For most fashionable American intellectuals, the life and work of the poet, novelist, and essayist Wendell Berry represents something of a scandal. Of course, it is understood to be a scandal in its current meaning as a disgrace and most certainly not in its older Christian sense as a temptation. Not only is Berry a writer who lives among the hoi polloi in rural Kentucky instead of cultivating a salon in New York City, but he also spends most of his time farming or, in the vernacular of contemporary America, doing menial labor.
Further, with apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan, Americans tend to think of everyone who has been begat as either a Republican or a Democrat. Berry’s polemical work, however, is not easily classifiable under either label. In an age when people are leaving or being forced from their farms and when most Americans no longer understand that the phrase res publica refers to something more significant than “everyday low prices,” Berry is committed to the old Jeffersonian idea of an agrarian republic comprised of independent, self-reliant citizen-farmers.
Of course, Berry’s agrarianism has been dismissed as anachronistic by those for whom the idea of progress is religious dogma. However, as C.S. Lewis wrote, “as to putting the clock back, would you think I was joking if I said that you can put a clock back, and if the clock is wrong it is…a very sensible thing to do?”
Berry’s The Unsettling of America, published in 1977, appears at first glance to be a critique of American agricultural policy, which indeed it is. However, it also articulates a sustained, coherent, and compelling analysis of the fragmentation and alienation of modern American liberal culture, and offers an intimation of both an alternative understanding of culture and community, and a classical conception of human beings, their past, and their purpose.
According to Berry, America has suffered from a split personality since the time of the arrival of the first Europeans. In that European beginning, America was considered a land of economic opportunity, a colony in the modern sense of the term. It was understood as a resource to be exploited by the mother country. As Berry writes, “the first and greatest American revolution…was the coming of people who did not look upon the land as a homeland.” This America, the land of the get-rich-quick scheme, attracted fortune hunters, conquistadors, and assorted other adventurers on the make who treated the land and its inhabitants as a business venture.
At the same time, however, America was also a colony in the classical sense in that it was a place of settlement. This America attracted those who wanted a place to live and a land to cultivate, free from the religious and social strife which plagued Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Wallace Stegner, who was Berry’s teacher at Stanford, called the first of these types “boomers” and the second “stickers.” A century and a half earlier, Tocqueville noticed this split and attributed it to the difference between royal, proprietary, and merchant colonies and colonies created by compact. However, for Tocqueville, the Revolution and the generally democratic character of the population overcame this dichotomous beginning.
In contrast, Berry suggests that this split identity created two cultures and, as the years have passed, the culture of material exploitation has become more and more dominant. He writes that “generation after generation, those who intended to remain and prosper where they were have been dispossessed and driven out, or subverted and exploited where they were, by those who were carrying out some version of the search for El Dorado.”
These two conceptions of America have also entailed two very different ideas about the character of community and about the proper function of government. The “boomer” understands community to be an artificial collection of individuals united solely by mutual interests, and conceives the government’s role as protecting and managing these mutual interests.
For the “boomer,” government is understood as an economic enterprise with its goal as the management of the efficient exploitation of the resources, both material and spiritual, of the state. As Silent Cal once said, “the business of America is business.” However, Berry rejects this valorization of cupidity, noting that “people who have desired material quantities on such a scale have always been recognized as evil.”
Conversely, the “sticker” considers community to be an historical association of people united by common beliefs, institutions, and practices, and believes that government ought to be concerned with maintaining and supporting those beliefs, institutions, and practices. For Berry, “we and our country create one another.” Thus, government is not understood as a manager of a common enterprise, but instead as a means by which the political community preserves itself and accommodates itself to change.
Further, while the “boomer” views specialization both in the private and public realm as a boon to productive efficiency and thus dismisses the importance of self-sufficiency and active citizenship, the “sticker” is committed to creating and sustaining an independent citizenry capable of virtuous self-rule. Indeed, for Berry, “the disease of the modern character is specialization” which results in the “calamitous disintegration and scattering-out of the various functions of character: workmanship, care, conscience, responsibility.”
