Uneven Ground Read Online Free PDF Page A

economic development that have dominated American life for the last century and that have produced the challenges that we currently face, or do we reconsider the meaning of the good life and build an economy and society that are based on a different set of values? Earlier in our history we witnessed two great transitions that promised progress and prosperity for the region, first at the turn of the twentieth century, when industrialization came to the mountains, and then after World War II, when government programs promised to bring Appalachia into a Great Society. Neither unregulated, free-market growth nor federal social engineering has eliminated the persistent problems of the region. This is because Appalachia’s problems are systemic, and reform policies to uplift the region’s people and integrate the region’s economy into the mainstream have failed to address these systemic problems. Our current social and environmental challenges will not yield to the incremental reform politics of the past century if we approach them with the same assumptions that have guided past efforts. The problems facing Appalachia today require a fundamental rethinking of our political economy and a deeper reexamination of our values and culture.
    These challenges, of course, are not limited to Appalachia. A growing number of our deepest thinkers (economists, scientists, historians, and philosophers worldwide) have questioned the direction of contemporary life and challenged the ethics and sustainability of consumercapitalism. Writers such as Bill McKibben, Gus Speth, David Korten, Wendell Berry, Jim Wallis, David Shi, and a host of others have called for a kind of cultural revolution that redefines our American economy, society, civic life, and relationship to the natural world. 1 At the heart of the systemic changes that must occur if we are to avoid environmental catastrophe, global violence, and widespread despair, they suggest, is a “new consciousness,” or as Gus Speth has argued, “a reorientation of what society values and prizes most highly.” 2 These modern-day critics call for a cultural turn away from a received value system in which progress equals growth at any cost, wealth is measured only in terms of money, people and communities are expendable, and greed is good.
    These writers don’t ignore the need for political action and institutional change, but they recognize that changing public policy and structures in our time requires a more radical transformation of our values and culture, a deep change that stirs people to act in both private and public ways. This transformational change, notes the economist David Korten, requires the building of “a powerful social movement based upon a shared understanding of the roots of the problem and a shared vision of the path to its resolution.” 3
    Distinguishing between deep, ideological change within the dominant culture and behavioral change of those on the margins of the system separates these social prophets from other critics. The libertarian Charles Murray, for example, has recently blamed America’s “coming apart” on the degeneration of white, working-class culture from the supposed “founding virtues” of hard work, marriage, and religion. Murray blames the working poor themselves for rising unemployment, neighborhood crime, and illegitimacy. 4 Ironically, the assumptions about culture in Murray’s analysis are not far removed from those of the socialist Michael Harrington whose 1962 book,
The Other America
, helped rediscover American poverty and Appalachia. 5 Harrington saw America’s poor in general and Appalachians in particular as constituting a nation within a nation, people who represented a different way of life from that of the middle-class mainstream. Both authors based their views on the idea of a “culture of poverty” and assumed that it was the values of the poor that were deficient.