Month: September 2011

I’ve just run across a particularly pithy summary of the classic critique of monetized economies in favour of a labour-oriented approach to economics:

One particularly prominent strand in Western discourse, which goes back to Aristotle, is the general condemnation of money and trade in the light of an ideal of household self-sufficiency and production for use. The argument goes something like this. Like other animals, man is naturally self-sufficient and his wants are finite. Trade can only be natural in so far as it is oriented towards the restoration of such self-sufficiency. Just as in nature there may be too much here and not enough there, so it is with households which will then be forced to exchange on the basis of mutual need. ‘Interchange of this kind is not contrary to nature and is not a form of money-making; it keeps to its original purpose – to re-establish nature’s own equilibrium of self-sufficiency’ (Aristotle 1962: 42). Profit-oriented exchange is, however, unnatural; and is destructive of the bonds between households. Prices should therefore be fixed, and goods and services remunerated in accordance with the status of those who pro-vided them. Money as a tool intended only to facilitate exchange is naturally barren, and, of all the ways of getting wealth, lending at interest – where money is made to yield a ‘crop’ or litter’ – is ‘the most contrary to nature’ (Aristotle 1962: 46).

“Introduction: Money and the morality of exchange” from Jonathan Parry And Maurice Bloch eds., Money and the morality of exchange (1989: CUP), p. 2.

I should also mention for those of you who won’t go on to read the whole book that this is not the author’s position, merely a very helpful summary of one in a spectrum of many options.

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Wendell Berry opens his latest collection of essays, “Imagination in Place” with the following:

By an interworking of chance and choice, I have happened to live nearly all my life in a place I don’t remember not knowing. Most of my forebears for the last two hundred years could have said the same thing. I was born to people who knew this place intimately, and I grew up knowing it intimately.

Berry goes on to suggest that this geographic rooting in a particular plot of land has guided his writing and reflection; by being anchored he has avoided a certain amount of unhealthy creative ‘drift’ and by being well-planted on his farm in Kentucky he grown to love not just for the generic ‘environment’ but a particular place guided by intimate knowledge of its geography.

I’m very convinced by the trajectory of Berry’s suggestions. This notion of what the monks once called ‘stability’: purposefully anchoring yourself to a place, could go a long way towards dissolving the anomie that so much of our generation suffers from as we come and go from nondescript places where we work and live. Berry and others suggest also that by unrooting ourselves from a particular place it has become far easier to despoil God’s creation and again, I think there is something to this suggestion.

My own life and experience is a nearly perfect inversion of Berry’s tale. The demands of a graduate education have led my wife and I to relocate numerous times, from the Puget Sound region to upstate New York, to British Columbia in Canada, and most recently to Scotland. Digging back into previous generations, I’ve spent some time reconstructing our own family history from old census records in hopes that might find a stable family farm hidden somewhere in my past waiting to be reclaimed. But my family also is an inversion of this tale of being rooted in place. For the past four or five generations, almost every branch of my family has moved away from their place of birth to a different state – in most cases a completely different geography. For me, there is no family farm. For that matter, my family has invested itself so lightly in place that there is no family legacy lingering in any of those places they formerly occupied.

So with regards to being rooted in a place, I cannot escape the post-modern ‘blessing’ of self-construction. I suspect that I’m not alone in this predicament, both in desiring a place to call my own which I can commit our family to inter-generationally and in lacking an obvious option. What’s more, former generations have re-engineered the American labour market to support transience. Many employers are now trans-national and they often expect a person to pick up and move at some point over the course of their career. The notion of local business has nearly disappeared into unplaced options such as Wall-Mart, Whole Foods, Starbucks, and McDonalds. These workplaces may offer excellent compensation and benefits, and even invest in local community projects, but they remain decidedly un-parochial – and at best impostors. Local musicians, artists, writers, and local government struggle to capture the attention of the occupants of towns and cities. In the midst of these realities, to choose one’s “place” rather than inheriting it seems to represent a peculiar challenge, if not a fantasy.

While this essay might come across as a lament, I don’t mean for my tone to convey despair. It’s all well and good for Wendell Berry to enjoy his farm, but I’m in a different situation faced by a task that is perhaps more prefatory. I must first work to create the circumstances in which parochial life is again possible for my children and grandchildren. To this end, I have begun to search for ways to re-commit myself to those old parochial patterns. Here are a few that I’ve settled on thus far: finding culture generated by local people; ignoring presidential political theater until I’m confident that I understand and can participate in my local government and the issues it faces; spending my money at businesses which are not only staffed by local people, but which are owned and supplied by local people who choose to invest their wealth in their neighbourhoods. Finally, I’ve also begun to consider what features of their former homes led my family to leave their communities behind so that inasmuch as I can influence the shape of my future community it doesn’t suffer from these patterns.

If we are to address the ecological crisis that threatens the future of our children, we must commit to making decisions which are not just superficially ‘green’ but also pursue patterns of life which produce healthy locally invested communities.

Some Further Reading…

  • Berry, Wendell. Imagination in Place. Counterpoint Press, 2010.
  • Northcott, Michael. A Moral Climate: The Ethics of Global Warming.
  • Gorringe, Timothy. A Theology of the Built Environment : Justice, Empowerment, Redemption. Cambridge, U.K. ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
  • Bouma-Prediger, Steven, and Brian J Walsh. Beyond Homelessness : Christian Faith in a Culture of Displacement. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Pub, 2008.
  • Wilson-Hartgrove, Jonathan. The Wisdom of Stability : Rooting Faith in a Mobile Culture. Brewster, Mass.: Paraclete Press, 2010.
  • Inge, John. A Christian Theology of Place. Aldershot, Hampshire, England ; Burlington, VT, USA: Ashgate, 2003.
  • Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good’, in Kelvin Knight (ed.),  The MacIntyre Reader, Notre Dame, Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press, 1998, 235 – 252.