Moral Ignorance

Why not another nugget from Berry? "Moral ignorance," he says, is "self-induced" and comes with the "excuse" of "objectivity."

One of the purposes of objectivity, in practice, is to avoid coming to a moral conclusion. Objectivity, considered a mark of great learning and the highest enlightenment, loves to identify itself by such pronouncements as the following: "You may be right, but on the other hand so may your opponent," or "Everything is relative," or "Whatever is happening is inevitable," or "Let me be the devil's advocate." (The part of devil's advocate is surely one of the most sought after in all the precincts of the modern intellect. Anywhere you go to speak in defense of something worthwhile, you are apt to encounter a smiling savant writhing in the estrus of objectivity: "Let me play the devil's advocate for a moment." As if the devil's point of view will not otherwise be adequately represented.)
--Wendell Berry, "The Way of Ignorance" in The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays, p.55

Ironic, isn't it, that those who consider themselves most objective say things like "Everything is relative?"

Berry Nuggets

All of the following is drawn from Wendell Berry's essay "The Joy of Sales Resistance," which serves as the preface to his book Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community.

Berry describes the "political package" of Tolerance and Multiculturalism like this:

Quit talking bad about women, homosexuals, and preferred social minorities, and you can say anything you want about people who haven't been to college, manual workers, country people, peasants, religious people, unmodern people, old people, and so on. Tolerant and multicultural persons hyphenate their land of origin and their nationality. I, for example, am a Kentuckian-American.

On "intellectual property," he says,

As I understand it, I am being paid only for my work in arranging the words; my property is that arrangement. The thoughts in this book, on the contrary, are not mine. They came freely to me, and I give them freely away. I have no "intellectual property," and I think that all claimants to such property are thieves.

He also sees one (perhaps the only one) advantage to being a straight and white Protestant American:

I am, I acknowledge, a white Protestant heterosexual man, and can only offer myself as such. I take no particular pride in my membership in this unfashionable group, nor do I consider myself in any way its spokesman. I do, however, ask you to note, dear reader, that this membership confers on me a certain usefulness in that it leaves me with no excuses and nobody to blame for my faults except myself.

Concerning those who oppose him,

On my more charitable days, I am grateful even to my enemies, who have sharpened my mind and who have done me the service of being, as a rule, wronger than I am.