The Challenge of Wendell Berry: A Personal Assessment

I first met Wendell Berry—who died this August—on a farm east of Louisville, Kentucky. His daughter and then son-in-law had replanted former tobacco fields with grapes from which they made a respectable variety of wines. My wife and I drove from Cincinnati one Saturday evening to attend an outdoor dinner and concert at the winery. I had already read some of his many books, finding in them insights I had never heard before but knew to be true, and I hoped to meet the man himself.

The drive proved relaxing, the farm tidy and well-appointed, and the fare satisfying, but I kept scanning the crowd until I finally saw him. He was sitting in a chair, talking with someone who, judging from Wendell’s[1] reaction, had just said something quite funny. How fitting that my first memory of Wendell Berry was of him laughing. For all his erudition, industry, and grave concern for the fate of the land and its creatures, I remember him as a man who loved a good laugh, an engaging story, a well-told joke.

Stirring up my courage, I approached, awaiting an opportunity to introduce myself. When at last he turned to me, we exchanged initial pleasantries, then quickly dove into a conversation of astonishing depth and feeling. When we parted, my satisfaction with how our brief exchange had gone was tempered by a mixture of starstruck bewilderment and pangs of imposter syndrome. Who was I to think this would be anything but a one-off conversation between a noted writer and one of his fans? I could not have known it at the time, but I had, in fact, just begun a decades-long friendship that would reshape my thinking, my convictions, and my life choices.

From that moment on, through exchanges in person, over the phone, and in letters sent by mail—Berry famously foreswore computers—he introduced me to new writers and better ways of seeing the world. Through him, I met Norman Wirzba, whose homage to Berry can be found here, and Wes Jackson, founder of The Land Institute and a man of great insight, sharply focused labor, and strong opinions. I learned I shared my admiration for his work with many others, from the American actor, Nick Offerman, to the English novelist and cultural critic, Paul Kingsnorth.

I encountered Berry’s detractors, too, many of whom rejected a caricature of his thought, either from not reading him carefully or not reading him at all. I continued to learn from his prodigious body of work, discovering the breadth and unity of his vision. Whether expounding the virtues of locally grown produce, exploring lasting social implications in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, or examining the inherent contradictions in the modern practice of medicine, his central concern was how to embrace our creatureliness in a world of limits.

Land and Limits

So far, I have been talking in abstractions, a habit Wendell abhorred. Better to show how he changed me than merely tell you that he did. “What I stand for is what I stand on,”[2] he writes, and from that embodied commitment to place, everything else in his work follows. One way to understand Berry’s massive literary output is as a series of explications of his first major book, The Unsettling of America (1977). His primary concern there is the way in which white European settlers saw arable land as a standing reserve from which food could be extracted like coal from a mine rather than as a gift in need of careful stewardship.

Preferring predictivity over sustainability and expensive technology over experience, modern farming practices drive farmers into crippling debt, ultimately concentrating farmland into fewer and fewer hands. These large-scale, technology-dependent practices also squander precious topsoil that took centuries to accumulate, the resulting runoff sending a slurry of loam and fertilizer down the Mississippi river to dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico. Furthermore, the agribusiness model requires long-distance distribution systems to move products from field to table, using many times the energy and storage space of small, local farms.

Furthermore, in The Unsettling of America Berry sees the consequences of bad farming practices extending far beyond the specialized concerns of flyover country. For Berry, the small farmer’s predicament is not merely a crisis of agriculture, but also of culture and character. Accordingly, his book also looks at the evolution of the family home from a place of production to a locus of endless consumption; the long-term consequences of energy misuse; an abiding American prejudice against manual laborers; the importance of marriage in a free society; and the intimate connections between the body and the earth.

For Berry, these are not tangential concerns but integral components of a culture whose people need to eat and hope to live well. They all radiate from his central concern—caring for the land without which we cannot live—like spokes on a wheel. To quote one of Berry’s agrarian influences, the twentieth-century English botanist, Sir Albert Howard, we must understand “the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal, and man as one great subject.”[3]

Accordingly, his ideological enemies are specialization, abstraction, and individualism: specialization because it blinds adherents to crucial matters outside their area of expertise, abstraction because it exalts generalized theory over the particulars at hand, and individualism because it obscures the countless ways we depend on other creatures—human and otherwise—not simply for our flourishing but for our very survival. Everything is connected and no creature is an island entire to itself. In my much-underlined copy of The Unsettling of America, in a passage on how the loss of community and connection has sickened us, stand two sentences I have called attention to with marginal stars, arrows, and exclamation points: “There is, in practice, no such thing as autonomy. Practically, there is only a distinction between responsible and irresponsible dependence.”[4]

I have lived in several places—all of them cities—since I discovered Berry’s work: Cincinnati, Atlanta, Baltimore, and now Santa Fe. Though I was born and raised in Cincinnati, moving to Santa Fe feels like the real homecoming. My wife and I had our first jobs on the Navajo Nation in Arizona and we fell in love with the landscape, the cultural mélange, and the desert quiet. Human foolishness in the face of severe ecological limits is so much clearer here as climate change wreaks havoc on land enduring its worst megadrought in more than a thousand years.

