The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry

Notes

  • Agriculture is the foundational layer of civilizations and its erosion is a symptom of a wider societal degeneration/degradation/collapse
  • pg.9: Exploiter vs Nurturer
    • strip miner model exploiter
    • farmer model nurturer
    • exploiter specialist/expert: efficiency, money, profit, organization
    • nurturer: care, health, order, stands for character and community
    • Confucius: "If a man have not order within him / He can not spread order about him ..."
  • pg. 14: escaping work vs work as a necessary part of human condition
    • "good work our salvation and our joy"
  • pg. 21: Pros and Cons of specialization
    • disperses core functions of character: worksmanship, care, conscience, responsibility
    • creates fragility in a system
  • pg. 23:
    • Order != Organization
    • more intricate != more structure
  • Language is thinking, if we lose the words we lose the ability to think about it
  • pg. 35: Abstractions/Generalizations
    • treating every part the same is industry -> more efficient
    • abstractions are powerful but come at cost of fine-grained control
    • generalized knowledge destroys values and individual agency
    • the transition of household to consumer same as farm to factory
  • pg 85: On energy
    • humans cannot create energy; only harness/destroy/change -> the ever forward marching of entropy in the universe
    • electrical energy thought of as a current (reflects above point well)
    • energy can be destroyed by changing the form so that it cannot be used again
      • wastes become pollutants
      • nature exceptionally good at "recycling energy" (one animals waste other organisms food)
  • Technology is bringing energy to use:
    1. living things bring energy to use
    2. tools/machines are energy harnesses
    3. skills/techniques tell us how to use the above two
  • machines can enhance/elaborate skill or replace it
    • Computers enhance skill for technical/creative/morlocks individuals (neil stephenson's word from In the Beginning was the Command Line: morlocks vs eloi)
    • Computers replace skill for normies/"others"/eloi
  • pg. 95: What is skill?
    • "connection between life and tools"
    • "acknowledgment of responsibility to other lives"
    • "practical understanding of value"
    • opposite is: "ignorance of sources, dependencies and relationships"
  • pg. 123, 126: Sexuality and sexual energy
    • sexuality general and particular
    • "One cannot love a particular woman unless one love womankind - if not all womand at least other women"
    • generosity of instinct and
    • "what is exploited becomes undesirable"
    • sexuality a form of energy
    • culture requires energy to move in ?forms?
  • pg. 125: "purposeless virtue is a contradiction in terms"
    • "Virtue, like harmony, cannot exist alone"
  • pg. 151, 158, 161: Education: the general and the particular (barbell strategy)
    • "liberal" vs "practical" education -> need both
    • colleges should be a system of local institutions that respond to local needs and problems
    • modern education suffers from careerism: "rather be professionally reputable than locally effective"
    • Liberal education:
      • "one learns to order one's thoughts and to speak and write coherently by studying exemplar thinkers, speakers, and writers of the past"
      • human nature doesn't change so fast -> study history
    • Practical:
      • what works
      • what earns you money
      • is an investment -> "oriented entirely towards the future"
    • learning about vs learning from
    • liberal/library and practical/street-knowledge should be balanced like weights on a barbell. Together they train you fully
  • pg. 172: Experiment vs Experience
    • often experiments are only interested if successful
      • disregard negative results
      • shallow intelligence

    • experience interested in what works and what doesn't

  • pg. 178: Margins
    • change/interesting stuff happens at the margins
    • berlin party districts in Mitte and where else the wall went along
    • Prophets came from desert not temple
    • find more examples (write-about)
  • pg. 196: Gardens
    • having own garden is inefficient but healthy
    • digital gardens (own blog and some own infra)
    • you learn by doing this stuff
    • take ownership and preserve knowledge
  • pg. 198: Definition of "based":
    • "They are people of principle, both stubborn and adventurous, independent enough to trust their own experience and strong enough to hold in considerable isolation to truths not officially or popularly favored"
  • pg. 203: great breakdown of misleading top-level statistics
    • petrochemical industry is huge!
  • pg. 230: ngmi list of assumptions
  • pg. 233: pitfalls of a priori thinking
    • do not begin with set of predetermined ideas
    • start with particular places, people, needs and desires in mind