I
Wendell Berry—Kentuckian, farmer, poet, novelist, environmentalist,
pacifist, patriot, Christian, agrarian, and to my mind most importantly,
essayistic thinker about all of the above—passed away at the age of 92 on
August 31. Writing about those thinkers who have influenced me upon their
passing is a long-standing (and long-winded) blog tradition of mine, but
when it comes to Berry, I cannot reflect solely upon what learned from his
thoughts; rather, I have to reflect upon how his writing of
those thoughts came, over the decades, to be inscribed in important ways upon
not only my own thinking, but my own sense of self. So this reflection is not
simply about Berry, but about my reading of him, and where that reading led me,
and how I carried it with me when I was being led otherwise.
II
During the 57 years when my life on earth overlapped with his, I had
the opportunity to actually talk with Berry only once, at a Front Porch
Conference in Louisville, KY, in 2019. I stood in line, while Berry—then 85
years old—graciously sat and waited on us all, wanting to grant to as many as
possible the opportunity to look into his eyes, shake his hand, thank him for
his inspiring writings and his prophetic example, and perhaps engage him in
some idea or question. The photo of my meeting with Berry suggests that I was
attempting the latter, but if I did, I have no memory of what I asked or what
he said in reply. But in at least one crucial sense, the content of our brief
exchange really doesn’t matter.
As I would hope any open-minded reader of Berry’s careful and weighty
words would realize, for him the proper end of any relationship among or
communication between people ought to be wholeness. Our work, our associations,
our lives ought to serve to critique, and help create conditions wherein as
many as possible may overcome, the competitive divisions which surround and
hurt us: as he described them at the end of his magisterial The Unsettling of
America: Culture & Agriculture, “industrial uniformity” schools us to believe
that “competition invariably results in the triumph of the best,” with the
result that “body and soul, man and woman, producer and consumer, nature and
technology, city and country are thrown into competition with each other,” a
divisiveness which can only end with “the exhaustion of both.” The key to any
such critique and overcoming of this imposed competition is, very simply,
affection: to attend to, to learn from and listen to, to care for, the other;
to “look and see” (as the poetic
documentary of Berry’s life is titled) all that which is around us, in all its
particularity and locality. Thus to simply be in the presence of one another,
to treat them as part of one’s whole, is at least as important, and far more
comforting, than whatever it is we may tangibly present to one another while
sharing that presence. (And that “one another” is not restricted solely to the
human, of course.)
When despair for the world grows in
me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
(“The Peace of Wild Things,” 1968)
III
I think I first became aware of Wendell Berry thanks to Phillip
Lopate’s 1994 collection The Art of the
Personal Essay, which I still have an original copy of sitting on
our bookshelves at home, and in which Lopate included Berry’s essay, “An
Entrance of the Woods.” At that time in my life—newly married, newly graduated
from Brigham Young University, partly shaking off and partly re-constituting the
political and religious conservatism which I’d been raised within and which the
Utah Mormon culture of BYU made mostly normative, all while working at a
newspaper and a Sears call center and trying to decide between journalism or
academia as a career—I loved nothing more than personal essays. I’d tried my
hand at that form a few times in
student publications; my voice was a pretentious one, but I hoped if I read
more and wrote more, I’d improve. (That hope has probably not been entirely
fulfilled.)
I especially loved essays that presented writers encountering nature—though
the red rocks and desert canyons of the Colorado Plateau and the La Sal
mountain range never moved me as they did other famed regional writers like
Edward Abbey (whose Desert Solitaire I was
ambivalent about) or Terry Tempest Williams (whose then-new book Refuge I
admittedly adored). The previous summer I had interned in Washington DC, and
while driving out there, after visiting my fiancé and her family in Michigan, I
had passed through some hilly farmland in south-central Pennsylvania, with red
barns nestled among wooded hills and small streams, and I thought I’d never
seen anything so beautiful. I don’t think I made the agrarian connection
then—I’d grown up surrounded by wheat and alfalfa fields in Spokane,
Washington, hauling hay bales and milking cows by hand, but it would be another
decade, more or less, before I began to intellectually reconnect with that
learning. Still, I know that Berry’s simple description of a weekend he spent
in the Kentucky woods, sometime around 1970, passing under beech and poplar
trees and through thickets of ferns and rhododendron, listening to the hoots of
nuthatches and the buzzing of insects, planted a seed in my mind which never
left.
Lopate, in his introduction to the essay, called Berry’s writing
“upright,” “Puritanical,” and “Biblical”; “he rarely shows humor,” he added,
“or even irony; but then, saints are rarely funny, and Wendell Berry, in his
lifelong efforts to protect the earth’s ecological balance, is something of a
saint.” I think I always was, and still am, too doubtful to manage much
sternness myself. But perhaps that is one reason why Berry’s words stuck fast.
