Thoughts on Berry (Autobiographical and Otherwise)

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 21^st-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?

 

Becky Elder, a Local Kansas Matriarch (and More)

Last week, on a clear and cold Friday afternoon, I joined a couple of hundred other people to attend, and pay our respects during, the graveside service of Rebecca Love “Becky” Elder, at Elderslie Farm, her family’s property in Kechi. She was a powerful and beloved Kansas matriarch, in the tradition of many others throughout the history of our state. She was also an inspiration and a friend, one that I will deeply miss.

I can’t remember when I first met Becky; it was likely a few years after my family moved to Wichita and I began teaching at Friends University in 2006. I know I was definitely aware of her by 2011; by that I time I had, after a slow start, begun to involve myself in local associations and arguments—I think my presentation on populism at the Wichita Pachyderm Club might have been one that really caught Becky’s eye—and as I became more familiar with different people, projects, and programs throughout Sedgwick County, I discovered that she and her family members were a thread which could connect almost all of them. People that knew Becky well could run down the same list of local endeavors she had her fingerprints on which my memory is calling up, and no doubt add many more to it: the Eighth Day Institute, the New Symposium, SunnyDale Community Library, the Friends University Neighborhood Garden (the only one of all these where my involvement actually preceded hers), Jubilee Presbyterian Church, and most importantly, Northfield School for the Liberal Arts.

The closest and broadest associations Becky had, at least from my observations outside the immediate Elder family and their church communities, were those that sprung, one way or another, from Northfield. Becky’s long crusade on behalf of home schooling, independent schooling, classical schools, micro-schools, and a half-dozen other overlapping alternative educational visions was central to her public identity. Becky's visionary aspirations perhaps put her more in the position of being an entrepreneur of teaching rather than a full-timer teacher herself, but as someone who has made the latter his career, my admiration for her skill with students is boundless. She was one of the purest believers in the ability of people to embrace the history, tradition, language, and culture they have inherited, simultaneously critique it, and through doing so make it part of their own civic and spiritual formation—the classical notion of humanitas--that I have ever known. While I never heard her quote it—and she quoted lots of authors, be they philosophers, theologians, economists, sociologists or more, to say nothing of dozens of figures from the literary canon—I cannot think of anyone I have known through all my decades in the classroom who more deeply embraced, as both a pedagogy and a telos, Goethe’s great celebration of self-discovery, and thereby self-revelation, from Faust:

 

Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast,

Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen.

Was man nicht nützt, ist eine schwere Last;

Nur was der Augenblick erschafft, das kann er nützen.

 

(What from your fathers you received as heir,

Acquire anew, if you would possess it.

What is not used is but a load to bear;

But if today creates it, we can use and bless it.)

 

My wife and I were products of the public schools, meaning our education was not one informed by such classical assumptions and discipline. That doesn’t mean we were ignorant of the limitations of the public schooling model, with its centralized and standardized curricula and bureaucratic disciplinary regimes; my mother turned to home schooling my younger siblings soon after I left home, and that legacy has shaped the education of most of my nieces and nephews. Still, Melissa and I never considered any approach besides the public one for our own children, perhaps in part because we always felt relatively successful in working with the schools our daughters attended, finding ways to preserve the localist and familial elements that are always present in any actually neighborhood school, or at least so we both believed. (The fact that, once we settled here in Wichita, we bought a home where our children could easily walk or bike to their elementary, middle, and high schools was certainly a part of this.)

As I wrote over 20 years ago, at a time when our four children were still in the midst of their public schooling journeys, “I like the idea of the state being a partial agent of education.” Why? Because the liberal democratic order—whatever its many flaws as manifested in the United States—can and, I think, usually does add an egalitarian element to one’s education, and by so doing complement and enrich the traditions one receives from home and community. Too often the personal development which an embrace of one’s individual inheritance makes possible is warped by our globalized capitalist world into just one more instantiation of meritocracy; structurally weaving the imperatives of liberal egalitarianism into the mass public educational ideal can preserve something truly civic, at least as much as the classic ideal may.

