The Ties That Bind

"Community" is rapidly becoming the buzzword of the '90s. Yet while many people seek community, few seem to find it. Ironically, the more frequently the word is heard in the common parlance, real community becomes increasingly rare. It only adds to the confusion when national leaders toss about such expressions as "the business community," "the African-American community," even "the global community."

For Wendell Berry, none of these phrases makes any sense. As he explains in Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, his newest book of essays, a community is defined by a shared connection to a specific, local place. This connection involves not only social ties but natural ones as well; a careless attitude toward our natural surroundings ultimately hurts the other human beings with whom we share them.

By and large, we have abandoned the work of nurturing our local communities for the quick, easy payoffs of "the global economy," and the results are plain to see. Without strong communities to serve as mediators - both between the individual and the larger society and between people and nature - violence and chaos reign in the social sphere just as poisoning and degradation do in the natural.

Even those well-intentioned people who advise us to "think globally, act locally" are part of the problem as Berry sees it. Global thinking has gotten us into this mess; only local thinking can get us out. Only when we keep the scale of our work small and our vision close to home can we be good neighbors and responsible stewards.

"Global thinking" is but one of the sacred cows that Berry knocks off its pedestal. He also blasts modern shibboleths ranging from "technological progress" and "the free market" to "human resources" and "safe sex." ("Sex was never safe, and it is less safe now than it has ever been.")

READERS of Berry's previous works will notice that, after 20-odd years of social criticism, Berry seems to be growing impatient. His irony has become more hard-edged, his wit sharper - honed, perhaps, on a social and economic scene grown increasingly absurd. But while Berry attacks trans-national corporations, conservative presidents, and other favorite targets of left-leaning thinkers, he is by no means "politically correct" - and has no desire to be. Berry toes no party line, fits no stereotypes, and defies all the usual political categories.

It is fashionable, for example, to romanticize family farmers, but it is quite another thing to defend tobacco farmers. In an essay that sparked something of a firestorm when it first appeared in The Progressive several years ago, Berry does precisely that. Tobacco farmers, in his view, are just one more group whose communities are being destroyed by a rapacious economy that is as unwilling to offer them viable alternatives as it is to examine its own pathological addiction. "[T]he tobacco controversy distracts from the much greater danger that we are an addictive society," warns Berry.

Among our addictions are "speed, comfort, violence, usury" - all enabled by what is perhaps our greatest addiction: petroleum. And for this substance, as the Persian Gulf war demonstrated, we are willing, like the most desperate drug addict, to go to any lengths, including murder.

Berry's essay on the Gulf war is the most penetrating and original analysis of the war that I have read. In format the essay is deceptively simple: Ideas are simply listed as numbered paragraphs, in the manner of Martin Luther's 95 theses tacked onto the church door at Wittenberg. And like Luther's manifesto, Berry's argument is far-reaching and prophetic - and much more complex than mere pacifism, radical as that is.

According to Berry, the war was, among other things, "a 'free market' war," the inevitable result of an economic system that demands quick fixes. The ongoing community disintegration - at home and abroad - that many pundits fatalistically write off as the price of "progress" is, in fact, only inevitable because our economy makes it so.

Berry contends that our communities are actively destroyed by a predatory economy that requires the dissolution of community bonds in order to function. After all, if people are happy, whole, and self-sufficient, what can corporations sell them?

Since government tends to be just as large-scale and abstract as the corporations are, it is pointless to look to the government for solutions. The only way communities can defend themselves is to disengage as much as possible from the economic system that is destroying them.

Communities must cease looking to the outside economy for the fulfillment of all their needs and instead must meet those needs, as much as possible, with their own locally produced goods and services - and even eliminate some "needs" entirely. "[I]f we want to be at peace," Berry writes, "we will have to waste less, spend less, use less, want less, need less."

KEY TO THIS RADICAL change in the way we think and live is the church, not just as a social organization - helping set up networks to link local farmers with local consumers, for instance - but also as the source of the vision we need for transformation.

Berry offers a starting point for such a vision in a brilliant essay titled "Christianity and the Survival of Creation." While disputing the argument of some environmentalists that Christianity is to blame for the destruction of the natural world, he acknowledges that "[t]he certified Christian seems just as likely as anyone else to join the military-industrial conspiracy to murder Creation." But this is possible only because of centuries of misinterpretation of the Bible. To heal both ourselves and the natural world, we must not reject the Bible but, rather, return humbly to it and take its true teachings to heart.

Berry, who has always been a deeply spiritual writer, here makes his debut as a real theologian. It is evident that he has studied the Bible carefully, and his love and respect for it shine through this essay, which was first delivered as a lecture at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

In the Bible Berry finds nothing but reverence for God's handiwork and a sense of the holiness of all life. If we take this message seriously, it cannot help but transform our society, which currently runs on "an economy firmly founded on the seven deadly sins and the breaking of all ten of the Ten Commandments."

Some people pessimistically visualize a future of reduced needs as one of reduced pleasure and greater hardship - a downturn in our "standard of living." But Berry sees a simpler, more self-sufficient life as the key to joy, a joy that transfuses all of creation.

Ever the poet, Berry writes:

[O]utdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders; we see that the miraculous is not extraordinary but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread. Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold and empty stellar distances will hardly balk at the turning of water into wine - which was, after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is turned into grapes.

It is through such wondrous but commonplace miracles that our communities, too, will be transformed.

KATHRYN COLLMER, a free-lance writer in Minneapolis, Kansas, writes frequently on agricultural, environmental, and social justice issues.