Wendell Berry 3
Prophet of the Real Series
As suggested in my note about Jon Grinspan’s article regarding politics and generational change, the one thing that the most influential among our public intellectuals fail to do is confront the massive, democracy-crushing elephant in the room, which since the Civil War has been Capitalism. We swing between Dems and the GOP, but Capitalism pretty much does its creative-destructive thing with the blessing of both. To be a recognized public intellectual these days, the kind who gets published in the New York Times, you either accept the reality Capitalism has created, or if you don’t, you ‘critique’ it from a soft Marxist standpoint that poses no impediment whatsoever to it.1
All this thinking on the Right and Left among our intelligentsia is utterly conventional, and conventional thinking no longer cuts it. And any Marxism that embraces a big-state, materialistic-rationalist framework is no better than Capitalism.2 The solution has to come from outside that Capitalist/Marxist duality, a duality that was shaped by a 20th-Century argument between two equally materialistic/nihilistic ideologies. Generational change isn’t real change until a generation comes along and says, “We reject all dead-end, rationalist-materialist solutions. We want something truly new, something deeply original.” And hopefully they have some plausible ideas to work with to achieve it.
That’s why I think we must take Berry seriously. He’s a heartland prophet of such an “original” approach. He doesn’t tick all the boxes (see Note 7), but he ticks a lot of them, the most important ones.3 Berry represents to me an attempt to think originally, realistically, and in a deeply humanistic way. And he’s not pulling his ideas out of thin air; his ideas are earthy, and grounded in a transcendental values tradition that Capitalism has done everything it can to obsoletize.
Berry is scathing in his critique of Capitalism, but he is not anti-business, anti-innovation, or anti-private property, and yet he’s no Hamiltonian.4 He’s against bigness and the unbalanced power that comes with it. He’s against huge corporate or governmental technocratic systems that destroy smaller, organic ones.5
And so it follows for someone like Berry that if there is to be a long-lasting, stable solution, it has to be grown organically, it has to be grass-roots, it has to emerge from below. And what we need from politicians and our public intellectuals is the good sense to either get out of the way or do what they can to nurture its growth. That’s why healthy political change must follow from healthy cultural change, and that’s why the job of serious intellectuals in coming decades should be to start thinking about what a healthy culture might look like if it stands outside of the Capitalist/Marxist bigness models.
And that’s where Berry can play a transitional role for intellectuals. For him it’s all about health—healthy soil, healthy culture; healthy culture, healthy society. Nothing is healthy about what we have now. If we’re lucky, we’re not homeless, a refugee, or crippled by debt. But the culture the ‘lucky’ have, if it can even be called a culture, is all about distraction. It’s about stupid things that keep us from being bored, of endless churn that keeps us in Kierkegaardian despair.6 To find health, we must change our thinking as a prelude to changing the way we work in the world. Yes, that requires unconventional thinking and innovation7 —but at what pace, at what scale, and in the service of what and whom?
Berry’s hope for the human future is not anti-technological; he’s anti-dehumanization. Right now what it means to be human is completely up for grabs. Most people haven’t thought about it very much. They just assume that being human is what they are, and how they are now is more or less how humans have always been and will always be. Dehumanization doesn’t mean much more for most people than a few bad apples being unnecessarily cruel. They don’t understand how nihilistic systems dehumanize; they just accept those systems as the way things are, the way they’ve always been, and always will be.8 It’s just human nature for some people to be so dehumanizing. This passivity baked into our consensus reality is essential for the Techno-Capitalist Matrix (TCM) to continue its march unimpeded.
Connection is subversive. Any sense of deep connection within the TCM — of being connected to the earth, to the people in one’s community, to one’s body,—is subversive of the TCM and its goals. It wants fragmentation, atomization, alienation. The only kind of ‘unity’ it approves of is a product of its inexorable homogenization. But real connection is essential for Berry’s vision of what human flourishing entails, and so he sets himself against everything that seeks to work against those those ways of being connected. He’s not the only one, but he’s a good place to start. And it starts with restoring balance between what he calls the Exploitative/Rational Mind and the Sympathetic/Nurturing Mind. The first abstracts and manipulates; the second connects and immerses. Guess which one is dominant within the TCM?
