Two Economies

Two Economies by Wendell Berry

“Two Economies” contrasts the all-encompassing “Great Economy” with the limited human or “little” economy. Beginning with Wes Jackson’s suggestion that the only fully comprehensive economy is the Kingdom of God, the essay argues that all creatures, processes, and values belong to an order too intricate for human beings to know completely. Humans cannot escape this order, though they may act as if they can; when they presume upon or violate it, they incur severe penalties. The Great Economy may be called the Kingdom of God, the Tao, or another traditional name, but it remains partly mysterious and beyond human accounting. Human beings nevertheless need a manageable economy of work, exchange, and provision. Such a small economy is good only when it gives priority to the larger order, recognizes nature’s sanctity, and acts within limits. The command to seek first the Kingdom of God is therefore not a rejection of worldly work, but an instruction to order human needs and economic behavior rightly. The essay stresses obligations to the future. Storing “much goods” and consuming topsoil, fossil fuel, and fossil water may seem like use in the present, but becomes theft from those who come after. A lasting economy must preserve primary goods that it did not create. Human work can add secondary value by turning trees into boards and boards into chairs, but it cannot originate the value of trees, human intelligence, or natural fertility. When people imagine that they can create value independently, money becomes false through inflation and usury, damaging the real sources of food, shelter, and livelihood. Topsoil is the chief example of a primary value. Humans cannot make it or replace it; they can only care for it by cooperating with its living processes. Soil transforms death into life, supports crops, retains and drains water, controls erosion and floods, and sustains a community of creatures. It is a quantity inseparable from quality: treating it merely as measurable material destroys the life that makes it fertile. A sound farm respects diversity and natural limits. Henry Besuden’s small flock of sheep illustrates how careful diversification can enlarge a farm’s productive capacity without straining land, animals, or household labor. Such benefits become visible when farming remains obedient to the Great Economy. The industrial economy, by contrast, imagines itself to be the only economy. It values only what it can convert into raw material and dismisses what it cannot use as useless, wild, or wasteful. It invades and pillages the larger order, especially when it imposes mechanical terms on agriculture. Industrial logic separates water retention from drainage, favors enlargement of area over diversity, and substitutes terraces, dams, ditches, tile, and other devices for the harder work of building healthy soil. Engineering devices may sometimes help, but they cannot replace restraint, patience, and the knowledge of when human action must defer to processes beyond human comprehension. This restraint is the practical meaning of Sabbath. Industrialism treats living potential as a limited fund to be mined until exhausted. It strips fertility and workmanship from land and nourishment from bread, producing commodities high in money value but low in real value. Its urgency of research and exploration arises not from free inquiry but from the desperation of an economy committed to consuming its own foundations. Its ideal of control is equally self-defeating: refusing to limit causes, it endlessly tries to manage effects. The desire to control nature while granting human appetite no limit leads to violence, explosions, pollution, and the possibility of uncontrollable catastrophe. Using Blake’s image of “Satanic” wheels turning against one another, the essay describes industrial society as setting humanity in opposition to nature. But what humans turn against eventually turns against them through erosion, floods, drouths, plague, famine, and other consequences of human provocation. A human economy can therefore be wrong in an absolute and practical sense, not merely inefficient or politically mismanaged. Its wastes and losses are not neutral trade-offs; their costs are borne by someone, sometime. The alternative is an economy in which the smaller wheel turns sympathetically within the greater. Because all members are joined and every transaction counts, maximum profit with minimum responsibility must give way to “the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption.” This ideal requires neighborly love, not abstract virtuousness. Virtues are practiced in “Minute Particulars” through competent work: good farming, forestry, carpentry, husbandry, homemaking, parenthood, and neighborhood. The essay finally rejects industrial specialization, which separates workers from products, producers from consumers, science from responsibility, and artifice from nature. There is no outside to the Great Economy, no escape from membership, and no specialization of results. Every act affects the whole. The proper arts and sciences are therefore arts and sciences of membership: ways of knowing and doing that remain joined to responsibility, community, and the common language of the places where they are practiced.

By Wendell Berry · First published 2019 · Genre: Environmental Essay, Nature Writing, Ecological Philosophy · 8,894 words

First lines

SOME TIME AGO, in a conversation with Wes Jackson in which we were laboring to define the causes of the modern ruination of farmland, we finally got around to the money economy. I said that an economy based on energy would be more benign because it would be more comprehensive.

Wes would not agree. "An energy economy still wouldn't be comprehensive enough."

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economics · localism · sustainable agriculture · environmentalism · rural life · consumerism · industrialization · community · agrarianism · ethical consumption · small farms · globalization

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