It all Turns on Affection

It all Turns on Affection by Wendell Berry

“It All Turns on Affection” argues that durable human and ecological well-being depends on affection for particular places, people, and forms of work. The author begins with family history: in 1907 his grandfather’s tobacco crop brought no profit after transportation and commission costs, revealing the power of the American Tobacco Company’s monopoly over small farmers. This experience helped form a family commitment to small farmers, soil conservation, and land-conserving economies. Using Wallace Stegner’s terms, the essay contrasts “boomers,” who “pillage and run” in pursuit of wealth and power, with “stickers,” who remain in a place, care for it, and love the life they have made there. James B. Duke represents the boomer: his corporate success depended on reducing farmers to impersonal quantities. The author’s grandfather represents the sticker: though burdened by debt, he stayed on his farm, repaired erosion caused by a badly timed corn planting, and valued his fields more than distant scenery. The essay identifies the central failure of industrial economics as a failure of imagination. Imagination is not fantasy but a clear, sympathetic knowledge rooted in tangible contact. People can responsibly inhabit a place only by imagining its unique character and the human and nonhuman lives within it. Imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection, and affection makes possible a neighborly, conserving economy. Affection must be directed toward what is true, just, and beautiful; it cannot properly attach itself to destructive machinery or poisoned, eroded land. Corporate industrialism, by contrast, treats land, labor, and communities as abstractions. It separates economic calculation from the health of the land-community, assumes that farmers and rural populations can be displaced without consequence, and accepts ecological and social damage as the price of progress. The author insists that the fate of land and people cannot be separated: abuse of one necessarily harms the other. He advocates stable, restorative, locally adapted economies of family-sized farms, shops, and trades. The argument challenges the modern belief that science, technology, finance, and economic growth can overcome all limits. Economy properly means household management and the careful husbanding of the goods by which people live. Effective ownership, as distinguished from merely legal ownership, requires personal and limited control; a small farm may permit intimate responsibility, while a share in a giant corporation transfers control to distant powers. Corporate ownership has displaced small ownership and gained the practical right to destroy land and burden downstream communities. Industrialism’s promises have been accompanied by ruined communities, damaged soils and ecosystems, species extinction, pollution, wasted fuels and waters, ugliness, and increasingly destructive war. Sustainability requires not only the natural cycle of birth, growth, death, and decay, but also a cultural cycle in which old and young people sustain local memory through continuing conversation. Nature’s fertility cycle turns by natural law; the cultural cycle turns on affection. The author argues that modern people have become participants in an absentee economy, relying on statistical knowledge rather than personal knowledge. Large numbers and remote systems exceed the scale at which human minds can imagine consequences or act responsibly. One neighbor’s hardship or one eroded gully can move the heart more powerfully than immense statistics. Human undertakings must therefore remain within a humane scale, closer to a neighborhood or small community than to global quantities managed by machines. Industrial “mobility” is portrayed as displacement and social unsettlement rather than genuine improvement. Rapid technological revolutions have weakened families, communities, local institutions, and local economies while making people dependent on fossil fuels, corporate products, and cycles of obsolescence. Genuine correction must arise both from the limits imposed by depleted nature and from efforts to rebuild local economies, especially food economies, that reconnect producers, consumers, causes, and effects within neighborhoods. Market price cannot measure everything. Land, ecological health, and the means of life possess an absolute value recognized by need and by affection. Good care of land cannot rest on morality alone, though destruction is morally wrong; its deepest and most reliable motive is informed, practical affection. Drawing on Howards End, the essay finds in Margaret Schlegel’s statement, “It all turns on affection now,” its central principle. Against materialism, bigness, mechanical thought, and expedient realism, affection joins knowledge to the heart and guides good work toward hope. The author calls economy itself an art: the making of human households on earth through kindly adaptation to ecosystems and neighborhoods. Though industrial economics has displaced millions from land and damaged both country and people, this outcome is not inevitable. Humans need not live as if they are alone.

By Wendell Berry · First published 2019 · Genre: Essay Collection, Environmental Nonfiction, Agrarian Writing · 11,079 words

First lines

"Because a thing is going strong now, it need not go strong for ever," [Margaret] said. "This craze for motion has only set in during the last hundred years. It may be followed by a civilization that won't be a movement, because it will rest upon the earth. " / E. M. Forster, Howards End (1910)

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essays · environmentalism · agrarianism · rural life · community · localism · sustainability · land stewardship · industrialization · economics · education · democracy

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