Page 12 - Introducing The Gratitudes

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INTRODUCING
THE GRATITUDES
Field Guides to Learning and Living Everyday Values
Here, then, is a great paradox: the clock was invented by men who wanted to devote themselves more rigorously to God; and it ended as the technology of greatest use to men who wished to de- vote themselves to the accumulation of money. Technology al- ways has unforeseen consequences, and it is not always clear, at the beginning, who or what will win, and who or what will lose.
A similar example is a story told by John McKnight, which was inspired by E.F. Shumacher:
“In 1673 Father Marquette encountered a village in Wisconsin sur- rounded by fields that had provided maize, beans, and squash
It took the Europeans and their new technology just one generation to make the prairie into a desert. The Sauk people, who knew how to sustain themselves on the prairie, were banished to another kind of desert called a reservation.
for the aboriginal Sauk people for genera- tions reaching back into unrecorded time. “When European settlers moved into Sauk territory in the 1840s, the government forced the native Sauk people out. These new settlers brought John Deere’s new in- vention, the steel plow, with them and used it to open the area to a new kind of agricul- ture. They ignored the traditional ways of the Sauk Indians and used their sodbusting tool for planting wheat.
“It took the Europeans and their new technology just one gen- eration to make the prairie into a desert. The Sauk people, who knew how to sustain themselves on the prairie, were banished to another kind of desert called a reservation. And even they forgot about the techniques and tools that had sustained them for gen- erations.
“And that is how it was that three deserts were created – the Sauk prairie, the reservation, and the memories of the people.
“More than a century later, the land of the Sauks is now being populated by the offspring of a second wave of European farm- ers who learned to replenish the soil through regenerative prac- tices that are probably very similar to those that enabled the Sauk people to be so productive.”
■ The Things We Need to Thrive
The English writer George Orwell remarked that the average per- son in the late 20th century was about as naive as was the average person in the Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages people believed in the authority of their religion, no matter what. In the 21th cen- tury we believe in the authority of science, no matter what.
The world in which we live is very nearly incomprehensible to most of us. There is almost no fact or story – whether actual or imagined – that will surprise us for very long, since we have no comprehensive and consistent picture of the world which would make the fact or story appear as an unacceptable contradiction. We believe because there is no reason not to believe. No social, political, historical, metaphysical, logical or spiritual reason. We live in a world that, for the most part, makes no sense to us. In a world without spiritual or at least intellectual order, nothing is