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From Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community
By Wendell
Berry
THE JOY OF SALES RESISTANCE
Dear
Reader, We live in a time when
technologies and ideas (often the same thing) |
Salesmen and saleswomen now hover about us as persistently as angels, intent on "doing us good" according to instructions set forth by persons educated at great public expense in the arts of greed and prevarication.
These salespeople are now with most of us, apparently, even in our dreams.
The first duty of writers who wish to be of any use even to themselves is to resist the language, the ideas, and the categories of this ubiquitous sales talk, no matter from whose mouth it issues. But, then, this is also the first duty of everybody else. Nobody who is awake accepts the favors of these hawkers of guaranteed satisfactions, these escape artists, these institutional and commercial fanatics, whether politically correct or politically incorrect. Nobody who understands the history of justice or of the imagination (largely the same history) wants to be treated as a member of a category.
I am more and more impressed by the generality of the assumption that human lives are properly to be invented by an academic-corporate-governmental elite and then either sold to their passive and choiceless recipients or doled out to them in the manner of welfare payments. Any necessary thinking—so the assumption goes—will be done by certified smart people in offices, laboratories, boardrooms, and other high places and then will be handed down to supposedly unsmart people in low places—who will also be expected to do whatever actual work cannot be done cheaper by machines.
Such a society, whose members are expected to think and do and provide nothing for themselves, will necessarily give a high place to salesmanship. For such a society cannot help but encourage the growth of a kind of priesthood of men and women who know exactly what you need and who just happen to have it for you, attractively packaged and at a price no competitor can beat. If you wish to be among the beautiful, then you must buy the right fashions (there are no cheap fashions) and the right automobile (not cheap either). if you want to be counted as one of the intelligent, then you must shop for the right education (not cheap but also not difficult).
Actually, as we know, the new commercial
education is fun for everybody. All you have to do in order to have
or to provide such an education is to pay your money (in advance) and
master a few simple truths:
I. Educated people are more
valuable than other people because education is a value-adding
industry.
II. Educated people are better than other people
because education improves people and makes them good.
III.
The purpose of education is to make people able to earn more and more
money.
IV. The place where education is to be used is called
"your career."
V. Anything that cannot be weighed,
measured, or counted does not exist.
VI. The so-called
humanities probably do not exist. But if they do, they are useless.
But whether they exist or not or are useful or not, they can
sometimes be made to support a career.
VII Literacy does not
involve knowing the meanings of words, or learning grammar, or
reading books.
VIII The sign of exceptionally smart people is
that they speak a language that is intelligible only to other people
in their "field" or only to themselves. This is very
impressive and is known as "professionalism."
IX.
The smartest and most educated people are the scientists, for they
have already found solutions to all our problems and will soon find
solutions to all the problems resulting from their solutions to all
the problems we used to have.
X. The mark of a good teacher is
that he or she spends most of his or her time doing research and
writes many books and articles.
XI The mark of a good
researcher is the same as that of a good teacher.
XII. A great
university has many computers, a lot of government and corporation
research contracts, a winning team, and more administrators than
teachers.
XIII. Computers
make people even better and smarter than they were made by previous
thingamabobs Or if some people prove incorrigibly wicked or stupid or
both, computers will at least speed them up.
XIV. The main
thing is, don't let education get in the way of being nice to
children. Children are our Future. Spend plenty of money on them but
don't stay home with them and get in their way. Don't give them work
to do; they are smart and can think up things to do on their own.
Don't teach them any of that awful, stultifying, repressive,
old-fashioned morality. Provide plenty of TV, microwave dinners, day
care, computers, computer games, cars. For all this, they will love
and respect us and be glad to grow up and pay our debts.
XV. A
good school is a big school.
XVI. Disarm the children before
you let them in.
Of
course, education is for the Future, and the Future is one of our
better-packaged items and attracts many buyers. (The past, on the
other hand, is hard to sell; it is, after all, past.) The Future is
where we'll all be fulfilled, happy, healthy, and perhaps will live
and consume forever. It may have some bad things in it, like storms
or floods or earthquakes or plagues or volcanic eruptions or stray
meteors, but soon we will learn to predict and prevent such things
before they happen. In the Future, many scientists will be employed
in figuring out how to prevent the unpredictable consequences of the
remaining unpreventable bad things. There will always be work for
scientists.
The Future, as
everybody knows, is a subject of extreme importance to politicians,
and we have several political packages that are almost
irresistible—expensive, of course, but rare:
1.
Tolerance and Multiculturalism. Quit talking bad about women,
homosexuals, and preferred social minorities, and you can say
anything you want about people who haven't been to college, manual
workers, country people, peasants, religious people, unmodern people,
old people, and so on. Tolerant and multicultural persons hyphenate
their land of origin and their nationality. I, for example, am a
Kentuckian-American.
