Our times call for humanization of values
October 7th, 2008 by Jim JustWendell Berry writes at OrganicToBe.org (also at The Energy Bulletin) that small farms and other locally-run enterprises are failing because the pattern they belong to is failing. The principal reason for this failure the universal adoption of industrial values which see things and places as assets, all relations as mechanical, and competitiveness as the prime human motivator.
Berry lists the values associated with the family farm: conservation, independence, self-reliance, family, and community – values suited to a world lived in by human beings, not to a world exploited by managers, stockholders, and experts.
I think Berry is more right than he knows. We must transform our economy and rebuild it based on the human-scale values he treasures.
“The economy” is no more than an abstraction, a description of how we extract our living from and survive in this world. Valuing it more than the global ecosystem on which it depends is blindness and folly. As we see the world economy collapse around us, the evidence is compelling that industrial values – which place “the economy” above all else – are ultimately destructive of life itself.
Conservation, independence, self-reliance, family, and community: as Berry says, these are the values that offer us survival, not just as farmers, but as human beings. And Berry is right that the transformation that is required cannot be left to others:
“It] cannot be accomplished by the governments, the corporations, or the universities; if it is to be done, the farmers themselves, their families, and their neighbors will have to do it.”