Berry on Community

I am convinced that a lack of community causes many problems in our culture. My thoughts on this are evolving, but have been heavily influenced lately by Wendell Berry, an author from Kentucky who was recommended to me by a friend because of Berry's interest in the local community.

Berry takes my concerns about lack of community a step further than I have been able to take them, and he provides a framework of language that is quite helpful. I do not see Berry as infallible on the subject. Actually, I disagree with many of his perspectives emphatically. But he has propelled my thinking to a different level, and for that I am incredibly grateful.

I will post two or three blogs on his essay, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, soon. In the meantime, here is an excerpt from this essay that I love.

...community is a locally understood interdependence of local people, local culture, local economy, and local nature.(Community of course, is an idea that can extend itself beyond the local, but it only does so metaphorically. The idea of a national or global community is meaningless apart from the realization of local communities.)

A community identifies itself by an understood mutuality of interests. But it lives and acts by the common virtues of trust, goodwill, forbearance, self-restraint, compassion, and forgiveness. If it hopes to continue on as a community it will wish to--and will have to--encourage respect for all its members, human and natural. It will encourage respect for all stations and occupations. Such a community has the power--not invariably but as a rule--to enforce decency without litigation. It has the power, that is, to influence behavior. And it exercises this power not by coercion or violence, but by teaching the young and by preserving stories and songs that tell (among other things) what works and does not work in a given place." 

 More soon...

(Thanks to Elena for the recommendation on this essay by the way. I am grateful.)