Hero Among the Wounded
The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry
edited by Mark T. Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter
ISI Books, 2011
(336 pages, $29.95, hardcover)
reviewed by Arthur W. Hunt III
"Your books seem conservative. They are actually profoundly revolutionary," wrote the American novelist and essayist Wallace Stegner in appreciation of Wendell Berry. "Readers respond to them as lost dogs in hope of rescue turn toward some friendly stranger." Stegner's open letter begins The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry, a collection of essays intended to probe the ideas of America's farmer-philosopher and to situate his work within the larger context of conservative thought.
Berry himself does not stray far from his 125-acre spread in Port Royal, Kentucky, so "lost dogs" seeking him out have occasionally been able to find him sitting on his front porch on Sunday afternoons. That is where editors Mark T. Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter found him, prior to assembling this collection. Liberals publish me, he told them. But conservatives come to visit. The remark is something of an indictment of those who wear the conservative label but do not value what Berry is defending—things like the household, fidelity to place, and functional local communities. For Berry, the remarkable incongruity of modern conservatism is that it does not want to conserve anything. Or, as Christopher Lasch put it, "What is traditional about the rejection of tradition, continuity, and rootedness?"
Berry's books are radical, asserts Stegner, because we no longer recognize age-old wisdom, the foundation of true conservatism: "They reassert values so commonly forgotten or repudiated that, reasserted, they have the force of novelty." Stegner calls Berry a hero to those who have been wounded by industrialism. Berry's books give solace to those longing for a simpler way of life, one in harmony with nature's prescriptions.
The vision of Wendell Berry is humane because it advances the virtues of love, loyalty, and self-restraint in the context of what he calls "good local culture." Indeed, only a local culture can be deemed good. "Global thinkers have been and will be dangerous people," says Berry. He avers that there can be no such thing as a "global village" because, no matter how much one may love the idea of it, one can only live fully in the world by living responsibly in some small part of it.
Berry is not just a farmer; he is an agrarian, someone who believes there should be more caretakers of the land, more people who have a spot on earth to love, cultivate, and nourish. Jason Peters describes how Berry has sought to distance himself from environmentalists and conservationists who do not see the presence of property-owning stewards as a part of their restorative vision. "What I stand for is what I stand on," says Berry. He has little patience for "progressive sophisticates" who rage about the environment from their computers or who find "husbandry" an embarrassing word.
A Wide-Ranging Vision
But Schlueter notes that Berry's essays, fiction, and poetry are not limited to farm life. His wide range of topics—marriage, education, democracy, technology, the market—form an integrated vision. Like C. S. Lewis, Berry sees the tragedy of our age as the separation of reason and imagination, a dualism exemplified in the divide between modern science and romanticism. This split ignores the fact that human experience is mediated through the body, the senses, the memory, history, and the imagination. The author with dirt under his fingernails is able to write eloquently about place because, unlike most of us, he is not a displaced person. "Berry himself is a model of integral wholeness," says Schlueter.
In Berry's writings, the marriage relationship has its full meaning in the context of local community. Marriage is not a private matter, notes Anne Husted Burleigh in her essay, but exists among others who sanction it, witness its commencement, and hold it accountable. Neither is sex a private matter, writes Allan Carlson, because it cannot be separated from procreation. Berry insists that there is no such thing as safe sex: "Sex was never safe, and it is less safe now than it has ever been." Sex is what joins us to the world and is the foundation of the household and the source of children. To cheapen it or "liberate" it from its elevated position in marriage squanders the moral capital it has had for centuries.
Richard Gamble investigates -Berry's view of education, writing that it, too, must be understood within the framework of communal membership. The problem with the universities is that they offer only one serious major: upward mobility. The one thing educators drum into the heads of students—and perhaps this is why students are so convinced of it themselves—is that the best thing for them to do upon graduation is to get on in the world, and that means leaving the place where they are now. For rural areas, this is a community-destroying proposition.
Arthur W. Hunt III is a former professor of public speaking at the University of Tennesse at Martin. He is now preparing to transition to ministry-related service and lives in the greater Memphis area.
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