Loading ...The Neocrats should read them some Wendell Berry. The world now confronts the reality that the habits of the industrial age are finally showing their true colors. The world in which we Neocrats have all grown up is based on fundamentally flawed assumptions about what human activities the planet can sustain. Berry has things to say about this, and better words to prove it to you than I have. So read him. I’ll give you two good reasons.
First, you’ll never be able to figure out whether Berry is a liberal or a conservative. In one paragraph, he sounds exactly like the deepest green hippy in Arcata, CA. In the next, you’ll swear he’s more reactionary than the hardest line of the crazy fundamentalists bred only in the American South. But through it all, he maintains a consistency of position in his argument that would make a boulder blink first. This is a man whose underling philosophy is so stable and his identification with that philosophy so deep that even where you disagree with him, you can’t for a moment disrespect him.
Second, Berry has a masterful view of what makes communities work, and he envisions a community so integrated on every level as to give anyone with access to the Revelation of Baha’u'llah pause to ask: have I really imagined what this Revelation means for the transformation of the world? I have come across few writers or thinkers who, not being part of my faith tradition, can make me understand the implications of that tradition at a profoundly different level. Berry is one.
I haven’t done Berry the justice he deserves, but I’ll close this recommendation to read him by saying this: One thing I think he misses is the need for integration at a global level. But his penetrating insights into the nature of truly functioning local communities makes me doubt that he’s missing anything.
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Thanks for the tip, Lincoln. I’ll have to check this out, but I have to say that I’m *very* suspicious of claims like these: “truly functioning local communities”. Utopian visions scare me because they don’t work and people get hurt.