Text Study 2: Wendell Berry

My second text study was an essay written by Wendell Berry in 1988 titled “The Work of Local Culture.” In it, he talks about really close communities of the sort that are very rare these days, because people don’t have the same roots to their place and knowledge of local culture, and as a result, young people move away from their hometowns and never go back.

The first thing that popped out at me was the high value Berry placed on good old-fashioned neighborliness. A good local community depends on people knowing and trusting one another, supporting and helping each other out, and is shaped from the inside, not by anything external. To illustrate the kind of close local community he was talking about, Berry told of a group of old neighborhood fogeys who would sit around in a field in Kentucky and just talk, and tell stories, even stories they’d all heard before. The kids would hear these stories, and in that way, local memory, and local culture, would live on. I think this is an important chunk of the passing down of knowledge thing I was talking about last week. These people didn’t have any money, but that didn’t matter to them. They had each other to support and help each other out, and they created their own entertainment. This reminds of Charles saying in my interview with him that real wealth has nothing to do with money, real wealth is having true friends.

Berry expresses his sadness and frustration that everybody is always moving away from their hometowns and families to big cities to get educated and be the biggest, most glorious and rich thing they can be. Everyone tries to move “up” as if it’s the only good direction to go, leaving big holes in the small but important spots. Those sort of insignificant things people do are often actually extremely significant in their obscurity, and a good local culture with people that are familiar with each other and the things they do, will appreciate those little things. While he was talking about education, he also showed a lot of disdain for “experts,” in this specific case, “educators.” He complains about how people are no longer educated to be effective members of their community, only to leave home and make tons of money. Before this was the prevalent attitude, education was centered more around the home as well, which the “experts” are now saying they’ve figured out that home is an important place to learn, and families should be involved in their children’s education. This is annoying because that’s the way it was done for years and years, before it was all ruined. They didn’t tell us anything new, they only hijacked old local culture and made it external, rather than the internally shaped thing it was before. I definitely feel the same annoyance for expertise as well. I’d rather look around me to the body of local knowledge that’s been cultivated forever by a community, than look up to some distant expert, who might not even be helpful. I think my favorite sentence from the whole thing is this: “the only true and effective ‘operator’s manual for spaceship earth’ is not a book any human will ever write; it is hundreds of thousands of local cultures.” Local culture is not only something I want for myself, but for the entire world, too. It breaks my heart when I hear about all those hundreds of thousands of old and diverse cultures disappearing as westernization and homogeneity creeps over them. I don’t even care if I never hear a thing about these cultures, I just want them to exist.

The hardest question the text raised for me was about Home. Home is something I’ve always known is important to me, but I’ve never teased out what it really means as far as my beliefs go. Having my own place to be comfortable and spend time in is really important to me, and having someplace you can always go back to. Berry talks about how sad it is that young people leave their hometowns and their parents and never return, and it made me think about whether I’m going to stick around Seattle forever. I definitely want to go places and travel, and I’ve dreamed of doing so for as long as I can remember, but I never could imagine living permanently in anyplace other than the Northwest. I’ve spent my entire life here, and most of my family is either in Seattle or Portland.