Yet in each of those cities, my wife and I attended to the gifts and limits of the place in our fashion: conserving water, growing some of our own food, supporting local growers, cutting our dependence on electricity generated from fossil fuel. My wife, being more sociable and outgoing, does better at immersing herself in the community, but I do what I can in a quieter way. Contrary to the assumptions of some of his detractors, Berry was not opposed to cities and the pleasures of urban life. He rather enjoyed his time in New York City, but left for Henry County, Kentucky when he felt called to embody his convictions. I wish it had not taken so many moves for my wife and me to finally return to the landscape of my heart, but I like to think we were answering a similar call.

I do not write this in a self-congratulatory way. Small individual actions in an economy bent on making the planet unlivable are necessary but insufficient and, like almost every other American, I am caught in a web of heedless consumption and ecological destruction that I cannot get free of. Saint Paul called such entrapping systems “principalities and powers.” In our faithless age, we are more likely to call them corporations and nation-states. Berry opens one of his well-known poems this way:

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.[5]

He then offers a long list of possible responses such as “Love the Lord / Love the world,” “Be joyful / though you have considered all the facts,” “So long as women do not go cheap / for power, please women more than men,” and “Practice resurrection.” Berry sees these as starting places, attitudes and actions that begin locally but can spread from community to community as each begins to grasp that their hopes and struggles are connected to everyone else’s. The challenge of Berry’s witness is to bridge the gap between inspiring words and the hard work of “becoming native to this place,” a phrase Wes Jackson used as the title for a book he dedicated to Wendell Berry.

Medicine and Membership

Berry challenged my practice of medicine most directly in his essay, “Health is Membership,” and his short story, “Fidelity.” Early in the essay, Berry declares his belief that God, who created the world as an act of love, “summons the world toward wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement with God.”[6] He then issues a one sentence manifesto that goes for the jugular of the hyper-individualist American medical-industrial complex: “I believe that the community—in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures—is the smallest unit of health and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms.”[7] Here, Berry returns to several of his central themes: the priority of place, the interdependence of creatures, and the limits of the body and local ecosystems. He again draws on the tradition of agrarian and ecological thought, most clearly in this instance on Aldo Leopold, who wrote, “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”[8]

Key to Berry’s communal vision of health are the physical needs and limits of the body. Contrary to the reductionist metaphor of bodies as biological machines whose parts can be repaired, replaced, or augmented as the consumer sees fit, Berry points out that, “Divided from its sources of air, food, drink, clothing, shelter, and companionship, a body is, properly speaking, a cadaver, whereas a machine by itself, shut down or out of fuel, is still a machine.”[9] In the second half of the essay, he writes movingly about the hospitalization of his brother, John, after a severe heart attack. Like many people, Berry finds the hospital surprisingly inhospitable, a place where a world of love collides with but never quite engages a world of machinelike efficiency.

He describes a common experience for hospitalized patients and their families: exclusion from the arcane knowledge of health professionals. In “Fidelity,” he writes of a doctor meeting relatives of Burley Coulter, an aging, formerly high-spirited man who has fallen into a coma. The doctor speaks to them “from the bright, orderly enclosure of his explanation, like a man in a glass booth,” while the others “stood looking at him from the larger, looser, darker order of their merely human love.”[10]

As a retired physician, I know this to be true. My colleagues and I spend years acquiring specialized knowledge, applying it to situations that truly are matters of life and death. Patients come to us in distress and seeking help, trusting that we will use our knowledge to their benefit. I have seen the faces of parents who had little choice but to follow my recommendations for their sick child. If, as Francis Bacon claimed, knowledge is power, I wielded a staggering amount of power, an imbalance that all our pretense over “informed consent” and “shared decision making” cannot erase. Yet, despite all my power and knowledge, I also know that every patient is a unique case, each body a dizzyingly complex intersection of inherent qualities, particular experiences, and external forces.

That is why, when leading hospital rounds, I often quoted directly from “Health is Membership,” reminding residents and medical students of the sobering truth that “medicine is an exact science until applied: application involves intuition, a sense of probability, ‘gut feeling,’ guesswork, and error.”[11] My hope in doing so was to nourish the humility and empathy in my residents and students that American medical education tries to beat out of them. In “Fidelity,” friends of Burley Coulter rescue him from the hospital so he can die and be buried with his community—his place and all its creatures. While I never advised doctors in training to abscond with their patients, I did encourage them to remember that patients come from somewhere. Learning about the place where my hospitalized patients would return after discharge helped me understand how best to ensure their continued health.

