So I might as well say why I find Robert Penn Warren’s account of the “agrarian” critique of modern society to be superior to Wendell Berry’s. In his novels and poetry Warren presents ambivalence—a real tension and conundrum—over against Berry’s easy condemnation of greed. For Warren, it is neither rural community (“stickers”) nor big city ambition (“boomers”)—as Berry puts it following Wallace Stegner in his Jefferson Lecture—that is at the heart of the trouble of the American soul. Rather, there is a tension between the two.
For Berry, American history has been defined by the greed of the “boomers.” To be sure, Berry says we’re all—boomer, sticker or otherwise—complicit in this greed, but Warren’s poetry is far more ambivalent about terms like greed, and therefore far more questioning in his “agrarianism” than Berry’s literalism of the land. Warren is not a John the Baptist Berry condemning greed.
According to Berry, if only we all grew up in such conditions of a Jeffersonian freehold whereby stewardship of the land was a reality to make for republicanism then we would all be okay. For all of Berry’s wisdom, this is simply utopianism. He keeps talking about land, land, land, but only those as contingently blessed as his own inheritance actually have land to speak of as their own. Warren places these questions in contemporary terms. We don’t own freeholds nowadays, and we find ourselves living already insignificantly in industrial (nowadays post-industrial) capitalism. But we must make a case for our own impoverishment nonetheless.
Warren knows both sides of the equation—proud rural farming and proud urban bourgeois sophistication. Rather than blindly defending the land, Warren was willing to admit that wealth may be more than land. Berry agrees, but one wonders if he would ever admit that his own partisan thumos in defense of the land has not itself become a commodity to be sold on a market for urban types who feel alienated from their own small town and rural backgrounds. Warren understands that world and understands that which can easily be commodified in the character of Jerry Calhoun in At Heavens Gate, Berry on the other hand presents himself as a naïf (albeit a profitable naïf).
As Marx says—of which Berry-ism is derivative—our free human productive power is historically determined by the concentrated wealth of ownership and control of the mode of production by the few over the independent producer. Like Bo Duke, a person to be vilified in Berry’s account of making one’s own, Berry seems to think that we can have an economy whereby income and expenditures are related to work, effort and ability. If only he had read his Aristotle, he would know that money making easily becomes a rule over against wealth in terms of productivity. Aristotle and Berry both warn against this dangerous monetary abstraction, but there is nothing new to this insight, and while Berry speaks truthfully about economy as oikonomike, he assumes that piety alone will prevent economic aggrandizement from becoming simple money making.
In Plato’s Republic, Glaucon became sickened by a city of pigs. and therefore he sought more. Berry, like Adeimantus, has more in common with the Zapotec resistance to conquest in Mexico, and a spirited defense of one’s own. But, unfortunately for Berry, there is no history like the Zapoteca’s have to rely upon in the USA. Unless one points to English or Teutonic past, Berry can at best point to the 19th century or John Cougar Mellencamp. I suppose he could rely on John Niehardt’s Black Elk Speaks, but Berry doesn’t wish to speak of what Warren (borrowing from Indian lore) calls the “dark and bloody ground” of Indian wars and slaughter.
Don’t get me wrong, I want to defend what Berry defends too, insofar as he is critical of quantatative measures of all elements of human life. But this is a loser’s proposition in the USA. The Puritan city on the hill, the Declaration’s natural law, and the Federalist’s “new science of politics,” make one’s own foundations as one of innovation, and such innovation needs the latest of data driven information. There is a way to defend the founding from such rank positivism, but it is difficult to defend it in terms of Berry-like conservatism in a society with a history like our own. The “Straussians”–whether east coast or west coast–are better in this regard.
Even if I favor Berry-ism, it seems to be too fantastic.
Berry speaks of land. Well give me some land to work on. As Locke pointed out, land is scarce, and that is why you invent money. Sorry Mr. Berry if I seek to make my way through money. I don’t own land like you do. Should I be your serf based upon your humanistic values? If we speak of land as land, I might follow the Carl Sandburg—
“Get off my estate”
“What for?”
“Because it’s mine”
“Where did you get it?”
“From my father.”
“Where he get it?”
“From his Father”
“And where did he get it?”
“He fought for it.”
“Well, I’ll fight you for it.”
Berry might as well quote Gibbon or Montesquieu on the failures of the Roman empire. But he has a concept of the human being as limited. However, he won’t mention God, but he will mention the land. This indicates Berry’s naturalism and near pantheism.
