Fire and Knowledge

The most obvious lesson of slavery, one that we have never learned, is about the limits of a mere market. A mere market cannot adequately recognize and protect the full value of a creature, as seller or buyer or as merchandise. We now call a market “free” to the extent that buyers and sellers are able to ignore the limitation.

—Wendell Berry, “Racism and the Economy” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (2002), p. 56

A new edition of the journal The New Atlantis is now available, including an article by Christine Rosen. She is sharp. Read whatever you can from her.

Many executives grow rich by the manufacture and sale of products that, being rich, they disdain to use. All of them grow rich by work that they do not do, and would disdain to do. The work of the executive is thus as unproductive and as spiritually desolate as that of the garbage collector. Indeed, depending upon the toxicity and persistence of the products and by-products, it may be more so. Certainly, by any standard, to haul garbage away is more virtuous than to manufacture it.

—Wendell Berry, “Racism and the Economy” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (2002), p. 54

What Colleges Forget to Teach by Robert P. George

A professor laments the loss of civics in education. All the more reason for a classics-based approach (especially before college!). An excerpt:

What is the source of this educational breakdown? The trouble isn’t the students—they’re bright and eager to learn. It’s that too few teachers are presenting students with the Founders’ philosophy, much less introducing them to the great issues, some still with us today, that divided the Founders.

And if teachers aren’t teaching the Founding’s principles, where will students learn them? They’re not likely to get any sense of the distinction between the delegated powers of the national government and the general jurisdiction of the states from any newspapers, national magazines, or television news networks, that’s for sure. Have the editors of the New York Times and the folks at CBS News even heard of that distinction yet? News travels slowly, true; but it shouldn’t take 218 years.

The solution to this educational breakdown is straightforward: we need to make a commitment at every level of schooling and within the public media to promote a deep awareness of the principles of the American Founding. Why educate students into archaism? some will doubtless object. Surely governing principles set forth in the eighteenth century have little relevance to us in the twenty-first. But American ideals, as embodied preeminently in the Declaration of Independence, are universal and timeless. They have force wherever there are human beings, fallible (indeed, as the Founders recognized, fallen) creatures, yet images of God in their possession of reason and freedom—beings, as the Declaration says, “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”

(via Justin Taylor)

Bottled water, a natural resource taxing the world’s ecosystem

“Even in areas where tap water is safe to drink, demand for bottled water is increasing, producing unnecessary garbage and consuming vast quantities of energy,” according to Emily Arnold, author of the study published by the Earth Policy Institute, a Washington-based environmental group.

Arnold said although in the industrial world bottled water is often no healthier than tap water, it can end up costing 10,000 times more.

In other words, stop buying bottled water. If you can’t stand the taste of tap water, get a filter pitcher (what I do) or a filter in your sink. Save money and help the environment at the same time!

[Black] descendents, living in the inter-city slums of the 1980s [when this was written], are no longer legally excluded from the institutions of citizenship, and so their political status may be said to have improved; but their economic status has become more dependent, consumptive, and degraded than it was before…. The transition from slave to citizen is good. But the transition from useful and therefore valuable slave to useless and therefore costly economic dependent is a bewilderment.

—Wendell Berry, “Racism and the Economy” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (2002), p. 52

Since blacks had been farm workers throughout their history in America, first as slaves and then as poor sharecroppers or day laborers, the correct and appropriate justice to them would have been to help and encourage them, so far as their individual ability and desires allowed, to become owners of small farms. This would have been the healing wound of slavery…. Instead, they were regarded as “excess population” in the country as soon as they were replaceable by machines, and they moved into the urban slums where, still, they are regarded as “excess population”….

—Wendell Berry, “Racism and the Economy” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (2002), p. 50

The root of our racial problem in America is not racism. The root is our inordinate desire to be superior–not to some inferior or subject people, though this desire leads to the subjection of people–to our condition. We wish to rise above the sweat and bother of taking care of anything—of ourselves, of each other, or of our country. We did not enslave African blacks because they were black, but because their labor promised to free us of the obligations of stewardship, and because they were unable to prevent us from enslaving them. They were economically valuable and militarily weak. It seems likely, then, that what we now call racism came about as a justification of slavery after the fact, not as its cause….

—Wendell Berry, “Racism and the Economy” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (2002), p. 47