[I]t has seemed to me for years now
that the doings of men no longer occur within nature, but that the natural
places which the human economy has so far spared now survive almost
accidentally within the doings of men. This wilderness of the Red River now
carries on its ancient processes within the human climate of war and
waste and confusion. And I know that the distant roar of engines, though it may
seem only to be passing through this wilderness, is really bearing down
upon it….No. Even here where the economy of life is really an economy—where the
creation is yet fully alive and continuous and self-enriching, where whatever
dies enters directly into the life of the living—even here one cannot fully
escape the sense of an impending human catastrophe.
(“An Entrance to the Woods,” 1971)
IV
In the years that immediately followed that first exposure to Bery, I
read fewer essays by him. Actually, I just read fewer personal essays in
general; I had chosen the academic route, and so was mostly reading those
scholars that my discipline (political philosophy) had canonized, writers and
thinkers whose primary goal was to try to understand and express the insights
of their research and the research of others—the texts, the surveys, the data
both anecdotal and analytic. Whereas the essayist, on the other hand, is trying
to understand and express themselves, and only through their own thinking
struggle with the world around them. A graduate education in the social
sciences and the humanities forms one to be always conscious of the
interpretability, the unfolding character, of research; no one, by definition,
can have an entirely definitive take on any given argument or idea. Hence there
is a suspicion—or at least there was in the teaching I internalized during
those years—of the essayist, of the first-person voice, of any attempt to overcome
specialization with a sweeping conclusion, whether humbly or sternly expressed.
So it perhaps was predictable that it wasn’t until I was finished with
my PhD and was leading my family on a difficult sojourn through different
universities—a journey that in our case took us entirely to various small towns
and cities, one year in northern Mississippi, three years in northeastern Arkansas,
another year in west-central Illinois, always with the looming fear that I’d
made a poor choice and that years of higher education would lead to endless
wandering rather than a place where we could put down roots, raise our
children, and be part of a community (and those words themselves reveal how
much I was already disposed towards Berry’s most fundamental concerns)—that I started
reading Berry’s introspective, searching essays again, this time with somewhat
different eyes. My education in political ideas—the philosophical communitarianism
of the ancient Confucians, the German romantics, and Charles Taylor; the
democratic republicanism of the Anti-Federalists, the American Populists, and
Sheldon Wolin; the Christian egalitarianism of the radical Reformation, Catholic
social justice teaching, and John Milbank—took on a different hue as I would walk or ride my bike to campus (financially, we always had to be, and remain
today, a one-car family), past cheap suburban developments, past stands of
loblolly pines or sugar maples, past fields of rice or soybeans, all while
thinking about Berry’s words, and their unflashy, relentless insistence upon
humble, local, ecological, agrarian truths. My professional and personal sense
of my own vocation and person shifted, and then shifted again, during these
years; Berry’s writings were hardly alone in shaping me during the early to
mid-2000s, but his influence on my development at that time was far from the
least consequential factor.
The collection of Berry’s essays that I have probably gone back to the
most in the two decades since that time of re-engagement is almost certainly Sex, Economy, Freedom
& Community. I probably first picked it up in 2002 or 2003. Berry’s
introspective—but never solipsistic—application of a Christian and agrarian
localism in this volume to hard questions about urbanism, sexual mores,
international trade, pacifism, environmental policy, and Biblical
interpretation makes it, I think, one of the most influential statements of his
overall worldview. Interestingly though, I have to say that the essay from this
volume that arrested me most when I first read it was on a topic which nominally
had the least of any of them to do with any personal or professional thinking I
was doing at the time, or have since: “The Problem of Tobacco.”
I’ve never smoked and have no real sense of smoking’s appeal. This is primarily
a result of my religious commitments as a Mormon, but it’s not only that; I’ve
never drank coffee either, yet as long as I can remember I’ve found the aroma
of coffee quite pleasant, so it’s not as though I’m incapable of recognizing
the value of something I’m outside of. (One of my fondest memories from the
summer of 1999 when my wife and I and our oldest daughter, then just three
years old, were living in Germany while I worked on my dissertation was a sunny
day spent wandering in the city of Mainz, during which we came upon a
biergarten in a park, one filled with jovial Saturday imbibers, and decided to order
some apple juice and settle in; I knew full well that a teetotaler like myself
could never fully partake of their social camaraderie, but I could enjoy and
appreciate its virtues all the same.) Still, for a religiously committed
opponent of tobacco to find insight in an elegiac argument over the necessary
passing of the productive—if poisonous—world of tobacco farming that was
central to Berry’s whole history was, if nothing else, strange.
