Transcription
Well, that was lovely. That was a beautiful job, everyone. Um, I want to add my welcome to Ambers and on behalf of the staff of the Barry Center that have been here to welcome you and maybe some of them showed you where to park. Um, I'm so glad that you've made it to Port Royal, as Amber said, on purpose. And we will today have the second annual Wendelberry lecture.
The Wendleberry Berry lecture is presented with the support of the Josephine Artery Foundation and the Tall Grass Farm Foundation, Cindy and Scott Anderson, Virginia Herod who is here, Jeff and Jeff Rickettts and Tony Perry who are also here. Thank you always to them.
This is a fitting place for the for Paul Kings North to speak. I think it isn't to say that those of us in small towns and in the countryside are not part of the machine that Paul writes of in his book, Against the Machine. There is no doubt that Port Royal, its church, and its community, along with most of rural America, are way out on the margins of this economy and culture. Certainly, the agricultural and cultural work of the Berry Center is marginal, but it is from the margins or the edge, as my friend, the biblical scholar Ellen Davis calls it, that the pretensions and deceptions of power can be exposed, where power that seems beyond opposition can be ironized or parodyied for those who can read and hear and see.
My father has told me all of my life that if you set an intention and make a commitment to something, the help you need will come. Sometimes the help might be the right book and sometimes it might be the right person. I've never doubted that my father has been and is right about most everything. And since starting the Berry Center in 2011, I've known this to be true. Tonight I am happy to say that the right person has come to us and he has written the right book. And [snorts] I'll just say uh I forgot to tell you who I am. I am Mary Barry and Wimbleberry is my father and Tanya Barry the pianist here is my mother. Um Carden the organist is my friend.
I started the center because the place that I love most in the world was falling apart. The Henry County that I grew up in was a farming county. The agrarian culture and community that it was that it was had an economic backs stop which protected the land and the people from abuse. The Burley Tobaca Growers Cooperative Association and the tobacco program it administered ended in 2004 because of the pressure from the free market and industrialism. The actual reasons we lost the program. The stated reason from the powers that be was health, a genuine concern, no doubt. But I wonder if the corn and soybean monocultures that now cover our land are healthier than the small diversified farm culture they replaced. Certainly, the chicken confinement feed operations that are now the major agricultural money maker in Kentucky have not improved our health.
Since the loss of the program, our county, like the rest of rural Kentucky and the eight states that the co-op served, have been nearly defenseless against ind industrial agriculture and development. Since 2004, Kentucky alone has lost 15,000 farms, thousands of farmers, and record losses of top soil. And so, of course, we have lost the culture of agriculture. And it was a culture, not an ideology. The devastation of rural America has not been inevitable. It has been destruction by design. Cheap food, cheap fuel, cheap building materials taken at the lowest possible price, leaving destruction behind. What has happened to the coal fields of the of the eastern counties of our state is the most obvious example. The richest counties in Kentucky are also the poorest. We must understand that this has happened everywhere.
So why am I telling you all this to introduce Paul Kings North? First of all, this is what I always say and my mother says about my father that he his principal talent as a writer has been to repeat himself for 70 years. So and I believe she has been heard to say that I now repeat myself every time this gets in in front of me. So why am I talking about this? right before Paul speaks because he has helped me understand more about what we are up against and how we got here.
How is it possible? I've wondered time after time to hear from the mouthpieces of industrial agriculture that everything is great in rural Kentucky as I recently read in a Farm Bureau magazine or to speak with a high with a highly placed elected agricultural official at the Berry Center and be told that the USDA is working every day for the small farmer. Things are better now than they have ever been, they say, and are going to continue to get better. And I think, can't these people see? To get to the center, our visitors have had to drive through a landscape still beautiful, but emptier than it used to be? Certainly not as carefully farmed as it used to be. And how do they ignore the empty storefronts in our town? I know that if they are not moved by love for particular places and particular people, they must at least read the same statistics I do. 3/4ers of 1% of this country's population now farms. 15% of us live in rural places. These people are servants of the economy, industrialism, the machine. They believe in the fantastical possibility of limitless growth, limitless wants, limitless wealth, limitless natural resources, limitless energy, and limitless debt. And it has taken me a long time to see that this is their religion and to see that they no longer speak for themselves or for their actual country, the land under our feet from which we live. And I am so very sorry. But I do believe that the truth will set one free. And in the truth there is hope. Once I stopped thinking that the cavalry was coming and understood that we would need to save ourselves, hope has come easily to me. So imagine my delight when I came to this paragraph on the next to last page of Paul's book. I have come to the end now and here is what I think that the age of the machine is not after all a hopeless time. Actually, it is the time we were born for. We can't leave it. So we have to fully inhabit it. We have to understand it, challenge it, resist it, subvert it, walk through it, on towards something better. If we can see what it is, we have a duty to speak the words to those who do not yet see, all the while struggling to remain human. And as my father says, we should be having a good time while we're doing all these things. So, it is my delight to uh welcome Paul Kingsorf.
