Wendell Berry’s Affections

Wendell Berry died yesterday. He was one of the mainstays of the "back to the land" movement, writing on rural topics of interest to those in the movement.

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Gary W. Houchens

The debt Wendell Berry described is owed by everyone who has inherited something – a faith, a family, a school, a country – from people who are now gone and who are now responsible for handing it, intact and loved, to people yet to be born. That is the whole of the cultural cycle Berry described.

Kentucky writer Wendell Berry has died. In this age of polarization, the poet, farmer, novelist and essayist steadfastly defied conventional political labels.

Progressives were drawn to Berry’s criticisms of industrial capitalism and his advocacy for environmental causes. But conservatives often noted that what progressives find appealing in Berry’s work is really the result of his deeper commitments to traditional, local ways of life, and how modernism (and, I would argue, liberalism) has undermined not just the physical environment, but the culture of family and place, perhaps even in ways Berry himself did not fully realize.

A good example is Berry’s 2012 Jefferson Lecture. Established in 1972, the Jefferson Lecture is an annual recognition by the National Endowment for the Humanities and is considered the highest honor awarded by the federal government “for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.”

Berry’s Jefferson Lecture was entitled, “It All Turns on Affection,” and he used the occasion to argue that utilitarian arguments for environmental conservation are insufficient without an even deeper emotional attachment to the specific places that are to be conserved. Such attachments are the results of generations of connection to a local community, its history, and its physical environment.

The example Berry used to frame his argument was his own family farm in Henry County, Kentucky, and especially his grandfather’s legacy of trying to preserve that land through the ups and – more often – downs of decades of tobacco farming, downs often engineered by corporate interests that benefitted tobacco companies against the farmers who grew the crop.

Berry described how technological “progress” has deprived most Americans of any meaningful connection to the land like his family has experienced for four generations. Many Americans may have an abstract appreciation of the natural environment, which they indulge through their visits to national parks or while admiring the countryside during a drive, but they lack a sense of emotional attachment to such places that would impact not just their politics or policy preferences, but the way they live their lives.

“Virtually all of us now share with the most powerful industrialists their remoteness from actual experience of the actual world,” Berry wrote. It is “in affection [that] we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy.”

“The primary motive for good care and good use [of the land] is always going to be affection,” he says, “because affection involves us entirely.” Such total attachment completely transcends a merely utilitarian approach to conservation. “We endangered ourselves first of all by dismissing affection as an honorable and necessary motive.”

Berry was surely correct that our loss of bonds of affection with natural places has eroded our commitment to their preservation. But traditionalists and postliberals – “conservatives” of a more ancient sort than you typically encounter in American politics – can hear in Berry’s arguments a cry of grief for the loss of affections that don’t just tie us to the land, but that bind us to each other, to our history, and our core values.

It all does, indeed, turn on affection, and Berry’s lecture hints at the broader cultural implications of this notion without explicitly naming them.

“Corporate industrialism,” he wrote, “has failed to sustain the health and stability of human society. Among its characteristic signs are destroyed communities, neighborhoods, families, small businesses, and small farms.”

Berry is right. Corporate industrialism has prized the individual seeking his personal satisfaction and fulfillment, usually in materialistic terms, above the bonds of affection that also tie us to our families, faith commitments, and traditional values. Such individualism and disdain for unchosen obligations and traditions are part and parcel to liberalism more broadly understood, an argument postliberal thinkers like Patrick Deneen have been making for the last decade or so.

It is not clear that Berry was as concerned about the demise of traditional family structures and Judeo-Christian ethics as he was about the demise of the land, but the connections are obvious, and he seemed to suggest as much in certain parts of the Jefferson Lecture:

“The problem of sustainability is simple enough to state. It requires that the fertility cycle of birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay… must turn continuously in place. For this to happen in the stewardship of humans, there must be a cultural cycle, in harmony with the fertility cycle, also continuously turning in place. The cultural cycle is an unending conversation between old people and young people, assuring the survival of local memory.”

Liberalism (which includes the free market fundamentalism of many “conservatives”) has severely damaged the cultural cycle Berry described by teaching us that we owe little to the past except the freedom to do as we please, to reject the people, places, and traditions that gave us such liberty in the first place.

Only through affection for our inheritance “is the promise of a stable, democratic society,” Berry wrote, “a promise not to be found in ‘mobility’: our forlorn modern progress toward something indefinitely, and often unrealizably, better. A principled dissatisfaction with whatever one has promises nothing or worse.”

Indeed, progressive education has taught generations of American school children to be perpetually and principally dissatisfied with the culture they have inherited, with disastrous results not only to their civic and historical knowledge, but for the very future of democracy itself.

In his 2018 book Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West, R. R. Reno explains how this disaffection with the past is the direct result of a cultural shift he identifies as “the postwar consensus.” Indeed, Return of the Strong Gods is an excellent companion to Berry’s essay, “It All Turns on Affection,” and thoughtfully diagnoses our collective disenchantment and ultimate rejection of everything that, like Berry’s understanding of the land, once commanded our loyalty and love.

