In 1970, farmer, writer, and environmental activist Wendell Berry published his essay, "Think Little." In it, he writes about the dangers of not making your public causes private causes as well, depending too much on outside organizations to make decisions, and—this is key—of how autonomy should lead to the greater good and the recognition of interdependence.
Many of these messages resonate in the conspirituality world. Derek frames the essay before reading it in full.
Show Notes
The World-Ending Fire — Wendell Berry
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I was recently in Bend, Oregon, where I had the pleasure of giving the keynote address to the Oregon State Librarian Association Conference.
It was really a lot of fun talking to 350 librarians about the wonderful world of conspirituality that we cover on this podcast.
Bend itself is a little haven in the middle of the high desert in Oregon.
For me, it hit all the right notes.
It had fantastic food and coffee and a wonderful record store.
So if I need somewhere to live, that's going to be it.
Now that said, Portland is about the size city that I can deal with.
Moving to a smaller city at this point in my life would just be too much of a stretch given that all of my adult life was spent in New York City or Los Angeles.
I bring that up because while visiting that bookstore, I happened to pass a collection of essays by Wendell Berry called The World Ending Fire.
I know of Berry's work, I've heard his name for decades, and yet I've never read the man.
He was someone who, in the late 1950s, coming from rural Kentucky and growing up on a farm, decided he would make it as a writer, moved to New York City, did that thing for a few years, and then realized he really missed Kentucky.
So he moved back, and he has been a farmer and a writer for the past 50 years or so.
He did work as a professor for a little while.
He said the land was calling him and that it was his job to tell the story of the land.
It's quite beautiful, this collection of essays.
I don't agree with everything.
He is very staunchly anti-technology to a level that I'll never understand.
I can understand why he is, I just don't happen to agree with everything that he says.
But I would say that I've underlined more passages in this book than most books that I purchase and read.
And I want to share with you an essay he wrote in 1970 called Think Little.
I've often said on this podcast that some of the wellness influencers that we cover who are selling questionable products while decrying big pharma and government and all these supposedly malicious agencies out there and who are saying we don't live in such a way as to get back to the earth are often the beneficiaries of the technologies that they're decrying.
In some ways, and it's why I chose this essay, Barry makes the same point about all of our relationship to the technologies in a consumer society that we enjoy.
And it's not easy to hear sometimes.
It's not easy to wrap your head around the fact that Many of the things that we commonly enjoy, like climate control inside of our homes or artificial lighting or, of course, being able to drive or fly places, is part of the contribution to what's destroying the environment.
And Barry, of course, is an environmentalist to a degree that I think few people of our modern era have ever aspired to be.
And of course, I'm part of that too, sitting here on my technology, being able to record and then transmit and share this with you.
And Barry isn't without humility.
He understands that we all pay this cost in terms of living in modern society.
He implicates himself at times as well.
But he does also entertain the question of what are we willing to sacrifice?
What can we give up to make it a better place for everyone?
And I think that is a message of utmost importance.
It was in 1970 and it continues to be today in 2023.
He also discusses something that is very of this time, which is armchair activism, or the idea of living an activist life without actually following through or doing anything about the topic in which you're supposedly dedicating yourself to.
This trend, of course, has increased dramatically thanks to social media.
It's very often to think that you are a champion of a cause without actually doing anything for it.
He was critical about that in 1970.
I think it's worth self-reflecting on that today as well.
And as I said a moment ago, I don't necessarily agree with everything in this book.
I don't agree with every sentence in this essay, but I very much agree with the larger sentiment, especially considering how many of the influencers that we cover who talk about sovereignty Which effectively has to do with their own personal desire for autonomy, not for the collective good.
So I really appreciate how Wendell writes about the necessity of sovereignty, of not relying on organizations and governments, but in the hopes of achieving collective good.
He's using autonomy as a gateway into interdependence, which I believe is much different than what we hear in so many of the podcasts and the videos and the social media feeds that we cover on this podcast.
