I've not read much Wendell Berry, but Catherine has recently been making her way through his works and we've been talking a lot about what he has to say. The vigorous defense of local community focus, small-scale agriculture, and the inhumanity of "corporate farming" is compelling. I think it's easy to take some of his statements too far — by far the majority of Americans now live in urban or suburban locations, and a small-town existence for a population of our size is actually much harder on the environment than reasonably green cities. His fundamental critique, though, seems to revolve around the difference between exploitation and stewardship of the land. That's paired with his assertion that the corporatization of farming in our country has gone hand in hand with a profoundly destructive focus on productivity over sustainability.

When I saw that writer David Gordon was taking shots at Berry in his scathing article on Crunchy Conservatives, I wanted to check out what he had to say. To put it mildly, Gordon's statements are frustrating.

[When critiquing the competitive ethic of capitalism], Berry has confused two very different things. In a war, each combatant aims to destroy the other. But economic competition is not a war. Quite the contrary, competition in a free market is a form of social cooperation.... “Losers” are not destroyed but directed to different lines of work.

"Competition is cooperation" is a pretty novel response, I'll give him that. However, the meat of Gordon's objection is either dishonest or profoundly ignorant.  Continue reading...