Culture and Agriculture
So I've been reading the first for chapters of this book to prepare for the Permacultures course I'm taking at the beginning of next month. The book is, 'The Unsettling of America Culture & Agriculture by Wendell Berry'. Some of this book is going right over my head, however I understand the concepts that are set forward within it even if I don't grasp the whole picture that Berry is trying to put forward. Mostly because I don't know enough about the agricultural system within the U.S. In the last chapter of this book that we were asked to read a few things jumped out at me: Chapter Four, The Agricultural Crisis As a Crisis of Culture
-- "That the discipline of agriculture should have been so divorced from other disciplines has its immediate cause in the compartmental structure of the universities, in which complementary, mutually sustaining and enriching disciplines are divided, according to "professions," into fragmented, one-eyed specialists. It is suggested, both by the organization of universities and by the kind of thinking they foster, that farming shall be the responsibility only of the college of agriculture, that law shall be in the sole charge of the professors of law, that morality shall be taken care of by philosophy department, reading by the English department, and so on. The same, of course, is true of government, which has become another way of institutionalizing the same fragmentation."
-- "However, if we conceive of a culture as one body, which it is, we see that all of its disciplines are everybody's business, and that the proper university product is therefore not the whittled-down, isolated mentality of expertise, but a mind competent in all its concerns. To such a mind it would be clear that there are agricultural disciplines that have nothing to do with crop production, just as there are agricultural obligations that belong to people who are not farmers.
A culture is not a collection of relicts or ornaments, but a practical necessity, and its corruption invokes calamity. A healthy culture is a communal order of memory, insight, value, work, conviviality, reverence, aspirations. It reveals the human necessity and the human limits."
-- "There seems to be a rule that we can simplify our minds and our culture only at the cost of an oppressive social and mechanical complexity. We can simplify our society--that is, make ourselves free--only by undertaking tasks of great mental and cultural complexity. Farming , the best farming, is a task that calls for this sort of complexity, both in the character of the farmer and in his culture. To simplify either one is to destroy it."
-- "The definitive relationships in the universe are thus not competitive but interdependent. And from a human point of view they are analogical. We can build one system only within another. We can have agriculture only within nature, and culture within agriculture. At certain critical points these systems have to conform within one another or destroy one another."
Anyway. I'm contemplating reading a bit more of this book out of curiosity but I haven't decided yet. I think I'm trying to wrap my brain around too many new concepts all at the same time. I wonder how well any of them are actually sticking. Though I have taken a break from the other book as I have not decided how to put what it dictates into practice.
After all if you are to change you're negative thinking. How do you stop yourself from thinking something? My thoughts come and go, I can not act on them but that does not stop me from thinking them. I can be quiet vicious within my own mind sometimes. But is it possibly to stop your self from thinking those things?
*poofs out*
-- "That the discipline of agriculture should have been so divorced from other disciplines has its immediate cause in the compartmental structure of the universities, in which complementary, mutually sustaining and enriching disciplines are divided, according to "professions," into fragmented, one-eyed specialists. It is suggested, both by the organization of universities and by the kind of thinking they foster, that farming shall be the responsibility only of the college of agriculture, that law shall be in the sole charge of the professors of law, that morality shall be taken care of by philosophy department, reading by the English department, and so on. The same, of course, is true of government, which has become another way of institutionalizing the same fragmentation."
-- "However, if we conceive of a culture as one body, which it is, we see that all of its disciplines are everybody's business, and that the proper university product is therefore not the whittled-down, isolated mentality of expertise, but a mind competent in all its concerns. To such a mind it would be clear that there are agricultural disciplines that have nothing to do with crop production, just as there are agricultural obligations that belong to people who are not farmers.
A culture is not a collection of relicts or ornaments, but a practical necessity, and its corruption invokes calamity. A healthy culture is a communal order of memory, insight, value, work, conviviality, reverence, aspirations. It reveals the human necessity and the human limits."
-- "There seems to be a rule that we can simplify our minds and our culture only at the cost of an oppressive social and mechanical complexity. We can simplify our society--that is, make ourselves free--only by undertaking tasks of great mental and cultural complexity. Farming , the best farming, is a task that calls for this sort of complexity, both in the character of the farmer and in his culture. To simplify either one is to destroy it."
-- "The definitive relationships in the universe are thus not competitive but interdependent. And from a human point of view they are analogical. We can build one system only within another. We can have agriculture only within nature, and culture within agriculture. At certain critical points these systems have to conform within one another or destroy one another."
Anyway. I'm contemplating reading a bit more of this book out of curiosity but I haven't decided yet. I think I'm trying to wrap my brain around too many new concepts all at the same time. I wonder how well any of them are actually sticking. Though I have taken a break from the other book as I have not decided how to put what it dictates into practice.
After all if you are to change you're negative thinking. How do you stop yourself from thinking something? My thoughts come and go, I can not act on them but that does not stop me from thinking them. I can be quiet vicious within my own mind sometimes. But is it possibly to stop your self from thinking those things?
*poofs out*