Tragedy of the Commonwealth and the Vision of Wendell Berry, The

4. Industrialization & Technology

The industrial economy stands opposite Berry's preferred agrarian economy, the economy of the commonwealth.166 As mentioned briefly above, Berry generally opposes industrialization and "labor-replacing" technologies.167 Whereas an agrarian economy is one of subsistence and relative independence from foreign influence, stable in its diversity, and involving "activities [that] bind people to their local landscape by close, complex interests and economic ties," the industrial economy, according to Berry, "alienates people from the native landscape precisely by breaking these direct practical ties and introducing distant dependencies."168 Industrialism demands "the separation of people and places and products from their histories"-the very antithesis of a commonwealth's close connectedness.169 It is an economy "of the one-night stand,"170 creating a "scarcity of satisfaction" in order that new commodities and technologies promising, but never delivering, greater satisfaction can replace the older ones.171 Industrialism's overly consumptive nature leads to Berry's concern that overproduction, increased waste, and disregard for the local economy and environment imperil the health of the commonwealth.172

Industrialism's infatuation with the production and consumption of commodities drives its search for more "efficient" modes of production, which is to say, "laborsaving" technology. For Berry, these technologies often, though not always, contribute to the degradation of the local commonwealth as they ultimately are not intended to "save" labor, "but to replace it, and displace the people who once supplied it."173 Maintaining his defense of the localized commonwealth and its community of small farmers, shopkeepers, and workers, Berry worries that "labor saving" has been "defined for us by the corporations and the specialists, as if it involved no human considerations at all, as if the labor to be 'saved' were not human labor."174 Having allowed such a definition, "[w]e never asked what should be done with the 'saved' labor; we let the 'labor market' take care of that. Nor did we ask the larger questions of what values we should place on people and their work and on the land."175 Thus, in the industrialized economy, Berry contends, "[i]t appears that we abandoned ourselves unquestioningly to a course of technological evolution, which would value the development of machines far above the development of people."176

Industrialism and the advance of "labor replacing" machines work against the localization of the commonwealth. Displacing the small shopkeeper, removing the rural farmer to the urban factory, and untying the laborer from the landscape of his local community combine with the pervasive but remote control of the corporations and the globalization of the competitive free market to devalue the commonwealth and destroy its agrarian economy, its intimate knowledge, and its affectionate care for the land. In his effort to save the commonwealth and its environment, Berry opposes these destructive forces and writes extensively of conserving the land, restoring and protecting the local economy, and returning to a proper understanding of stewardship.