Give me a break for all of this. Why should I take this guy seriously? He mentions Allen Tate, but then misses the whole point about human beings not being gods and not being beasts as well. It seems that Berry can’t take the negative and think the corollary that there may be a God and that humans are not beasts.
Meanwhile the rest of us must make truck with our talents, and these talents may point beyond what our forefathers said were limits. I wonder of these Washingtonians–deracinated from any productive skill or from any true local community–who applaud Wendell Berry in his near Gandhian, or at least Thoreauvian remarks of limits, place and simplicity.
This is an insult to the best that Wendell Berry has done. But then again Port William is no Yoknapatawpha.
No doubt, Mr. Berry is right about the data driven prowess of those who look at the land and humans as standing reserve. But apart from summer camp or weekends hunting, most Americans are far removed from the whole truth of what Berry says. We’re—or should I say I’m—not so far removed from cotton farming (industrial as it was), or hunting for deer or duck.
Berry says important things, but Warren spoke to people living in the “industrial” and “modern” world that was personal as such, and didn’t make some ideological stance against what may have been the result.
In old age, Warren wrote deep/silly poems with Eliotic tiles like “Cocktail Party” which had such embarrassing stanzas and order like–
Beyond the haze of alcohol and syntax and
Flung gage of the girl’s glance, and personal ambition,
You catch some eye-gleam, sense a faint
Stir, as of a beast in shadow. It may be Truth.
May 2nd, 2012 | 5:43 am
I agree with this. Berry, as eloquent as he is, at the end of the day is pretty simplistic. He seems to completely ignore that agrarianism isn’t the only possible human flourishing. According to the Bible, the land itself is cursed due to the Fall. It is just as possible to be greedy on the land as it is in the city. The Bible begins in a garden where humans till the land but ends in a city where no mention of agriculture is made.
I agree that the modern disconnect from the land is a bad thing, but Berry only really offers nostalgia – not a path forward.
May 2nd, 2012 | 7:54 am
A fine post, John. I’ve long had the impression that Berry is a binary thinker, prone to Manicheanistic dichotomies. Tertia non dantur.
May 2nd, 2012 | 8:22 am
I find Berry to be far too agrarian-centric, and can’t really get over the fact that he’s a TOBACCO farmer for goodness sakes!
BUT, agrarians and distributists and subsidiarity-ists and other movement-ists all share the spot-on prescription that a major problem in modern society is that too many people are gravely dissatisfied with the path that they think is set for them of spending two-thirds of their life sitting in a cubicle for a gigantic corporation. Mocking them by saying that we can’t all be gentleman farmers pretty much misses the point.
May 2nd, 2012 | 10:40 am
I think that Mr. Berry would argue that only true Utopianism would suggest we can continue to abuse the land, pollute the environment, and do economic & moral violence to rural communities indefinitely without consequence.
May 2nd, 2012 | 1:05 pm
John, Please do this: Add some more specific analysis of the Jefferson lecture and just a bit more meat on Warren and send this my way for PERSPECTIVES.
May 2nd, 2012 | 2:19 pm
Berry’s spot on in his criticism of the crisis that is modernity. Men embrace all sorts of mental and spiritual pathologies and boast of it.
Berry, in his symbolic act of refusing the computer, is right that much of modernity’s ills are promulgated via a soul robbing technology/techne that acts to de-humanize while simultaneously overwhelming the senses and all that that portends.
Berry’s derailment is centered on his embrace of a pernicious secular progressivism that can be seen in his talented epigones at the Front Porch.
I don’t believe Mr. Berry’s inclinations are gnostic, politically or otherwise. One can, rather easily, ‘go back to the land,’ there’s nothing much new in that idea. What’s difficult and that which Berry failed to accomplish was to teach us how to construct an agrarian republican community.
Lite ‘em if you got ‘em.
May 2nd, 2012 | 4:21 pm
Robert Cheeks,
Agreed. It is one thing to diagnose the ill, it is something else to point to a proper treatment. We very much have lost something important in our societal neglect of land and embrace of technology as a cure-all. But given the reality that the massive majority of the population live in urban and suburban settings with livelihoods derived far removed from the land, what now? Sell everything and become small freeholders? Rewind the clock to 1870? How exactly is that supposed to work?
Matthew L…
Who is suggesting that? Did I miss the “3 cheers for abusing the land” post or comment? Again, much of Berry’s critique of modernity is spot on. It is his thoughts (or lake thereof) regarding the what now element that are lacking.