According to Reno, an ethicist by training and editor of First Things magazine, European and American intellectuals were so horrified by the carnage of the First and Second World Wars, they committed to challenging foundational assumptions about Western culture so that we would never again face the specter of totalitarianism and global war. But however noble this instinct, the “postwar consensus” that emerged completely misread the root causes of World War II and mislead every generation since about what it really takes to maintain a flourishing, free society.

The postwar consensus mistakenly claimed that the violence of the world wars was the result of something inherently evil in Western civilization, the conviction that we must restrict loves that command our fierce loyalty, loves that Reno calls the “strong gods:”

By “strong gods,” I do not mean Thor and the other residents of the Old Norse Valhalla. The strong gods are the objects of men’s love and devotion, the sources of the passions and loyalties that unite societies. They can be timeless. Truth is a strong god that beckons us to the matrimony of assent. They can be traditional. King and country, insofar as they still arouse men’s patriotic ardor, are strong gods. The strong gods can take the forms of modern ideologies and charismatic leaders. The strong gods can be beneficent. Our constitutional piety treats the American Founding as a strong god worthy of our devotion. And they can be destructive. In the twentieth century, militarism, fascism, communism, racism, and anti-Semitism brought ruin.

But the postwar consensus concluded that all strong gods must be rejected, and that to avoid future tyranny we must insist on a weakening of all convictions and truth claims that might be held too tightly. “The inescapable lesson, most came to believe, was that war and destruction arose from close-minded modes of life and thought,” Reno wrote. Paradoxically we must enforce (violently, if necessary) a culture of openness, weakness, and disenchantment. We must be skeptical of all truth claims. We must insist on the supremacy of the individual to find his or her own “meaning” in life. We must worship diversity and multiculturalism as the only antidotes to creeping fascism.

The postwar consensus helped effectively define the West against Soviet collectivism, but with the end of the Cold War, we have found it impossible to let go of the tyranny of the soft gods.

“The Manichean tendency of the postwar consensus, which insists that either it must dominate or fascism and racism will return, blinds our leadership class to the realities of the twenty-first century and poisons our politics with an all-or-nothing moralism that is as self-serving as it is destructive,” Reno writes.

Today, the greatest threat to the political health of the West is not fascism or a resurgent Ku Klux Klan but a decline in solidarity and the breakdown of the trust between leaders and the led. Fearful of strong loves and committed to ever-greater openness, the postwar consensus cannot formulate, much less address, these problems. Unable to identify our shared loves—unable even to formulate the “we” that is the political subject in public life—we cannot identify the common good, the res in the res publica. Under these circumstances, increasingly prevalent in the West, civic life disintegrates into the struggle among private interests, and in this struggle the rich and powerful win. In the twenty-first century, oligarchy and an unaccountable elite pose a far greater threat to the future of liberal democracy than does the return of Hitler.

Berry and Reno are both right that our current cultural crisis stems from a lack of affection – attachments to those things that give life purpose and meaning. But an obvious objection to Reno’s position is that affection for place, nation, and inheritance can easily become just another “soft” god, curdling once again into the prejudices and tribalism of the twentieth century that gave liberalism so much of its fuel.

Berry, in the last book of his life, seemed to address this concern directly. In The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice, Berry returned to the wound he first examined in 1970’s The Hidden Wound, that slavery left both white and Black Americans broken on the inside, bound together by a fracture neither side can heal on its own. His answer is not to weaken affection for past and place (Reno’s concern) but rather to order it rightly. Patriotism, for Berry, was about homemaking, the discipline of facing our inheritance honestly but deliberately carrying forward what in it needs to survive. The postwar consensus concluded that we must love less, and less fiercely, to keep prejudice at bay. Berry’s last book insists on the opposite. Prejudice is what fills the space where honest affection should have been.

The sad irony is that in the absence of rightly ordered loves (what St. Augustine called ordo amoris), we don’t simply love less; we love wrongly. We attach ourselves to identity politics, consumption, shallow “self-fulfillment,” to whatever counterfeit offers the feeling of belonging but without real sacrifice. R.R. Reno saw it happen to a nation, while Berry saw it happen to the land, but both were describing the same disorder from different rooms of the same house.

Wendell Berry has died, but the conversation he asked us to engage in does not end with him. We do not honor him by treating affection for place as a nostalgic virtue reserved to farmers, any more than we honor the American Founders by treating the Constitution like some kind of quaint museum artifact. The debt Berry describes is owed by everyone who has inherited something – a faith, a family, a school, a country – from people who are now gone and who are now responsible for handing it, intact and loved, to people yet to be born. That is the whole of the cultural cycle Berry described.

His death is an occasion not just to mourn a great writer, but to ask what our own generations are built upon, and whether we still know how to love it enough to keep it.

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This essay originally appeared on the author’s Substack, “Schools, Souls, and Civitas.”

The featured image is a photo, “Wendell Berry stands before the solar panels on his farm in Henry County, KY. ” Photo by Guy Mendes. Date 14 December 2011. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.