The Weekly, August 21, 2024
Hi all,
I’ve been going back through old Wendell Berry essays for a variety of reasons. One thought that struck me, as I made my way through The Long-Legged House is that there is some sense in which Berry knew from his earliest work as a writer that his project was doomed, in some sense.
The first essay in Long-Legged House, written in 1965 when he was either 30 or 31, is a denunciation of 1960s-era style welfare for undermining the work of small craftsman, such as a furniture maker Berry knew. Specifically, he condemned a regime that gave the craftsman and his family food, on the condition that they not make too much money, rather than tools, which the craftsman might have used to make his business more profitable and able to support the family with a living wage. So the upshot is not a typical libertarian denunciation of welfare, but rather a kind of Ivan Illich-style call to order welfare to conviviality by providing people with the means by which they can be independent.
The second essay is a consideration of strip-mining, which he refers to as “the landscape of Hell.” At that time Berry wasn’t a Christian so it is interesting to see him reaching for Christian, or at least western religious language, to capture the horrors of strip mining. That piece was also written around the same time as the first. So in his early 30s Berry was already confronting the thing that is perhaps the apotheosis of all the things he opposes—and that thing had basically already “won” as it were and would go on winning.
And yet nearly 60 years later Berry is still writing. So he has spent 60 years, virtually the entirety of his career as a writer, writing from a place of defeat and apparent doom. But he has done it without giving up and without despairing.
That strikes me as something of enormous moral significance that all of us could learn from. Specifically I thought of this passage from an interview he did that I linked in last week’s newsletter. Forgive the length of the excerpt, but it’s too good not to share in its entirety:
WB: You realize, don’t you, that you’ve won this argument?
TD: What is localism’s answer to refugees? To those whose homeland is not livable anymore? Whether that place is underwater, has turned to desert, was destroyed by American imperialism and our desire for more resources?
WB: You’ve won this argument. The argument for despair is impenetrable, it’s invulnerable. You got all the cards. You got the statistics, the science, the projections on your side. But then we’re still just sitting here with our hands hanging down, not doing anything.
One of the characteristics of the machine civilization is determinism. You’ll find plenty of people who’ll tell you there’s nothing you can do, it’s inevitable. You can’t make an organization to refute that; you’ve got to do it yourself. You’ve got to cleanse that mess out of your heart. Among our own people, the only communities who’ve done that have been the Amish. Their communities have survived. We were living very much like them when I was a boy here, doing our field work with horses and mules — [A device in Wendell’s pocket beeps].
TD: There’s a machine talking to you.
WB: I’ve got this damn thing. It’s called a “flip phone,” I think. It’s fixed so I don’t have to hear from anybody except Tanya.
TD: You want me to erase that from the recording so nobody knows you have a cell phone?
WB: I just pushed the button down. That kills it. This county here was full of self-employed people, full of people who were living without bosses. There were a lot more people going to church here then than now, and I’m sure they were all hearing, from time to time, Jesus’s two laws: love God and love your neighbor. And the difference between us and the Amish is that they took that law as an economic imperative. If you love your neighbor, you can’t replace your neighbor with a machine. And that so far has worked for them. But the key to it is love. That doesn’t mean that you’re going to like your neighbor. It means that you know what the commitment to love requires of you, and you’re going to keep the commitment. The Amish in fact keep the commitment.
TD: Right.
WB: David Kline just published a book called The Round of a Country Year. One of the remarkable things is that it’s a happy book. David’s family, his neighbors, they’re cooperating all the time, and nobody’s overworked. Somebody will start a task, somebody will come to relieve that person. At two o’clock in the afternoon, somebody comes with a fresh team of horses and finishes the work.
TD: So take that community as an example. That happy community that is working sustainably in that way. Now let’s say, even a small fraction of the 80 million Bangladeshis whose homes are less than ten meters above sea level, who are losing their homes right now, every day — a small portion of them, just a few hundred thousand, show up at that community. How do they respond? What is that community’s response to that mass migration?
WB: Well, we can’t answer that because it hasn’t happened yet.
TD: But there’s a knock on our door every day. The people who are coming from places that are no longer livable — in large part because of the actions of this country and others like it. We have to have an answer. I see folks like David Fleming, who are explicit that a local economy requires barriers to entry. He’s pretty explicitly opposed to immigration. And when we look at the pattern of migration, the military has an answer, the xenophobes have an answer.
WB: What’s the military going to do about it?
TD: When it became clear that all those people in Bangladesh are going to lose their homes, India built a border fence all the way around Bangladesh. A nineteen-hundred-mile, partially electrified border fence. Over the past decade, there’s been a proliferation of border fences, between rich and poor areas, across the world. The military’s answer is genocide — we’re going to make sure these people die right where they’re at. So if we’re going to live in love in this time in history, we need to have a better answer.
WB: Well, here we are, wasting time. What are we doing here? Why aren’t we out somewhere else doing something else? Why are we just sitting here talking?
TD: Because we don’t know what to do. That’s what I’m trying to say. It’s really complicated to live in love, at this time.
WB: We do know what to do. We need to take care of the responsibilities that we’ve got.
