I am very much a child of a the modern age, I have a facebook, a twitter, I have a cell phone with a full keyboard, so I also text. I am very connected, so it is not that big of a leap to guess why I have this drive to know who, what, where, when, and why. I am programed to do this. After reading Wendell Berry, I realized first of all that he would hate me. I love technology, and I enjoy the convenience of globalization. Berry is leery of technology, he does not even approve of air travel. "for me, air travel always has about it an insistent feeling of unreality. I feel that I am where I do not belong...I feel that I am going too fast - incomprehensibly fast"(22). Berry thinks that as the world turns more and more to technology we end up moving faster and faster.
The faster me we go the more removed we get from our communities. Wendell Berry is big on community. He thinks that being local oriented, he thinks that staying small and knowing your community and its needs. Berry shies away from progression, he is wary of it yet he knows that it needs to happen. Berry tries to find a balance, yet it seems to me that his balance is hard to achieve.
Farmington to me seems like a community that tries to think locally. I am probably wrong in this idea, but I have always felt like the town tries to support its own. I to try to think locally but it is hard to do so, when buy local products is almost always expensive. Also, it is hard to think locally when I need to buy technology, there is none that is produced within the state. I like Berry's idea, of being local and thinking small yet, it is hard to enact as the world has already gotten so big.
Rachel, I always love your posts! I relate to them so much so that I end up thinking about them in context to my own nature walks and when I venture into town I think of something you have said about Farmington. This time though, I find that I am feeling guilty for acting like a greedy technology focused person. I relate to what Berry says about balance with nature and industry and “value” its influence on my own part in helping keep the balance. I think the main reason our world and economy fall is because the balance that is crucial to the maintenance and longevity of them both becomes wacked, with the greed of one side over the other making things unequal in terms of use, abuse, and production. I do love technology and I love when new products or inventions are created. But I wonder why I love these things so much, how could or would I live without them?
ReplyDeleteWe are programmed in a sense, our ideas of what we need and want are skewed with what society and the economy says we need and want. Many people, myself included, would rather pay for the “cost of convenience” rather than do it themselves. This, in relation to balance, only adds to the fact that our local suffers when we favor our global. But does our global ever really suffer? I wonder if with all these “greedy technology focused” people how global economy suffers in use or even abuse for that matter. The economy does shift up and down and right now the economy in the United States is recovering. But in comparison to local and small towns, who is the one that suffers the most- our country or the individual? The economy as a whole may suffer but the person trying to sell their farm-grown produce is the one that suffers the most when people choose to go to Wal-Mart over buying local- is Wal-Mart really suffering when a few people go back to that farmer’s stand?
Berry says that “Our present economy, by contrast, does not account for affection at all, which is to say that it does not account for value.” (pg. 144) We do not understand what value is and what it means. Our value of technology and our value of the simple or local is out of balance. Until we can figure out what it is that we should rightly “value” in the world our economy, our nature and industry will continue to be out of balance.