Yet I found insight aplenty in the essay nonetheless. Through his
imagined dialogue between himself—a tobacco farmer who has given up smoking and
was looking to eliminate that indefensibly addictive and unhealthy crop from
his livelihood while still holding on to policies and practices which would
enable traditionally tobacco-dependent Kentucky farming communities to survive
on their own terms—and an opponent of the crop—one who, like most of those
(myself definitely included) that routinely fall into fierce opposition to (or,
sometimes, enthusiastic embrace of) any number of scientific or social
phenomena without any tactile knowledge of the local world which that phenomena
impacts or within which it is nestled, had given no thought whatsoever as to
what is to become of tobacco farmers—Berry modeled for me not only how one
should engage with those whose actions seem morally appalling, but also spelled
out practical examples of what trying to bring localist and agrarian
sensibilities into contemporary disputes ought to involve (collective
decision-making, fierce market resistance, small-scale democracy, ecological
humility, economic and social justice, and more). The fact that, as I later
realized, the essay also anticipated the self-destructive political anger of
its author’s own people 30 years before it came to irrational fruition was
simply icing on the cake:
“I see you are still clinging to
the idea of an agricultural economy of diversified small farms that produce for
local markets and local consumers.”
“Yes, I’m still clinging to it. I
want people to eat. I want them to have, as dependably as possible, a local
supply of good food. I want their food budget to support a thriving population
of local farmers. That way, the land will thrive.”
“And you see the tobacco farmers as
necessary to that?”
“I see all farmers—all that
are left and, I hope, some more—as necessary to that. Tobacco farmers are
farmers and among the best of them; their know-how is a great public asset, if
the public only recognized it. They are farming some very good land. They
should be growing food for the people of their region, the people of neighboring
cities—or they should have a viable choice of doing so. The people who so
eagerly condemn them for growing tobacco should be just as eager to help them
find alternative crops. It is wrong to condemn people for doing a thing and
then offer no alternative but failure. A person could get mad about that.”
(“The Problem of Tobacco,” 1991)
V
In 2006, through some combination of perseverance and God’s grace and
random luck, we found ourselves a home at last—Friends University, a small
Christian liberal arts college in Wichita, Kansas, where we’ve lived ever
since. Save for one visit to Friends’s surprisingly (to me) wooded campus just
west of the city’s downtown for an interview, I had no personal knowledge of
Kansas before moving here; I’d only ever driven across it on I-70. My
assumption upon arrival was more formed by Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little
House on the Prairie (a book and series worth revisiting, I later
decided) than any actual data; I assumed the majority of my students would be
arriving with rural backgrounds, or at least from agriculturally connected
families and communities. That assumption was, it turned out, wrong more often
than not.
While there were (and still sometimes are) notable exceptions, the
Friends University student body was, and has become more so over the two
decades I’ve taught here, every bit as disconnected from and specialized away
from the communal and agrarian aspects of American life as that of any other
group of 21st-century suburban Americans. So within a few years of
my arrival, I began to strive to make more whole what I was teaching, what I
was reading, the life I and my family were living, and the environment we were
part of—specifically the city of Wichita, a surprisingly (again, to me) diverse
mittelpolitan region
of middle-size, a slow- (or barely) growing city that stands unconnected as the
regional center of south-central Kansas, dependent upon industries that it has
very little financial ability to prevent being taken advantage by, and surrounded
by fields of sunflowers and grain sorghum, by nestled gullies crowded with Osage
orange and black locust, and by long, flat, bike-friendly horizons of, as John
Denver sang, windy wheatfields
of gold under blue summer skies. With all this in mind, I started to innovate
beyond the courses in American government, comparative politics, and
constitutional law I’d been hired to teach.
I assigned students chapters from Berry’s The Unsettling of
America and Citizenship
Papers as part of inquiries into the history of
government policies regarding conservation, nutrition, and health; I started
taking students on trips to visit with farmers, ranchers, butchers, gardeners,
and anyone else attempting to nudge our food system towards greater
sustainability; I picked up and developed untaught courses on social justice
and Christian environmentalism, aiming to explore with students what the Bible
can teach us about the stewardship, redistribution, and communal importance of
land. Most importantly, I discovered The Land
Institute in Salina, Kansas, a little over an hour north of
Wichita, and began to make yearly visits there with my students. We listened to
presentations on agricultural policy, climate change, and the history of Black
farmers in America; we visited TLI’s labs and experimental farm plots to learn
about the development of kernza and
other perennial crops; we were able to meet such famed authors as Naomi
Klein, Bill
McKibben, and Eric
Schlosser—and on a couple of occasions, we heard
from Berry himself. In weaving
his ideas into my classes I found myself, for the first time, reading more
of his fiction, understanding more about how Berry’s ideas, outside the strict
form of the essay, reveal a flexibility and adaptability, especially
in regards to intimate questions of identity, sexuality, and spiritual belief,
something that far more of my students found central to their young lives than
they did Berry’s insistence upon local or agrarian knowledge. Through all this
time, I was still learning from the man.