TD: Where are the boundaries of those responsibilities, though? In this interconnected age, when we have benefited so much from an extractive, interconnected, globalized world?
WB: The effective boundaries of responsibility are your own limits. There’s so much you can do, and you ought to do it. That’s all. But to sit here and hypothesize the worst possible thing that could happen and decide what we’re going to do about it, or what the Amish are going to do about it, seems just a waste of time.
TD: As we’re already seeing those impacts, I would disagree. Because we’ve avoided having that conversation, but those who profit from the exploitation of other people have thought about it. So when those unprecedented situations happen, they’re the ones with the plan on the table, they’re the ones people turn to because they’ve got answers.
WB: Because they think the answers are simple.
TD: Right.
WB: Well, I think the burden of our conversation is that the answers are not simple. They depend on people taking responsibility. If you’re absolutely convinced of the evil of certain people, you can become John Brown. You can go to those people’s houses at night and drag them out of bed and kill them. He was a professed Christian. But Jesus didn’t tell you to go and drag anybody out of bed because they’re evil. If you believe in the real answer, if you believe really in honoring the being of all the people and all the creatures who have being, including the rain and the rocks, then you can’t have simple answers.
TD: But it doesn’t mean not confronting them. Jesus didn’t say, Go drag violent or dangerous people out of their bed, but he did say, Turn the other cheek for it to be struck as well. And I think we often forget about that last part, about it being struck as well. We’re not turning the other cheek and walking away. We confront that force of violence with our vulnerability.
WB: You going to do that in Bangladesh?
TD: There’s a way of confronting those power structures that would put kids from Honduras in cages. To confront them with that force of our vulnerability. To arouse the empathy of all those who can see. The genius of that instruction from Jesus is that empathy is the strongest part of human nature. Going out and hitting somebody, dragging them out of their house, doesn’t rattle anyone awake from a culture of violence. But that force of vulnerability is so countercultural, the empathy rattles people out of their sleepwalking.
WB: Jesus didn’t tell us to be ashamed of being unassaulted. He didn’t say we should hunt up somebody to slap our face.
Not too long ago, a bunch of us sat in the governor’s office. Maybe that rattles some people, I don’t know. But do you know the score on the opposition to strip mining in this state? About a hundred to nothing. It’s a wipeout. We haven’t won a damn thing. We’ve walked our legs off, made speeches, written essays. I wrote my first essay against strip mining in 1965. I don’t mean that I shouldn’t have done it. Not at all. The triumph is that the counterargument has lived. I’ve helped a little to keep the idea of husbandry alive. The other side hasn’t scored so far as to wipe out the opposition. I think you helped that. I think I helped a little bit. However bad it gets, anybody willing to act with goodwill, in good faith, with some competence in acting, can make things a little better. I don’t care if it’s the last day of the world. That’s my faith.
We don’t have to go to Bangladesh to find desperate people. Eastern Kentucky’s still poor. We’ve had two political parties in this state in my time, both of them were for coal. And that money has left here. Suppose we say, Well, coal’s finished. What else do we have? We have people. We have streams. We have the forest, and we have some bottomlands along the rivers and creeks that are arable and could produce food and income for the local people. Why don’t we do an inventory up there, see what we’ve got?
TD: But even looking at what is available is blocked. In West Virginia, it’s the same story. Every year in Obama’s proposed budget, he had money in there specifically for economic diversification of West Virginia, targeting the coal mining areas. But every single year, the congressional delegation cut that money out of the budget. Every single year, they said, “We don’t want our people to have any other options,” because they’re beholden to the coal industry. That’s both Democrats and Republicans.
WB: You’ve got two bunches of officials, one as hypocritical as the other. So you need to look for a way to bypass those people. There’s the forest up there. Do you have to harvest timber from that forest by way of skidders? A new one costs about $300,000. From what I’ve seen, there is a better way of forestry. Logging with horse or mule teams to minimize the incidental damage. Employing the right kind of energy, increasing work for people. And worst-first, single-tree selection. Worst-first singletree selection means that you go into these degraded woods, which is about all we have in Kentucky, and you look around, and you see what trees are, by a fairly reliable definition, worst. Misshapen, diseased. Enough of that low-grade stuff to pay for getting it out. The idea is not to make a once-in-a-lifetime bonanza, but to go back again in fifteen or twenty years with the same proposition — look at every tree, take the worst, leave the best. You keep the forest ecologically intact. Every time you go back, the quality is better.
TD: And so we should apply that to the politicians, is what you’re saying?
WB: No!
TD: Go in and take out the worst first.
WB: If there are arable lands along the creeks and the rivers, the people in those regions ought to be eating from that land. So it’s very discouraging to go up there, drive along those creeks and river bottoms, and see them in soybeans.
TD: Down the road from here a couple miles, there’s sixty-three acres for sale, all monocrop corn.
WB: That used to be a diverse farm, and the plunderers got ahold of it. You may have noticed that there’s a long, steep hillside along there that has to drain down to and across that bottom, and there are no waterways across it.
TD: So it just washes out the soil and drowns the crops?
