There is a genre of book of which I am particularly fond. Anyone who knows me well knows how I can rabbit on about books until I have thoroughly lost the attention of everyone in the room, but that’s particularly true of books of this kind. My soft spot is for the kinds of books that diagnose very fundamental problems with society that leave you feeling the world has been pulled out from under you, and suggest that you resist these problems by means as trivial as going for a walk, buying fruit from a local orchardist, or following the Lectionary. I’ve written about this before but I think the point needs elaboration: some problems are so big that there is no instant solution – perhaps there is no solution – and all we can do is devote ourselves unswervingly to trivia over many years.
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‘A path,’ says Wendell Berry, ‘is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place… it is a form of contact with a known landscape.’ When the mind wanders, the feet know the way. The result is that paths are at every turn moulded and dictated by the landscape. If there is a tree, or a rock, or a badger sett, the path judiciously curls around it. If there is an impassably steep slope, the path zigzags up it or selects another route. And what is more, the path-taker attends carefully to virtually every step of the route – noting the changing of the seasons, the advance and recession of the plants and brambles, the wet sop of the ground against and sometimes through the shoes.
The road, on the other hand, moulds and dictates the landscape: ‘even the most primitive road embodies a resistance against the landscape… its wish is to avoid contact with the landscape.’ [This emphasis is Berry’s own.] Trees are felled, rocks are removed, badgers are turfed out of their homes. The rough places are plain, and every mountain and hill made low. The roadbuilder, and indeed the road-passenger, sees departure and destination; the features in between are incidental.
There is of course a great economic advantage to roads. Roads make many things possible that otherwise mightn’t be – visits to your grandparent on the south coast, away days at the New York City Stadium and Carrow Road, and the delivery of sofas to your doorstep. Roads are convenient: they facilitate transactions and meetings, and they minimise frictions and lateness.
But there is also a great cultural advantage to paths. Being less measurable this sounds less important – perhaps it can only be the opinion of a privileged bumpkin who does not rely upon the economic advantage of roads for his living or for the delivery of his groceries. Perhaps you are thinking that actually I do rely upon roads for these things even though I am not immediately aware of it: the caterers and pupils at the school where I work certainly do rely on roads, some of them several times a day. If they were to be taken away, I would feel it, and that fast. Berry himself says so, too: ‘It is obvious that one who values the idea of community cannot speak against roads without risking all sorts of absurdity.’
But how do you know that your reliance on paths is not of the same order? Without them, your colleagues and friends might be more unhappy, or your sense of privilege at living in this world less sharp. If the world were full of roads, your air would be dirtier and your lungs weaker, and the bees who pollinate your food plants less numerous, making your stomach emptier. Indeed, one of the great triumphs of the roads has been the prosperity of the cities, a great part of the convenience of which is the accessibility of the office, the supermarket, the café, the underground station, the park and the pub – namely, all the amenities of modern life – by foot. And every time you take a half step to the left to avoid colliding into a cyclist or a lamp-post, every time you duck under the doorway of your local, and every time you shave 15 seconds off your commute by cutting the corner towards the tube station escalator, what you are really doing is walking a path.
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The road-building mentality has not stopped with transport in modern Western society. The quest to simplify and accelerate everything is most definitely ongoing, with ruinous consequences everywhere. Berry supplies us with a vivid and compelling picture of it with his image of the Kentuckian prospectors felling whole forests to build a new and deeply necessary road. (This proves to Berry the fact that these supposed settlers ‘had not in any meaningful sense arrived in America’ [emphasis mine] – indeed Americans in Berry’s day still had not arrived in any meaningful sense.) But once you start seeing all sorts of cultural, social, and economic objects as being roads where there used to be paths, you will see them everywhere.
Once upon a time, we would have learnt life lessons at the feet of our grandparents and the local elders – now they are available in bulleted Instagram posts. Crafts which took years to master for those apprenticed by seasoned masters are the subject of YouTube tutorials. The art and catharsis of writing and sending a letter is now replaced by the convenience of instant messaging. I even saw somebody recently suggest on social media that writing or reading books is a waste of time now that a four-paragraph blog post is more than sufficient for any idea. Cultural institutions once beckoned ‘tolle, lege’; now, they wave ‘tl;dr’. In all things, the ponderous, slow, painstaking work that is itself joy-bringing, and that serves the quality of its goal, is outmoded. Rather, in our society the solution that takes the smallest fraction of a second to implement, or the least effort to learn, is everywhere preferred. This effect is compounded by a race to the bottom: those who value traditional methods, whatever their reasons, are bound to seem incompetent yokels in comparison to smooth-talking sleeksters with their gadgets. Everywhere the philosophy of Hunter and Rushton in The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists triumphs: work is to be scamped and rushed, for this work is more profitable.
These things are like roads because roads, unlike paths, are entirely incidental. There is no pleasure in the passage of a road, just as there is no satisfaction in the watching of a video tutorial. Roads lead from departure to destination, and that’s all there is to them. The same is true of our modern methods – they speed our progress to the bottom line, and they entirely wreck the idiosyncrasies and irregularities of the landscape around them. In their relentless convenience they cannot help but erase anything that is unique, nostalgic, or charming – in short, anything that is special.
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My dissertation would have been unwritable without SAS. My lessons would be intolerable without Google Slides (and arguably still are, with it). I thank my God for WiFi, for the functionality of Microsoft Excel, for the fact that I can watch football happening thousands of miles away in real time. These things are wonderful indeed: sometimes roads, of all kinds, bring great benefits. But I mourn what we have lost in the pretence that roads make everything better, because it is incalculable.
Yikeiatry 