After talking with Liberty about my summer reading, I’ve decided that I’m going to alternate between Berry’s collection of short stories titled That Distant Land and his collection of essays titled The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (ed. Norman Wirzba). I just finished reading the essay titled “The Unsettling of America,” in which Berry sheds the dichotomy between conqueror and victim for the terms exploitation and nurture.
Let me outline as briefly as I can what seem to me the characteristics of these opposite kinds of mind. I conceive a strip miner to be a model exploiter, and as a model nurturer I take the old-fashioned idea or ideal of a farmer. The exploiter is a specialist, an expert; the nurturer is not. The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The exploiter’s goal is money, profit; the nurturer’s goal is health—his land’s health, his own, his family’s, his community’s, his country’s. Whereas the exploiter asks of a piece of land only how much and how quickly it can be made to produce, the nurturer asks a question that is much more complex and difficult: What is its carrying capacity? (That is: How much can be taken from it without diminishing it? What can it produce dependably for an indefinite time?) The exploiter wishes to earn as much as possible by as little work as possible; the nurturer expects, certainly, to have a decent living from his work, but his characteristic wish is to work as well as possible. The competence of the exploiter is in organization; that of the nurturer is in order--a human order, that is, that accommodates itself both to other order and to mystery. The exploiter typically serves an institution or organization; the nurturer serves land, household, community, place. The exploiter thinks of numbers, quantities, “hard facts”; the nurturer in terms of character, condition, quality, kind.(39)
Berry prefers these terms, in part, because they “describe a division not only between persons but also within persons” (39). When I consider this division in my professional life, I have to confront the fact that I serve--in some capacity--“an institution or organization.” Thankfully, my role as professor and director of a writing center place me in the service of the people who come to the university. I get to be one of the nurturers (I hope) within the institution. But, I can’t help wondering when and how I slide into the role of exploiter. For example, when do I find myself thinking in terms of the writing center (as institution) rather than the writers we seek to serve? When do I find myself thinking of my students in terms of “how much and how quickly [they] can be made to produce”? To what degree does the nature of the institution (generally or specifically) enable me to think, act, and live as nurturer rather than exploiter?
A classroom of students can respond just as unpredictably as a piece of land, and that response is tied to a whole bunch of variables--some of which are outside of the farmer’s/teacher’s influence. But the analogy breaks down when one considers that those students--individually and collectively--have a will that one doesn’t find in a piece of land. Students, too, can find themselves wrestling with the divisions between exploiter and nurturer. Thus, in addition to self-examination, one must end up asking how to help shape a community that tends toward nurturing.
Berry asserts that the answers (to his questions, at least) "are to be found in our history: in its until now subordinate tendency of settlement, of domestic permanence" (45). What does "settlement" look like for a professor? For a student? For a writing center? For communities--like institutions of higher education--that depend upon recurrent waves of students with an ambitious and decidedly unsettled eye toward the horizon?
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