Standards for Good Solutions, Part 2

This will be the last post that focuses specifically on Wendell Berry's essay, "Solving for Pattern," so let me summarize what has been done so far:

1. In Bad Solutions, I introduced Berry's essay, and discussed two types of bad solutions: unintended consequences and amplifying feedback loops; I noted that these correspond, in the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, to "simplicity this side of complexity."
2. In Good Solutions, I discussed what constitutes a good solution, including the proper goal, which is health; I also noted that good solutions correspond, again in the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, to "simplicity on the other side of complexity."
3. In Earl Spencer's Farm, I reviewed the example Wendell Berry gives of solving for pattern that leads to a good solution.
4. After presenting Earl Spencer's dairy farm as an example of good solutions, Berry goes on to list fourteen Standards for Good Solutions; I review the first seven, and identify themes (e.g., the importance of limits).
5. In the next three posts I introduce Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), using Earl Spencer's dairy farm as a case study; the first of these introduces the notion of Activity Systems.
6. The next post introduced the notion of Cycles of Expansive Learning, using Earl Spencer's process of solving for pattern as an example.
7. The third post in this series introduced the notion of Zones of Proximal Development, as well as the Industrial Mind and the Relational Mind.
8. All of which leads us to this post, which looks at the remaining seven Standards for Good Solutions.

Standards 8-14

As I did with Part 1 of Standards for Good Solutions, I will reproduce Wendell Berry's standards (#'s 8–14), and follow the list with my analysis (themes):

8. A good solution always answers the question, How much is enough? Industrial solutions have always rested on the assumption that enough is all you can get. But that destroys agriculture, as it destroys nature and culture. The good health of a farm implies a limit of scale, because it implies a limit of attention, and because such a limit is invariably implied by any pattern. You destroy a square, for example, by enlarging one angle of lengthening one side. And in any sort of work there is a point past which more quantity necessarily implies less quality. In some kinds of industrial agriculture, such as cash grain farming, it is possible (to borrow an insight from Professor Timothy Taylor) to think of technology as a substitute for skill. But even in such farming that possibility is illusory; the illusion can be maintained only so long as the consequences can be ignored. The illusion is much shorter lived when animals are included in the farm pattern, because the husbandry of animals is so insistently a human skill. A healthy farm incorporates a pattern that a single human mind can comprehend, make, maintain, vary in response to circumstances, and pay steady attention to. That this limit is obviously variable from one farmer and farm to another does not mean that it does not exist.
9. A good solution should be cheap, and it should not enrich one person by the distress or impoverishment of another. In agriculture, so-called “inputs” are, from a different point of view, outputs – expenses. In all things, I think, but especially in agriculture struggling to survive in an industrial economy, any solution that calls for an expenditure to a manufacturer should be held in suspicion – not rejected necessarily, but as a rule mistrusted.
10. Good solutions exist only in proof, and are not to be expected from some absentee owners or absentee experts. Problems must be solved in work and in place, with particular knowledge, fidelity, and care, by people who will suffer the consequences of their mistakes. There is no theoretical or ideal practice. Practical advice or direction from people who have no practice may have some value, but its value is questionable and is limited. The divisions of capital, management, and labor, characteristic of an industrial system, are therefore utterly alien to the health of farming – as they probably also are to the health of manufacturing. The good health of a farm depends on the farmer’s mind; the good health of his mind has its dependence, and its proof, in physical work. The good farmer’s mind and his body – his management and his labor – work together as intimately as his heart and lungs. And the capital of a well-farmed farm by definition includes the farmer, mind and body both. Farmer and farm are one thing, an organism.
11. Once the farmer’s mind, his body, and his farm are understood as a single organism, and once it is understood that the question of the endurance of this organism is a question about the sufficiency and integrity of a pattern, then the word organic can be usefully admitted into this series of standards. It is a word that I have been defining all along, though I have not used it. An organic farm, properly speaking, is not one that uses certain methods and substances and avoids others; it is a farm whose structure is formed in imitation of the structure of a natural system; it has the integrity, the independence, and the benign dependence of an organism. Sir Albert Howard said that a good farm is an analogue of the forest which “manures itself.” A farm that imports too much fertility, even as feed or manure, is in this sense as inorganic as a farm that exports too much or that imports chemical fertilizer.
12. The introduction of the term organic permits me to say more plainly and usefully some things that I have said or implied earlier. In an organism, what is good for one part is good for another. What is good for the mind is good for the body; what is good for the arm is good for the heart. We know that sometimes a part may be sacrificed for the whole; a life may be saved by the amputation of an arm. But we also know that such remedies are desperate, irreversible, and destructive; it is impossible to improve the body by amputation. And such remedies do not imply a safe logic. As tendencies they are fatal: you cannot save your arm by the sacrifice of your life. Perhaps most of us who know local histories of agriculture know of fields that in hard times have been sacrificed to save a farm, and we know that though such a thing is possible it is dangerous. The danger is worse when topsoil is sacrificed for the sake of a crop. And if we understand the farm as an organism, we see that it is impossible to sacrifice the health of the soil to improve the health of plants, or to sacrifice the health of plants to improve the health of animals, or to sacrifice the health of animals to improve the health of people. In a biological pattern – as in the pattern of a community – the exploitive means and motives of industrial economics are immediately destructive and ultimately suicidal.
13. It is the nature of any organic pattern to be contained within a larger one. And so a good solution in one pattern preserves the integrity of the pattern that contains it. A good agricultural solution, for example, would not pollute or erode a watershed. What is good for the water is good for the ground, what is good for the ground is good for the plants, what is good for the plants is good for animals, what is good for animals is good for people, what is good for people is good for the air, what is good for the air is good for the water. And vice versa.
14. But we must not forget that those human solutions that we may call organic are not natural. We are talking about organic artifacts, organic only by imitation or analogy. Our ability to make such artifacts depends on virtues that are specifically human: accurate memory, observation, insight, imagination, inventiveness, reverence, devotion, fidelity, restraint. Restraint – for us, now – above all: the ability to accept and live within limits; to resist changes that are merely novel or fashionable; to resist greed and pride; to resist the temptation to "solve" problems by ignoring them, accepting them as "trade-offs," or bequeathing them to posterity. A good solution, then, must be in harmony with good character, cultural value, and moral law.

