Exploiter or Nurturer?

I’ve found two distinct personalities resonating in Wendell’s writing. I don’t say this to imply I’m a literary critical genius. I’m simply going back to his essay “The Unsettling of America” and reading the words. Wendell is not one to smother his thoughts in half truths and speculations. He pretty much tells you what he’s thinking. Whether or not he’s right, at least you know where he stands. Here’s the mad farmer on exploiters and nurturers.

Let me outline as briefly as I can what seem to me the characteristics of these opposite kinds of mind. I conceive a strip-miner to be a model exploiter, and as a model nurturer I take the old-fashioned idea or ideal of the farmer. The exploiter is a specialist, an expert; the nurturer is not. The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The exploiter's goal is money, profit; the nurturer's goal is health - his land's health, his own, his family's, his community's, his country's. Whereas the exploiter asks of a piece of land only how much and how quickly it can be made to produce, the nurturer asks a question that is much more complex and difficult: What is its carrying capacity? (That is: How much can be taken from it without diminishing it? What can it produce dependably for an indefinite time?) The exploiter wishes to earn as much as possible by as little work as possible; the nurturer expects, certainly, to have a decent living from his work, but his characteristic wish is to work as well as possible. The competence of the exploiter is in organization; that of the nurturer is in order – a human order, that is, that accommodates itself both to other order and to mystery. The exploiter typically serves an institution or organization; the nurturer serves land, household, community, place. The exploiter thinks in terms of numbers, quantities, "hard facts"; the nurturer in terms of character, condition, quality, kind.

This is not just a division of a culture between its people but Wendell points to a division within a person as well. These are, as he said, a kind of mind. There will be some who immediately dismiss this thinking as a generic stereotype. It's not meant to categorize people but to reveal two possible and conflicting mindsets in ourselves, our relationships to the land and each other and in our culture. A long historical argument exists for Yin and Yang, Creation and Destruction, Light and Dark and one may consider this an extension of that philosophy which can be especially applied to America.

Philosophies aside, are there elements of these ideas in our lives? I think it may be worthwhile to examine these points of character and see if I can categorize myself and how I live as one or the other or neither. Any ideas on how they manifest themselves on the streets, among the houses and in the fields of our place?