Not just self-restraint, that old killjoy, but communal restraint.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of not only individual self-discipline but also the necessity of collective responsibility in society.
Wendell Berry's quote highlights that true fulfillment and harmony in community life demand more than personal self-restraint; it calls for a communal approach to discipline and consideration for the shared well-being of society. This communal restraint can serve as a foundation for a thriving, cooperative environment where individuals prioritize the common good over mere personal satisfaction.
In practice
This quote could be used in a speech about community involvement and civic duty.
We weren't allowing our hopes to become expectations. Expectations are tempting, pleasant, maybe necessary. They are scary too, once you have had some experience. They are not necessarily and not always a bucket of smoke, but they can be and are even likely to be.
The uplands of my home country in north central Kentucky are sloping and easily eroded, dependent for safekeeping upon year-round cover of perennial plants.
A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
WE ARE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY - I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.
Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.
We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.
When, after having examined in detail the organization of the Supreme Court, one comes to consider in sum the prerogatives that have been given it, one discovers without difficulty that a more immense judicial power has never been constituted in any people.
A society that is not willing to demand a life of somebody who has taken somebody elseβs life is simply immoral.
Survival in the conventional sense of the term means to continue to live, but also to live after death.
The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints.
But then I'm one of those guys that is still a bit afraid of the telephone, its implications for conversation. I still wonder if the jukebox might be the death of live music.
I have beliefs, of course, like everyone-but I don't always believe in them.
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