Faustian Economics

Faustian Economics by Wendell Berry

“Faustian Economics” argues that the dominant response to the end of cheap fossil fuel and other foreseeable shortages has been denial, profit-seeking schemes, and faith that science or technology will preserve an “American way of life” founded on consumption, waste, and limitless growth. This belief mistakes human beings for limitless creatures and treats greed as an honorable economic motive. The resulting economy has no place for thrift, temperance, ecological return, responsibility, or restraint, and therefore becomes destructive by definition. The essay criticizes the conventional language of industrial development, which promises jobs, security, clean energy, and environmental friendliness while assuming that resources can be consumed ever faster. Such optimism ignores the absurdity of measuring security by how long intensified consumption can continue. A limited world cannot sustain limitless wants, wealth, resources, energy, debt, technology, or progress. The desire for limitlessness necessarily produces violence, waste, war, and destruction, while reducing moral life to efficiency and freeing people from obligations to neighbors, communities, and places. The author contends that monetary wealth increasingly fails to represent real wealth: land, resources, workmanship, and durable care. The work most urgently needed—neighborliness and caretaking—cannot be accomplished by large machines, remote control, or vast energy use. As industrial assumptions fail, people are being forced to recognize themselves as limited creatures in a limited world. This need not be a condemnation. Human traditions define people as capable of accepting natural limits and choosing cultural limits through stewardship, generosity, loyalty, friendship, care, and love. Freedom, the essay argues, is wrongly understood as escape from restraint. Because “free” is related to “friend,” freedom properly implies the faithful connections through which people set one another free. Human identity lies not in isolated selfhood but in deliberately maintained relationships. Christopher Marlowe’s Faustus becomes the central figure for the modern economic predicament. Faustus seeks all knowledge, power, and nature’s treasure, selling his soul for apparent mastery. Mephistophilis defines hell as limitless: wherever the damned are, hell is. Faustus’s rejection of ordinary limits, including marriage and family attachments, mirrors a culture that treats unrestricted desire as liberation. Milton’s Raphael similarly warns that knowledge requires temperance: knowledge beyond what the mind can rightly contain turns wisdom into folly. Knowledge without measure is dangerous. Religious and cultural traditions matter here because they challenge the selfishness of individual life and ask what humans are obliged to do and refuse to do. The Declaration of Independence is cited as assigning human equality and rights to a Creator rather than government. The deepest fear is not merely death or extinction, but survival through inhumanity. A genuinely human society must recognize limits: it must refuse such acts as war on civilians, detention without fair trial, and torture. The phrase “free market” exposes the corruption of freedom, since unlimited power for some produces powerlessness for others. The essay contrasts veterinarians whose dependence on patented drugs makes treatment economically harmful to farmers with an elderly farmer who rents land on a crop-share basis. In the latter arrangement, landlord and renter share good and bad years alike. This “community economy” joins their fates and interests, unlike a predatory economy in which powerful sellers profit at the expense of vulnerable buyers. Scientists and technicians have often served community-destroying enterprises by calling themselves agents of progress. What is needed instead are sciences and technologies of limits, domesticity, and “homecoming,” working within the contexts of communities, neighborhoods, and natural places. Outward expansion, whether in farm debt, war, or corporate gigantism, is not automatically improvement. Faustus and Satan show the loneliness and doom of those who refuse subordination to any proper limit. Limits are not confinement but sources of form, relationship, meaning, and abundance. An ecologically intact farm, forest, or ecosystem can be inexhaustible despite being bounded; a small place can sustain lifelong work, learning, beauty, and pleasure. Recovery requires abandoning fantasies of human omniscience and omnipotence and learning to make the most of what people are, have, and have been given. The arts offer a model because they gain richness within accepted boundaries. Paintings, plays, music, poems, and stories are limited in form, yet can remain inexhaustibly meaningful. Sustainable economic landscapes likewise require the intricate living complexity of ecosystems, achieved through skilled agriculture, animal husbandry, forestry, and the art of living. Unlike scientific experiments, which can be followed by more experiments, destructive uses of land and resources cannot simply be redone. Soil lost to bad agriculture, mountains and forests destroyed for coal, and petroleum already wasted are irrecoverable. “Peak oil” thus signifies the end of the delusion that there will always be more. The rational response is to slow down, avoid catastrophe, assess alternative energy realistically, and reshape economic life according to the tolerances of earthly places. Where there is no more, the necessary task is to make the most and best of what remains.

By Wendell Berry · First published 2019 · Genre: Essay, Environmental Nonfiction, Ecological Criticism · 4,525 words

First lines

THE GENERAL REACTION to the apparent end of the era of cheap fossil fuel, as to other readily foreseeable curtailments, has been to delay any sort of reckoning. The strategies of delay, so far, have been a sort of willed oblivion, or visions of large profits to the manufacturers of such "biofuels" as ethanol from corn or switchgrass, or the familiar unscientific faith that "science will find an answer. " The dominant response, in short, is a dogged belief that what we call "the American way of life" will prove somehow indestructible. We will keep on consuming, spending, wasting, and driving, as before, at any cost to anything and everybody but ourselves.

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economics · environmentalism · agrarianism · sustainability · capitalism · consumerism · industrialization · ecology · rural life · localism · ethical economics · natural resources

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