David Hahn, Our Devolving Home Environment.

5/25/08
David Hahn, Our Devolving Home Environment.

From Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture

“The modern home is so destructive, I think, because it is a generalization, a product of factory and fashion, an everyplace or a noplace. The modern house is not a response to its place, but rather to the affluence and social status of its owner. Everything around him, everything on TV, tells him of his success: his comfort is the redemption of the world. His home is the emblem of his status, but it is not the center of his interest or of his consciousness.”(Berry, 52-53)

This seems to be the sad realization of the home environments of most mid to upper class Americans. Berry depicts perfectly the decay of many people’s lifestyles over the last couple of decades or even centuries. Ones home only used to be a place simply to sleep, eat, and live, but now many people’s homes are used for showing ones power and wealth through his expensive possessions. The decline in ethics and moral values of our home environments is declining rapidly, and it seems our old fashioned traditional ways would be an appropriate approach to solving this drastic downfall in our homes.