificing to it their farmers, farmlands,
and communities, their forests, wetlands, and prairies, their ecosystems
and watersheds. They had accepted universal pollution and global warming
as normal costs of doing business.
V. There was, as a consequence, a growing worldwide effort on behalf
of economic decentralization, economic justice, and ecological responsibility.
We must recognize that the events of September 11 make this effort more
necessary than ever. We citizens of the industrial countries must continue
the labor of self-criticism and self-correction. We must recognize our
mistakes.
VI. The paramount doctrine of the economic and technological euphoria
of recent decades has been that everything depends on innovation. It
was understood as desirable, and even necessary, that we should go on
and on from one technological innovation to the next, which would cause
the economy to "grow" and make everything better and better.
This of course implied at every point a hatred of the past, of all innovations,
whatever their value might have been, were discounted as of no value
at all.
VII. We did not anticipate anything like what has now happened.
We did not foresee that all our sequence of innovations might be at
once overridden by a greater one: the invention of a new kind of war
that would turn our previous innovations against us, discovering and
exploiting the debits and the dangers that we had ignored. We never
considered the possibility that we might be trapped in the webwork of
communication and transport that was supposed to make us free.
VIII. Nor did we foresee that the weaponry and the war science that
we marketed and taught to the world would become available, not just
to recognized national governments, which possess so uncannily the power
to legitimate large-scale violence, but also to "rogue nations",
dissident or fanatical groups and individuals-whose violence, though
never worse than that of nations, is judged by the nations to be illegitimate.
IX. We had accepted uncritically the belief that technology is only
good; that it cannot serve evil as well as good; that it cannot serve
our enemies as well as ourselves; that it cannot be used to destroy
what is good, including our homelands and our lives.
X. We had accepted too the corollary belief that an economy (either
as a money economy or as a life-support system) that is global in extent,
technologically complex, and centralized is invulnerable to terrorism,
sabotage, or war, and that it is protectable by "national defense"
XI. We now have a clear, inescapable choice that we must make. We can
continue to promote a global economic system of unlimited "free
trade" among corporations, held together by long and highly vulnerable
lines of communication and supply, but now recognizing that such a system
will have to be protected by a hugely expensive police force that will
be worldwide, whether maintained by one nation or several or all, and
that such a police force will be effective precisely to the extent that
it oversways the freedom and privacy of the citizens of every nation.
XII. Or we can promote a decentralized world economy which would have
the aim of assuring to every nation and region a local self-sufficiency
in life-supporting goods. This would not eliminate international trade,
but it would tend toward a trade in surpluses after local needs had
been met.
XIII. One of the gravest dangers to us now, second only to further terrorist
attacks against our people, is that we will attempt to go on as before
with the corporate program of global "free trade", whatever
the cost in freedom and civil rights, without self-questioning or self-criticism
or public debate.
XIV. This is why the substitution of rhetoric for thought, always a
temptation in a national crisis, must be resisted by officials and citizens
alike. It is hard for ordinary citizens to know what is actually happening
in Washington in a time of such great trouble; for we all know, serious
and difficult thought may be taking place there. But the talk that we
are hearing from politicians, bureaucrats, and commentators has so far
tended to reduce the complex problems now facing us to issues of unity,
security, normality, and retaliation.
XV. National self-righteousness, like personal self-righteousness, is
a mistake. It is misleading. It is a sign of weakness. Any war that
we may make now against terrorism will come as a new installment in
a history of war in which we have fully participated. We are not innocent
of making war against civilian populations. The modern doctrine of such
warfare was set forth and enacted by General William Tecumseh Sherman,
who held that a civilian population could be declared guilty and rightly
subjected to military punishment. We have never repudiated that doctrine.
XVI. It is a mistake also - as events since September 11 have shown
- to suppose that a government can promote and participate in a global
economy and at the same time act exclusively in its own interest by
abrogating its international treaties and standing apart from international
cooperation on moral issues.
XVII. And surely, in our country, under our Constitution, it is a fundamental
error to suppose that any crisis or emergency can justify any form of
political oppression. Since September 11, far too many public voices
have presumed to "speak for us" in saying that Americans will
gladly accept a reduction of freedom in exchange for greater "security".
Some would, maybe. But some others would accept a reduction in security
(and in global trade) far more willingly than they would accept any
abridgement of our Constitutional rights.
XVIII. In a time such as this, when we have been seriously and most
cruelly hurt by those who hate us, and when we must consider ourselves
to be gravely threatened by those same people, it is hard to speak of
the ways of peace and to remember that Christ enjoined us to love our
enemies, but this is no less necessary for being difficult.
XIX. Even now we dare not forget that since the attack of Pearl Harbor
- to which the present attack has been often and not usefully compared
- we humans have suffered an almost uninterrupted sequence of wars,
none of which has brought peace or made us more peaceable.
XX. The aim and result of war necessarily is not peace but victory,
and any victory won by violence necessarily justifies the violence that
won it and leads to further violence. If we are serious about innovation,
must we not conclude that we need something new to replace our perpetual
"war to end war"?
XXI. What leads to peace is not violence but peaceableness, which is
not passivity, but an alert, informed, practiced, and active state of
being. We should recognize that while we have extravagantly subsidized
the means of war, we have almost totally neglected the ways of peaceableness.
We have, for example, several national military academies, but not one
peace academy. We have ignored the teachings and the examples of Christ,
Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and other peaceable leaders. And here we
have an inescapable duty to notice also that war is profitable, whereas
the means of peaceableness, being cheap or free, make no money.
XXII. The key to peaceableness is continuous practice. It is wrong to
suppose that we can exploit and impoverish the poorer countries, while
arming them and instructing them in the newest means of war, and then
reasonably expect them to be peaceable.
XXIII. We must not again allow public emotion or the public media to
caricature our enemies. If our enemies are now to be some nations of
Islam, then we should undertake to know those enemies. Our schools should
begin to teach the histories, cultures, arts, and language of the Islamic
nations. And our leaders should have the humility and the wisdom to
ask the reasons some of those people have for hating us.
XXIV. Starting with the economies of food and farming, we should promote
at home, and encourage abroad, the ideal of local self- sufficiency.
We should recognize that this is the surest, the safest, and the cheapest
way for the world to live. We should not countenance the loss or destruction
of any local capacity to produce necessary goods.
XXV. We should reconsider and renew and extend our efforts to protect
the natural foundations of the human economy: soil, water, and air.
We should protect every intact ecosystem and watershed that we have
left, and begin restoration of those that have been damaged.
XXVI. The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before
that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is
not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries,
neither by job-training nor by industry-subsidized research. It's proper
use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically,
socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering
or "accessing" what we now call "information" ‹
which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority.
A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order,
which means knowing what things are more important than other things;
it means putting first things first.
XXVII. The first thing we must begin to teach our children (and learn
ourselves) is that we cannot spend and consume endlessly. We have got
to learn to save and conserve. We do need a "new economy",
but one that is founded on thrift and care, on saving and conserving,
not on excess and waste. An economy based on waste is inherently and
hopelessly violent, and war is its inevitable by-product. We need a
peaceable economy.
Back to Peace Talk Index, Spring, 2002