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.