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The Nation's Pulse
The Affections of Wendell Berry
A true Jeffersonian delivers the Annual Jefferson Lecture.
After 2012 Jefferson Lecturer Wendell Berry, of Port Royal, Kentucky, received a standing ovation, the chairman of the National Endowment for Humanities Jim Leach rose to remind the audience that Mr. Berry’s words did not reflect the official policy of the U.S. government.
Like we needed to be reminded.
After all, Berry’s is one of the wisest and sanest voices in America today. His more than 50 books of poetry, fiction, and essays are full of bitter medicine for what ails American society, and the only sweetener is his earthy prose. I challenge you to find one kind word about Washington in any of his works.
As the drawling spokesman for everything local and regional, Berry’s affection thins as it widens. He cherishes first and foremost his family and family farm. The town of Port Royal and Henry County figure somewhere a little further down the list. But the entity known as the USA is about as significant to Berry as Timbuktu. As for our nation’s capital: “[I]n my best moments I am not aware of the existence of the government.”
Berry did, however, accept an invitation last month to go to Washington to deliver the annual Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, if only to chide the bureaucrats and plutocrats. The honor is long overdue, for no one has carried the torch for Jefferson’s agrarian vision like Berry. His lecture, “It All Turns On Affection,” touches on the usual Berry themes: the importance of limits, of putting down roots, a healthy distrust of Big Corporations and Big Government (including that part of Big Government that keeps shipping Henry County, Kentucky boys overseas to die in undeclared wars), the cult of development, nostalgia for the Southern agrarian life, and the joys of family, of place and of community.
From his mentor and teacher Wallace Stegner, Berry learned early on that Americans can be divided into two types: “boomers” and “stickers.” Boomers are “those who pillage and run,” who want “to make a killing and end up on Easy Street.” Whereas stickers are “those who settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.” If you know anything about Berry you know he is sticky as molasses. “Stickers … are motivated by affection, by such love for a place and its life that they want to preserve it and remain in it,” says Berry. Sadly, we consumer-citizens are all boomers now.
BERRY, HOWEVER, IS TOO CONTENTED with his life to be all doom and gloom. At times he is even hopeful that things may change for the better, though that hope is predicated on the axe of progress first striking rock bottom. “The diminishment of the goods of nature will, sooner or later, enforce change,” he predicted. Also holding out promise is the now well-established effort to build or rebuild local economies, starting with economies of food . “An economy genuinely local and neighborly offers to localities a measure of security that they cannot derive from a national or a global economy controlled by people who, by principle, have no local commitment,” he said.
With Berry it inevitably comes back to place and one’s affection for it. “The primary motive for good care and good use of the land-community is always going to be affection, which is too often lacking,” he says. In the end people will sustain the land-community not because it’s morally right but because they want to; affection is going to be the determining motive. Without affection one looks upon the world and its creatures as “exploitable without limit.”
The lack of charm in our modern-built environments is also a result of our restless mobility and withdrawal of affection from places. When we gaze upon beautiful old architecture it is because the builders and owners of these institutions lived nearby, and had true affection for their neighbors and communities, while today’s CEOs and absent stockholders reside hundreds of miles away in gated communities. Why should they care what their buildings look like? They never have to look at them or live next door to them. Just build it as cheaply as possible.
Nearing 80, Berry remains happily secluded in his picturesque if remote corner of Kentucky, shunning the spotlight, reveling in his family and farm and, on occasion, trying to make the rest of us nomadic boomers see the practicality of what he calls “the life of the soul.” Such a task must make crop farming look easy.
About the Author
Christopher Orlet writes from St. Louis.
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Melvin| 5.3.12 @ 8:02AM
When I was an active duty Marine I had the best opportunity to appreciate the land all over the world.
Even today living in a somewhat rural setting there are times when I tell the wife, "Smell it dear, can you smell the earth reaching up to us." She looks at me with concern when I sniff the air, and tell her it is going to rain later in the day.
I spent the vast majority of my life living outside, whether it be farming or chasing bad guys through jungles, deserts and savannas. The smell of the air and the earth definitely let us know when it is going to rain.
