“Established in 1972, the Jefferson Lecture is the highest honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual and public achievement in the humanities.” So says the website of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Since few of us are such renaissance persons as to be acquainted with the work of all the Jefferson Lecturers as they make their annual appearances in Washington, the lecture itself is potentially a valuable introduction for those making their first acquaintance.
And so I looked forward with some small measure of eager anticipation to this year’s Jefferson Lecture, given April 23 by Wendell Berry. In recent years a number of friends have urged me to give Berry a look. He is concededly a rare breed—a working Kentucky farmer who also writes novels, poems, and essays, and who might be described, with broad brushstroke, as anti-modern. The degree of seriousness with which he is taken as a profound thinker is quite something. He is the subject of academic studies and anthologies of essays by earnest young scholars, as though he were a long-dead philosopher—Hegel or someone of that rank—and not a living writer a bit younger than my own father.
Can one have an off day in giving the Jefferson Lecture (an off week or month in writing it)? I’d like to think so. For judging by the text of the lecture Berry gave in Washington at the beginning of this week, his thinking can be fairly repellent. Titled “It All Turns on Affection,” his lecture is chiefly a catalogue of Berry’s hatreds. He hates wantonly destructive land use, soil erosion, mountaintop-removal mining. So far so good.
He hates “agribusiness” and large-scale farming, though it is a great success story in the battle against hunger. He hates “corporations” and derides the notion that they are “persons” in the law, sounding as much like a wise man as the average backbench Democratic hack in the U.S. Congress. He hates “industrialism,” “plutocracy,” and “capitalism,” explaining why his thought is popular among a certain breed of college professors. He hates “materialism” but seems unable to transcend it at any point in this lecture.
Taking a breather from his litany of loathing, he indicates that he loves Nature, which he capitalizes, and draws attention to capitalizing, just in case we might be too slow to miss his implicit pantheism. He loves the local, and he loves the land, and he loves the impressive but largely vacuous sentences he composes about them. He loves E.M. Forster, a minor novelist of the last century who is remembered today chiefly for providing the raw material for some rather precious motion pictures.
He loves the “stickers” and he hates the “boomers,” terms he borrows from his teacher Wallace Stegner. Boomers are mobile creatures, moving from place to place and seizing opportunities—presumably like the first Berry who came to America centuries ago. Stickers are the ones who stay in place and sink roots in the land. Is there room in Wendell Berry’s moral imagination (he loves that word, “imagination”) for a good word to be said about each of them?
Not on your life, you boomer you. “The boomer is motivated by greed, the desire for money, property, and therefore power. . . . Stickers on the contrary are motivated by affection, by such love for a place and its life that they want to preserve it and remain in it.” The Berry family is a bunch of stickers, and Wendell is the Poet of Stickers. There is nothing redeeming or redemptible, not one thing, to be found in boomers. They’re hateful. So there.
And oh, does he hate James B. Duke. Who he, you ask? He’s the über-boomer in Berry’s universe, the guy whose name is on Duke University. A century or so ago, Duke briefly controlled most of the domestic tobacco market through his trust, the American Tobacco Company, which the government later broke up under anti-trust laws. It seems that once upon a time Wendell Berry’s grandfather took a tobacco crop to market and, after paying the transportation costs and being forced to accept the market price and pay a broker’s commission, came home with nothing to show for a year’s work as a farmer. This was all James B. Duke’s fault.
Over and over Berry comes back to Duke in the Jefferson Lecture, but he seems not to know a lot about him, or to care how little he knows. The telltale sign of this carelessness is the initial hedging of Berry’s assertions about the man. Duke “would have known” about such and such—never that he “knew.” “We may assume” this or that about Duke, Berry says; he has no idea whether his assumptions are true. But in the end the temptation to claim knowledge is strong. Here is an example of how a lazy writer can move fluidly from idle supposition to firmly asserted judgment, and from a representative of a despised type to a blanket condemnation of all members of the class:
It may seem plausible to suppose that the head of the American Tobacco Company would have imagined at least that a dependable supply of raw material to his industry would depend upon a stable, reasonably thriving population of farmers and upon the continuing fertility of their farms. But he imagined no such thing. In this he was like apparently all agribusiness executives. They don’t imagine farms or farmers. They imagine perhaps nothing at all, their minds being filled to capacity by numbers leading to the bottom line.
This is a sparkling example of an ideological mind at work. “It may seem plausible to suppose,” he gently begins, that a fellow like Duke “would have imagined” some kindly thought that would naturally occur to an enlightened sticker like Berry. Now comes the transition to certitude. “But he imagined no such thing.” Does Berry know this? He does not. He doesn’t actually claim to know it. He can’t be bothered with such a trivial thing as a single fact about a man, other than that he rooked Grandpa in 1907.
