Space Enough, and Time

Abstraction is a powerful thing.  It works in favor of whoever can wield it, really.  Wendell Berry knows this, particularly when it comes to how we see the places around us (just as much as the people, really).  In his reflection on affection, Berry asserts that our abstraction of knowledge has contributed a great deal to what we prioritize as important.  He starts with economy and works in from there.

That we live now in an economy that is not sustainable is not the fault only of a few mongers of power and heavy equipment. We all are implicated. We all, in the course of our daily economic life, consent to it, whether or not we approve of it. This is because of the increasing abstraction and unconsciousness of our connection to our economic sources in the land, the land-communities, and the land-use economies. In my region and within my memory, for example, human life has become less creaturely and more engineered, less familiar and more remote from local places, pleasures, and associations. Our knowledge, in short, has become increasingly statistical.

Statistical knowledge once was rare. It was a property of the minds of great rulers, conquerors, and generals, people who succeeded or failed by the manipulation of large quantities that remained, to them, unimagined because unimaginable: merely accountable quantities of land, treasure, people, soldiers, and workers. This is the sort of knowledge we now call “data” or “facts” or “information.” Or we call it “objective knowledge,” supposedly untainted by personal attachment, but nonetheless available for industrial and commercial exploitation. By means of such knowledge a category assumes dominion over its parts or members. With the coming of industrialism, the great industrialists, like kings and conquerors, become exploiters of statistical knowledge. And finally virtually all of us, in order to participate and survive in their system, have had to agree to their substitution of statistical knowledge for personal knowledge. Virtually all of us now share with the most powerful industrialists their remoteness from actual experience of the actual world. Like them, we participate in an absentee economy, which makes us effectively absent even from our own dwelling places. Though most of us have little wealth and perhaps no power, we consumer–citizens are more like James B. Duke than we are like my grandfather. By economic proxies thoughtlessly given, by thoughtless consumption of goods ignorantly purchased, now we all are boomers.

Personal knowledge and statistical knowledge.  The latter abstracts and distances us.  The former helps us truly the understand the world on both sides of the window.

(Berry’s use of the term boomer at the end of the excerpt relates to those who care for location only insomuch as they can strip it of its value before moving on to the next location.  Nothing to do with boomers and busters.)

(image from onyxacademy.org)

Yesterday I wrote a bit about Wendell Berry’s “rescue” of imagination as preparation for understanding the importance of affection (which I will take as at least a form of what others might call love).  Both terms are used by Berry in “It All Turns on Affection,” a lecture given in 2012 through the National Endowment for the Humanities concerning the role of farming in America.  After refining the meaning of imagination, Berry moves on to affection.

Obviously there is some risk in making affection the pivot of an argument about economy. The charge will be made that affection is an emotion, merely “subjective,” and therefore that all affections are more or less equal: people may have affection for their children and their automobiles, their neighbors and their weapons. But the risk, I think, is only that affection is personal. If it is not personal, it is noth
ing; we don’t, at least, have to worry about governmental or corporate affection. And one of the endeavors of human cultures, from the beginning, has been to qualify and direct the influence of emotion. The word “affection” and the terms of value that cluster around it—love, care, sympathy, mercy, forbearance, respect, reverence—have histories and meanings that raise the issue of worth. We should, as our culture has warned us over and over again, give our affection to things that are true, just, and beautiful. When we give affection to things that are destructive, we are wrong. A large machine in a large, toxic, eroded cornfield is not, properly speaking, an object or a sign of affection.

I almost want to encourage anyone reading this to read that excerpt again and substitute the word love in each time you see affection (like it was 1 Corinthians 13 or something).  Berry is right, though: it is a dangerous thing to make an argument a
bout seemingly immensely practical things with an “emotional” thing like affection.  In faith circles, that would be taking the personal/emotional route and totally dismissing the apologetics route.  And maybe that’s a good thing.  (Or maybe the analogy is weak.  Hmm.)

I like the word “cluster” Berry connects with affection: love (see!), care, sympathy, mercy, forbearance, respect, and reverence.  Then it’s less than a hop, skip, and jump to things that are true, just, and beautiful.  These are things that move us, that move in us.  And Berry seems to think that culture throughout history has been tasked with “qualifying and directing” those affections that shape our “life together.”  This, of course, lines up well with the assertions of James K. A Smith (and Augustine before him) about how we are shaped by what we love (and then shape other things accordingly).  In Berry’s mind (and heart), affection is key in refraining the big economic/community issues of our time.

And so imagination followed by affection.  Tomorrow we’ll look at the role knowledge plays in Berry’s argument.  Feel free to read the rest of his essay here.

(image from commons.wikimedia.org)

What’s been interesting to me over the last few years of thinking through things like James K. Smith’s cultural liturgies concept (teased out well in You Are What You Love) is how the idea of what you love and how it shapes you is nothing new (or even, ultimately, unique to Smith).  Wendell Berry, Kentucky poet, essayist, and farm-spokesman, has had similar thoughts, some of which show up in his essay, “It All Turns on Affection.”  Affection is tied closely to, might even be synonymous with, love.  From the essay:

The term “imagination” in what I take to be its truest sense refers to a mental faculty that some people have used and thought about with the utmost seriousness. The sense of the verb “to imagine” contains the full richness of the verb “to see.” To imagine is to see most clearly, familiarly, and understandingly with the eyes, but also to see inwardly, with “the mind’s eye.” It is to see, not passively, but with a force of vision and even with visionary force. To take it seriously we must give up at once any notion that imagination is disconnected from reality or truth or knowledge. It has nothing to do either with clever imitation of appearances or with “dreaming up.” It does not depend upon one’s attitude or point of view, but grasps securely the qualities of things seen or envisioned.

I will say, from my own belief and experience, that imagination thrives on contact, on tangible connection. For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it. By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world. As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy.

Imagination hasn’t fared well in our all-too-practical way of life.  Perhaps that’s why Berry seems to try and rescue it from simply being “flights of fancy” or what in the time of King James had an air of thought set in opposition to the mind of God.  Instead, imagination is active, rooted in tangible things.  I remember learning a number of years ago (from a book I can no longer recall) that imagination is the thing that helps us hold things together, an act of faith that helps us see connections that are present but perhaps not seen.

I think this is a great rehabilitation of the term.  In Berry’s argument, it is our lack of imagination (and therefore affection) that has crippled what he sees as a key part of living well.  More on that tomorrow.

If you’ve got some time, you can read the entire essay from Berry here.

(image from natureworldnews.com)