I suppose it boils down to appreciating the land, and the sense of community of the neighborhood. I want to say that I live in the best neighborhood in the world.
Most of us are retired from the Marine Corps, and I observe my fellow Marines and neighbors aging as the land around them ages.
Genesis 3:19:
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
It doesn't matter who we are, our how wealthy, we eventually return to the earth.
Bob K.| 5.3.12 @ 8:04AM
He wrote somewhere that, "It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines." Perhaps musing on the differences between those who have an unquestioning belief in technology and those who don't.
And, as an example, he is fortunate that his beloved Henry County does not have Marcellus Shale 8000 feet below the surface of it's earth to exploit for those CEO's and stockholders who live far away in those gated communities or he would see those people who wish to live as machines up close and uncomfortably.
We need more people like him.
KyMouse| 5.3.12 @ 4:55PM
Like Mr. Berry, I'm a Kentuckian who loves the land.
However, I'm concerned about the fact that groups such as the Center for American Progress, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the National Religious Coalition for Creation Care are very big fans of Mr. Berry's. The NRCCC and other groups with which he has ties believe very strongly in manmade global warming.
The Center for American Progress reported the following concerning last month's Earth Day festivities in D.C.:
"Earlier Sunday morning, Dr. Matthew Sleeth, Executive Director of the Christian environmental education organization Blessed Earth, hosted a conversation with Berry in the Cathedral sanctuary. Berry pulled no punches for destructive environmental practices like mountain top removal. 'People who own the world outright for profit will have to be stopped,' he warned. 'By influence, by power, by us.'"
Bob K.| 5.4.12 @ 3:33AM
I once heard a West Virginian joke that soon the only unstripped mountaintop in West Virginia would be the one where Senator Jay Rockefeller had his mansion.
Lawrence| 5.3.12 @ 8:48AM
Eh. Berry and especially some of his more shallow acolytes have always struck me as much less interesting and wise than they think they are. They're just another group of utopians who see their way of live as a panacea for every problem rather than a choice that comes with its own set of tradeoffs. And many fetishize localism, becoming just as materialistic in their own way as the affluent cosmopolitans they despise; they care just as much about what one wears and what one eats, but they consider themselves enlightened merely because they sort their food and clothing by a metric that's different but no less dogmatic.
Orlet approvingly quotes Berry in his claim, "An economy genuinely local and neighborly offers to localities a measure of security that they cannot derive from a national or a global economy controlled by people who, by principle, have no local commitment."
Since the market for food has expanded to a national and even a global scale, has food shortages become more of a problem or less of a problem?
In what sense is your food supply more secure if it is more dependent on your particular county not suffering a drought?
There are people who rail against affluence because of the deadly epidemic of obesity, not realizing that starvation is, by orders of magnitude, a much more difficult problem to address, but they only think that the problems of modernity are significant only because they have been so thoroughly disconnected from the more brutal problems that have plagued man for millennia.
In the same way, the supposedly wise agrarians are able to promote the benefits of their lifestyle while ignoring its significant costs because their lives are ultimately being propped up by the modern world that they disdain.
Bob K.| 5.3.12 @ 9:43AM
But, referring here to Orlet's 5th paragraph in summarizing Berry's philosophy: What have the plutocrats and bureaucrats, the Big Corporations and Big Government and I would add, the Great Economists with their philosophies, done to alleviate these brutal problems that have plagued man for millenia?
Their philosophies expounded and practiced by their true believers have been just as ineffective and far less benign.
Occam's Tool| 5.3.12 @ 6:50PM
I live next door to North Dakota. Thay are happy as hell to have the Bakken.
I lived in rural Kentucky for 5 years. I loved rural Alabama. Kentucky always struck me as a place that didn't have the courage of its convictions.
Peppermint Tea| 5.3.12 @ 8:50AM
Wendell Berry is an icon, yet an unheeded voice. And for good reason. In about every essay he bemoans the state of things--that agrarian lifestyle is not rewarded more than it is--and usually resorts to some half-baked idea that implies government price fixing.