Of all the perspectives my engagement with Berry’s writings have opened
up to me, I think none are as important as helping me see the terrible mistake
of confusing the vital, and virtuous, role that natural limits play in our
lives, with what he condemned in his collection The Art of Loading
Brush as the “doctrine of inevitability,” a notion that
he (I think rightly) labeled just “a poor excuse for…economic and technological
determinism.” To seek that wholeness which hopefully characterizes a life lived
in settled and sustainable integration with one’s local community and
environment, will obviously involve an acceptance of limits—such a resolution
requires seeking some contentment with, to quote Berry’s friend and founder
of The Land Institute Wes Jackson, the “genius of the place.” But
that seeking does not mean,
and must not
mean, accepting as natural those progressive expectations (embrace the carbon
economy and the corporate rat race!) and those competitive presumptions
(because, as
Margaret Thatcher famously insisted, there is no alternative!) which go by
the guise of “realism,” but functionally are just positional tools that serve
to establish what Berry sneeringly called, in perhaps his angriest poetic
passage (which is also, perversely, part of one of his Sabbath poems), “the
objective.”
Even while I dreamed I prayed that
what I saw was only fear and no foretelling,
for I saw the last known landscape destroyed for the sake
of the objective, the soil bludgeoned, the rock blasted.
Those who had wanted to go home would never get there now.
I visited the offices where for the sake of the objective the planners planned
at blank desks set in rows. I visited the loud factories
where the machines were made that would drive ever forward
toward the objective. I saw the forest reduced to stumps and gullies; I saw
the poisoned river, the mountain cast into the valley;
I came to the city that nobody recognized because it looked like every other
city.
I saw the passages worn by the unnumbered
footfalls of those whose eyes were fixed upon the objective.
Their passing had obliterated the graves and the monuments
of those who had died in pursuit of the objective
and who had long ago forever been forgotten, according
to the inevitable rule that those who have forgotten forget
that they have forgotten. Men, women, and children now pursued the objective
as if nobody ever had pursued it before.
The races and the sexes now intermingled perfectly in pursuit of the objective.
The once-enslaved, the once-oppressed were now free
to sell themselves to the highest bidder
and to enter the best paying prisons
in pursuit of the objective, which was the destruction of all enemies,
which was the destruction of all obstacles, which was the destruction of all
objects,
which was to clear the way to victory, which was to clear the way to promotion,
to salvation, to progress,
to the completed sale, to the signature
on the contract, which was to clear the way
to self-realization, to self-creation, from which nobody who ever wanted to go
home
would ever get there now, for every remembered place
had been displaced; the signposts had been bent to the ground and covered over.
Every place had been displaced, every love
unloved, every vow unsworn, every word unmeant
to make way for the passage of the crowd
of the individuated, the autonomous, the self-actuated, the homeless
with their many eyes opened toward the objective
which they did not yet perceive in the far distance,
having never known where they were going,
having never known where they came from.
(From “Sabbath Poem II,” 1997)
VI
For a man whose intellectual and artistic and personal focus was so concentrated,
Wendell Berry’s writings contained multitudes. This was, I think, as I review
the monument of words he built over so many decades, the most Christian thing
about his legacy. In the same way that believers like myself take seriously the
words attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of John—“Jesus then said to the Jews
who had believed in him, ‘If you continue in my word, you are truly my
disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free’”
(John 8:31-32, Revised Standard Version)—this reader of Berry, at least, sees
in the discipline he elaborated upon and exemplified an invitation to an anarchic
(which is different from an individualistic) freedom. To identify with and
embrace that which is local to oneself obviously limits one’s choices, but it also
potentially frees one, even if only partly, from the burden of the exploitative
systems modernity has placed upon us and the world’s resources, and opens up
paths of affective connection that, too often, the competitive expectations and
divisions of modernity interfere with.
To conclude with an argument from my own training, the perspective
which Berry’s writings help us see is an example of the
second of Michael Walzer’s two types of communitarian argument: “The
liberal ideology of separatism cannot take personhood and bondedness away from
us,” but “does take away the sense of our
personhood and bondedness,” with political and economic systems built upon the
presumption of, even a celebration of, that deprivation. Berry’s whole life’s
work was, very simply, to do the opposite: to help us see that which is present
to us, and to enlist us in a struggle against all that makes difficult, or
disdains the possibility of, connecting with, and breaking bread with, and
dwelling alongside, and being entirely open to, whatever is locally our own.
What, in the end, could be more holistic than that?
