SPACE AND SCALE. These two elements of a radical alternative are so closely related that they must be explored together. First, they establish the importance of creating a demographic and economic balance, and of defining social equity as the quality of life. Now the quantity of disposable income (to use the contemporary capitalist idiom) is a legitimate if desperately limited bench mark for evaluating the performance of any political economy. That is the essence of what capitalism calls the standard of living. It has become abundantly clear, as we have watched the MOSKLFTS CASIO tolerable, nay, even enjoyable and delightful, given...old association—an almost exhaustive biographical or historical acquaintance with every object... within the observer’s horizon. And he goes on to say that even though a place “may have beauty, grandeur, salubrity, convenience," it still cannot be comfortably inhabited by people “if it lacks memories." And in a letter to H. Rider Haggard about the effects of the migration of the English working people, Hardy wrote that, “there being no continuity of environment in their lives, there is no continuity of information, the names, stories, and relics of one place being speedily forgotten under the incoming facts of the next." From the perspective of the environmental crisis of our own time, I think we have to add to Hardy’s remarks a further realization: if the land is made fit for human habitation by memory and “old association," it is also true decay of a once superb railway system, for example, that radicals have all too easily accepted the capitalist definition of the standard of living grounded in individual income statistic as a basis for thinking about a socialist political economy. Even if one agrees that the concept of individual disposable income is a useful tool for measuring the performance of any system, it nevertheless remains true that disposable income involves social as well as individual pleasures. And radicals have not made it clear enough— not at all clear enough—that taxes spent for first-rate that by memory and association men are made fit to inhabit the land. At present our society is almost entirely nomadic, without the comfort or the discipline of such memories, and it is moving about on the face of this continent with a mindless destructiveness, of substance and of meaning and of value, that makes Sherman’s march to the sea look like a prank. Without a complex knowledge of one’s place, and without the faithfulness to one’s place on which such knowledge depends, it is inevitable that the.place will be used carelessly, and eventually destroyed. Without such knowledge and faithfulness, moreover, the culture of a country will be superficial and decorative, functional only insofar as it may be a symbol of prestige, the affectation of an elite or “in” group. Aipd so I look upon the sort of regionalism that I am talking about not just as a recurrent literary phenomenon, but as a necessity .A.merican radicals must face and answer the naughty question: do they want to manage an essentially unchanged corporate capitalist political economy as little more than especially sensitive and responsible administrators, or do they want to change the world. education (for all ages) and public services from sanitation to transport are likewise disposable income. When people increasingly choose to dispose of more of their income on private rather than social purchases, the quality of life begins to decline along an exponential curve. And, having failed to develop a clear radical conception of the quality of life, and advance it with clarity and vigor, radicals forfeit a great opportunity to confront capitalism with a devastating critique. Our failure to date, I suggest, lies in the particular kind of centralized nationalism and internationalism that radicals inherited and accepted from Bonaparte, Lincoln and Marx. So long as radicals continue to operate—thinking as well as practicing—within that idiom, they will become increasingly irrelevant because they have ceased to be radical. of civilization and of survival. / notice a prevalent tendency among my contemporaries to think of existing conditions as if they were not only undeniable, but unassailable as well, as if the highest use of intelligence were not the implementation of vision but merely the arrangement of a cheap settlement. It would appear that any fact, by virtue of being a fact, must somehow be elevated to the status of Eternal Truth. Thus if we have become a nation of urban nomads, at the expense of human society and at the world’s expense, the common anticipation seems to be that, knocking around in this way, we will sooner or later evolve an urban nomadic civilization that will correct the present destructiveness of urban nomadism. I do not believe it. I da not believe it even though I am sure that my disbelief will be thought by many people to be impractical and unrealistic. I certainly am aware that there have been great nomadic civilizations. But it seems to me that those were evolved in response to natural conditions of climate and soil, whereas our nomadic civilization has evolved in response to an economy that is based upon a deliberate wastefulness. That a desert should produce a nomadic life is perfectly understandable. I l l Hence I want to propose an alternative approach and a different agenda. My basic proposition is this: American radicals must confront centralized nationalism and internationalism and begin to shake it apart, break it down, and imagine a humane and socially responsible alternative. It simply will not do to define radicalism as changing the guard of the existing system. Therefore these propositions. 1. Radicals must initiate and sustain, in each local, state, and regional arena, a dialogue (including running for office) about how to define and implement a balance between resources and population, between town and country, and within each of those elements of the political economy. In that process, radicals must insist, as Jane J. Mansbridge, author of Beyond Adversary Democracy, has so powerfully argued, upon moving to create a human scale participatory democracy. From my experience, many people would like to reassert control over their community affairs. But given the radical disdain of such fundamental politics, they have ceded power to irrelevant conservatives. 2. That dialogue must be explicitly pointed toward restructuring American society into a confederation of regional governments based upon proportional representation and a parliamentary system within each region and the overall confederation. The various regions would duly elect representatives (and their minority shadow counterparts—the “loyal" opposition) to a confeder- .ation parliament charged with the That my own section of Kentucky—well wooded, well watered, having had originally the best of soils, and still abundantly fertile—should have produced a race of nomads is simply preposterous. It could have happened only by a series of monumental errors—in land use, in economics, in intellectual fashion. With the urbanization of the country so nearly complete, it may seem futile to the point of madness to pursue an ethic and a way of life based upon devotion to a place and devotion to the land. And yet I do pursue such an ethic and such a way of life, for I believe they hold the only possibility, not just for a decent life, but for survival. And the two concerns—decency and survival—are not separate, but are intimately related. For, as the history of agriculture in the Orient very strongly suggests, it is not the life that is fittest (by which we have meant the most violent) that survives, but rather the life that is most decent—the life that is most generous and wise in its relation to the earth. © 1970 by Wendell Berry abridged from his volume A Continuous Harmony and reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. Clinton St. Quarterly 7
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