The options

You can either be Amish, or a sellout. Those are the options.

I'm (finally) reading Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America. He is right that the scale of our civilization causes problems—for example, regarding technology (94-95), identity (110-112), and gender, sexuality, and marriage (112-123). These passages are spot-on.

But don't you oversimplify, Wendell? Doesn't the scale of our civilization also provide benefits? For example, you enjoy the reputation you do because publishers exist to publish your books, and because your readership has been educated, and has leisure time for reading. But then you cannot isolate those benefits from civilization as a whole. If you doubt this, have you read I, Pencil? Touch one part of the system, and you are as implicit as any Secretary of Agriculture. You are a sellout.

One theme in Unsettling is that we must learn to live humbly within our limits. Now, both the benefits and the problems of our civilization derive from fundamental realities of the way systems scale. Scaling is generalizing, by definition. Yes, generalizing necessarily turns land into a resource and humans into consumers. But generalization cannot be avoided if we want a civilization that can publish books. So if you want to publish books, then the problems of globalization cannot ultimately be solved, as in entirely canceled out. Without giving up the benefits of scale, we can at best ameliorate its problems. This is one of the limits we must humbly live within.

The Amish do the best job of foregoing benefits rather than selling out (though even they do interface with "the world"). Interestingly, the reason the Amish accept such austerity is precisely to retain their culture of humble faith, a key tenet of which is non-judgment. An Amishman would never write Unsettling. Instead, he would do the very thing we admire him for: humbly live within his limits.

As a sellout who, with Wendell Berry, deeply admires the Amish, I have to hope that some meaningful amelioration is possible. Berry probably even has some good suggestions (I haven't actually gotten that far yet). My point here is that the humility that Berry calls for includes a recognition that we are all sellouts who are stuck with a problem that is not in our power truly to solve. Feed back to Chad Whitacre.