May 2nd, 2012 | 4:51 pm
“But given the reality that the massive majority of the population live in urban and suburban settings with livelihoods derived far removed from the land, what now? Sell everything and become small freeholders? Rewind the clock to 1870? How exactly is that supposed to work?”
But what else will work? I have seen almost no postindustrial societies capable of supporting children and opposing degeneracies and perversion.
May 2nd, 2012 | 6:54 pm
Steve,
I wasn’t specifically accusing you, just asserting that WB is much more of a realist than a utopian. I agree that if can be easy to walk away, especially just based on that one speech, with a sense that Wendell Berry is tossing off idyllic nostalgia and utopianism. However, I think that if you read Wendell Berry enough, you’ll get more of a sense of the “what now?” And if you read his fiction especially, you’ll see that he hardly paints rural life in Kinkade-esque soft glow– his characters bleed and sweat and yell and suffer in a way that hardly idealizes the past.
I think he generally hesitates to offer a multitude of specific suggestions about how cities ought to function (except, of course, to stop abusing the rural places around them) because he doesn’t know them as well as rural places. He has a start here, though: http://www.fs.fed.us/eco/eco-watch/ew910219
I think a lot of movements we’re seeing towards local food & urban farming are a step in the right direction– and it might be as simple as that. That is, if most people in America started eating some significant portion of their food in some sustainable/local fashion, we could significantly reshape the economic forces driving the exploitation of rural places.
May 2nd, 2012 | 9:17 pm
Steve,
Talk about simplistic, black and white thinking…Wendell Berry never claimed that we can turn back the clock, or that everyone should move back to the country. Give me some time, and I can find dozens of places where he addresses these issues with the full sophistication they deserve. I also get frustrated with those who specialize in describing problems without offering solutions, but I honestly don’t think Wendell Berry is one of them. That said, he doesn’t offer detailed solutions. How could he? He is only one man. Solutions will only we worked out through the determined efforts of large numbers of people. And different places with call for different approaches.
May 3rd, 2012 | 12:08 am
Agree with Matthew. Doesn’t seem too hard to do something like this in an urban setting.
Sensible integration of food production and design. Davis California.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSsCvpDbMW8
Quarter acre permaculture food forest
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9fhCEzWS04
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/growincities/growing-cities-a-film-about-urban-farming-in-ameri
http://www.permaculture-media-download.com/2011/11/best-permaculture-homesteading-books.html
And if this is the context then there mightn’t be time to quibble. David Goldman explained how the debt crisis is spiritual/demographic (hundreds of millions butchered in abortion), and those whose judgment is relied upon to navigate the financial crisis are the same who would vote to deny care to a baby escaping abortion, the very capacity for right judgment is absent. If God is just how could the killing be allowed to continue, working through secondary causes, there seems an urgency now.
http://traditionalchristianity.wordpress.com/2012/05/01/the-end-of-the-dollar/
May 3rd, 2012 | 9:56 am
I have read plenty of Berry and really like his fiction. It’s his non-fiction that seems flat and one-dimensional. And yes, his speech was a horrible, angry mess.
As to the links kindly provided – I actually have incorporated some of them into my own home life. (Square foot gardening is pretty darn fun and easy and fresh veggies and herbs can’t be beat).
Sorry if I have touched someone’s sacred cow, but today’s On the Square essays say what I want to say better than I can. (His defender, in fact, concedes much of the criticisms).
May 3rd, 2012 | 10:11 am
Where to start.
You don’t understand Berry, I don’t think. I will try to keep this to a solitary point: More than “land” Berry is talking about “place”. “Stickers” are not rural and “Boomers” are not urban, for example. “Stickers” are invested in their place and community, “Boomers” are not. “Boomers” are what some call “takers” – they are exploiters in the most extreme, and apathetic passerby’s in the least. They have not developed that necessary affection for “place” and hence, are ultimately, whether actively or passively, destroyers of land, economy, community, society.
He is right on the money with this. And once he spells it out, it is almost utterly obvious.
May 3rd, 2012 | 12:54 pm
I’m on board on the STICKERS vs. BOOMERS thing to a point. It’s a good analytic thing, but there’s some STICKER and BOOMER in each of other. And being a BOOMER isn’t just about taking, and lots of STICKERS defend place even at the expense of truth and justice. And there’s a third category so prominent in my town of oligarchic localist, who defends old money and its prerogatives against new money and entrepreneurial innovation that might benefit ordinary guys.