For Berry, the independent citizen is most appropriately a yeoman farmer, a small freeholder who owns and works a plot of land. He writes that “as many as possible should share in the ownership of the land and thus be bound to it by economic interest, by the investment of love and work, by family loyalty, by memory and tradition.”
This conception of the proper role for human beings reflects Berry’s commitment to what Alasdair MacIntyre calls a teleological ethic. According to Berry, following Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the medieval scholastic philosophers, human beings, like the rest of God’s creation, are created for a purpose. Indeed, the title of one of his collection of essays is What Are People For?. Berry’s answer is that the telos of human beings is care for self, for others, and for God’s creation. Care, in Berry’s formulation, is quite similar to caritas or love, the most complete of the Christian virtues. The proper ruling metaphor, at least for males, is that of the good husband who cares for his wife, his family, and his land. Berry claims that “marriage and the care of the earth are each other’s disciplines. Each makes possible the enactment of fidelity toward the other.”
Farming involves a daily cognizance of the miracle of life (another of Berry’s books is titled Life is a Miracle) and the possibility and necessity of renewal and resurrection. It is, in many ways, a necessarily conservative way of life, given the necessity on a farm of preserving, nurturing, and reproducing life. According to Berry, “a healthy culture is a communal order of memory, insight, work, conviviality, reverence, aspiration. It reveals the human necessities and the human limits. It clarifies our inescapable bonds to the earth and to each other.”
This inherent conservatism and its resistance to the blandishments of “progress” is what led Marx to praise bourgeois capitalism for rescuing the proletariat from the “idiocy of rural life.” In order to make revolutions, one must strip the people of their connection to each other, to their past, and to their land.
Living and working on the farm in an appropriate way, which also serves as an antidote to modern alienation, requires an understanding of the rhythms of nature, an acceptance of the mystery of creation, and an acknowledgment of the inherent limitations of human power. Like Benedictine monks, Berry’s understanding of the proper attitude toward life can be summarized in the phrase ora et labora, for the suitably human stance toward creation is one of reflective awe, prayer, and concerned care, not one of efficiency, calculation, and mastery. Berry warns that “we can make ourselves whole only by accepting our partiality, by living within our limits, by being human—not by trying to be gods.”
In addition to the account of American cultural schizophrenia, Berry’s work also offers an intriguing insight into a view of the past which rejects the contemporary orthodoxy of an inevitably progressive direction leading away from the benighted irrationality of religion and tradition to the New Jerusalem of science and rationalism. Instead, and in the tradition of agrarian writers from Hesiod and Virgil to Chesterton and Belloc, Berry suggests that history, like nature, is cyclical, and that the achievements of human beings contain within them, not the key to unlimited improvement, but the seeds of future dissatisfaction, corruption, and failure.
Like his conception of human purposes, Berry’s understanding of the past owes a great deal to Aristotle, who understood the past in cyclical terms, and the medieval Christian tradition, which understood history as eschatological, not progressive. Berry insists that, like the good farmer, we must “align ourselves with the universal law that brought the cycles into being and that will survive them.”
It is a great irony, then, that the most compelling critique of Berry’s work comes not from contemporary proponents of perpetual progress but instead from some of the classical sources which nourish his own work. For Aristotle, the natural end of human activity is contemplation of the beautiful, the good, and the true, and the prerequisite for such contemplation is leisure. Indeed, the distinction between work, which is inherently practical, and contemplation, which is concerned with the intrinsic value of things, is central to classical philosophy.
Of course, the Aristotelian understanding of leisure refers to time spent in study and contemplation, not time spent on the golf course with a six-pack. However, despite Berry’s exceptional gift for combining the active life with the contemplative, for most human beings, the leisure necessary to achieve the contemplation of the true and the good requires leaving the farm for the library or the monastery. Thus, the real dilemma that Berry’s work presents lies not in choosing between a sterile and fragmented liberalism, which he rightly derides, and a more nourishing and unified agrarian ideal, but instead consists of the perennial struggle to balance the necessary and fundamental value of proper work with the indispensable because essential task to become more fully human through the contemplation of the permanent things.
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