[applause] >> [applause] [applause] >> Thank you very much. Um, don't usually find myself speaking from the pull pit of a church. I'm not sure how appropriate that is, but we'll find out, won't we? Um, certainly feel like I'm going to be in trouble if I get it wrong. Um uh I I'd like to start with an apology. I have been uh moving around America for 3 weeks talking a lot and just in the last couple of days I've managed to get myself a nice chesty cold. Um so if I sort of splutter and cough a bit um I apologize for that.
Um, thank you very much Mary for that introduction. Um, it's really good to be here. I almost didn't get here actually. I nearly missed my flight. I had to fly from Pittsburgh to get here which is not very local. Um, and I had to get a car to the airport and there was a huge traffic jam which went on for ages and ages. I was sure I was going to miss the plane. Um, uh, and according to the little satnav that the driver had, there was an accident in the road. So, we were going along for about half an hour waiting to get to the accident and it we came up upon it and [snorts] thought it was going to be a crashed car or a truck and um, actually it was a cow. A cow had managed to get into the central reservation of this highway and it was just standing there eating grass. It was quite relaxed, but there was a huge panic and all these guys were standing there in their yellow jackets and they had big flashing lights with arrows and everybody had to close the lane of both the highways. So, I thought that was a good story to tell at the Wendel Berry Center [laughter] because it's it's symbolic of something even though I'm not sure what.
Um, okay. I'm going to start with a poem but it's not one of mine. It's one of Wendel Berry's. is called for to my children fearing for them. Terrors are to come. The earth is poisoned with narrow lives. I think of you. What you will live through or perish by eats at my heart. What have I done? I need better answers than there are to the pain of coming to see what was done in blindness, loving what I cannot save. Nor your eyes turning towards me. Can I wish your lives unmade though the pain of them is on me.
It's hard at the moment I often find not to fear for our children. I have children myself getting to the age where they're going to be going out into the world. Earlier this month I was watching an interview with the so-called godfather of AI, the British scientist Jeffrey Hinton. Hinton is impeccably polite and soft-spoken in a very English way, which only makes it more terrifying when you hear him say that the thing he has ushered into the world has, by his estimate, a 20% chance of causing total human extinction. And Hinton isn't alone in these fears. In fact, they're quite widely shared. And not just by the sort of people who come to events like this or write the kind of books that I've written. They're actually enunciated by the people who created the very machines that they're now frightened of.
In another recent example, quite a local example actually, Dr. Roman Yampolski, who is professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Louisville and is a worldleading expert on AI safety, predicted that by 2045, just 20 years time, AI systems will be, and I quote, working so quickly that we cannot keep up anymore. This, he says, is the definition of singularity. the moment at which machines become so much more intelligent than us that we can't keep up with them or even comprehend them. And since he says we cannot predict what a smarter than us system will do by the year 2011 by the end of this century in other words humanity will either be extinct as Mr. Hinton suggests or we'll be looking at a world which is from this perspective literally impossible to imagine.
Now, it's worth saying that there are some words here that need interrogating. The words are smart and intelligent. Quite a lot of these words everywhere at the moment. And we're all, if we're paying any attention, either fearful or excited about the coming of so-called machine intelligence, or maybe we're both. And yet, nobody can actually define the word intelligence. There's never been any agreed understanding of what the word means. Come to that, there's never been any agreed understanding of what consciousness is, either in humans or in non-human creatures. No instrument can measure it. No triple blind laboratory test can pin it down. [snorts] And in fact, the materialist assumption that consciousness emerges from matter is increasingly under question even from some branches of science itself. And as for the word smart, well, let's just take note of the fact that the smart people are the ones who created a technology which they themselves are now telling us may end the human race. If that's the definition of smartness, we could probably do with a few smart people around.
But smartness, intelligence, cleverness, ambition, the quest to colonize Mars, the desire to upload our minds into cloud files that will give us immortality, [snorts] the campaign to replace nature with technology, and the ultimate quest, which is to end death. These are what are coming to define our broken way of seeing as the 21st century really gets going. Billions of dollars are poured into these and and similar projects. And at the same time, of course, we have the kind of death of the small town we've just been hearing about here. We also have a arguably the sixth mass extinction on Earth unfolding right now. We've lost half of our forests. The oceans are full of plastic. The climate is shifting around us. And of course, if you want to know the details of how we've treated our soil, the soil that's nurtured us for millennia, how we've ravaged our land and our food and our communities in our quest always to be somewhere else, then I refer you to Wendel's life's work.
So we have a lot of smart people around today, but we don't have a lot of wise people and we have even fewer who know how to be at home in a place. And in fact, the entire focus and aim of our society for at least a century has been to take us away from home, to take us away from wherever we come from or find ourselves, to put us somewhere else, to divorce us from nature and history, to fill our heads with broken digital dreams, and present all of this, of course, as progress. And in one sense, perhaps it is because what does that word mean? After all, to progress is simply to move towards something. And we're certainly doing that. Quite what we're moving towards, however, is the question at hand. Or maybe actually the question is what we're moving away from. And sometimes, maybe always, it's always the lo local stories, the small stories that illustrate this.
