Fire and Knowledge

Newsweek has an article about “extreme commuters” who travel long distances to their job each day. Why do people subject themselves to this kind of life? They waste their lives (and their paycheck) in driving. The rest of their time they work at a job that they take little pleasure in. One man says he does it so he can live in a house in the country. But when does he get to spend time in it? Sleeping?

Thoreau calls this “spending of the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it.” Is this where the “American dream” leads to?

“Often I wish to do something, but it is a dangerous illusion to think one can do much for more than a few.” [Mr. Sammler]

–Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), p. 223

It would not do for the consumer to know that the hamburger she is eating came from a steer who spent much of his life standing deep in his own excrement in a feedlot, helping to pollute the local streams, or that the calf that yielded the veal cutlet on her plate spent its life in a box in which it did not have room to turn around. And, though her sympathy for the slaw might be less tender, she should not be encouraged to meditate on the hygienic and biological implications of mile-square fields of cabbage, for vegetables grown in huge monocultures are dependent on toxic chemicals—just as animals in close confinement are dependent on antibiotics and other drugs.

The consumer, that is to say, must be kept from discovering that, in the food industry—as in any other industry—the overriding concerns are not quality and health, but volume and price…. As scale increases, diversity declines; as diversity declines, so does health; as health declines, the dependence on drugs and chemicals necessarily increases. As capital replaces labor, it does so by substituting machines, drugs, and chemicals for human workers and for the natural health and fertility of the soil. The food is produced by any means or any shortcut that will increase profits. And the business of the cosmeticians of advertising is to persuade the consumer that food is so produced is good, tasty, healthful, and a guarantee of marital fidelity and long life.

—Wendell Berry, “The Pleasures of Eating,” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (2002), p. 324

Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have…. It is possible to invent a house still more convenient and luxurious than we have, which yet all would admit that man could not afford to pay for. Shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes to be content with less?

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854), p. 29

The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared or fast food, confronts a platter covered with inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, stained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality.

—Wendell Berry, “The Pleasures of Eating,” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (2002), p. 323

This week, April 24-30, 2006, is TV turn-off week. Did you know that the average US home has a television on for over 7 hours a day? And that they admit to watching it for an average of 4 hours a day? 49% of Americans say they watch too much TV. Do something about it this week. Turn the stupid thing off. Instead of mindlessly staring into a screen, pick out a couple of good books to read (see my recommended reading page for my suggestions). If you haven’t already read it, one of those books should be Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. Everyone should read Postman’s book at least once. It will help you understand the effects of television on our society and make you want to keep it off. As a society, we have long turned away from reading in favor of watching. Let’s reverse that trend. It can only happen through each of us doing something about it. If someone laments the current problems that television has had a hand in creating (and there are many), and then turns on the tube each night, they are part of the problem. Let’s be part of a solution. I challenge you to keep your television off the entire week—and, God willing, beyond.

A few more resources about television:

• Television: the Cyclops That Eats Books by Larry Woiwode
• Important Books About Television (and not TV shows about books) by Douglas Groothuis
• Quotes about television from books I’ve read

In a revolution you took away the privileges of an aristocracy and redistributed them. What did equality mean? Did it mean all men were friends and brothers? No, it meant that all belonged to the elite. Killing was an ancient privilege. This was why revolutions plunged into blood. Guillotines? Terror? Only a beginning—nothing.

–Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), p. 144

[M]onth by month the roads smelt more strongly of petrol, and were more difficult to cross, and human beings heard each other speak with greater difficulty, breathed less of air, and saw less of the sky. Nature withdrew: the leaves were falling by midsummer; the sun shone through dirt with an admired obscurity.

–E. M. Forster, Howards End (1910), p. 91