The main problem with the Occupy Dartmouth kids is that none of them have the integrity that Wendell Berry has. They have gotten all these ideas in their head from reading Marx in the pleasure of Ivy League surroundings (and not in the midst of any of Marxism’s bloody wars)
Wendell Berry is a man with faults, but he is also a man of principles.
This post is about a recent panel at Dartmouth on Spirituality and the Occupy Dartmouth Movement, but before I talk about that I want to tell a story about a man named Wendell Berry.
Wendell Berry, like many of the participants in Occupy Dartmouth, is a man who has serious and fundamental worries about the present state of the American economy, the configuration of American politics, and the state of our culture. He was trained as a poet and got a job teaching creative writing at the University of Kentucky. At the age of 43, he decided to quit his job and move to a farm in his native town. He was convinced that he was participating in an economy and a way of life that was environmentally unsound and morally and culturally deficient. So he got out.
He has refused to buy a computer because it requires more energy than he thinks he needs. In his mind, such unnecessary energy use is destroying our planet. In 2009, he pulled his personal papers from the University of Kentucky because they named a new dorm after a coal company who donated money to the school.
I mention Berry because Berry is a man who has ruthlessly lived out his values. He became convinced that living normally in the modern economy is morally illicit and so he has decided to live in a radically different way. I wish I could say the same about the Occupiers.
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