I live in the west of Ireland and recently the elderly neighbor of a friend died. There was a wake and there was a funeral. These things are still taken very seriously in rural Gway. And then the men of the neighborhood got together to dig his grave which is the tradition and he was laid to rest. Laid to rest. Now this old bachelor farmer had lived on his own in a small house owned by the local authority. And after his death, the council moved in to clean up the place so they could bring in a new tenant. And to be fair, as is often the way with houses inhabited by bachelor farmers, the place needed a fair bit of work. It needed the whole roof replaced for starters. But the way that the council replaced the roof was what struck me. The old man had heated his house, as farmers do, round our way with a turf fire. But nobody in that house will be burning turf in the future because the house has been rebuilt without any chimneys. Now chimneys are in fact illegal for all new build houses in Ireland. Now this is all part of a wider campaign across the country and the whole European Union to effectively ban wood and turf fires for environmental reasons. We hear that wood smoke is full of particullet and contributes to climate change and new houses should have solar panels or ground source heat pumps instead in the name of sustainability. [snorts]
Now I'm all in favor of genuine sustainability however much I hate the way the word is used. We shouldn't be heating our houses by destroying forests or pete bogs and it's a good idea to reduce our carbon emissions. Breathing in particulates is indeed a bad thing. But the case made for banning fires in the small cottages of Ireland is in large parts entirely bogus. The same government that wants to end log fires is promoting and subsidizing pellet boilers whose wood pellet fuel comes in some cases from protected forests in Eastern Europe. Solar panels are full of rare earth metals and require fossil fuels to manufacture and transport. And the state, which is happy to campaign against old men in their cottages burning a bit of turf in the evening, has nothing to say about the giant internet server farms, which are springing up all over the Irish Midlands, and which will, by some estimates, be consuming an amazing 70% of Ireland's electricity by the end of the decade. And by the way, since we're at the Berry Center, I think we should all linger on that descriptive phrase, server farm. Isn't that good? Server farm. We're growing servers now.
Now, I do have a personal agenda here because in our home, we burn wood, which we grow and cut and chop and season ourselves. We're trying to create a genuinely sustainable copus cycle, which sees us replanting trees as we log them for fuel. Now, obviously, not everybody can heat their home like that, especially if they live in a town or a city, but it works for us. It's local. It helps rather than harming the environment we live in. And of course, there's a certain satisfaction to be had from sitting by a fire in the winter, knowing that the fuel you're using to heat your home comes from 20 yards outside your back door.
In his short essay, Fireside Wisdom, the esoteric English writer John Michelle suggested that the displacement of the hearth or the fireplace from the home was one of the many reasons for the craziness of the modern world, which his whole life was spent exploring. And [snorts] very entertainingly, by the way, if you've never read John Michelle, you should. The fireplace at the center of the home, he wrote, was both an ancient practicality and a device of cosmological significance across cultures and time. He wrote this within the circumference of the wall representing a limited universe. The hearth stone is the body of the earth with four corners and four directions. And it's the seat of Hestia, the hearth goddess whose energies are concentrated in the central fire. The chain is the world pole, the link between heaven and earth, and the means of intercourse with gods and spirits. Conversation is directed into the fire while dreams and images are drawn out of it. It's too smoky to read or look at pictures, eyes and minds are concentrated on the focal point. In that [snorts] situation, sitting in friendly company around a fire on which a pot is simmering, one is likely to feel centered and at ease. In the past, the act of sitting staring into the smoky fire with family or neighbors was the genesis of the folktale and the folk song which tied the culture together. Now we stare at digital fires hemmed into boxes manufactured by distant corporations who also tell us our stories. No song we can dream up around a real fireplace can compete with what these boxed fires can sell us. Thus, wrote John Michelle, the traditional cosmology is no longer represented by its domestic symbols, and a new secular, restless, uncentered worldview has taken its place. The word focus, Michelle explained, is the Latin name for the central fireplace. The fire not only warms, he wrote, but as a symbol illuminates the corresponding images of a center to each of our own beings and of a world center which is divine, eternal and unchanging. Lose your fires, in other words, and you literally lose your focus as a culture.
>> [snorts] >> Now, in this context, a government spokesman telling his population, as one minister in Ireland recently did, that they should get over their nostalgic attachment to the halffire and install ground source heat pumps instead, is more than just a nod to efficiency. It's an assault on what remains of the home and its meaning. It's an attack on the cultural center, maybe even the divine center. Not that you will get very far explaining that to your local Democratic representative. I don't really recommend trying. But the point of the campaign against chimneys, I've come to think, is not really anything to do with protecting nature from human destruction. Rather, it's about removing people's independence and tying them into a web of technological intervention in which every aspect of your power consumption is monitored and controlled by states and corporations. It's about creating dependency on what I've come to call the machine. The web of power, money, and technology that today holds us all in its sway. Apologies for my cold. The machine exists to create dependency. It's essentially a mechanism of enclosure and colonization. And the history of modernity is the history of the spread of this machine and its mentality to all corners of the earth. as western traders and moneymen, having enclosed the lands of their own people and forced them into the mines and factories and slums sailed out to do the same in what would become known as the colonies. And in this way, the machine has by now colonized us all, not just externally, but internally, colonized our lands and our hearts and our minds. Externally, we see the results in the ongoing internal destruction of nature. Internally, we see it in the loss of our stories, in our brokenhearted confusion about who and where we are. Locally, we see it in the loss of our self-sufficiency and agency in a place where all the human stories begin, which is the home. Take that chimney ban again as an example. When you can no longer grow your own wood or cut your own turf to heat your own parlor, you're made that little bit more dependent on the matrix of government technology and commerce that has sought to transmute self-sufficiency into bondage since the time of the lites. And the justification for this attack on family and community sufficiency changes with the times. In 17th century England, the enclosures were justified by the need for agricultural efficiency. Today, they're justified by the need for energy efficiency. But the attack is always of the same nature, and each blow struck against local self-sufficiency and pride and love of place weaves another thread into the pattern which has been developing for centuries and which is almost complete now in most so-called developed countries.