2.
Preservation of Human Resources. Despite world-record advances in
automation, robotification, and other "labor-saving"
technologies, it is assumed that almost every human being may, at
least in the Future, turn out to be useful for something, just like
the members of other endangered species. Sometimes, after all, the
Economy still requires a "human component." At such times,
human resources are called "human components," and are
highly esteemed in that capacity as long as their usefulness lasts.
Therefore, don't quit taking care of human resources yet. See that
the schools are run as ideal orphanages or, as ideal jails. Provide
preschool and pre-preschool. Also postschool. Keep the children in
institutions and away from home as much as possible—remember that
their parents wanted children only because other people have them,
and are much too busy to raise them. Only the government cares. Move
the children around a lot while they're young, for this provides many
opportunities for socialization. Show them a lot of TV, for TV is
educational. Teach them about computers, for computers still require
a "human component." Teach them the three Ss: Sex can be
Scientific and Safe. When the children grow up, try to keep them
busy. Try to see that they become addicted only to legal substances.
That's about it.
3.
Reduce the Government. the government should only be big enough to
annihilate any country and (if necessary) every country, to spy on
its citizens and on other governments, to keep big secrets, and to
see to the health and happiness of large corporations. A government
thus reduced will be almost too small to notice and will require
almost no taxes and spend almost no money.
4.
The Free Market. The free market sees to it that everything ends up
in the right place—that is, it makes sure that only the worthy get
rich. All millionaires and billionaires have worked hard for their
money, and they deserve the rewards of their work. They need all the
help they can get from the government and the universities. Having
money stimulates the rich to further economic activity that
ultimately benefits the rest of us. Needing money stimulates the rest
of us to further economic activity that ultimately benefits the rich.
The cardinal principle of the free market is unrestrained
competition, which is a kind of tournament that will decide which is
the world's champion corporation. Ultimately, thanks to this
principle, there will be only one corporation, which will be
wonderfully simplifying. After that, we will rest in
peace.
5.
Unlimited Economic Growth. This is the pet idea of the Party of
Hardheaded Realists. That unlimited economic growth can be
accomplished within limited space, with limited materials and limited
intelligence, only shows the unlimited courage and self-confidence of
these Great Minds. That unlimited economic growth implies unlimited
consumption, which in turn implies unlimited pride, covetousness,
lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth, only makes the prospect even
more unlimited.
Or, finally, we might consider the package
known as:
6.
The Food System, which is one of my favorites. The Food System is
firmly grounded on the following principles:
I. Food is
important mainly as an article of international trade.
II. It
doesn't matter what happens to farmers.
III. It doesn't matter
what happens to the land.
IV. Agriculture has nothing to do
with "the environment."
V. There will always be
plenty of food, for if farmers don't grow it from the soil, then
scientists will invent it.
VI. There is no connection between
food and health. People are fed by the food industry, which pays no
attention to health, and are healed by the health industry, which
pays no attention to food.
VII. It follows that there is no
connection between healing and health. Hospitals customarily feed
their patients poor-quality, awful-tasting, factory-made expensive
food and keep them awake all night with various expensive attentions.
There is a connection between money and health.
In this Christmassy
atmosphere, an essayist must be aware of the danger of becoming just
one more in this mob of drummers. He (as a matter of syntactical
convenience, I am speaking only of men essayists) had better
understand with some care what it is that he has to sell, what he has
to give away, and certainly also what he may have that nobody else
will want
I do have an interest in this book, which is for sale.
(If you have bought it,
dear reader, I thank you. If you have borrowed it, I honor your
frugality. If you have stolen it, may it add to your confusion.) Most
of the sale price pays the publisher for paper, ink, and other
materials, for editorial advice, copyediting, design, advertising (I
hope), and marketing. I get between 10 and 15 percent (depending on
sales) for arranging the words on the pages.
As I understand it, I
am being paid only for my work in arranging the words; my property is
that arrangement. The thoughts in this book, on the contrary, are not
mine. They came freely to me, and I give them freely away. I have no
"intellectual property," and I think that all claimants to
such property are thieves.
I
am, I acknowledge, a white Protestant heterosexual man, and can only
offer myself as such. I take no particular pride in my membership in
this unfashionable group, nor do I consider myself in any way its
spokesman. I do, however, ask you to note, dear reader, that this
membership confers on me a certain usefulness in that it leaves me
with no excuses and nobody to blame for my faults except myself. In
fact, I am only grateful to my parents, my family, and my friends,
who have done their best to make me better than I am. On my more
charitable days, I am grateful even to my enemies, who have sharpened
my mind and who have done me the service of being, as a rule, wronger
than I am.
