Wendell Berry on the 10 Commandments

I have been slowly reading Wendell Berry's The Need to be Whole of the past couple months. It is slow because I usually read it in doctor office waiting rooms. The introduction is excellent, and I meant to write some comments on it a few months ago.

This morning I read a new take (for me) on the tenth commandment (9 & 10 are combined here: Thou shalt not covet.) Here goes:

"Thou shalt not covet .... any thing that is thy neighbor's." By contrast the industrial famers of our time are economically constrained, and by the industrial orthodoxy are encouraged to regard their neighbors as competitors, and to overcome them (and possess their farms) by means of newer technologies and bigger machines. Thus a fundamental relationship and obligation is broken by the now generally accepted "realism" and "necessity" of economic competitions, which necessarily brings us to our present condition: a public consisting of dismembered families and communities and the virtually deserted economic landscapes of our country, where, as the parents grow old and die without successors, the children are distributed from sea to sea.

I never really thought of capitalist systems as violating the commandments against coveting, but I should have. I have looked at industrial farming and other capitalist endeavors from a moral view to be sure, but never really connected them to a specific commandment.

Oremus pro invicem!