Berry’s critique of the medical system did not blind him to moments when doctors and nurses bridge the divide between the worlds of love and efficiency, transforming the professional relationship into “a meeting between two human beings,” that he found “invariably moving.”[12] His attentive rendering of such moments gave me words to ask the same from those I taught on rounds. He gave me the courage to say to young physicians who had all the latest science at their fingertips that one requirement of being an exemplary practitioner is to love your patients, even the ones you cannot bring yourself to like.

Peace, Consumption, and Costly Hope

In “Peaceableness Toward Enemies,” a series of reflections on the 1990-91 Gulf War, Berry writes:

A number of things about our attitude toward this war were troubling, and the most troubling was our willingness to impose the whole burden of it on young people in the military services and their families. We evidently determined to preserve at all costs a way of life in which we will contemplate no restraints. We sent an enormous force of our young men and women to kill and be killed in defense of our oil supply but we have done nothing to conserve that supply or to reduce our dependence on it. We will not ration petroleum fuels. We will not mention the possibility of more taxes. We wish to give our people the impression that except for their children, nothing will be required of them.[13]

I could quibble with Berry’s use of “us” and “we” here—the first-person plural pronouns suggest that I, too, wanted this war—but at least George H. W. Bush sought and obtained Congressional consent for Operation Desert Storm, a nod to Article I of the U.S. Constitution the current administration openly ignores. Yet, to be honest, despite my objections to the war at the time, little in my life changed. I continued to drive my SUV across the Navajo Nation where I worked, dutifully played the role of voracious consumer, and outwardly behaved as if all was normal.

Years later, when I came upon the sentence, “We wish to give our people the impression that except for their children, nothing will be required of them,” I froze. With two children of my own, I had been given me a context with which to understand that war—and all American wars thereafter, with the exception of the prolonged and ultimately futile Afghan War. Yet even the Afghan War was couched as “a war against terrorism.” Such wars can indeed go on forever, there being no end to potential terrorists in a world where retributive violence is the norm. The aim in these wars, Berry asserts, is not peace but victory—a military achievement that both “justifies the violence that won it and leads to further violence.”[14] For all the rhetoric over national sovereignty, weapons of mass destruction, and “not letting them get the bomb,” the primary goal in these wars has been to preserve an American way of life that, for all its many gifts, depends on limitless consumption. Berry concludes “Peaceableness Toward Enemies” with a direct challenge to the U.S. and its leaders:

Finally, if we want to be at peace, we will have to waste less, spend less, need less. The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war, but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and less wasteful.[15]

Thirty years later, Berry’s challenge remains unanswered.

Wendell Berry did not persuade me to endorse pacifism. Stanley Hauerwas had already convinced me that following Christ required nonviolent action in all my personal affairs. Pope Leo XIV seems to be moving in that same direction with respect to nation-states when he writes: 

Today, more than ever, without prejudice to the right to self-defense in the strictest sense, it is important to reaffirm that the “just war” theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated. Humanity possesses far more effective and capable tools for promoting human life and resolving conflicts, such as dialogue, diplomacy, and forgiveness. The use of force, violence, and weapons reflects a relational poverty that always has disastrous consequences for civilian populations.[16]

Berry asserts, as do I, that pacifism is not passivity but a continuous practice of choosing not to exploit other people, other countries, and other creatures. Speaking of “other creatures,” Berry was not a vegetarian, nor did he believe that not eating meat was an inherently noble act. There are many commendable reasons to adopt vegetarianism, but Berry saw the real enemy in livestock agribusiness, where animals are treated as raw materials in a factory assembly line. He advocated living carefully and consciously, but:

That is not to suggest that we can live harmlessly, or strictly at our own expense; we depend upon other creatures and survive by their deaths. To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.[17]

I have both fed and tasted Berry’s farm-raised lamb. While my wife and I intentionally limit our meat consumption, we have not eliminated it. We raise chickens for their eggs and grow our own vegetables and herbs. Could we do more? Certainly, but doing more and doing them well are two different things and there is so much we cannot change. I participate in a so-called free market economy that Berry finds “less and less distinguishable from warfare.”[18] Having worked with Native Americans, the inner-city poor, and Honduran campesinos, I have seen too much to pretend I can live a guiltless American life or that life is fair. But I can attend to the place I find myself, learn its glories and wounds, and address my fellow creatures in a loving way.

Berry titled his 2012 Jefferson lecture “It All Turns on Affection,” borrowing the phrase from E. M. Forster’s novel, Howard’s End. We care for what we love, Berry says, and to care for the world, we must know and love a particular place in it—not as an abstraction, but in all that place’s inherent complexity. “Knowledge without affection leads us astray.” Berry adds, “Affection leads, by way of good work, to authentic hope.”[19] Perhaps Berry is partly to blame for my self-identification as a hopeful pessimist.