I am well aware that you cannot give your thoughts to someone who will not take them, and I am prepared for that. I would like to be agreed with, of course, but the rules of publication require me to be willing also to be disagreed with, to be ignored, and even to be disliked. Those who are moved by this book to disagreement or dislike will take discomfort, I hope, from hearing that some of my readers treat me kindly.
Kindness from readers is something that no essayist (and no writer of any other kind) has a right to expect. The kindness I have received from readers I count as the only profit from my work that is entirely net. I am always grateful for it and often am deeply moved by it.
But kindness is not—is never—the same as complete agreement. An essayist not only has no right to expect complete agreement but has a certain responsibility to ward it off. If you tell me, dear reader, that you agree with me completely, then I must suspect one or both of us of dishonesty. I must reserve the right, after all, to disagree with myself.
But however much I may
change my mind, I will never agree with those saleswomen and salesmen
who suggest that if I will only do as they say, all will be fine.
All, dear reader, is not going to be fine. Even if we all agreed with
all the saints and prophets, all would not be fine. For we would
still be mortal, partial, suffering poor creatures, not very
intelligent and never the authors of our best hope.
Yours
sincerely,
Wendell Berry
P.S. Last summer,
for example, I read a newspaper article announcing, in the
awestricken voice of the science journalist, "a new generation
of technological inventions—most of them involving some variation
on the home computer." The two inventions specifically described
in the article were electronic newspapers and something called
"hypertext."
The benefits of the electronic newspaper
apparently all have to do with convenience: "These screens will
display a front page with an index. The user can tap a pen to the
screen to call up a story, flip a page, turn a still photograph into
a TV news scene, or even make a dinner or theatre reservation from an
ad."
Hypertext "makes it possible to create all sorts of linkages and short circuits within a text." And this "is extremely useful in organizing technical material so that the reader can efficiently select which parts of a text to read." The reason for this, according to a "consultant," is that "usually you don't want to read everything— you only want to read what you don't know . " Hypertext "is reader-friendly and makes it easy to chart a path to the desired parts." Thanks also to this invention, "creative writing professors are teaching courses about how to write hypertext novels that literally go in all directions." These novels are "interactive":
In reading a
hypertext novel You may follow the point of view of a chosen
character, or you may chose the outcome you like best, or you may
wander off into subtleties beyond anything James Joyce could have
imagined. The possibilities —and the stories—may be endless.
This
opens up new realms of choice and creativity. In some ways it frees
the reader from being merely a passive receptacle of the "
author's genius (or lack of same)
Dear reader,
I hope you will understand at least somewhat the disgust, the
contempt, and the joy with which I have received this news.
It
disgusts me because I know there is no need for such products, which
will put a lot of money into the pockets of people who don't care how
they earn it and will bring another downward turn in the effort of
gullible people to become better and smarter by way of machinery.
This is a perfect example of modern salesmanship and modern
technology—yet another way to make people pay dearly for what they
already have (the ability to turn the pages of a newspaper or respond
to an ad; the ability to read and write, to choose what to read, and
to read "actively").
I
read about these things with contempt because of the nonsense and the
falsehood involved. For example, no real comparison is made in this
article between paper newspapers and electronic ones. The stated
difference is simply that one is newer and somehow easier than the
other. And what exactly is implied by the use of a machine that makes
it possible to read only "what you don't know"? is this
perhaps what we call "skimming"? But how do you know,
without reading or at least skimming, whether you know or do not know
what is in a text? And what of the pleasure of reading again what you
already know? The assumption here is that reading is an ordeal, of
which the less said the better. And don't we remember that television
was once expected to produce a new era of general enlightenment? And
now will we believe that the electronically stupefied will turn from
their soap operas to "hypertext" and indulge themselves in
"subtleties and complexities" beyond the powers of James
Joyce? And are we to suppose that readers of, say, James Joyce have
hitherto been mere passive receptacles of his genius? And haven't we
known all along that the stories are endless?
My joy comes
from my instantaneous knowledge that I am not going to buy either
piece of equipment. When the inevitable saleswoman comes to tell me
that I cannot be up-to-date, or intelligent, or creative, or
handsome, or young, or eligible for the sexual favors of so fair a
creature as herself unless I buy these products, dear reader, I
am not going to do it.
Somewhere is better than
anywhere.
—Flannery O'Connor
Why I am Not Going to Buy a Computer
* "What is Going to
Become of the Written Word?" by
Walter Truett Anderson
(Pacific News Service),
The Mountain Eagle (Whitesburg, KY), July
22, 1992, 4 and 8.
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