Mielot Alan Mitchell

Berry on Language, Work, and Reality 13 February 199

In his Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, Wendell Berry explores the contemporary gap

between abstract and real-world economics. While he argues that people have become

preoccupied with useless information instead of useful work, he also introduces a series of

dichotomies that goes beyond community economics and touches on the fundamental

relationship between the words we speak and thS mean~. This relationship functions to

defU::ur perception of reality, and Berry worries that global industries are controlling that I

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perception. His opening statement that "This is a book about sales resistance" (xii) belies the

difficult philosophic (and philological) tensions underpinning many of Berry's ideas.

In resisting sales, according to Berry, we must resist "the language ... and categories of 0
this ubiquitous sales talk" (xii) and separate what we are told we need from what we really (

need. Berry seems to posit himself as a steward not only of the Kentucky outback, but also of

words, as though he and other writers were warring "against salesmen. This "first duty of

writers" implies a disjunction between language and reality, in which to need becomes to want,

and a person devolves into a "human component." It is not surprising that Berry, a poet, concerns

himself with language, but the extent to which language affects his notions of reality and \)

political economy is remarkable. In his preface and throughout his book, Berry assails

salespeople and other figures in an elite academic-corp orate-governmental cabal who have

used language not to convey reality, but to disguise it. Worse still, Berry fears the language of

the elite has taken over the language of the common person, and their own words have lost a

true meaning. For Berry, this problem of language translates into a rift between the perceived

world and the actual life-world.

Under the impression that people have become disconnected from the reality of their

lives, and have succumbed to an identity "invented" (xii) by the elite, Berry hopes to reunite

his readers with lives of self-determined significance. To do so, he must encourage his readers

to dispense w~y of the assumptions they hav: dev~d about lif~ ~i1omm
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In his preface, "The Joy of Sales Resistance", Berry offers a pointedly reductive view of the

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oppostition's opinions on matters ranging from education and multiculturalism to economics and

free trade. Berry's sarcastic tone and incessant list-making presents to the reader, in pre-

packaged form, a system of beliefs that has already been sold to them by the institutional I ,Q<f (
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The lists and outlines, Berry shows, come specially designed for apathetic citizens who
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"are expected to think and do and provide nothing for themselves" (xii). In presenting
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everything from car options to political agendas in conveniently packaged forms, salesmen are
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able to reduce the complexity of a given item to its most salient components, without ever

admitting its entirety. For example, Berry suggests, the issue of education might be reducted to

a sixteen-piece plan held together with a vague logic that ignores the details, but concentrates

on the manage~
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Ule palabtbltr.'13erry contends that such reductions are dangerous, since

the language used to make them inherently subtracts from the reality of the issue. The public's

desire for increasingly digestable forms of beliefs undermines the necessary knowledge relevant

to an informed decision. When a salesman presents a package deal, he implies that the

package contains everything one needs. His language does not accommodate variance, opposing

opinion, or even complexity. Reality, by contrast, comprises all these and more, and Berry
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argues that the language of the salesperson has substituted the package for reality.

Berry suspects that real intelligence and wisdom have been supplanted by mere images

of each. An education is not so important as the appearance of one. Language, too, plays a role

in building the illusion of intelligence, as with the society of experts (many of whom make up

the institutional elite) who "speak a language that is intelligible only to other people in their

field" (xiii). By being unintelligible to outsiders one likely will give the impression either of

madness or genius, and too often, suggests Berry, people assume the latter. As Berry points out,

being smart in this sort of way pushes people to make use of their "intelligence" in order to

prove that they are actually smart. The experts then allow only tangible effects as signs of

intelligence. For a professor, "the mark of a goof teacher is that he or she spends most of his or

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her time doing research and writing many books and articles" (xiii). Again, such figures use

their expert language to construct the image of the "good teacher." On a macro level, the more

the faculty of a university produces, the better the university: "A good school is a big school"

(xiv).l The real-world side effect of this mentality is a measurable reduction in autonomous

forms of knowledge, or the intelligence needed to live a free and rewarding life. While one

could argue that such a life is not necessary in a system that favors a few elites and many

white- and blue-collar drones, Berry might retort that lacking real knowledge eventually will

bring society into stasis, precisely the condition the modern salesmen try to avoid. When the

experts become experts not in their purported "field," but only experts in image-making and

wordpl~:hlOwledge will cease to matter.

The way this mentality plays out in relation to the environmentand economy is of

special interest to Berry. Believing that much of America has lost touch with its the ground on

which it makes its home, Berry advocates a simple lifestyle that concentrates on local, rather

than universal or global issues. Berry argues that the individual cannot effectively relate to

the entire world and still maintain any reality-grounded notion of what it is like. He describes

our current economy as "absentee," meaning that people do not draw connections between the

numbers and reality, or one action and its effects. When our idea of natural resources

encompasses all the globe, rather than our immediate surroundings, we try to reduce it to a

digestable size, much the same way the salesman ignore the complexity of issues like education

and government. Thinking globally militates against acting locally, Berry says, because we

cannot conceive globally without resorting to artificial or distortive means of dealing with

reality, such as economics. Using statistics and bits of information to construct the world is

easier than trying to envision the totality of the situation. The language of experts on economy I
IBerry's discussion of education recalls my experience as a first-year student at the University
of Richmond. The president of the University will be remembered as a man who greatly
improved the school's reputation of while doing very little to improve the ~ of education
there. He did so through essentially selling his product, the school, to wealthy !
philanthropists and big business. While the school itself is not a large one, it prides itself on7 M
offering "all the advantages of a larger school", with the intimacy of a small, private, elite '

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and resources package the earth as though it were a commercial item. Lost in a haze of

percentages and ratios, citizens detach themselves from their immediate surroundings. For

Berry, economics revolves around the home. As such, he does not require

understand his environment, since "language [is] incapable of giving a tnt

relation to the world" (34). Because the language of experts cannot capture creek, rivers,

mountain and oceans, or even describe them in real terms, Berry looks for a way to connect with

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his world, grow from it, and not damage it. He concludes that "the ~na~~f

to this everywhere different and differently named earth i( 'work'" (ts . a- ou~

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interaction with his home place, Berry comes to an understanding of at reality is. Th

steward of language becomes the steward of the earth.

In keeping with his argument that the language of salespeople detaches the general

public from its surroundings ("No settled family ... has ever called its home place an

'environment'), Berry posits that work is the only way to reassociate with the land and our

place in it. "The closer we live to the ground we live from, the more we know about economic •
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life" (39), he says, indicating that as it stands, most of us live far from the ground and know ry;:.

very little about economic life. Living close to the ground-working-is a step in the avoidancV. ~ \

of the ubiquitous salestalk Berry encourages us to resisy1n that sense, simple work and hO~~ •

economics is sales resistance, and in this resistance Berry finds his joy. I. ;
In his essays, Berry misses some important points that would make it difficult to put

his advice into effect, but his discussion of language and its manipulation by salespeople and

experts should not be underestimated merely because of his alternately sarcastic and somewhat

utopic tone. Even if we should not abandon the cities in favor of a few acres of farmland, the

condition of American society could benefit from realigning words with their meaning and

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resisting efforts to create disjuntions between reality and language. If Berry is arguing for the

preservation of land, he also argues for the preservation of knowledge.