And Duke, safely dead, becomes a stand-in for all the living human beings Wendell Berry despises but hasn’t the courage to name—a whole class of human beings that he doesn’t know or care to know about any more than he cares to know about Duke.
James B. Duke may be one of the great villains of American history. This we cannot actually know from anything Wendell Berry tells us. His lecture gives us no grasp of a real man. It is an attack on a bronze statue on a college campus, not on an actual life a man once lived.
What we can know from this year’s Jefferson Lecture is that James B. Duke is a damned sight more interesting than Wendell Berry.
Matthew J. Franck is Director of the William E. and Carol G. Simon Center on Religion and the Constitution at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, New Jersey.
RESOURCES
Homepage for the Jefferson Lecture
Nathan Schlueter, In Defense of Wendell Berry
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Comments:
It's good for the Inside the Beltway leaders to hear what Berry has to say, because his take on the economy, and economists in general, is that we pay - citizens and nature, a very high price for what is delivered materially. A high psychic cost too, stated directly as the cost of the rapid pace of technical change and its disruption of our living patterns, the "unsettling of America" was the title of one of his better known works in 1977.
Although he doesn't speak as directly in his lecture as he has in other essays about the elimination of the small farmer by compteition and the role of technology in replacing farmers with machines, it is strongly implied by his handling of the "settle" between his grandfather and James B. Duke, where his grandfather leaves with nothing, reminding me of the famous settle described in Nicholas Lemann's "The Promised Land," where the black sharecroppers in Mississippi also get little or nothing, before being displaced by "productivity" improvements in the form of the mechanization of cotton picking. They would unfortunately head to northern and Midwest cities just as these places were beginning to deindustrialize.
Berry is moving from his close observations on how competitive capitalism worked its wonders and horrors in agriculture - something he has seen all his life firshand, and now extending those observations to a national economy wracked by what similar "abstractions" have brought us in finance and mortgages. Here too, don't take it personally, we're merely witnessing the "indifference of a grinder to what it grinds."
In his other essay, he focuses on the fuller meaning and implications of what competition invokes in economics and for society, and its a very different, and fuller accounting than our mainstream economists deliver. I was - am still - working on an essay about the costs of "creative destruction" in regards to deindustrialization, so I was very interested to see that term pop up in Berry's speech.
Berry acknowledges the benefits of our industrialized economy - a term which is itself quaint and out-of-date by at least 40 years in the way economists look at things, but he strongly suggests that there is a grand accounting coming due in environmental damage, to go along with the already high human psychic costs - the unsettling - which we try to disguise under the term "mobility" and the implication that it is usually "upward." The events of 2008- 2012 in the real economy ought to give what Berry is saying a wider audience, but I have to note that it does not appear that his speech was covered in the Washington Post or Washington Times. That says a lot about our society and its elites.
I have my reservations about Berry's vantage point as well, and place him somewhere between the Southern Agrarians and their manifesto of "I'll Take My Stand" and Lewis Mumford's Technics and Civilization and The Culture of Cities from the 1930's. The Southern Agrarians got a lot of the costs of industrial capitalism right, especially in the psychological realm, but anyone who looks at their southern agricultural world of the 1920's - at least back over the shoulder from today, could hardly say that given the prominence of the Klan and tenant farming, it had ideal human relations. And Mumford's grand scale thinking was impossible to implement even during the experimental New Deal; the New Deal's attempts at new rural communities, thinly supported and poorly funded, ran head long into that old nemisis of "class relations" - which looked none too fondly at attempts to aid tenant farmers at the expense of their master land owners.
Now Berry has written some 50 books, and I don't know whether he addresses my concerns here in them - that small local scale agriculture and face to face small scale capitalism lead to much better human relations - southern society in the 1920's and 1930 would suggest caution. And Berry doesn't seem to grapple with the unemployment problems and foreclosure nightmares of our present moment. But he certainly has a good part of a reform movement in his environmental perspectives. I would think that based on what he's seen first hand in Kentucky alone, he could have the makings of 10,000 jobs restoring the damaged soil and ecosystems around him: a solid basis for a new CCC or WPA, which he did not call for.
It's a shame his speech hasn't gotten more coverage. It deserves better, agree or not. Although his message isn't explicitly "Christian," one can certainly read the Sermon on the Mount into the title and the stated ethics, although Berry would say they are grounded in something more pragmatic. Yes he did write an essay in that collection entitled "Faustian Economics," and my sense of his work is that he directly raises the question of a once again relevant conflict between Christian ideals - Sermon on the Mount, if you like, and the current brand of capitalism we live under, which also goes by the name "neoliberalism" and the practices of "free-market" globalization. But as we all know from the history of Christianity, its possible to split into mutually incomrehensible camps over the most unlikely disputes - like slavery. But there was at one time an attmept to apply The Sermon to social and economic matters - The Social Gospel. I suspect that's not a very big hit at "first things." But I wish you well,nonetheless.