Wendel Bry's 1980 essay, Family Work, written 45 years ago now, is a meditation on the meaning of home, its disintegration under the pressures of modernity, and how it might, to some degree, at least be restored. And like so much of Bry's work, it locates the center point of human society in the home and explains many of the failures of contemporary western or specifically American society as a neglect of that truth. [snorts] The home to Wendel Berry is the place where the real stuff of life happens or should do. The coming together of man and woman in partnership. The passing down of skills and stories from elders. The raising and educating of children. The growing, cooking, storing and eating of food. The learning of practical skills from construction to repair, tool making to sewing. The conjuration of story and song around that fire, the focus of the home. Universally across the world and across cultures, the family and the home, however they were quite constituted, have always been at the heart and the root of culture. It follows, therefore, that the machine, in order to succeed, must uproot both in order that culture may be destroyed and replaced with a marketplace in which we can buy and sell products, identities, and ideologies while our ground source heat pumps maintain a constant and inoffensive temperature. self-sufficient people, skilled people, independent people, thinking people, strange people. These are anathema. They have to go so that the machine may live.
Certainly in my lifetime and in my small part of the world, the notion of the meaning of home has steadily crumbled under this external pressure until it's now little more than a word. I've seen this in my own life, in my own family, in my own country. In the culture of the machine today, the home is little more than a dormatory. Maybe owned by a landlord or a bank because you can't afford to buy your own where I come from. Maybe in this home, two or more people of varying ages and degrees of biological relationship sleep when they're not out being employed by a corporation or [clears throat] educated by the state in preparation for being employed by a corporation. And the home's needs are met by pushing buttons or increasingly by swiping screens, buying in everything from food to furniture because who has the time for anything else? And who's been taught how to do anything else? Phones long ago replaced half fires. And handily, of course, a phone, unlike a fire, can be kept under your pillow in case something urgent happens at 2 in the morning because you wouldn't want to miss anything.
Now even back in 1980 when Wendel Bry wrote his essay, this is as I say 45 years ago, he recognized that the home had become an ideal rather than a practical reality. And it had become an ideal precisely because the reality had been placed out of reach for many people. I do think that the ideal is more difficult now than it was. He writes, "We're trying to uphold it now mainly by will without much help from necessity and with no help at all from custom and public value. For most people now do seem to think that family life and family work are unnecessary. And this thought has been institutionalized in our economy and in our public values. Never before has private life been so prayed upon by public life."
So what killed the home? Well, back in 1980, Wendel Berry suggested it was three things: cars, mass media, and public education. Automobiles and several decades of supposedly cheap fuel, he said, have meant that both work and le leisure could for the first time in history happen a long way away from your home. And the second, TV and other media, as he put it back then, have since the midentth century, learned to suggest with increasing subtly subtlety and callousness, especially and most wickedly to children, that it's better to consume than to produce, to buy than to grow, or to make, to go out than to stay at home. If you have a TV, your children will be subjected almost from the cradle to an overwhelming insinuation that all worth experiencing is somewhere else and that all worth having must be bought. [snorts] Those sentences sound quite old-fashioned now in a sort of bittersweet way. If only the only problem we face today was television. Finally, says Barry, the school system, a machine of its own, is designed, as he writes, to keep children away from the home as much as possible. Parents want their children kept out of their hair. Education is merely a byproduct, not overly prized. Much public education, he says, is more like a form of incarceration. Schools exist to train children to fit into the machine world being built for them to inst to internalize and normalize its ethics and goals and to prepare for a life serving its needs. As I say, that essay is 45 years old now. Not quite as old as me, but nearly. So, it's interesting to wonder what you could add to the list today. I'd say you could add supermarkets, huge [snorts] out of town superstores and in online internet shopping and the whole paniply of global supply chains that go with them. I don't think in 1980, as far as I remember, it was very common to buy avocados in winter in the northern hemisphere, let alone endless streams of screenbased gadgets put together by slave labor in China, which can be thrown away the next week when they break down, which they will. And it wasn't very common either, I don't think, to ship the resulting waste products to Turkey or West Africa and dump them on beaches where the poor will sift through them for pennies. Way out of our purview. Because of course, it's not only the homes of Western consumers devastated by the global supply chain of the machine. In fact, we were the last in line and have been its most obvious beneficiaries. [clears throat] I suppose we could also add careers and maybe this has been the main culprit.