These polarities are very close to what Iain McGilchrist is talking about as neurologically grounded in the different functions of the left and right brain hemispheres. But I’ve reached my word limit, and I’ll get into that next time.
See also Wendell Berry 1 and Wendell Berry 2.
Neo-Marxism as it shapes the identitarian Left’s politics is not a Marxism that Marx would recognize. It is a mostly French intellectual bastardization of Marxism, and it is in no way a threat to the underlying structure of Techno-Capitalism. It is largely in alignment with its rejection of the past, its disruption, its deracination, and its homogenization. It is at best well intentioned, but astonishingly shallow critique of Capitalism’s cruelties.
There are different flavors of Marxism. William Morris was a Marxist, a friend of Marx’s daughter Eleanor, and his vision for the future is anything but rationalist-technocratic. It’s very Berry-esque. Read his News from Nowhere. Latin American Liberation Theology is another very Gramscian, grass-roots, localist adaptation of Marxist ideas that I think might get the OK sign from Leo that it didn’t get from John Paul and Benedict.
Ten years ago, when I still had some hope that we’d find a gradualistic way to muddle through, I would not have said that. I would have looked at Berry as offering a lifestyle choice for people who wanted to find a way to live more or less off the grid, and I would have been more Marxist friendly in a Terry Eagleton key. I guess I still am in a Bernie key, but I see that now as merely reactive, as trying to blunt Capitalism’s worst effects, but inadequate for not addressing the deeper structural ailment.
He’s an agrarian squarely in the Jeffersonian stream, and as such he’s someone who believes that democracy is only possible when you have economically independent people—farmers, small business people, professionals, mechanics, independent local media, shop owners— living in face-to-face communities that have a healthy relationship to one another, to the land—and to the earth as a whole. Wage slavery—even high wages—is not what Jefferson or Lincoln had in mind—it’s anathema to it.
The problem that we’ll discuss in future posts is how you get from big to small. You need bigness to fight bigness, and so that contradiction must be resolved. This was the Occupy Wall Street dilemma. All solutions have to be local, but they cannot be sustained unless there is some kind of global framework that insures that the local be protected from thymotic bullies (see note 7). This is clearly impossible within the thinking framework as the Techno-Capitalist Matrix structures it. But not impossible within another kind of framework that might emerge. Global systems aren’t going away; the question is whose interests will they serve, what values will guide them, and what kind of enforcement mechanisms are plausible to protect them from powerlusting sociopaths.
For SK, to be in despair is to not know you’re in despair. It’s to be trapped is a kind of dream that he calls the ‘aesthetic’, which is to be distracted from distraction by distraction. To be in despair is to be not yet awakened to your destiny as a spiritual being.
At some point we have to come back to the “Thymos” problem. That’s not something that Berry deals with. And it’s where I’ll be going when we get back to Goethe and Faust. The Fausts we shall have always among us. They cannot and should not be repressed, but their energies must be channeled lawfully. And that pretty much depends on a society having consensus about what is lawful, which depends on a broadly accepted sense of a moral order—shared by both demos and elites. Impossible you say? Yeah, it is as long as we accept the Techno-Capitalist Matrix as providing the only legitimate metaphysical imaginary. A healthy culture educates desire, and it educates ‘thymos’. And it finds ways to contain the uneducable.
Berry describes this passivity in “The Unsettling of America” (1977)— where most of us just
…tag along with the fantasists in government and industry who would have us believe that we can pursue our ideals of affluence, comfort, mobility, and leisure indefinitely. This curious faith is predicated on the notion that we will soon develop unlimited new sources of energy: domestic oil fields, shale oil, gasified coal, nuclear power, solar energy, and so on. This is fantastical because the basic cause of the energy crisis is not scarcity; it is moral ignorance and weakness of character. We don’t know how to use energy, or what to use it for. And we cannot restrain ourselves. Our time is characterized as much by the abuse and waste of human energy as it is by the abuse and waste of fossil fuel energy. Nuclear power, if we are to believe its advocates, is presumably going to be well used by the same mentality that has egregiously devalued and misapplied man- and womanpower. If we had an unlimited supply of solar or wind power, we would use that destructively, too, for the same reasons. (pp. 128-29)