[Andrew Marr: ".......as the Prince tip-toes towards a full-throated critique of consumer economics, he moves closer to some curious companions, such as the anti-free trade movement and anarcho-green organisations such as People's Global Action...."
Interestingly, Marr is pro-Blair New Labour. The Observer's Political Correspondent, he's just got the same job with the BBC.
But he's a sympathiser of Wendell Berry too: "...Wendell Berry says the problem is that America (but the same goes for us) has become 'a nation of fantasists. We believe, apparently, in the infinite availability of finite re-sources... We believe democratic freedom can be preserved by people ignorant of the history of democracy and indifferent to the responsibilities of freedom'.
Mark Jones]
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Andrew Marr welcomes the Prince's promotion of spiritual values and argues that, unwittingly or not, Charles has hit the key issue: money and markets
Sunday May 21, 2000
It is a disconcerting thing, a shaking thing, to find I share a private passion with the Prince of Wales. But there it is. The passion is for a man, a writer, a tobacco farmer, a poet and essayist from Henry County, Kentucky, whom history may remember as the single most important and influential political thinker alive today. It is unlikely you have heard of Wendell Berry. Fame is fickle and prediction mostly daft; but it is likely that your descendants, assuming they are literate, interested people, will know his name.
Berry is one of the influences on Charles's thinking on spiritual values and sustainable development, the subject of last week's Reith lecture. Charles's agonising, his large cars, personal extravagances and spiritual quest have been much mocked on these pages. Distinguished and wise scientists have been badly hurt by his generalised attacks on them. But in the longer term perhaps none of that matters so much. Charles has chosen to be part of a real world-sized political argument about power, science and control - nothing less than the direction of society - and in that argument, Berry's writing is becoming more and more influential.
A word of warning: like many great political thinkers, Wendell Berry is an extremist, in much the same way as Thoreau was. His loathing for most of the sprawl, waste and junk of modern urban life is unrestrained; his stiff-necked local pride and his constant assertion of the importance of farming, the local and the specific, put him far beyond the reach of most professional politicians. He's against big corporations, free trade, computers and industrial farming. He is outside the ordinary conversation of politics but his secret power is that he's also a prose writer of genius. Searching for his books around the house I reflected that he's one of these writers whose books one keeps pressing on friends and never getting back - and a fine poet too, with a wildness and energy in his thought that makes him a dangerous guru for anyone.
On some of these questions, including trade and admiration for science, I am on the other side of the fence. But the core of the oppositionist case put best by Berry goes wider than trade deals or pesticides. It is really about what it means to be human. The poet-farmer deals with this again and again, emphasising we are not to be defined by consumption but by our relationships with land, family and community, and above all by our capability for 'good work' - work done with care, affection, intelligence.
Somewhere, in our scientific confidence and economic giantism, we have lost the plot, stopped being whole, broken contact with the world around us. It is not an original argument -- there are clear lines running from Rousseau, with his idealised Swiss peasants, to Prince Charles. There is, or is supposed to be, a connection between ever-greater scientific specialism, the narrowing of the liberal mind, and the reduction of people to mere consumers. No whole vision, no spiritual unity, no more generous human society. The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955), with his attacks on 'mass man', is perhaps the best example of this thinking; in each generation, he argued, 'the scientist through having to reduce the sphere of his labour, was progressively losing contact with other branches of science, with that integral interpreta tion of the universe which is the only thing deserving of the names of science, culture, European civilisation'. This is close to Prince Charles today: 'Of course our descendants will have scientific and technological expertise beyond our imagining but will they have the insight or the self-control to use this wisely...?'
The prince is a very rich and unelected man whose views have blighted good people's careers, but here he asks a hugely important question - is humanity a species charging out of control, following one kind of thinking, lemming-like; or are we really sapiens, with the internal, democratic, philosophical levers to control the consequences of our own curiosity? Today, I'd say, our most striking common experience is acceleration - the speeding up of change in everyday life, the exponential growth of biological knowledge and computer power, the 24-hour financial spasms, the dizzying churn of technology. The same goes for the extinction of rival species - the biologist Edward O. Wilson speaks of the 'Hundred Heartbeat Club', his grimly witty name for the animal species which have 100 or fewer members, and are that number of heartbeats away from total extinction - eagles, Javan rhinos, Hawaiian crows, dolphin species, and so on. If the current rate of habitat destruction continues in forests and coral reefs alone, he says, half the species of animals and plants will be gone by the next century: 'Our descendants would inherit a biologically impoverished and homogenised world.'
So, for Charles to raise the question of speed and control, the duty of one generation to the next, the problem of reconciling the acceleration of today with the longer rhythms of planetary life, is something he can hardly be mocked for.
What, though, of the answer? A return to 'nature' is not it. As Charles suggests, the complexity of life on Earth ought to (and does) inspire humble awe in scientific atheists as well as spiritual believers. But mankind, inside nature, has altered it irrevocably, not least by reproducing with such exponential success. Even if we wanted to clamber back in again to the pre-industrial natural world, with its harsh choices and smaller populations, it is not possible. Nature was never stable, particularly since we were always part of it. Now, with our sprawling populations and needs, there is no return journey available - not short of the greatest catastrophe to occur to our species so far.
