Wendell Berry (Part 1)

Wendell Berry is a farmer. He is a poet and essayist and novelist. He is a critic. He is a husband and father and grandfather. He is very tall and a very good talker. He is coming from such a different perspective and has so committed himself to an older way of life and so he becomes a voice for true local culture. I have been reading him for a couple years now and feel like I owe him quite a lot for stretching my brain ... possibly even helping me to imagine an entirely new way to see the world.

The next few posts are all going to deal with his essay "Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community".

He begins the essay with a relatively modern example of a public failure regarding private matters ... stating that this convolution of the two, which is missing any concept of community is just one more example in the long line that represents the disintegration of community ... the spending of social capital (with the only result being the lining of profit-lined pockets).

Ok, so here is your first quote: "As our communities have disintegrated from external predation and internal disaffection, we have changed from a society whose ideal of justice was trust and fairness among people who knew each other into a society whose ideal of justice is public litigation, breeding distrust even among people who know each other."

This is most certainly a sad state of affairs that we find ourselves in. But look how he connects it to sexuality.

"Once it has shrugged off the interests and claims of the community, the public language of sexuality comes directly under the influence of private lust, ambition, and greed and becomes inadequate to deal with the real issues and problems of sexuality. ... 'Sexual education' carried out in this public language, is and can only be a dispirited description of the working of a sort of anatomical machinery--and this is a sexuality that is neither erotic nor social nor sacramental but rather a cold-blooded, abstract procedure that is finally not even imaginable."

to be continued ...