May 3rd, 2012 | 1:48 pm
Peter Lawler
Agree – given the immigrant nature of the U.S., the boomer vs sticker dichotomy is very artificial. If you have ever lived in a small rural town (I have) – you would know that there are some old prerogatives that are land and community destroyers rigorously defended by “stickers” and that some relative newcomers who would change certain customs and practices are actually in the right. Sometimes the opposite is true and the old timers are defending what is right and newcomers are bringing destruction in their wake.
This applies to many other settings as well. Again, it is the all-too-easy Manichean categorization that is, IMO, a great weakness in Berry’s thinking. His fiction works very well because you are dealing with a fictional community where the lines can be drawn much clearer than they often are in real life. His skill as a writer in depicting place and painting emotional landscapes obscures some of the simplistic categorization that underlies much of the story. The non-fiction, however, doesn’t have this luxury in place.
I don’t dislike Berry, I just think his thinking has holes. (Most thinking does, including mine and I don’t have near the writing ability that Berry does).
May 5th, 2012 | 11:54 am
I’m sympathetic with Presnall, but agree with tawster that there is more careful complexity in Berry that his Manichean moralizing tone often conveys. Berry has a sentimental and nostalgic streak–sure. But if that’s not your thing, there is a brass-tacks agrarian environmentalist message that is extricable from all of that.
One important point:
Berry would not say everyone should live on and from the land as a settled family farmer. His point is that the large portions of land that we use to produce food fuel and fiber should be lived on by someone in the careful and affectionate manner he celebrates, not abused by ham-fisted corporations, which are by design motivated not by the full range of human drives but merely the profit motive.
So, its not “thou shalt live on the land” but “the land we all indirectly “live on” needs to be really LIVED on by someone.”
Berryism sans nostalgia would like to see public policies that would encourage and facilitate the substitution–in a very spatial geographic sense–of small-scale lived-on farms for corporate coal mines, big agribusiness, etc., even if that means things will cost a little more. He thinks it would be worth it because it work out better environmentally (less extraction, more sustainability) and socially (better quality of life, more social capital). So the question we should argue over is: would it?
I would like to read about Berry in PERSPECTIVES.
May 6th, 2012 | 9:08 pm
Jake, good stuff. My thanks, as I’ve been too occupied with other tasks and topics this week to sort through where I need to defend Berry from my friend John, and where I agree with his criticism.
I do get bored with the heavy focus, by both friends and critics of Berry, on the food-front, though. I think the more radical and important Berry-ian thrust has to do with empowering local communities.
May 7th, 2012 | 8:18 am
Methinks Wendell, in his heart, is a New Deal socialist. All we gotta do is get the gummint (the necessary tax dollars, the correct number of apparatchiks, a sympathetic congress, etc.) that really, really wants to hep the people and bingo-bango we got us an Agrarian Utopia with additional points for saving the planet.
Given that, a lot of his preachments are common sense and right on.
May 8th, 2012 | 2:05 am
That is the great problem with Wendell Berry, and as you mention his promise as well.
“STICKERS defend place even at the expense of truth and justice. And there’s a third category so prominent in my town of oligarchic localist, who defends old money and its prerogatives against new money and entrepreneurial innovation that might benefit ordinary guys”
But defense of place is it’s own kind of truth and justice, and I assume Stephen Decatur would agree. And I am sure it would not surprise you for me to say that it is right to fear many innovation that come our way in this day and age.
May 9th, 2012 | 3:21 pm
[...] Thoughts on Wendell Berry, Robert Penn Warren and Other Things So I might as well say why I find Robert Penn Warren’s account of the “agrarian” critique of modern society to be superior to Wendell Berry’s. In his novels and poetry Warren presents ambivalence—a real tension and conundrum—over against Berry’s easy condemnation of greed. For Warren, it is neither rural community (“stickers”) nor big city ambition (“boomers”)—as Berry puts it following Wallace Stegner in his Jefferson Lecture—that is at the heart of the trouble of the American soul. Rather, … [...]
May 10th, 2012 | 5:03 am
Carl, I take your point–for Berry “food security” and whatnot is mostly important because it serves community empowerment, not vice versa. Although, for me, Berry’s communitarianism raises but does not answer the tough questions, like “how local is local?” and “whither economic protectionism?” not to mention all of the questions of the civic republicanism v. classical liberalism debate.
May 17th, 2012 | 3:22 pm
[...] Berry’s recent Jefferson Lecture was not, as both his supporters and detractors have acknowledged, his finest piece of writing. His use of the lectern to present a [...]
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