Now I speak as a farm-boy, and a rancher, but to stew too long in Berry's prose makes one start to believe that the world values my avocation more that it actually does. Von Mises is generally more accurate. The economy is made up of everybody trading and they set the value based on supply and demand. Sometimes Truth hurts.
Doctor Detroit| 5.3.12 @ 12:56PM
Soon Berry will get his wish granted. Food demand will skyrocket when our debt society finally breaks.
Christopher Orlet| 5.3.12 @ 9:56AM
I can't speak for Mr Berry, but I think he would say that there is more to life than simply economics. Unlike Berry, who is a devout Christian, Mises was an agnostic, after all.
Vern Crisler | 5.3.12 @ 9:47PM
Mises was also an anti-Christian, but I think Luther said somewhere that he'd rather be ruled by a wise Turk than....
So, better to go with Mises on economics than with all the nostalgic, Southern, neoconfederate sort of agrarianism that was being bypassed not long after Jefferson's time. (Jefferson was in charge of the patent office, after all, and Eli Whitney's cottin gin was approved by Jefferson himself.)
Mike W| 5.3.12 @ 10:48AM
OK, I get that his grandpa got cheated by some plutocratic tobacconist. But his critique of capitalism is as vague as it is shallow, and –like a soft-core Taliban-- his celebration of the parochial seems to owe as much to a petulant animus toward people who aren’t like him as it does to any principle of subsidiarity. In “Christianity and the Survival of Creation”–a tissue of biblical and historical cherry-picking--his Christianity is affirmed only to the extent that it validates his conventional environmentalism. You –and Rod Dreher—may call him a crunchy-con. I call him a cornpone pantheist. In some ways he reminds me of Joseph Campbell –another prolific windbag whose airy pontifications lead a wide and contradictory fanbase to claim him as their own.
Christopher Orlet| 5.3.12 @ 11:01AM
MW, I suspect you would object to ANY critique of capitalism, no matter how mild.
Mike W| 5.3.12 @ 1:36PM
Suspect all you want. I object to vaporous moralizing trying to pass as substantive criticism. Capitalism is a powerful solvent, destructive of much that is good and holy, but an effective critique --and an effective remedy-- requires more than a jumped-up version of the geezer yelling at kids to get off his lawn.
terry| 5.3.12 @ 2:39PM
Berry has written 50 books. I haven't read one line of vaporous moralizing in any of those 50 books. You might try reading more and commenting less.
Mike W| 5.3.12 @ 6:48PM
Then clearly you don't know how to read.
Occam's Tool| 5.3.12 @ 6:54PM
My father in law is a rural Southerner, a farmer---he has 600 head of cattle and has been on his farm closing on over 60 years now, and a veteran of 2 wars (II and Korea). He is a Capitalistic businessman. Please. Spare me the odes to the agricultural lifestyle and the need to break down the cities. When Dad gets sick, he cheerfully drives the 45 minutes to Birmingham and excellent physicians at one of the top Medical Centers in the South (and the world, for that matter)---UAB.
THKrupp| 5.4.12 @ 7:36AM
Exactly, farming is a business like any other. Some farmers are good businessmen, the others unless they inheirit a ton of land and cash go broke. They all rely on technology developed by scentists, machinery built in factories and demand for their products by urban consumers. The myth of independance is basically a marketing tool developed to make farmers feel good to sell them more chemicals and machinery.
Bob K.| 5.3.12 @ 2:18PM
I don't think it can be described as a mistrust of Capitalism. That is too simplistic. Many other factors are involved here.
John Lukacs has described the phenomenon which applies to Berry and others like him as something new. As a mistrust of the uniquely American idea of Progress.
"Gradually, slowly, more and more Americans, more or less consciously, were becoming uneasy with the once sacrosanct and unquestionable American idea of Progress." Opposition began to appear in the 1980s to things like "suburban sprawl," increasing pollution, highways creating more and more traffic congestion. etc ............ "Such were the first, though multiplying signs of a future deep division among the American people: between people who were still unthinking believers in technology and economic determinism, and people who were not."
p.421 A NEW REPUBLIC A History of the United States in the Twentieth Century.