Bill Neil
I fail to see how consumerism, abortion, and sexual perversion, and simple tastelessness have this country a "great nation".
Agrarian conservatives simply acknowledge that the material arrangements of our present day society have done as much or more to empower the left and promote divorce, homosexual marriage, low birth rates etc. as any loon with a megaphone in New York.
More generally, I had to suffer Thoreau and his "look at me," untethered-from-historic-Christianity narcissism in college. It was painful to have to write papers that implied I agreed with the savant status the academy insisted Thoreau deserved. (The only alternative was heresy; had I committed heresy I would not have graduated as salutatorian). I've not read Berry (in part because the usual suspects who are so enthralled with him are also enthralled with Thoreau). So if I've already read Thoreau, it would seem that I've paid my dues and can in good conscious continue to ignore Berry. Once is enough.
Finally, I worked with my grandfather on his Berry-esque Indiana farm as a boy, I still own a portion of that farmland, and I am glad every year that our "industrial" farmer (our families have known one another for five generations) comes with outstanding yields and astute marketing advice on how to deal with those awful ag execs. Thank God for both of them, their expertise and efficiency has made it possible to keep the land in the family, and when I occasionally get to drive the massive farm equipment I am once again a gear-head teenager. I like it.
but it's only a paragraph. and the contrast between grandpa and duke was probably more a literary stroke, a use of exemplars to make a broader point about protagonists and antagonists. it seems to me that true meaning is in the details, and i'd rather read about duke than about statistical factoids.
i was astonished to discover that wendell berry seems to understand the term "morality" as excluding motives, including the motive of affection. it appears that even he has ceded the term "morality" to deontologists and consequentialists who think aristotle's virtue ethics quaint and irrelevant.
and it all does not turn on affection. for how are we to conjure up affection? it requires being affected first, being loved first, realizing that the universe is grace, that all is gift. and how do we realize these things? through deep honesty to see the truth of things, which is probably the result of supernatural grace. it all depends on God and his affection. and maybe that was wendell berry's point, but i doubt it given the rest of the lecture.
it was a great lecture otherwise, and especially challenging to me given my withered imagination and tendency to soar into flights of abstraction.
The truth is, there are some good points that Berry makes when he is not trash talking those he doesn’t know. Environmentally Americans do need to make a change and start being more aware. It's unfortunate that because of his pompous attitude the awareness being spread by this man is not taken seriously.
That Berry himself confesses to being a boomer should give us some hint as to what his real objective is: a society better than he himself has attained, where humanity no longer exploits the soil it relies on to survive and in which is embedded the sustenance for future generations.
For example:
If a property, say a small farm, has one owner, then the one owner has an effective and assured, if limited, control over it as long as he or she can afford to own it, and is free to sell it or use it, and (I will add) free to use it poorly or well. It is clear also that effective ownership of a small property is personal and therefore can, at least possibly, be intimate, familial, and affectionate. If, on the contrary, a person owns a small property of stock in a large corporation, then that person has surrendered control of the property to larger shareholders.
I do not at all like Berry's essays. Some are good. Some are appalling ideological diatribes wrapped in an extremely distasteful self-righteousness that simply does not sit well with me.
Since I never know if I'm going to meet the gentleman farmer or the cantankerous, wild-eyed ideologue in his essays, I generally stick with Berry's fiction and avoid his non-fiction.
I took interest in the fact that one of the sponsors announced by the head of the National Endowment for the Humanities was "the History Channel." Do you think we will ever see the Berry lecture - or indeed, any Jefferson Lecture speaker, on the History Channel? I don't ever recall seeing a show of any type on that channel about the political economy or "heaven" forbid, the interaction between Christianity and capitalism, which is not quite where Berry is coming from - but close enough - the Classical Christian tradition of limits, but now where the limits are applied just to personal behavior, not social or economic institutions - that's where unlimited growth - dare we say greed, must be good, very good indeed.
Mr. Sperling is an important economic advisor to President Obama.
The essay is broken into four sections, and all appear online at ourfuture.org. The entire essay is 110 pages.
Part II, which I provide a link to here, is subtitled: "Wendell Berry Applies 'Conservative' Classical Christian Humanism to the Economy."
Here at http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2012062202/part-ii-costs-creative-destruction-wendell-berry-vs-gene-sperling
