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<DIV><FONT face=Arial>[Andrew Marr: <STRONG>".......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...."</STRONG></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>Interestingly, Marr is pro-Blair New Labour. The
Observer's Political Correspondent, he's just got the same job with the BBC.
</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>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'. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>Mark Jones]</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><STRONG><FONT face=Arial>
<HR noShade SIZE=1>
<BR><BR>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 <BR></FONT></STRONG><FONT
face=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif><BR><STRONG>Sunday May 21, 2000</STRONG>
<BR><BR>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.
<P>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.
<P>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.
<P>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.
<P>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...?'
<P>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.'
<P>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.
<P>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.
<P>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.
<P>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.
<P>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.
<P>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.
<P>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'.
<P>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.
<P>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.
<P>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.
<P>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.
<P><B>Poet who sees sermons in stones</B>
<P>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.
<P>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.
<P>Another of Berry's hobbyhorses, shared with Prince Charles, is saving rural
communities. Not that everyone should turn to the Good Life:
<P>'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.' </P>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman">The Observer 21.05.00</FONT></P>
<P></FONT><BR><FONT face=Arial>Mark Jones<BR></FONT><A
href="http://www.egroups.com/group/CrashList"><FONT
face=Arial>http://www.egroups.com/group/CrashList</FONT></A></P></DIV></BLOCKQUOTE></BODY></HTML>