WB: World destruction is a discounted cost of production. Two or three people have been ruined there. It’s unsustainable even from an economic point of view. Nothing good can be said for it. Farming now pays a lot more to the people who buy the product and furnish the so-called inputs than to the farmers, and that’s probably been the way most of the time from the very start of agriculture. The village cultures of the Middle East got rid of their crop surpluses in natural ways: I’ve got too much of this, you’ve got too much of that, let’s trade. But then came writing. And after the writing, the bureaucrats, the people who could keep track of the crop, predicting production and so on.
TD: Maintain a debt ledger.
WB: That’s right. And so the first city-states grew upon crop surpluses that could be cornered by the worst people. Farmers thus became a captive population, and a lot of the wars of those times would be for slaves to add to the workforce. So that goes way back. Now I’m reading about the Aborigines in Australia, who had a much better land use record until the English got there in 1788. Archaeologists have found grain mills there that go back thirty thousand years, which means these people were baking bread thirty thousand years ago. They were building very sophisticated fish traps. They were keying the stones of the traps into the bottoms of the river so that the floods wouldn’t move them.
They also had a working relationship with killer whales. They built two fires along the shore, and some fellow would walk like a hungry old man on his last legs, back and forth between those fires. And that would let the killer whales know that the humans needed something to eat. And they’d drive the other whales in and beach them out. For their reward, they got the tongues out of those beached whales. And that relationship went on after the white people came. The white people were taking part in it until one of these settlers killed the lead whale of the killer whales. That ended the partnership immediately.
TD: Do you think that kind of deep relationship with the nonhuman world is still within us? That we can tap into that?
WB: Oh, sure it is. It’s called sympathy. Sympathy is part of imagination. We still have that capacity in us. We could see the need for it, cultivate it, and recover it. After all, a thousand years is not very long.
TD: The next thousand years will be, though.
WB: The unfortunate people who are going to live for a thousand years are going to get pretty damn tired of it. But — oh, there’s a warbler out there on the grapevine.
TD: I saw him earlier. He’s eating your grapes.
WB: No, the grapes aren’t ripe. I don’t know that bird.
Guy Mendes: What’s the yellow bird?
WB: That’s a wild canary or goldfinch, male. Purple finches are eating at that feeder. So you see, the world is still furnishing beautiful birds and flowers, and it’s showing us human goodness, and it’s making us love each other. And we would be wrong if we don’t let ourselves be happy because of those things.
I had a student one time who told me she wasn’t going to be happy until everybody was happy. I was up there on the hillside one night, thinking about that girl, wondering what would be better use of adding one more unhappy person, and I made a poem:
O when the world’s at peace and every man is free
then will I go down unto my love.
O and I may go down several times before that.
The argument for despair is impenetrable—so, I think Berry wants us to see, it’s not worth bothering with. You’ll lose. What you have to do is consider your domain of responsibility and competence and then act well in that domain, whatever it is.
Thinking in terms of my own life, the arguments for despairing of the American church are strong and numerous. If I wanted to, I could easily convince myself she is beyond hope—and don’t try to use the lines from “The Church’s One Foundation,” to talk me down. God makes promises to the church universal, but no such promises to regional churches. Regional churches have died and failed countless times in church history—go read Philip Jenkins. It maybe that the American church will share the fate of the Japanese church of the 17th century. That’s a possibility we have to be open to.
But that reality isn’t an argument for doing nothing. With the competence we have and the responsibilities we have, we can seek to do something different, something better. And so that’s what we do at Mere Orthodoxy. We’re Christians who work for renewal, both in the church and in broader society, not because we think success is certain or even probable, but because it’s the work God’s given us to do. To quote from another man who did good work in a small way (which in time became quite large, in his case!) to keep alive some small, good things:
It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.
When he wrote those words he was still a relatively anonymous university don who took extra work grading university entrance exam essays to bring in the extra income needed for his family. The arguments for despair in Tolkien’s day were as strong as in our own, particularly when one considers that much of the story was written under the shadow of World War II and in the grim days that followed in the UK as the nation came to realize its massively diminishing place in the world. Yet amidst it all he continued to work—and God brought much good out of it.
So: Let us be people who seek to uproot the evils that exist in the fields that we know, resisting despair less with arguments and more with the simple facts of a well-lived life.
Books
I finished the Coolman parenting book, which is excellent. I also finally finished Favale’s Genesis of Gender. I’d recommend both quite warmly. I’m now in full-on book writing mode + lecture writing mode ahead of two talks I need to give next month at Covenant Seminary in St Louis. Amongst other things, that has meant picking up Postman’s Technopoly and Barba-Kay’s A Web of Our Own Making.
Articles
Myles Werntz on homeschooling and the common good
Scott Alexander on slave morality
Freya India on moral direction
A group of friends and admirers, including Russell Moore and Andrew Peterson, reflect on what Wendell Berry has taught them
Elsewhere
Haven’t made anything new lately—as summer winds down I’ve been enjoying some simple rum drinks. The Hemingway daiquiri has been my go to.
Thanks for reading!
Under the Mercy,
~Jake