Recurring Themes

Standards 8-14 reflect, for the most part, the same themes that were found in Standards 1-7, as discussed in my earlier post on Standards for Good Solutions. For example, the theme of limits, seen in the first six standards, can also be seen in Standard #8, where Berry poses the question, "How much is enough?" Which reminds me of the book, Enough: True Measures of Money, Business, and Life, by John C. Bogle, which is a must-read. As an aside, this standard is antithetical to a value that is all too apparent in America today, which Berry calls out in his Standard #8: "Industrial solutions have always rested on the assumption that enough is all you can get." (Think tech bros, mega yachts, and weddings in Venice.)

When Berry introduces the term organic, in Standards 11-14, he introduces a new way of viewing the qualitative nature of good solutions, which Berry discussed earlier in Standards 3 & 4. In Berry's usage, terms such as organic and qualitative focus our attention on patterns, especially patterns that connect (for those readers familiar with TBRI, think of the attachment cycle). This focus can be seen most clearly in Standard #12, where Berry says, "In an organism, what is good for one part is good for another. What is good for the mind is good for the body; what is good for the arm is good for the heart." And in Standard #13, where Berry says, "It is the nature of any organic pattern to be contained within a larger one. And so a good solution in one pattern preserves the integrity of the pattern that contains it. A good agricultural solution, for example, would not pollute or erode a watershed. What is good for the water is good for the ground, what is good for the ground is good for the plants, what is good for the plants is good for animals, what is good for animals is good for people, what is good for people is good for the air, what is good for the air is good for the water. And vice versa." In other words, if what's good for A is also good for B (and vice versa), then A and B are part of the same (organic, qualitative) pattern, and they are in relation to one another.

The theme contrasting the Industrial Mind with the Biological (Organic) Mind was introduced in the first set of standards, and is present, in one form or another, in all seven of the standards in this second set (#s 8-14). I prefer to phrase this distinction as the contrast (contradiction) between the INDUSTRIAL MIND and the RELATIONAL MIND, for three reasons. First, as indicated in the previous paragraph, I think what Berry really has in mind by patterns is relationships; I will further explore this point in later blog posts, where I look at some of Berry's later writings (e.g., his Jefferson Lecture, "It all turns on affection"). Second, by adopting the term "Relational Mind," these discussions extend more naturally to the work we have been doing at the Karyn Purvis Institute (KPICD), with a focus on Trust-Based Intervention (TBRI). And third, the term "Organic," especially, has acquired consumer-based connotations that, in my view, don't really reflect Berry's original meaning, as expressed in his essay, "Solving for Pattern."

This is the last of my blog posts devoted specifically Wendell Berry's essay, "Solving for Pattern." However, we are just getting started with exploring the full range of ideas contained in this essay as well as in Berry's other writings. In subsequent posts I will explore not only the ideas of Wendell Berry, but also ideas found in CHAT, TBRI, and other adjacent frameworks. The point of it all is to inform the design of healthy systems by solving for pattern.