None of this rules out a more intelligent, knowing approach to land-use, of course: but a return to organic and sustainable farming is a slow thing, which will probably be led by the richest parts of the world and driven by consumer power. The bigger issue is consumer power itself. Charles often puts this in the context of spirituality, but he understands, surely, that to advocate self-restraint, as he does, is to fundamentally challenge consumer capitalism. It is based on appetite, consumption and waste; they are not by-products but driving forces.
Wendell Berry's ideal is a deliberately frugal farmer on the banks of the Kentucky river, who does not squander and has put decades of human sweat into his land. He is a model of self-control or, as he would put it, 'good work'. He is the opposite of mass man. Charles's position is unique, so far outside ordinary experience he can offer little practical advice.
He is a highly privileged Westerner, crammed with literary knowledge, owning good land and with the leisure and mental gifts to think. Most of the world's population are not living in plenty, have no ambition to return to peasant lives and would greet the news that their materialism was the problem with no little bemusement.
Indeed, as the Prince tip-toes towards a full-throated critique of consumer economics, he moves closer to some curious companions, such as the anti-free trade movement and anarcho-green organisations such as People's Global Action. This group, barely mentioned in mainstream journalism, originated in a protest in southern Mexico in 1994 against the North American Free Trade Association, and has held key meetings or 'encounters' in Bangalore, Geneva, Belem in the Amazon and the US. Its keenest supporters include French and Indian farmers, Indonesian trade unionists, even Ukrainian environmentalists. Its geographical reach is as impressive as that of many multi-national corporations.
This is possible thanks to the Internet, which is to this generation of anti-capitalists what the illegal printing press was to the Leninists a century ago. There are literally hundreds of links between different anti-capitalism sites and a great slew of advice, information and argument spinning round the world. It all has a tremendous idealistic and romantic appeal. One of the protest groups, Mayday 2000, describes itself as 'a maverick wild child' while the PGA itself speaks of its origins in 'the humid mists of the Chiapas' whence the rebels emerged 'using a jungle-battered laptop computer... people everywhere soon heard of the uprising'. Soon this lot will have their Che as well. Meanwhile, they use homely revolutionary saws, such as 'If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito'.
This is hardly, yet, a movement. It is more of a hubbub of concern and anger, a mood, a ragged world-wide heckle against science-driven, free-trading consumerism, which runs from Prince Charles at one extreme and anarchists at the other, with millions of trade unionists, religious groups and non-governmental organisations such as Greenpeace, Jubilee 2000, Christian Aid and the World Development Movement in the middle.
It is the inevitable reaction to the vast power of global business, riding on the back of our scientific flowering - ultimately a protest at the effects of the Enlightenment. It won't 'win'; there will be no final settlement. But it will shape choices and change the politics of the next few decades. The important thing for Prince Charles to remember is that it is not a 'safe' thing, all this, limited to spiritual musing and hesitation about science. There is now no gap between humanity on the one hand and science on the other. The real argument is between angry people and is about power, markets and democracy. It is not about 'natural values' - Charles's 'grain of nature' is a cruel, predatory cycle - but about how to regain self-restraint and an understanding of time that goes beyond fashions or five-year electoral cycles. And that's a political matter.
In one essay, Wendell Berry says the problem is that America (but the same goes for us) has become 'a nation of fantasists. We believe, apparently, in the infinite availability of finite re-sources... We believe democratic freedom can be preserved by people ignorant of the history of democracy and indifferent to the responsibilities of freedom'. Berry is a great figure because he is also a passionate democrat.
This is my last column: I am off to the BBC to report politics from there, though I hope to keep writing on other things. But it seems a good theme to end on. Prince Charles's intervention speaks to two great truths that are vital for people like me to remember in the 'who's up, who's down' world of Westminster. First, politics doesn't stop at tax rates or the result of the next election - it touches our all our futures. But second, whatever the problem, democracy will be part of the answer.
Poet who sees sermons in stones
Wendell Berry is a farmer-poet of the Patrick Kavanagh ilk who sees sermons in stones. He is a prolific writer of mystic poetry and ecological essays, a mainstream American poet.
Berry is a professor at Kentucky University and a teacher at Schumacher College, an ecological studies centre in Devon. An agricultural seer, he espouses a return to a more low-tech, considered existence, and farms tobacco, sheep and vegetables in Kentucky. One of his greatest concerns is the 'industrial eater' - typical city consumers who eat mass-produced food without knowing or caring about its origins.
Another of Berry's hobbyhorses, shared with Prince Charles, is saving rural communities. Not that everyone should turn to the Good Life:
'Anyone who understands farming would be aghast at the idea of a lot of city people rushing into the country to farm. It would be like a mass movement to play the violin.'
The Observer 21.05.00
Mark Jones
http://www.egroups.com/group/CrashList
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