Back in the early 19th century when the lites rebelled against the machine as it was then they called what they rebelled against the factory system. Maybe we should call it the office system. Now the factories have all been shipped off to China. And the factory system was the main reason that the hope was home was broken into in the first place. The preodern home was as few homes are today a workplace. The Lites again from northern and central England. They were hand loom weavers and they were running literal cottage industries and their rebellion against the rise of industrial capitalism was a [snorts] rebellion in defense of the home as a place of work as well as domesticity. That work was shared by men and women who would both have their domestic spheres of influence whatever the particular build business of the home was. And in this sense, there's a case to be made, and maybe it's been made most powerfully recently by the English writer Mary Harrington in her book Feminism Against Progress, that the premodern woman working in her home with her husband and family had more agency and power in that sphere at least, than her contemporary counterpart, whose life is directed from outside the home by distant commercial interests.
Machine modernity prized the men away from the home first as the industrial revolution broke their cottage industries and their farms and swept them into the factories and mines. This is what happened to my ancestors and probably many of yours. Swept them into the places where their brute strength could be useful to the machine. Later the women who had mostly been left to tend the home single-handedly were subjected to the same liberation which was sold to them as a blow struck against inequality. And maybe it was, but it was also a blow struck against the home for men and for women and for children. In this context, the accelerating attack on traditional family structures and gender roles and more recently gender and biology themselves, while presented as a liberation from the tyranny of both tradition and biology, can also be seen as propaganda and interests in the interests of the machine. Making a home requires both men and women to sacrifice some of their own desires for that of the wider family and maybe the community. But that kind of sacrifice doesn't feed the monster. Only by unmoring the human being from his or her roots and community and place can the emancipated individual consumer and self-creator be born. Only by promoting the fulfillment of individual desire as the meaning of a human life can the selflessness that we once prized as a cultural ideal be transmuted into the selfishness that the machine needs to thrive. [snorts]
I tell a story in the book about a BBC story uh a story on the BBC website that I came across a few years ago about what it called the limitations of motherhood. So, the BBC had produced a new TV show called The Baby, and it was an interview with the screenwriter who explained how excited she was about the possibility of exploding cultural ideas around motherhood. It's a very BBC sentence. And she explained how the traditional way of thinking about motherhood, and I quote, reinforces the idea that the mother is cis, female, straight, middleclass, white, caring, and nurturing. And the job of writers like her was to explode such outdated notions. [snorts] Caring, nurturing mothers, female mothers perish the thought. Could it be that motherhood itself is problematic? And the answer is yes, it is problematic in the eyes of the machine. >> [snorts] >> biology and family and home and place and anything to do with bodies and biology and limits and nature. All of that's problematic. All of that has to be taken apart.
Reading that article actually took me back to the days when I had a TV many years ago and actually this kind of thing is the reason I got rid of my TV. Found myself watching a current affairs program also on the BBC called News Night. You'll know it if you've been to Britain. And there was some talking head or another arguing that the government should give all women the right, which actually sounded more like a veiled obligation, to put their newborn children into paid child care at 6 weeks old so they could get back to work to help grow the economy. What the children might grow up to feel about this was never considered, nor was the notion that any mother might be horrified at the thought. Liberation and profit turned out to prove a seamless fit.
Now, of course, the question when we talk like this is what we're actually going to do about it. And again, I say we could probably say this is a question to which Wendel Berry has dedicated his life. And probably I've dedicated a bit of mine as well. I like the idea, by the way, that Wendel Berry has spent 70 years repeating himself. I feel like I've spent 30 years repeating myself. So, he's way ahead of me, but at least I've got a mentor. I've got a model now. It's good. I'm glad I'm not the only one. So, what do we do about this? Even though I've just written a book on the subject, and the last several chapters are an attempt to answer the question, I'm still not really sure I have a comforting and cohesive answer. And the reason I don't have a comforting and cohesive answer is that there isn't one really. And why should there be? Because if we're going to identify our enemy as a giant soulless machine and the alternative as a local human scale creative act of rebellion and rootedness, then we're not going to arrive at a nice five-point plan for the government to implement or a new revolutionary theory by which we can abolish technofudalism. Instead, we're going to have to do something more difficult than any of that. [snorts] We're going to have to look at the world differently and inhabit it differently. And this doesn't require new revolutionary theories. It requires, I think, now drawing on a deep well of wisdom which is already available to us and using the water from that well to fuel our contemporary resistance to the machine.
