Jackson, MI. In the latest issue of The Baffler, George Scialabba reviews the Library of America’s recent collections of Wendell Berry’s essays. It’s a perceptive and sympathetic review, but Scialabba ultimately parts ways with Berry because he’s frustrated by Berry’s insistence on “Thinking Little.” Such an approach, Scialabba argues, is an inadequate response to the huge, systemic problems of our day. Maybe so, or maybe not. Regardless, Berry is not interested in merely fixing the problems corporate gigantism has wrought: his invitation, his challenge, is both more modest and more radical—to participate in the Creator’s life and love.
Scialabba summarizes Berry’s posture by way of a (too-simple) dichotomy: “Personal responsibility is his watchword, rather than solidarity.” He goes on to quote a long passage from Berry’s essay “Think Little,” and he responds by laying out his disagreements with Berry’s vision:
This is splendid prose. It is disastrous advice. Leave aside the implicit belittling of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, and other examples of “plan-making” and “law-making” that tens of millions of Americans have felt very grateful for. Look to the present balance of forces: the structures of legislative, electoral, ideological, and financial control in the United States are deeply entrenched, highly resistant to citizen initiative, and virtually without exception geared to the needs of the country’s largest industries and banks. Nothing those plutocrats do not wish to be done will be done in America, even if a hundred million Little Thinkers “go ahead on their own.” Only if that hundred million organize themselves and coordinate their efforts—in other words, become Big Thinkers—is there the slightest hope for wresting control of our country from this corporate/financial oligarchy.
While Scialabba’s line of critique is relatively common, it misses the mark on two levels. The first is that it depends on a false dichotomy between personal and communal action. Even Jedediah Britton-Purdy, who largely shares Scialabba’s perspective and who also wishes that Berry would write more explicitly in favor of “politics and collective action,” acknowledges that Berry’s “local focus is not narrow but expansive.” In other words, thinking little and local action can become the ground for large-scale change. In fact, such an approach may be the only viable ground for lasting, systemic change.
More fundamentally, however, Scialabba doesn’t think Berry’s localism is adequate because he doesn’t share his theological vision. Later in his essay, Scialabba makes their differences clear:
although it lends his writing gravity and grace, I’m sorry that Berry insists on giving the agrarian ethos a religious framework and on situating human flourishing within a “Great Economy,” by which he means not Gaia but the “Kingdom of God.” As a result, he speaks less persuasively than he might to those of us who feel that our civilization has somehow gone wrong, and that at least some part of traditional wisdom is indeed wisdom, but who cannot believe that this universe is the work of the Christian God, or of any God.
Instead of this Christian vision, Scialabba calls for “a pious paganism, a virtuous rationalism.” Berry’s early writing did espouse a kind of pious paganism, but Berry ultimately found that insufficient and returned to his Christian tradition and language. As Scialabba’s largely sympathetic review attests, however, Berry’s theological vision remains winsome, attractive even to those who don’t share it. Throughout his essays, Berry pairs his theological, moral arguments with ecological, pragmatic ones. This approach enables him to build common ground with people like Scialabba who don’t share his belief in God.
Nevertheless, in the final accounting, Berry’s localist vision does depend on his theology. I could point to any number of essays where he acknowledges as much. See, for instance, “Health is Membership,” where he states his credo: “I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love. I believe that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in the world, summons the world always toward wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement with God.” But it is in his novels that his theological imagination is most fully realized. Consider, for example, Jayber Crow’s haunting question: “What did love have to say to its own repeated failure to transform the world it might yet redeem?” Jayber’s distinction between transformation and redemption names precisely the gap between Scialabba’s standard and Berry’s. Scialabba insists that our actions are meritorious and good if they are effective, if they transform society and lead to measurable improvements.
Berry, on the other hand, upholds love as its own standard: human lives are good insofar as they participate in divine love’s redemptive work. In describing the effects of his strange “marriage” to Mattie Keith Chatham, Jayber admits that it doesn’t bring many measurable benefits to either Mattie or him, but he still concludes it was good: “What good did I get from it? I got to have love in my heart.” By any quantifiable metric, that seems like a faint consolation for a failure to transform the world, but by the logic of the gospel, participation in love is indeed what ultimately matters. And, as Berry insists time and again, love and affection have economic results. As he puts it in “It All Turns on Affection,” “it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy.” To relate this to Scialabba’s critique, Social Security without love is inadequate, but love for our elderly neighbors may lead to support for Social Security. Medicaid without love is a soulless bureaucracy, but affection for particular people who lack income or healthcare may lead to Medicaid.
Regardless, such results are never sufficient justification for our actions. That line of thinking would lead to consequentialism, and Berry insists that “hope lives in the means, not the ends.” Berry’s way of love celebrates those actions that allow us to have love in our hearts: the joys of good farming, the pleasures of eating healthy food, the delights of convivial membership. Given his core theological differences, Scialabba seems likely to remain Berry’s respectful ally rather than his comrade. As he concludes, “No amount of recycling, farming right, eating right, being neighborly, or being personally responsible in other ways will matter much if we don’t subsidize solar and wind power, raise mileage requirements, steeply tax carbon, drastically reduce plastic production, kill coal, and provide jobs for all those whom these measures would disemploy.” The key phrase here is “matter much.” Matter according to what standard, transformation or redemption, efficacy or participation in divine love?
