As I have watched the stock market continue its free fall over recent weeks, much has been thought about money, work, and how it is that we live. That we are in an ongoing relationship with excess and irresponsibility is beyond question. That we would exit that relationship graciously was too much too expect. That it would end, inevitable. The essay that follows is by a "gentleman farmer," someone who rather than ponder this, has expounded upon it, sought the source and found it in self. He has embarked upon a reflective life of self and inter- dependence, and done so thoughtfully. That the subject of this essay might at first appear unrelated to my ramblings, is yours to consider. I believe it to be to the point.

"Thoughts in the Presence of Fear"

by Wendell Berry

I. The time will soon come when we will not be able to remember the horrors of
September 11 without remembering also the unquestioning technological and
economic optimism that ended on that day.
II. This optimism rested on the
proposition that we were living in a "new world order" and a "new economy" that
would "grow" on and on, bringing a prosperity of which every new increment would
be "unprecedented".
III. The dominant politicians, corporate officers, and
investors who believed this proposition did not acknowledge that the prosperity
was limited to a tiny percent of the world's people, and to an ever smaller
number of people even in the United States; that it was founded upon the
oppressive labor of poor people all over the world; and that its ecological
costs increasingly threatened all life, including the lives of the supposedly
prosperous.
IV. The "developed" nations had given to the "free market" the
status of a god, and were sacrificing to it their farmers, farmlands, and
communities, their forests, wetlands, and prairies, their ecosystems and
watersheds. They had accepted universal pollution and global warming as normal
costs of doing business.
V. There was, as a consequence, a growing worldwide
effort on behalf of economic decentralization, economic justice, and ecological
responsibility. We must recognize that the events of September 11 make this
effort more necessary than ever. We citizens of the industrial countries must
continue the labor of self-criticism and self-correction. We must recognize our
mistakes.
VI. The paramount doctrine of the economic and technological
euphoria of recent decades has been that everything depends on innovation. It
was understood as desirable, and even necessary, that we should go on and on
from one technological innovation to the next, which would cause the economy to
"grow" and make everything better and better. This of course implied at every
point a hatred of the past, of all things inherited and free. All things
superseded in our progress of innovations, whatever their value might have been,
were discounted as of no value at all.
VII. We did not anticipate anything
like what has now happened. We did not foresee that all our sequence of
innovations might be at once overridden by a greater one: the invention of a new
kind of war that would turn our previous innovations against us, discovering and
exploiting the debits and the dangers that we had ignored. We never considered
the possibility that we might be trapped in the webwork of communication and
transport that was supposed to make us free.
VIII. Nor did we foresee that
the weaponry and the war science that we marketed and taught to the world would
become available, not just to recognized national governments, which possess so
uncannily the power to legitimate large-scale violence, but also to "rogue
nations", dissident or fanatical groups and individuals - whose violence, though
never worse than that of nations, is judged by the nations to be
illegitimate.
IX. We had accepted uncritically the belief that technology is
only good; that it cannot serve evil as well as good; that it cannot serve our
enemies as well as ourselves; that it cannot be used to destroy what is good,
including our homelands and our lives.