All this, of course, meant that Becky and I had some very deep disagreements when it came to schooling. And yet those disagreements never got in the way of us conversing—always curiously and joyfully—about the potential for neighborhoods to reflect, and provide foundations for, the plurality of ways in which people can learn and grow, and thereby sustain one another, their communities, and their natural environments. She embraced and was always looking to share with her students and me and anyone else who would listen those authors and intellectual models who tied their stories to the socio-economic and environmental conditions that made real localism possible. She was instinctively sympathetic to deeply Kansan anti-government, anti-union attitudes she had inherited from her family, but she took up those arguments in a populist, even radical way. In that way, her Old Right libertarianism and my anarcho-socialism met on common ground. The first time I was invited to speak at Northfield (back when the school met in the old Love Box warehouse on 37^th St. in north Wichita), I walked into the makeshift classroom, saw quotations from McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers all around the walls, and assumed I was entering a traditionally conservative environment; but after a day of presentations and discussions with students of all ages, conversations which had ranged from town meetings to backyard gardens to the interstate highway system to oil monopolies to climate change to do-it-yourself-tractor repair, I saw the truth: Becky Elder was a hippie. God bless her for it.

The hippies get a bad rap, to be sure, and much of it is deserved; so much of the counter-culture a half-century or more ago turned its back upon tradition entirely, and assumed that a new civilization could be simply willed into existence, through communes and co-ops, from the ground up. And too many of the wrong lessons of that counter-cultural vision continue to inform the transhuman delusions of the Silicon Valley elite, whose understanding of the DIY mentality focuses more on venture capital and AI technology than practical crafts and community sharing. But the best aspects of hippie-dom, especially when conjoined with the kind of deep Christian faith and agrarian practice that Becky’s whole existence reflected, are profoundly wise. It is a good thing to insist on developing real local knowledge, on breaking away from larger systems and getting down on one’s knees instead, whether to weed a garden or pray to God or read a text closely (or ideally, all three). While the political culture of Kansas may on the surface may seem to be anything but friendly to this kind of deep, loving, local engagement, I think that Becky’s example of rooted, trusting, make-it-up-as-you-go-along activism actually only adds to our state’s long tradition of local matriarchs making the most of the soil and situation around them, and making history as they do so.

I’m thinking here of Mary Skubitz, a Slovenian immigrant to Kansas who was brought to the coal mining country of Crawford County by her parents as a child in 1890. Decades later, she helped organize other wives and mothers into the “Amazon Army” of 1921, a mass protest of women, marching from mine to mine, facing armed threats from the owners, demanding improvements of the terrible conditions their husbands and sons suffered in the mines. Or I’m thinking of Minnie Wish-Ken-O, a Potawatomie woman in Jackson County who took up the leadership in her tribe during the 1930s, in the midst of the dissolution and despair brought on by drought and the Dust Bowl, and from her farm led the fight against the national government’s efforts at tribal re-organization and termination over the subsequent two decades.

Even more humbly, my colleague Ken Spurgeon has resurrected—through his film Sod and Stubble—the story of Rosa Hagg Ise, a new bride who settled with her husband Henry and raised a family in Osborne County in the 1870s. The frontier challenges she overcame made her a determined believer in education, and her children in turn graduated from some of the most prestigious schools in America (as well as telling their mother’s story in what became an early Kansas classic). Unsurprisingly, education is a constant in so many of these stories—which just brings us around to Becky again. Her great-grandmother, Eldora Dugan Love, settled with her husband Charles in Butler County in the 1870s; from her homestead, Eldora published a women’s journal which made educational and religious improvement its central message. And three generations later, that message continues on.

Towards the conclusion of Becky’s graveside service, the pastor invoked Becky’s commitment to “place,” both in terms of landed particularity (the family had made arrangements beforehand, in accordance with Kansas state law, to bury Becky without embalmment on her own property, which they did), and in terms of an attitude towards our part of God’s plan—loving where we are planted, and looking forward to that heavenly place of love and grace where we can reside after our earthly sojourns end. As I watched her body lowered by her sons into the grave, I could help but think of my own mother’s recent passing, and also think of how this great matriarch of the Elder clan was still teaching. By example, she was showing us how one puts down roots, and becomes part of an ever-growing, ever-revealing bounteous creation. She lived a Kansas life, and a Christian life, and a life that found and shared freedom and opportunity and insight in fertile minds and fertile ground. What could be more graceful, and more local, than that?

 

 

 

Minding Laurie Johnson’s Gap

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic] 

President Trump has been in office a month as of today, and the maelstrom of orders and actions which he has taken has elicited delight, horror, and/or confusion from many. In the midst of it all, I find myself still thinking about the Never Trumpers. I live in a mostly conservative state, and am a life-long member of a mostly conservative church; hence, the relatively small number of Republicans I know who still dissent from the faux-populist posturing, paranoid postliberal muttering, and borderline criminality that has overtaken most of what passes for politically “conservative” thought these days tend to really stand out. They’re honorable folk, these teachers and police officers, filmmakers and military veterans, farmers and parents and good friends, and the criticism they receive from their supposed ideological allies when they refuse to celebrate the latest mad (or Musk-influenced) order from Washington DC is painful to watch.