In my book, I give this stance a name. I call it reactionary radicalism. And it's the closest I've ever come to working out what my own politics is. And now that I think about it, it's probably the best description in my mind of the politics of Wendel Berry, too. He's not here tonight to correct me, but I'll accept a correction later if that's wrong. Now, I'd like to pretend I coined this phrase myself, but I didn't. Actually, most of the phrases in the book I didn't coin myself. [snorts] I stole them from better writers. I think it was Oscar Wild who said, um, what did he say? He said, uh, talent borrows, genius steals. So, that's my excuse. So, I didn't coin this phrase. I stole it from a fairly old and obscure work of English history, Craig Calhoun's book, The Question of Class Struggle, which was published in 1982, two years before Wendel Bry wrote his essay, Family Work. And despite the boring title, um it's not a Marxist tone. In fact, it's specifically written to take aim at the popularity of Marxist history, as exemplified especially in EP Thompson's famous work, The Making of the English Working Class, which is a terrific book. And Calhoun was politely critical of Thompson for imposing a later Marxist framework onto the historical struggles of workers in the early stages of the industrial revolution and particularly for framing as workingass many people who didn't fit into that generalized category. For Calhoun, Marx's binary portrait of a proletariat set against a bourgeoisi might have had some utility when studying the factory system of the mid-9th century, but it didn't apply to those artisans and small farmers and small businessmen and families who resisted the rise of that system in the first place. These people who were most famously exemplified again by those machine-breaking lites from the north and the midlands of England were according to Craig Calhoun anyway more radical than the later proletariat would turn out to be despite Marx's hopes. While the industrial working class were fighting for their rights within the established factory system, the earlier rebels were striving to prevent the arrival of that system in the first place. And Calhoun called these people reactionary radicals. In his words, they were, and I quote, movements of those who would fight against the coming of industrial society, who had traditional communities to preserve. This populism was radical. It rejected the very foundations on which capitalist society was being built in England. Calhoun's book is the story of the doomed resistance of the pre-industrial people of England to the destruction of their economies and their associated ways of life.
We're accustomed today to work and home and consumption and production being separate categories, but back then, of course, as I've already suggested, they were not. In the home of the pre-machine economy, they amounted to the same thing. [snorts] For those artisan weavers in pre-industrial England, to continue the example, home was where the family lived, where the trade was carried out, where the food was grown and eaten, where the children were born and reared. And the process of breaking this apart into those small sections, turning the home into a dormatory, and its adult inhabitants into both workers and consumers, and its children into pupils at a distant school, and its parlor into a showroom for TV and tablet and gaming console, and its kitchen into a store room of shop bought processed food. This was the work of the machine. And it begins with the rise of the factory system in the early 19th century. [snorts] And those who resisted this process, according to Calhoun, didn't do so for the kind of ideologicallydriven reasons that a class conscious Marxist might. Their drive was much more particular and therefore passionate. He writes, "Traditional values, not a new ex analysis of exploitation, guided the workers in their radicalism because there was no way to defend the community without coming into contact with the forces of capitalist industrialization and with the state which sheltered and sometimes encouraged those forces. The communal solidarity of the reactionary radicals was never in a simple sense conservative. Even when they defended past practices, they called for changes in present ones. What these reactionary radicals were defending above all, says Calhoun, was something he called the moral economy. And this moral economy was the polar opposite of this new free market that was being built on the bones of Old England and across the wider world. The free market so-called commodified everything from products to people and it sought to make that commodification global. [snorts] The booming British Empire built as it was on the demolition of the moral economies of other nations and their absorption into a British new world order was only an exemplar of what the British elite had already done to the working people of England and Scotland, Wales and Ireland. It was a story of factory lords, big land owners and a newly empowered capitalist class destroying the moral economies of communities from Lancasher to the Punjab and forcing their peoples into the new capitalist workplace instead where most of us remain to this day.
So this reactionary radicalism then is now as a defense of that moral economy which is to say a system built around community bonds and local economics and human scale systems in the face of the ongoing colonization of the machine. And that colonization might come through gunboats or trade agreements, red coats or giant superstores, enclosure acts or centralized digital currencies. But it will always suck the wealth out of place-based communities and funnel it to distant stockholders just as it sucks the power away from local people and funnels [snorts] it to national or international bodies whose interests align with those of the machine. It will always replace people with technology and it will always make consumers of us all. The way that these reactionary radicals in the early years of the industrial revolution attempted to defend the moral economy was not with the thoughtless thuggery that the propaganda of the victors would later portray but by a reasoned series of demands. The lites, for example, opposed new machinery in a way that was thoughtful, not absolute by its Calhoun. They were concerned with more than machinery. They campaigned for the right of craft control over trade, the right to a decent livelihood, for local autonomy, and for the application of a improved technology to the common good. Machinery was the issue. Technology was the issue because it specifically interfered with these values. So the Leites thought that technology should be applied in a way which reinforced the moral economy rather than destroyed it. EP Thompson's description of how the elite understood these demands might sound familiar to anyone who's heard today's equivalents responding to people like Wendel Berry over the years. Manufacturers everywhere, he writes, were availing themselves of the many wonderful inventions that were being brought out for cheapening labor. And as the new machinery threw thousands out of employment when extensively introduced, the poor misguided wretches who could not understand how that could be a benefit which deprived them of the means of earning a livelihood and reduced them to beggory met in secret conclaves and resolved in their ignorance to destroy them. Had they been better instructed, they would have known that it was their duty to lie down in the nearest ditch and die.
So the reactionary radicals, says Craig Calhoun, represented, in his words, an English populism that was not status or supportive of reactionary elites, but rather a genuine and radical insurgency. It came from the people. It stood for the people. It represented a defense of the moral economy against the machine. And this reactionary radicalism doesn't fit very easily into any left-right framing of the kind that we use today because its politics is from an older world, from a preodern world. Its stance is reactionary because it looks for guidance to the past, to an established or maybe a lost moral and economic order, hallowed by tradition rather than seeking to build a new one based on an abstract ideology. But it's radical too in its resistance to the values of the machine and in its demand for justice for communities and a fair and balanced moral, social and economic order.