Optimism, the belief that things will always turn out for the best, ignores the ubiquity of pain and suffering in the world. I do not expect everything will get better, but I can live in what I have come to see as costly hope. Like Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s account of grace, there is a cheap form of hope that demands nothing of me, rendering it all but indistinguishable from optimism. There is, on the other hand, a demanding, costly hope that requires me to admit my addiction (in this case to limitless consumption), make a searching and fearless moral inventory of my assumptions and behaviors, acknowledge the exact nature of my wrongs, and make amends wherever possible to those I have harmed. Those familiar with twelve step programs will recognize the source for this language. Unbridled consumption and the obscured violence needed to sustain it are addictions. Like the unending process of recovery, shedding these faults will take a lifetime—or longer.

Costly hope is hard work, a journey littered with pitfalls. To brave the road, I need friends and mentors. I cannot do it alone. I long to live peacefully, but not to the detriment of others. Good luck with that. When others—the poor, the suffering, and those who call them to my attention—keep me mindful of what I am purchasing, using, or eating, a realistic aim is to limit the harm I cause. I cannot live blamelessly, but together, we can hope to live better.

So What? And Now What?

A mentor of mine once told me that the two most important questions to ask after reading a scientific paper were “What does this mean or change?” (so what?), and “How should we use this information?” (now what?). Berry’s many books never masquerade as scientific reports, but it may help to ask the same questions when assessing them. Wendell was my friend and his writing, as you have seen, affected me deeply, but that does not mean I always agreed with him or that he is immune to criticism. His late book-length essay on race, The Need to Be Whole (2022), was an expansion of—but not always an improvement upon—his earlier book, The Hidden Wound (1989).

In particular, his attempt to separate the Confederacy’s agrarianism from the brutality of enslavement falls flat. He has little good to say about wealthy Southern landowners, but he claims—without providing documentary evidence—that the common soldier understood himself as defending their farms and communities against Northern industrialism. While I appreciate Berry’s efforts to understand what motivated the common man in gray—life is full of tragic choices and ethical tradeoffs—this comes close to giving Johnny Reb a free pass.

Others may quarrel with his emphasis on local action rather than national policy, but that is a bit unfair. Berry advocated for policies that benefitted rural communities, including what he and Wes Jackson called “The Fifty-Year Farm Bill.”[20] He approved of the 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act, a piece of New Deal legislation designed to reduce surpluses of wheat, cotton, corn, hogs, rice, tobacco, and milk through subsidies that shielded farmers from the uncertainty of weather and markets. His real policy focus, however, was on local endeavors such as the Burley Tobacco Growers Co-Operative Association, an organization Wendell Berry’s father, a lawyer, actively defended. Though the product—tobacco—is deeply problematic now, the local effort helped keep many small farmers solvent in difficult times.

Thirdly, for all his attention to the particular, there is an objectivizing tendency in some of his fiction that turns some characters—especially those on the side of the industrial economy—into cartoons. In “Fidelity,” a story I otherwise admire, Detective Kyle Bode is a hapless urban divorcé who combs his hair to look like Ringo Starr and “objects” to the hills and hollows the other characters call home. Kyle Bode and his ilk are, of course, representatives of an economy that harms what Berry most cares about: land, community, wholeness. Yet, given Berry’s ability to render the inhabitants of the fictional town of Port William, Kentucky in rich, multidimensional detail, it is disappointing that he does not do the same for his enemies.

If the perfect is the enemy of the good, it would be a shame to use these objections as reasons not to engage his work. I strongly encourage others to see for themselves before rendering judgement. Those interested in answering the question, “So what?” in respect to Berry’s literary efforts might need some assistance in choosing which of his more than fifty books to read first.

Given how his poems, fiction, and nonfiction are all concerned with “one big subject,” I suggest readers dive into whatever genre they prefer. Latecomers to his writing are fortunate that many shorter works are now available as collections. Readers of short fiction might start with That Distant Land (2004), which gathers some of his finest stories. Novel lovers could consider trying Jayber Crow (2000) or the revised edition of A Place on Earth (1983). Berry’s New Collected Poems (2012) and This Day (2013)—the latter bringing together the Sabbath Poems he wrote on Sundays in lieu of going to church—abound with rich and varied verse. While The Unsettling of America is his foundational nonfiction text, it may not be the easiest starting place. Likely alternatives include essay collections such as The Art of the Commonplace (2002) and The World-Ending Fire (2017).

Not everyone finds Wendell Berry’s writing to their taste. That is no fault in itself. What I object to are those who pigeonhole his thought as Luddite nostalgia without seriously engaging with the texts. That is hardly an honest response to the question, “So what?” As I hope I have demonstrated, my answers to “Now what?” have been complex and life changing. How other readers choose to answer is up to them.

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