N-E-W… Assembly
The following quote from Wendel Berry is offered as a starting point for the collaboration:
‘We live, as we must sooner or later recognize, in an era of sentimental economics and, consequently, of sentimental politics. Sentimental communism holds in effect that everybody and everything should suffer for the good of ‘the many’ who, though miserable in the present, will be happy in the future for exactly the same reasons that they are miserable in the present.
Sentimental capitalism is not so different from sentimental communism as the cooperate and political powers claim to suppose. Sentimental capitalism holds in effect that everything small, local, private, personal, natural, good, and beautiful must be sacrificed in the interests of the ‘free market’ and the great corporations will bring unprecedented security and happiness to ‘the many’- in, of course, the future.’
‘In a viable neighbourhood, neighbours ask themselves what they can do or provide from one another, and they try to find answers that they and their place can afford. This, and nothing else, is the practice of neighbourhood. This practice must be, in part, charitable, but it must also be economic, and the economic part musty be equitable; there is significant charity in just prices.’
Berry W, 2000, The Total Economy, P68 / 79