Lawrence| 5.3.12 @ 2:53PM
"You –and Rod Dreher—may call him a crunchy-con. I call him a cornpone pantheist."
To-may-toe, to-mah-toe, organically grown either way.
Dittohead| 5.3.12 @ 5:26PM
As El Rushbo says, Nothing worse than organically grown food. Give me mine with lots o' pesticides! Yum!
Lawrence| 5.4.12 @ 11:33AM
Organic food is fine, what isn't fine is fetishizing it and accusing those who don't of being materialists.
THKrupp| 5.3.12 @ 11:39AM
I enjoy Wendell Berryy's writing and in a sense he is correct, but its a utopian vision he has. The Amish attempt to live like that but they have their share of problems and without demand for their goods and the tourism that is generated from that demand they wouldnt be able to sustain their lifestyle.
Bob K.| 5.3.12 @ 1:54PM
Their lifestyle is by no means expensive and they sustain it today exactly as they did well back into the 19th century when most of America (outside the few big cities) lived in that manner.
Vern Crisler | 5.3.12 @ 9:50PM
And had to put up with falling prices for their crops, and consequent poverty.
Bob K.| 5.4.12 @ 3:22AM
In a few places like southeastern PA their farms were and are on the richest farmland in the USA. In other areas that is not so. In some places they have small businesses. I have seen none in poverty. Their own religious community, independence and self reliance is their insurance. Years ago my work travel took me past a barn raising to replace one which had burned. Amish came from 50 or more miles around to work on it. Even local non Amish pitched in. Women sold baked goods and canned goods at the side of the well traveled country highway. It was completed in a month.
THKrupp| 5.4.12 @ 7:28AM
Thats not quite accurate. I have seen Amish using the modern equivilant of food stamps. I have seen many in poverty. The well to do Amish own business's that cater to outsiders and encourage tourism. The price of farm ground goes up regardless of how you plan to farm it. The economic advantage of using horses fails at about 200 acres of land. If you have a large family you still have to feed them somehow. You still have to buy stuff. They are not completely self sufficient. Their yields are substandard compared to modern farming practices.
Bob K.| 5.4.12 @ 10:35AM
What is the modern equivalent of food stamps as compared to the real government issued ones?
Dittohead| 5.4.12 @ 12:31PM
Ditto, THKrupp, but you forgot to say the Amish are a cult too.
Bob K.| 5.4.12 @ 1:55PM
About a 400 year old cult counting their time in Moravia.
THKrupp| 5.7.12 @ 10:31AM
Its some sort of credit card. Im not sure what its called. Ive often seen Amish using them.
Petronius| 5.3.12 @ 12:39PM
Again, nostalgia ain't what it used to be, and again, family farms being supplanted by agribusiness and the cracker barrels of the bygone general stores giving way to the Walmart scanners are all to blame. I don't know Mr. Berry's work but I do know why they invited him, and those expectations were satisfied. I have issues with Walmart because of how friends who work for them are abused on the job and I seldom go in one. Agribusiness and their ethanol scam is one of our great plagues. But the biggest reason Berry's world disappears is due to tax policies requiring liquidation to settle estate taxes when farm and business owners die. More SOSPHAD! Competent people form their own enterprises to be their own boss. Incompetent people work for the Government and ruin the former. So why is the latter never at fault? While there is validity to Wall St. preying on Main St. the Law isn't helping one bit. Allowing for the inheritance of illiquid assets would certainly add to the maintenance and restoration of our erstwhile pastoral scenes. Remember Stuckey's last stand.
Peppermint Tea| 5.3.12 @ 1:03PM
Chris "Berry would say there is more to life than simply economics."
Well, of course. A great man once said that man does not live by bread alone. And my life now struggling on a ranch to make $100 K of gross income so I can survive is a testament that I haven't ordered my life around money only. My point is that until utopia arrives (Second Coming?) Berry usually hints that some help is needed to keep the good lifestyle running. In other words, subsidization. And anything subsidized is not making it on its own, and is prone to dependency, regulation, and control.
ednamae| 5.4.12 @ 12:47AM
1. It's easy to romanticize the land when you inherited it from your parents, as Berry did. 2.Henry County may be a great but I can't count the times over the years that I have seen Mr. Berry's car in carpool line outside his grandkids' private school in Louisville ( a 52-mile commute) .3. That car has an OBAMA sticker on it.