X. We had accepted too the
corollary belief that an economy (either as a money economy or as a life-support
system) that is global in extent, technologically complex, and centralized is
invulnerable to terrorism, sabotage, or war, and that it is protectable by
"national defense"
XI. We now have a clear, inescapable choice that we must
make. We can continue to promote a global economic system of unlimited "free
trade" among corporations, held together by long and highly vulnerable lines of
communication and supply, but now recognizing that such a system will have to be
protected by a hugely expensive police force that will be worldwide, whether
maintained by one nation or several or all, and that such a police force will be
effective precisely to the extent that it oversways the freedom and privacy of
the citizens of every nation.
XII. Or we can promote a decentralized world
economy which would have the aim of assuring to every nation and region a local
self-sufficiency in life-supporting goods. This would not eliminate
international trade, but it would tend toward a trade in surpluses after local
needs had been met.
XIII. One of the gravest dangers to us now, second only
to further terrorist attacks against our people, is that we will attempt to go
on as before with the corporate program of global "free trade", whatever the
cost in freedom and civil rights, without self-questioning or self-criticism or
public debate.
XIV. This is why the substitution of rhetoric for thought,
always a temptation in a national crisis, must be resisted by officials and
citizens alike. It is hard for ordinary citizens to know what is actually
happening in Washington in a time of such great trouble; for all we know,
serious and difficult thought may be taking place there. But the talk that we
are hearing from politicians, bureaucrats, and commentators has so far tended to
reduce the complex problems now facing us to issues of unity, security,
normality, and retaliation.
XV. National self-righteousness, like personal
self-righteousness, is a mistake. It is misleading. It is a sign of weakness.
Any war that we may make now against terrorism will come as a new installment in
a history of war in which we have fully participated. We are not innocent of
making war against civilian populations. The modern doctrine of such warfare was
set forth and enacted by General William Tecumseh Sherman, who held that a
civilian population could be declared guilty and rightly subjected to military
punishment. We have never repudiated that doctrine.
XVI. It is a mistake also
- as events since September 11 have shown - to suppose that a government can
promote and participate in a global economy and at the same time act exclusively
in its own interest by abrogating its international treaties and standing apart
from international cooperation on moral issues.
XVII. And surely, in our
country, under our Constitution, it is a fundamental error to suppose that any
crisis or emergency can justify any form of political oppression. Since
September 11, far too many public voices have presumed to "speak for us" in
saying that Americans will gladly accept a reduction of freedom in exchange for
greater "security". Some would, maybe. But some others would accept a reduction
in security (and in global trade) far more willingly than they would accept any
abridgement of our Constitutional rights.
XVIII. In a time such as this, when
we have been seriously and most cruelly hurt by those who hate us, and when we
must consider ourselves to be gravely threatened by those same people, it is
hard to speak of the ways of peace and to remember that Christ enjoined us to
love our enemies, but this is no less necessary for being difficult.
XIX.
Even now we dare not forget that since the attack of Pearl Harbor - to which the
present attack has been often and not usefully compared - we humans have
suffered an almost uninterrupted sequence of wars, none of which has brought
peace or made us more peaceable.
XX. The aim and result of war necessarily is
not peace but victory, and any victory won by violence necessarily justifies the
violence that won it and leads to further violence. If we are serious about
innovation, must we not conclude that we need something new to replace our
perpetual "war to end war?"
XXI. What leads to peace is not violence but
peaceableness, which is not passivity, but an alert, informed, practiced, and
active state of being. We should recognize that while we have extravagantly
subsidized the means of war, we have almost totally neglected the ways of
peaceableness. We have, for example, several national military academies, but
not one peace academy. We have ignored the teachings and the examples of Christ,
Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and other peaceable leaders. And here we have an
inescapable duty to notice also that war is profitable, whereas the means of
peaceableness, being cheap or free, make no money.
XXII. The key to
peaceableness is continuous practice. It is wrong to suppose that we can exploit
and impoverish the poorer countries, while arming them and instructing them in
the newest means of war, and then reasonably expect them to be
peaceable.
XXIII. We must not again allow public emotion or the public media
to caricature our enemies. If our enemies are now to be some nations of Islam,
then we should undertake to know those enemies. Our schools should begin to
teach the histories, cultures, arts, and language of the Islamic nations. And
our leaders should have the humility and the wisdom to ask the reasons some of
those people have for hating us.
XXIV. Starting with the economies of food
and farming, we should promote at home, and encourage abroad, the ideal of local
self-sufficiency. We should recognize that this is the surest, the safest, and
the cheapest way for the world to live. We should not countenance the loss or
destruction of any local capacity to produce necessary goods
XXV. We should
reconsider and renew and extend our efforts to protect the natural foundations
of the human economy: soil, water, and air. We should protect every intact
ecosystem and watershed that we have left, and begin restoration of those that
have been damaged.
XXVI. The complexity of our present trouble suggests as
never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education
is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries,
either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It's proper use is to
enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and
culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or "accessing" what we
now call "information" - which is to say facts without context and therefore
without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in
order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it
means putting first things first.
XXVII. The first thing we must begin to
teach our children (and learn ourselves) is that we cannot spend and consume
endlessly. We have got to learn to save and conserve. We do need a "new
economy", but one that is founded on thrift and care, on saving and conserving,
not on excess and waste. An economy based on waste is inherently and hopelessly
violent, and war is its inevitable by-product. We need a peaceable economy.