When Scialabba writes that “cultivating our own gardens and learning the virtues we have forgotten will not suffice to save the world,” he is right. But the irony is that if his goal is to save the world, his own approach is also doomed to failure. No amount of political organizing will bring about salvation. The good news, of course, is that we don’t have to save the world; the Creator is also the Redeemer, and Berry’s writing constitutes a joyful invitation to participate in His work of love. As I argue at greater length elsewhere, this theological vision is deeply empowering: “If we believe that God is going to save the world, then we have time to salve our neighbors’ wounds.”
Excellent, Jeffrey. Your “matter much” comment at the end really clinches it for me. Of course we want those things we do to “matter,” to have effects in the world. But to measure that which we do by the standard of “mattering” is a consequentialist, capitalist trap. (Thinking of my FPR essay on Berry and “inevitability” here.) Anyway, a superb response to a solid work of criticism; thank you for it.
Exactly. You raised many of these points in your review of Loading Brush.
So, it’s okay to allow all the national parks to be turned into high rises if we have good intentions, but the best results in the world don’t matter if we have a bad attitude? Yes, it would be lovely if we all loved our elderly neighbors enough to make Social Security redundant but humans have never worked that way so we need the government. Good results may not entirely justify evil means but ideal means are worthless without some actual results. Berry is deluded and his critic here is quite correct.
Actually, you’re deluded, as usual, and Berry is quite correct.
National Parks turned into high-rises: Berry endorses this where? You’re one to ask for chapter and verse, so give us chapter and verse. Or is it still your practice to disagree with writers you’ve never made a careful study of?
I’ve read enough of Berry to know exactly how wrong he is. Let’s look at a couple of examples from “Jayber Crow:” In the scene referenced in the post, Jayber has learned that Mattie’s husband Troy is cheating on her. He has a date to the dance, Clydie, but he crawls out of a bathroom window to avoid Clydie (he has had sex with Clydie, making her obviously a whore who deserves to be humiliated by being abandoned at a dance) and walks home, claiming he will be the good husband to his already-married Ideal Woman. He demonstrates how much he loves this woman by doing absolutely nothing. His love exists wholly inside his own head. A real lover would have told Mattie that her husband was a cheat and given her the chance to take some action. Instead, Jayber sits, and allows Troy to destroy the farm that Mattie actually owns. Mattie herself is a worthless weakling, who never once in the novel shows any kind of action other than aiding her POS husband in destroying their lives. (I call her DoorMattie in my Goodreads review of this book.) Jayber ends up by moving off into the woods and becoming a creepy hermit. I imagine the sequel as a thriller in which he and that family he squats nearby murder hikers and people who have flat tires in their forest. That novel would at least feature recognizable realistic characters, unlike the one Berry provided.
Further evidence (as if we needed more) that ideology and reading comprehension seldom play nice together.
You didn’t read the piece very closely; your complaints are answered right in the thing itself.
~~~…acknowledges that Berry’s “local focus is not narrow but expansive.” In other words, thinking little and local action can become the ground for large-scale change. In fact, such an approach may be the only viable ground for lasting, systemic change.~~~
I really don’t understand how anyone who’s read Berry other than cursorily could miss this.
Great piece in any event, Jeff.
What I think people are missing who disagree with Barry’s thinking is that they want to continue their current lifestyle while demanding change of government and large corporations (a.k.a. scale). It it impossible for our world to change in any meaningful way unless each individual changes. We must change the way we live. Who was our prime example of this belief? It wasn’t even Wendell Berry. It was Jesus Christ Himself who worked and taught to change people individually, often one-on-one. The Christ-ian model of change is, in fact, “little” because it requires a person to make a choice and change themselves. The scale is small and as local as the individual heart. Changing to a local approach is the way we will change our society as a whole because it has to start with the individual saying, “I will change the way I live.” Believe me, this spreads because, like the Gospel, it is something that humans crave and they will adopt a new way to live if only we tell them how beautiful and peaceful a way it is to live, and then show them without hypocrisy that it is what we say it is.
Are any Front Porchers familiar with C.S. Peirce’s delightful essay Evolutionary Love? In it, he lays out his vision of love as a metaphysical reality, an evolutionary philosophy. I think his essay is a drawbridge for people to cross who have previously turned back at the moat of Berry’s impracticality/inefficacy.
Peirce begins to scratch the surface of how growth comes through love and why growth comes exclusively through love. Keep in mind that this man is perhaps the most brilliant philosopher of science ever, and is the father of American pragmatism (in strictly the philosophical sense of the term). For the empirically minded — those who are determined to see results — what better thinker is there to turn to about the nature of love?
I recommend Peirce’s Evolutionary Love to everyone, but especially to anyone who views Berry’s thought sympathetically despite being disappointed by its shortcomings.
Comments are closed.