So that was then and this is now. And the question I suppose is can we cleave to something like this? Can we cleave to such a reactionary radicalism? Can we recreate it? Is it still here? In a society in the advanced stages of conquest by the machine, in the age of artificial intelligence, in the age of chat bots and smartphones, is it too late? Is it even possible to think about something like a moral economy when so much has been taken away and absorbed into the machine? Because the reality is that the reactionary radicals of pre-industrial England comprehensively lost. Their moral economy was destroyed and we live in its commercialized ruins. And not only did they lose, but the ideologies of the modern age, whether left or right, have an interest in burying their memories. The Marx inflicted left once no truck with workers who resisted capitalism in order to defend traditional ways of life because those traditional ways stink of reaction and what Marx himself called the idiocy of rural life. Bet you haven't heard that phrase in Port Royal before. the idiocy of rural life. Meanwhile, on the right, because modern conservatism has attached itself limpit-like to capitalism, its advocates today can often be found defending the very matrix of global trade and empire and unaccountable corporate power that laid waste to the last remaining conservative cultures in preodern England and America and elsewhere. So, as ever, the modern ideologies fail us.
And yet actually this reactionary radicalism can still be found if we look in the right places. And it's especially prevalent outside the west in places where traditional moral economies are still at least partially intact. Every time you hear of a village in China or India resisting a giant dam or tribal people in West Papwa fighting eviction from their lands, fighting the destruction imposed by colonization and corporate power, rural or indigenous communities resisting mines or deforestation. And you're hearing from reactionary radicals and the state and the corporation will always set itself against them as will ideologues of left and right because if the moral economic order were ever to succeed well hell it might catch on. My first book one no many yeses which I wrote 25 years ago now. Now that I look back on it was a global exploration of communities like this all over the world from Brazil to West Papua to Mexico actually including America and parts of Europe. It was a journey around the world looking at movements of people who were resisting the globalization of machine culture. And now that I look back on those people, reactionary radicals is as good a name as any for them.
So what what though of those of us here today in the developed world so-called I always put quotes around that word the developed world precisely what we've developed into never seems to be quite explained but developed who we are what do we do here where the traditional moral economy if it hasn't been totally destroyed is certainly clinging on by its fingertips and where the machine has triumphed in so many ways well it's never quite as clear-cut as that as As I said, I spent many years of my life investigating experiments in rebuilding or defending the moral economy, not just in distant places, but in my home country. My second book was called Real England, and it was a journey around that country looking at the stories of people trying to defend or rebuild the moral economy against the machine and the way that it destroyed local cultures there. It's still happening. It's happening everywhere. I'm not known publicly for my optimism. I think it's fair to say. Yeah. Got [snorts] the biggest laugh of the night, didn't it? [laughter] Nevertheless, I am optimistic about the fact that people wish to remain human. And I think that's what's going to save us. And so, if the moral economy has been destroyed where we live, well, we can just start again. We can defend what remains if it remains, or we can start rebuilding it if it didn't. Because
The good thing about human scale work is that it's human scale. As Mary said, you don't need anyone's permission to do this. It's your moral economy. It's your high street. It's your community. It's your farm. It's your land.
Maybe we live in the place our ancestors have lived for generations, like Wendell Berry. Or maybe, like me, we moved to our place from another country 10 years ago. Either way, we're part of the life of that place. And we can help turn that place into a moral economy, which is to say a foundation from which to resist the values of the machine. And if we don't do that, we just capitulate to those values. In that sense, it's quite a binary choice.
Every day, every hour, every minute, the machine and the machine mentality colonizes your minds, and it colonizes your children's minds. The smartphone in your pocket demands your attention. We all know what the pressures are. So either we draw our lines, or the machine draws them for us. Either we make our choices about what kind of moral economy we want, or those choices are made for us by people whose values, if you're here tonight, you probably do not appreciate.
In other words, we start small because everything good starts small. Again, Mary's quite right. All the good stuff comes from the edges. Everything that goes on in the center is boring. And by the way, I think the greatest secret of the machine is that it's actually very boring. It's really dull.
When you preach against technology or the machine, this kind of stuff, it can be very easy to sound a bit like a sort of an aesthetic killjoy who doesn't want anyone to have any fun. But the machine isn't any fun. It's very, [snorts] very boring.
Somebody told me recently a story from Kurt Vonnegut. Kurt Vonnegut, back in the day, would uh, he would write out his his stories, and then he would post them off to a typist friend of his, and she would type them up for him, and she would send them back to him at home. And uh, one day he's at home, and he has to go and get an envelope so that he can go and post this this thing he's written out to his typist friend. And he says to his wife, "Honey, I'm just going to get an envelope." And she says, "Why do you keep going out to buy single envelopes? You're a wealthy man. You could get yourself a massive box of envelopes. We could get them all delivered to the post office." And he says, "I like going out."