Lest one be hopeful that the current hiccup in the economy might signal a change toward reasonableness in the world, consider the following:

Cells of resistance will be formed everywhere against technology’s unchecked power. They will keep reflection alive inconspicuously and will prepare the reversal, for which ‘one’ will clamor when the general desolation becomes unbearable. From all corners of the world, I now hear voices calling for such a reflection and for ways to find it -voices that are renouncing the easily attainable effect of technology’s power.

From a letter by Martin Heidegger to Medard Boss, December 29, 1967.

I suspect Wendell Berry is one of the voices Heidegger speaks of, whether he actually heard that voice.

Okay, this is not high-minded or edifying, it's just funny. Bet ya' a nickel you laugh!

If you ever wonder what it is that old man reads, and why, then perhaps the following will give a glimpse into the machinations behind the mania..........

Heidegger, Gadamer, Palmer, Language and A River

For Martin Heidegger, for Hans-Georg Gadamer, and for Richard Palmer as well, language is the very foundation of existence. “It is through language that something like world can arise for us” (Palmer p.228). Language speaking---spoken by man--- namingly calls Things into being, and those Things Thingingly gesture and bear the world. In the intimate, penetrated, unseparated between, the dif-ference “disclosingly appropriates things into bearing a world” and “it disclosingly appropriates world into granting things” (Heidegger p.1130). The “separateness and towardness of world and thing” unified in the dif-ference, emerge in the readiness-to-hand, concern, and solicitude for Things and Others, through language. The concise language of poetry in particular constitutes the bidding that calls the Things that grant the world into being. Rather than poetry being considered as a higher more formal language, Heidegger proposes that when we encounter the everyday language of common speech we find it is a decomposed and dead residue of the speech that is possible, the true speech of poetry. Poetry speaks metaphorically, figuratively and freshly; and brings worlds into being in that speaking. In Georg Trakl’s poem, “A Winter Evening” that ostensibly depicts a winter evening and describes a snowfall and vesper bells, Heidegger finds figuratively and metaphorically commanded into being for him, a clear and concise worlding of his theory of the “between.” This personal meaning that he understood comes into being as a result of his hermeneutical experience upon reading the poem. The language event that Heidegger experiences is a result of the collision of his past, his philosophy and experiences with the presence of the text of Trakl’s poem, in consideration of the future being he becomes as a result of that experience. The historicality of the language event is not the result of some static formal dismemberment of the poem, but rather of a dialectical conversation between Heidegger the critical reader and the text of the poem itself. The message that Trakl may or may not have wished to convey when he wrote the poem is of no import. Once in the world Trakl’s poem is what it becomes in the experiencing. It is the nature of language to convey meaning, but that meaning only becomes in the understanding.
The ontological function of language and of understanding discloses the being of things. “The hermeneutical experience is a language event…it is the truth that happens, emerges from concealment and yet eludes every effort to reduce it to concepts and objectivity” (Palmer p. 243).
Pastor John Maclean, the patriarchal father and minister of Norman Maclean’s A River Runs through It speaks of the power of the word, specifically the power of the literary word to illuminate truth when he tells his son Norman, “After you finish your true stories sometime, why don’t you make up a story and the people to go with it?
“Only then will you understand what happened and why.
“It is those we live with and love and should know that elude us” (Maclean p. 104)
Maclean knows that understanding is achieved, and truth is disclosed, when one places oneself in the middle of the actions in the world; one finds, in the between, the insights that lead to understanding, and the illuminations of an artful work with the power to pierce the veil of reality.

If you ever wonder, just what is it that old man reads, and why, then the following may be of some help............

