Seeing Our Economy Clearly

-- and Rebuilding an Authentic One

Review: "Inverting the Economic Order," by Wendell Berry, The Progressive, September 2009

[Note: Unfortunately, Inverting the Economic Order is only available at larger libraries and to subscribers of The Progressive.   To compensate, I have quoted generously to provide a fuller dimension to Berry's essay. -PT]

Upon finishing Wendell Berry's remarkable truth-telling essay "Inverting the Economic Order," one reader wrote: "Please reprint it into pamphlet form and distribute it to every high school and college library in this land, so needful of an agrarian resurrection." Yet another wrote: "The new Wendell Berry article is incredibly important and must be spread as widely as possible."

So what's all the fuss about?

Wendell Berry, poet, farmer, novelist, essayist, elder statesman of the agrarian movement now tackles "the economy" head-on. It would be tempting to add "economist" to his achievements, but that would be inaccurate. Economists operate today within a narrow context of ideas like production, distribution, exchange, consumption, goods and services, GDP, national debt, international monetary system, etc. Berry's context is much larger: it is the breathing soul of Mother Earth. In this context, economy is a subset of ecology.

If for some the word "economy" has become pejorative, Berry attempts to re-define it. For him an authentic economy is grounded in our planet's ecology, its air, land and water, its potential for local food production, and in the timeless traditions of the local peoples who steward these essential renewable (and therefore exhaustible) resources.

Since our economy tanked last year, hundreds of "experts" and pundits have sought to dissect and understand our current economic woes and causes through their narrow perspective: "bundled mortgage securities," "derivatives," "the Federal Reserve system," "not enough regulation," "too much greed," "financial system out of control," "unfettered capitalism," etc. Wendell Berry steps back as if he were an observer from outer space watching his home planet's economic order. The words "regulation," "market economy," "capitalism," "socialism," do not appear. He is looking at our economy from the point of view of the well-being of Earth and people's common good. It is probably the same point of view that most indigenous cultures' leaders must have taken, given their acute awareness of their people's dependence on the natural habitat within which they lived.

Berry says, "...in ordering the economy of a household or community or nation, I would put nature first, the economies of land use second, the manufacturing economy third, and the consumer economy fourth. The first law of such an economy would be what the agriculturist Sir Albert Howard called 'the law of return.' This law requires that what is taken from nature must be given back; the fertility cycle must be maintained in continuous rotation."

Berry then describes more specific values of such an "authentic economy," and in the process revives and gives substance to such essential ideas as the "pricelessness" of certain natural resources (air, water, soil, etc.). His thought process distinguishes between "needs and mere wants," a critical distinction that in recent decades had succumbed to the illusion of endless affluence, permanent growth, and the sophistry of our economy's advertising/marketing sector.

Most of "Inverting the Economic Order" is devoted to the following proposition: "The present and now-failing economy is just about exactly opposite to the [authentic] economy I have just described. Over a long time, and by means of a set of handy prevarications, our economy has become an anti-economy, a financial system without a sound economic basis and without economic virtues... It has inverted the economic order that puts nature first. This economy is based on consumption..."

Berry carefully chooses many examples from this failing economy of consumption that are prominent in today's economic discussions: stimulus spending, job creation, the financial system, fossil fuels, bio fuels, manufacturing, the industrial system. He then dissects and illuminates their fatal assumptions, methods, and consequences. For example, discussing the financial system, Berry states, "...the financial system puts a price, though a highly variable price, on everything. We know from much experience that everything that is priced will sooner or later be sold. And from the accumulating statistics of soil loss, land loss, deforestation, overuse of water, various sorts of pollution, etc., we have reason to fear that everything that is sold will be ruined. When everything has a price, and the price is made endlessly variable by an economy without a stable relation to necessity or to real goods, then everything is disconnected from history, knowledge, respect, and affection -- from anything at all that might preserve it -- and so is implicitly eligible to be ruined."

The last part of the essay addresses the current state of agriculture, emphasizing what Berry calls the virtues of the "land economies" and how these have been destroyed by our current economic order. There is the dramatic historical growth of industrial agribusiness and the corresponding dramatic decline in agricultural population. There is the destruction of the land and waterways by erosion, pollution, toxic runoff and neglected renewal. There is the impoverishment of small farmers, ranchers and farm workers in the misguided quest for cheap food. And with these losses in our farming communities comes the loss of knowledge, humble respect, and stewardship skills that once maintained those precious resources.

"We are destroying the cultures and communities of land use and land husbandry by deliberately slanting the economy of the food system against the primary producers . . . . The fate of the land is finally not separable from the fate of the people of the land (and the fate of country people is finally not different from the fate of city people)."

Berry strikes many targets, obvious and not so obvious, in his survey of our current economy: the entertainment industry, the educational system, "the tiny class of excessively wealthy people," the agriculture labor pool that exploits the poor of other countries, the advertising industry, and last but not least, ourselves -- the "gullible" public:

"The gulliblility of the public thus becomes an economic resource [for the manufacturing and advertising industries] . . . .The genius of marketing and selling has given us, for example, bottled tap water, for which we pay more than we pay for gasoline . . . . The system of industry, finance and marketing thus makes capital of its own viciousness and of the ignorance and gullibility of the public. By the influence of the marketers and sellers , citizens and members are transformed into suckers. And so we have an alleged economy that is not only . . . consumption-dependent -- but also sucker-dependent."

In the end, Berry's truth-telling has exposed to clear daylight the utter irrationality of our economic order, and our complicity in it. And if we were already vaguely, or not so vaguely, aware of these truths, we now have words for it and know it explicitly.

"In a consciously responsible economy, such abuses would be inconceiveable. They could not happen. To damage or destroy an otherwise permanent resource for the sake of a temporary advantage would be readily perceived as senseless by every paractical measure and, by the measure of human wholeness, as insane."

Our challenge is staring us in our faces. Berry's initial ordering for an authentic economy -- first, nature, second, land-use, third, manufacturing, fourth, consumption -- provides our guidelines. Here on Hawai'i Island it is up to us to place that economic order firmly in place where it belongs, on ka 'aina.

Read more at The Progressive