Passionately Engaged Gentlemen

Reading Wendell Berry is satisfying to me beacuse of his acute specificity of articulation when it comes to complex issues. Many of the problems he mentions in plain speak take other academics pages and pages to excogitate. Part of it is his brazenness is fearlessness to state his opinion, and to state it as blunt argument. We need to get closer to the land, and localize our farm industry, or things are going to get worse. He doesn't waver on this. His distaste for big business and the overarching 'fall from Eden' feeling invoked by his writing are easy to get behind.

I liked how in class we challenged its applicability to our day and age. Not only is he still right about what is happening, but it has gotten so much worse that we are at a point where we are much more helpless to it, and it is much more ubiquitous. His arguments have bounced around for forty years, and have been fleshed out ad nauseum and even more articulately by a sleu of geniuses, yet the changes have not taken place. Capital greed has won the day, and our (humans' and the land's) health has suffered because of it. We didn't come to a fruitful conclusion on what to do, though giving up certainly wasn't the answer.

This brings me to Thom Riser's presentation. He also suggested we don;'t become discouraged by the state of the world. It is strange, he seemed to blend work and play while keeping them separate at the same time. His work was very different from his play, and it seemed to take president over other things. For instance, he didnt start doing art or have kids until he was stable financially. He also didn't skateboard while in college. It seems like the work ethic point was his strongest. He just worked really hard at Math and Engineering, and put that work ethic into the rest of his life when it was available to him. He definitely kept his free attitude in life, but he also had a stable and specific business handed to him, and focused on security. (going to school again immediately after Guilford, for example.) That part worried me a little. It implied that if we want to do something of that calibur we need a lot more schooling. I guess thats true. There is just an overarching feeling for me that he is a poster child for the status quo. He went to school until he could be a big part of production, and he sequestered his creative side to the household. He felt wierd about his art being public, for example. He reserved enjoyment for the home, and balance of work and play was still balance of separate things. Also, he didn't go very far into how he made his business more positive on the world/more sustainable. Perhaps he didn't. Taking it full circle, he seems to imply that we shouldn't worry about those wider issues to where it keeps us from enjoying life. That is true. He did talk a little about fostering communication in his neighborhood. But it wasn't a promising story. anyway....

Yvon Chouinard was a total badass. That is unquestionable. I loved his life story, his growing up and trying everything he encountered, tending towards the challenging and extreme. But I agree with most of the class that the book left a lot to be desired, and that it became a sort of advertisement. We must, however, place his story in its proper historical context. He was the first to use organic cotton, kind of invented maternity leave, and was good to his workers *(managers, not foreign labor, as we talked about)... But overall I found his outlook very positive. The way he held sessions with all his managers about the philosophy of the company was really good. There was no compromising quality and stweardship for profit. And it bears repeating, he was a total badass.