Thoughts on Michel Foucault's The Order of Things and Norman Maclean's A River Runs through It. and

In The Order of things, Michel Foucault asked, “…What if empirical knowledge, at a given time and in a given culture, did possess a well-defined regularity…if the practice of old beliefs obeyed, at a given moment, the laws of a certain code of knowledge? If, in short, the history of non-formal knowledge had itself a system?” (P. ix-x). In his study of the “sciences” of language and its grammars, of economics or wealth, and of natural science or biology, Foucault saw “the emergence between these different figures, of a network of analogies that transcended the traditional proximities” (p. x). He also saw “an epistemological space specific to a particular period.” It is his identification of “a positive unconscious of knowledge: a level that eludes the consciousness of the scientist and yet is part of scientific discourse, instead of disputing its validity and seeking to diminish its scientific nature,” that provides the impetus for his study (p. xi). He showed that “the naturalists, economists, and grammarians employed the same rules to define the objects proper to their own study, to form their concepts, to build their theories” (p. xi). These rules of formation, which were never formulated in their own right, but are to be found only in widely differing theories, concepts, and objects of study, Foucault called, somewhat arbitrarily perhaps, archaeological (p. xi). This archaeology found its beginning in a passage from Borges that shone a light on the importance of the episteme, the way of knowing, to the practice of sciences. Encountering Borges’ quotes from a Chinese encyclopedia caused Foucault “to apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that” (p. xv). He saw that, “The fundamental codes of a culture— those governing its language, its schemas of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices— establish for every man, from the very first, the empirical orders with which he will be dealing and within which he will be at home” (p. xx).
In his readings Foucault uncovered two clefts in the scheses, in the epistemes, of thought in Western culture between the Renaissance and the Classical age in the mid seventeenth century, and between the Classical age and the modern age at the beginning of the nineteenth century. “The order on the basis of which we think today does not have the same mode of being as that of the Classical thinkers” (p. xxii). He discovered in terms of the “general space of knowledge,” of its “configurations” and of “the mode of being of the things that appear in it…the series of mutations necessary and sufficient to circumscribe the threshold of a new positivity” (p. xxiii).
This positivity, unconscious but powerful nonetheless, apprehends the transition from a theory of representation, full of the potentiality of language as a medium, into an age of reflexive tabulation, where language, transparent and redundant, consists of nothing “more than what is said” (p. 43). “The totality of the learning and skills that enable one to make the signs speak and to discover their meaning, [is] hermeneutics; …the totality of the learning and skills that enable one to distinguish the location of the signs, to define what constitutes them as signs, and to know how and by what law they are linked [is] semiotics: the sixteenth century superimposed hermeneutics and semiology in the form of similitude” (p.29). “The value of language lay in the fact that it was a sign of things” (p. 33). “In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the peculiar existence and ancient solidarity of language as a thing inscribed in the fabric of the world were dissolved in the functioning of representation; all language had value only as discourse. The art of language was a way of ‘making a sign’ — of simultaneously signifying something and arranging signs around that thing” (p. 43)
No thinker of that Classical age could have thought nor written as Norman Maclean does, “The voices of the subterranean river in the shadows were different from the voices of the sunlit river ahead. In the shadows against the cliff the river was deep and engaged in profundities, circling back on itself now and then to say things over to be sure it had understood itself. But the river ahead came out into the sunny world like a chatterbox, doing its best to be friendly. It bowed to one shore and then to the other so nothing would feel neglected” (ARRtI p. 95). These words, stratified with meaning, fit neither table nor matrix, and mean so many things that in the Age of Reason they would mean nothing. Classical language contains no deep pools of profundity and rivers do not speak. Words, binary and weightlessly transparent, connect sign and signified and between, there is nothing.

We have some people who are standing up for us right now. If you don't agree with the war in Iraq or Afghanistan that's okay, you'll have an opportunity to do something about that in the coming days. But, this video is about people who are already at risk, for us. Not anyone special really, just Americans who are putting their lives on the line every day, because our country said we need you to go and do this. They went, and some came home and some didn't, of those still there some will come home and some won't. As for me, I thank them, I am proud of them and they are in my prayers. Take a minute and watch this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ervaMPt4Ha0

On occasion I run across something I deem worthy of sharing. This is one of those things. I am not Catholic; I don't necessarily agree with everything that is included, BUT, I admire the way this is presented. No excuses, no apologies, just a short video saying that these are the things we believe in, and regardless of whether you agree or not, regardless of whether you plan to vote in a way that supports these things, go, vote, vote YOUR conscience. http://www.catholicvote.com/