George W.| 5.4.12 @ 12:26PM
What's wrong with inheriting land from your father? You people with bitch about anything.
ednamae| 5.4.12 @ 3:00PM
Nothing whatsoever "George". It's just that Berry preaches that we should all go back to the land, but those of us who weren't born with a silver farm in our mouths must engage in the sordid capitalist activities he so despises in order to raise the ready cash. But you knew that, didn't you?
Bob K.| 5.4.12 @ 2:07PM
Orlet has described Berry as a "Jeffersonian" above.
And Berry did speak as the Jeffersonian Lecturer at the National Endowment for Humanities. And after his speech the Chairman of that organization said that the speech did not represent the official policy of the US government.
Does that bumper sticker mean that Obama who ostensibly forms our government policies is a Jeffersonian too?
Bob K.| 5.4.12 @ 2:09PM
Make that "Jefferson" lecturer.
KyMouse| 5.4.12 @ 10:25AM
Yes, indeed, ednamae. Your observation pairs nicely with my comment of May 3 at 4:55 p.m.
Am I correct in guessing Collegiate?
ednamae| 5.4.12 @ 10:54AM
Nope. Highlands Latin.
KyMouse| 5.4.12 @ 11:28AM
Interesting. Thanks! I'll keep an eye out.
Bob K.| 5.4.12 @ 2:26PM
Surely you meant in that comment that 'Berry pulled no punches "against- not for"- destructive environmentalist policies like mountaintop removal.'
Conservative Not Republican| 5.4.12 @ 3:20PM
What is all this utopian nonsense? Was Jefferson utopian, too? Jeez, been reading Mark Levin much? Berry is humane, not utopian. Do yourselves a favor. Read Berry, not Levin. If you can.
Bob K.| 5.5.12 @ 2:21AM
Conservative but not Republican. That about sums Wendell Berry up.
Roy| 5.6.12 @ 5:17AM
I'm an overseas reader of these columns in New Zealand and have read one Wendell Berry book. I am astonished at the misunderstanding that city types have for farmer/smallholder country people, who try to spread the deep satisfaction that can be gained from small farm endeavours. Wendell Berry not only tries to impart good farming practices but suggests along with practical demonstrations how stock farming can improve the land. Along with new grass species and differing stock he puts forward in practical terms the farming systems he employs. It is to the detriment of country areas that small family farms are openly discouraged in order to satisfy the mainly crop farming corporate elites. It is a pity that honest farming people who have the intelligence to put pen to paper can be so misrepresented. Berry works for the good of the country and tries to suggest ways to improve the soil from which we all - indirectly or not - derive our living.
May I quote from Thomas Jefferson: "Whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on....The small landowners are the most precious part of a state".
Bill Neil| 6.4.12 @ 12:17PM
Thanks Christopher Orlet, that's a pretty good summary of the tone and content of the speech. I was nearly finished an essay about deindustrialization, and a possible "Renaissance" of American manufacturing, centered on Gene Sperling (a leading economic advisor to President Obama) when I came across Berry's Jefferson Lecture. I realized that he and I had been writing about the same subject - a different accounting system - for what he quaintly calls our "industrial" system - a term several generations out of step with things on the ground here in the USA, but the context and meaning are clear. So I wrote an essay entitled "The Costs of 'Creative Destruction': Wendell Berry vs. Gene Sperling and I'm providing a link to Part II, subtitled "Wendell Berry Applies 'Conservative' Classical Christian Humanism to the Economy" here at
http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-.....e-sperling
The essay, which is actually a small book of 110 pages and has been divided into four parts, which are easy to find by following the link.
It's a shame that most of the nation has ignored Berry's speech, agree or not, it's well worth pondering. No coverage in the WaPo or Wash.Times that I could find...Googling "Wendell Berry's Jefferson Lecture" doesn't turn up much commentary, present company and "First Things" at Princeton being two exceptions.