Status Updates From The Unsettling of America: ...

I don't know how Wendell Berry would feel about me listening to this in audiobook form on a smartphone while I hurtle all over the state in a car, but I will have to live with his hypothetical disappointment...

It is a rule that whatever is divided must compete. We have been wrong to believe that competition invariably results in the triumph of the best. Divided, body and soul, man and woman, producer and consumer, nature and technology, city and country are thrown into competition with one another. And none of these competitions is ever resolved in the triumph of one competitor, but only in the exhaustion of both.

We must learn again to think of our energy, not as something to be saved, but as something to be used and to be enjoyed in use. We must understand that our strength is strength of body and that this strength cannot thrive except in useful, decent, satisfying work. There is no such thing as a reservoir of bodily energy. By saving it —as our ideals of labor-saving and luxury bid us to do — we simply waste it.

To boast that now "95 percent of the people can be freed from the drudgery of preparing their own food" is possible only to one who cannot distinguish between these kinds of work. The former deputy assistant secretary cannot see work as a vital connection; he can see it only as a trade of time for money, and so of course he believes in doing as little of it as possible, especially if it involves the use of the body

Without the household -as a unifying ideal, as a practical circumstance of mutual dependence and obligation, requiring skill, moral discipline, and work -husband and wife find it less and less possible to enact their marriage. Without much in particular that they can do for each other, they have a scarcity of practical reasons to be together. They may
"like each other's company" but that is a reason for friendship.

‘Thus housewifery, once a complex discipline acknowledged to be one of the bases of culture and economy, was reduced to the exercise of purchasing power. As housekeeping became simpler and easier, it also became more boring…It became easier for her to believe that what she did was not important. And this heightened her anxiety and made her even more avid and even less discriminating as a consumer.’

"finding your-self" the pseudo-ritual by which the identity crisis is supposed to be resolved…it seems likely that the identity crisis is, one of the genres of self-indulgence…it is the easiest form of self- flattery-a way to construe procrastination as a virtue - based on the romantic assumption that "who I really am" is better in some fundamental way than the available evidence would suggest.’

‘The arguments that rise out of the machine metaphor —arguments for cheapness, efficiency, labor-saving, economic growth, —all point to infinite industrial growth and infinite energy consumption. The moral argument points to restraint. Much as we long for infinities of power and duration, we have no evidence that these lie within our reach, much less within our responsibility.‘

‘In an automated kitchen, in a gleaming, odorless bathroom, in year-round air-conditioning, in color TV, in an easy chair, the world is redeemed. The modern house is not a response to its place, but rather to the affluence and social status of its owner.’

‘the highly simplified role of the modern household with respect to the production and preparation of food: it has set itself increasingly aside from production and preparation and become more and more a place for the consumption of food produced and prepared elsewhere. The modern home, even more than the government and universities, has institutionalised the divisions and fragmentations of modern life.’

‘The consumer wants food to be as cheap as possible. The producer wants it to be as expensive as possible. Both want it to involve as little labor as possible.’