I don’t know if recommending Laurie Johnson’s fine book, The Gap in God’s Country: A Longer View of Our Culture Wars, to them would provide them with much solace, but it certainly couldn’t hurt. Johnson identifies herself at the start of the book as “an early ‘never Trumper,’” a registered Republican who broke from her party as she saw the conservative movement she’d long identified with turn into a “right-wing capitalist-friendly ethnically based populism” that idolized “an ill-equipped, seemingly unbalanced nationalist” (who also just happened to be a “narcissistic and unstable reality TV star”—p. 11). If you find such language describing the current occupant of the White House inaccurate or indefensible, then Johnson’s book probably isn’t for you. But that would be unfortunate, because the book—which was written and came out before the 2024 election—actually gives a pretty balanced assessment of Trump’s appeal to the sort of culturally conservative and rural voters whom Johnson (who, like me, lives in Kansas; she teaches at Kansas State University in Manhattan, while I teach at Friends University in Wichita) knows well.

Johnson’s book is sometimes meandering, but always thoughtful; as she writes at the outset, she thinks that the time for “narrow but safe and sure scholarship” (p. 12) is past, at least for her. Her overarching aim is to sketch out the long history of intellectual developments which have, in her view, turned inside out the positions she once held to, positions which most long assumed were deeply rooted in the cultural practices and perspectives common to our shared home in the Sunflower state. In turning to radical thinkers both right and left, Johnson's account of these developments turns primarily on, first, a process of “dislocation”—both material and moral—which has uprooted the cultural foundations for diverse, stable lives and sustainable living environments which were built up over generations, and second, a process of “strong-arming”—both ideological and religious—by which we submit to or participate in a collective attempt to paper over deep disagreements or deeply inhumane assumptions about the lives we live. I think her account is, ultimately, a wise one—but as someone who thinks Trump’s presidency was and will be appalling, I would think that, wouldn’t I?

Johnson is a complicated thinker and a careful writer; those looking for facile diagnoses and easy prescriptions also won’t find this book to their liking. She interchangeably employs both political psychology and political philosophy in building her arguments, making use of everything from sociological examinations of cults to complex agricultural economic data to the history of Bible translations to reflections on television sitcoms along the way. But consistent throughout her analysis is the attention she pays to “domination,” and particularly the cultural and social effects of economic dominion.

Johnson does not frame that domination in terms of class; she’s no Marxist, though she thoughtfully explores what she thinks his philosophy both got right and got wrong. Rather, the domination that she feels far too many of her fellow citizens have chosen not to see or have failed to see clearly is primarily ideational. American individualism, she argues, has been led to its current alienating and disempowering state by the way market-oriented and technology-obsessed thinking has come to permeate even the most basic institutions and practices of ordinary life—in our schools, churches, families, and communities. The domination of the calculating liberal individualist model has not only pushed us away from one another; it has cramped our appreciation of the real-world diversity and richness which open cultural engagement and collective action ought to allow. The omnipresence of “free-market liberalism,” in Johnson’s view, has reached the point that it “shares some of the totalitarian aspects of more openly apocalyptic revolutionary regimes,” with its insistence that “marketplace thinking works equally well for all people in all times and places” (p. 33).

The alarm she expresses at the effects of the homogenizing success of the so-called “American way of life,” as she has come to understand it, is present in every chapter, whatever its specific focus. She sees our valorization of this image in “the imperative to be efficient in the making or acquiring of …goods and services” (p. 99) when writing about human anthropology and psychology; and she sees it in the “politicized Christian opinion leaders” that focus parishioners solely on “worldly ends” (p. 228) when writing about political theology. Near the book’s conclusion, she puts forward a lengthy jeremiad that perhaps comes closer than any other single passage in the book to being an overall thesis statement about how she sees this constrained notion of liberal freedom and economic success as having warped American life:

Let me be perfectly clear. If you are concerned about the current state of our culture because of its contentiousness, seemingly amoral nature, the way it breaks up families, our loss of community, and the every-swifter march of secularization, look no further for the cause than the economy that thoroughly dominates us. Our “freedom to choose” does not stop at our toothpaste brands, though it apparently increasingly does stop at being a small businessperson or a small farmer. We are also free to choose to stay married or not, depending on how we feel. As we have less real choice due to our mounting social stratification and precarity, our “freedom to choose” necessarily gets more and more intensely expressed in our personal moral choices and lifestyles, as well as our stylistic choices. If you don’t like the way the kid down the street dyes their hair purple and wears tattoos, remember that they’ve been taught that the pinnacle of American freedom is in accumulation and personal expression. In effect, we are all in a constant state of flux, and yet we are taught to fear the actual trans person, the one who has the courage to disregard the superficial freedoms most Americans “enjoy” every day because they feel in their interior person that they are not what their exterior says they are. Before we launch any more assaults on our trans neighbors, we need to consider the largely life-frittering ways in which the rest of us are inauthentically fluid, and change our own ways if we do not like what we see (pp. 274-275).

The language by which Johnson condemns the consequences of liberal capitalism--its competitive demands, its expectations of constant change, its condescending charity, its mentality of disposability, its victimizing of those who fall behind, and most of all (echoing Wendell Berry here) its stultifying assumption of “inevitability”--has many echoes, and she does a superb job integrating the many facets of this sort of non-Marxist (though clearly Marx-influenced) cultural critique together. While her analysis mostly bypasses recent integralist critiques, Johnson is clearly respectful of those Christian thinkers who have called for a collective retreat from our corporatized capitalist state. However, reading through her broad-ranging assessment of how the dominance of market values and personal choice has warped American life, and torn a “gap” in structures of community life—a gap which, in her view, Christian churches and those who populate them have overwhelmingly failed to sew back together—makes it pretty clear that she has no interest in fleeing towards some reactionary religious position. (Some of this is plainly personal; twice in her book she details ways in which church communities she was part of simply failed to address the needs of suffering parishioners or to even understand what those needs were, in ways that both involved and affected her directly.)

Johnson’s training as a political philosopher was grounded in the classical liberal tradition, and it’s one she holds to. As such, she blanches at the idea of “a return to some sort of benevolent aristocracy/oligarchy” (p. 231). For her, religious strong-arming and economic domination have mostly developed in tandem, in opposition to a proper articulation of the rights we can exercise in communities built through work and cooperation, free from the worship of political saviors or Silicon Valley “innovators.” That freedom—a small-scaled civic one—won’t be achieved through revolution; as much as she clearly appreciates Marx’s assessment of power under capitalism, she’s not looking for any new vanguard (much less new government programs) to lead us forward.

Rather, Johnson’s hopes—to the extent they exist; her writing is more realist than romantic, and she is better at providing information than inspiration—lay in a different sort of movement, one more focused on recovering habits of work and association than affirmations of identity or authority. Her concluding chapters look closely as distributism and the Catholic Worker movement; she has praise for both, but also gentle criticisms, partly because she is clear-eyed (in ways that more than a few of their advocates are not) about some of the bottom-line realities of exploring these alternatives to capitalism: that is, having less money, less resources, less “stuff” all around. But making due with less is one thing that Johnson can speak to as something more than an academic and critic.

Johnson was instrumental in setting up the Maurin Academy, a multifaceted organization which includes both a farm and a school, one which seeks to provide both content online and food in-person, all in a way which challenges both profit-mindedness and state dependency. Inspired by the legacy of Peter Maurin (the co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, along with Dorothy Day), the idea is to provide a place for the kind of “persistent, often unglamorous work” that she believes—and, I think, has argued persuasively for in her book—is “real and compelling” in the way that life defined by our corporate capitalist and governmental masters is not (p. 269). She recognizes that what they are doing could easily be categorized—especially in the absence of shifts in the state and federal money which keeps our exploitive food systems operating as they have for decades--as just more “quixotic attempts at economic and social experimentation,” but what else, she says in her conclusion, can we do? “We can smile and talk all we want about the benefits of localism, farmers markets, and mutual aid, but how many of us even remotely approach consistently adopting those practices?” (pp. 286-287)

Johnson’s book may not be the antidote to the Trump years which her (all too rare) sort of small-c conservative might need. But she is at least living out, in part, her own retreat from the corporatizing of disruption that seems to be the American lot, at least for the next four years. She is walking her talk, and as much as there are ideas and arguments her book that I admired and learned from (including a few I strongly disagreed with), I find the person she actually is even more admirable still.