So he goes out. He goes down to the kiosk on the street, and he stands in the queue, and he talks to a lot of different people buying all sorts of things. And he buys himself his envelope, and then he goes down to the post office where he's secretly in love with the woman behind the counter, but he's never going to tell her. And he has a chat with her, and then he puts the stamp on. He goes to the post office, and he comes back, and he says, "I had a hell of a time."
Now, you could, I suppose, just WhatsApp that instead of doing all of that, but it's no fun. The machine is no fun. >> Human life is fun. [snorts] So there we are. We start small. All we have is our small power. But that's the only thing that really matters. The small power has an impact.
The machine seems like a behemoth, a great leviathan, a great depressing monster. And it is those things, but still, it manifests its own power at the human scale. And so that's the scale that you have to take its measure. The great critic of technology, Jacques Ellul, once put it like this: "We must not think about humanity but of my neighbor Mario. I refuse to believe in the progress of humanity. When I see from year to year the lowering of standards among men, I know whose lives I follow, in the midst of whom I live. When I see how they lose their sense of responsibility, their seriousness in work, their recognition of a true authority, their desire for a decent life. When I see them engaged in a desperate struggle which comes from the depths of their being against something they don't understand."
Back in 1980, Wendell Berry ended his essay by suggesting some actions that could be taken in this direction [snorts] as well as the obvious, amongst which, "get rid of the television set" took pride of place. Still excellent advice. He suggested that we should try to make our homes centers of attention and interest, to make them as productive and nurturing as we can. Once we get rid of the propaganda of the corporate media entertainment complex, which he excellently called a "vacuum line, pumping life and meaning out of the household." Never has a better description been written.
You [snorts] will see new possibilities begin to open up. You will see, in Wendell Berry's words, that "no life and no place is destitute. All have possibilities of productivity and pleasure, rest and work, solitude and conviviality that belong particularly to themselves." Wherever your home is, whether it's in the country, whether it's in the city or the suburb, all that's necessary, he wrote, is the time and inner quietness to look for them.
Now, it's fair to say that the "all" in that sentence is doing quite a lot of work [snorts] because it's harder and harder all the time, of course, to find any time or inner quietness. When you have a little surveillance device in your pocket which can take you anywhere in the world and endlessly bleeps at you, finding time and inner quietness is quite a difficult thing to do, particularly if that device is designed to algorithmically twist your brain so that you can't stop looking at the thing.
How do you actually find any time and inner quietness? Well, it's hard. But then, it's probably always been hard. This is probably why the desert fathers went to live in the tombs in the deserts of Egypt. It was hard enough in 4th century Alexandria or Constantinople to find time and inner quietness. It's certainly harder now, but still, just as Wendell Berry advised you to get rid of your television, I will advise you to get rid of your smartphone. Or, if you like, take a hammer to it, which is more fun.
Well, if [snorts] you don't get rid of it, then at least put the thing away somewhere where you can't be contacted all the time. Make time for time and inner quietness because it's worth searching out. The time and inner quietness are what you get when you sit in front of a fire and stare into the flame instead of sitting in front of your boxed fire and looking at whatever story the Disney Corporation is giving you today.
Homework is maybe the most important work of all, and homework will teach you things. I live in Ireland. My accent probably tells you I'm not Irish. I'm English. I moved to Ireland 12 years ago. Pulled a piece of land. Homeschooled our children there. Learned a lot of skills. I'm a boy from an English suburb. I have no practical skills at all. Or at least I didn't until I moved to Ireland. Now, now I know how to build sheds. They're a bit wonky, but I can build them. I can plant trees. I can keep chickens. I can keep bees. I can make bread. Doesn't rise as much as I'd like it to, but we got to start somewhere. I can cut hedges. I can unblock drains. I learned how to know my neighbors properly. I learned how to dig a grave. I was asked to dig my neighbor's grave last year, and that was something that was quite an honor to me. You know, you've arrived in rural Ireland when they ask you to dig a grave. It took 10 years, but I got there.
Now, back in the day when he wrote his essay, "Fireside Wisdom," John Michael concluded that the loss of the fireplace from the heart of the home had driven society mad without quite knowing it. "We knocked the center out of it," he wrote. And ever since, we've been fumbling around looking for it, mistaking our own or other people's obsessions for the real thing. And the machine's war against home, against place, against roots, against wherever you are. It knocks the center out of our lives in the same way. It throws us all off balance.
But still, when you're off balance, you can start regaining your footing. And you start that in the place you find yourself. In your home, in your place. That place, that home can be a friction against the machine. Perhaps it's the best one. If this is a war, it's long past time to begin fighting back.
I'm going to end on another of Wendell Berry's poems. [snorts] So many to choose from, but this one is the right one for tonight. This is called "Stay Home."
"I will wait here in the fields
to see how well the rain brings on the grass.
In the labor of the fields longer than a man's life,
I am home.
Don't come with me.
You stay home, too.
I will be standing in the woods
where the old trees move only with the wind
and then with gravity.
In the stillness of the trees,
I am at home.
Don't come with me.
You stay home too."
Thank you very much. [applause] [applause] >> [applause]