In Memoriam: Wendell Berry
With the passing of Wendell Berry, only a couple of weeks after his 92nd birthday, we see the end of the last of the major Southern agrarian writers. Berry carried on a legacy that stretched back to the vision of Thomas Jefferson himself, fittingly as Berry was a son of the daughter state of Jefferson’s Virginia.
Berry’s agrarian roots were planted in the same Kentucky tobacco-growing soil as Allen Tate of Winchester and Robert Penn Warren of Guthrie. However, Berry was not in a direct intellectual lineage with the Nashville Agrarians. Clyde Wilson once remarked to me that Berry’s agrarianism validated Southern agrarian philosophy, since it grew largely independently of Nashville’s shadow.
Rather than going to Nashville’s Vanderbilt, Berry left for California’s Stanford, where he studied as a Wallace Stegner Fellow. There he not only learned under the tutelage of one of the great writers of the American West, but was classmates with future notable writers Larry McMurtry, Edward Abbey, Ernest Gaines, and Ken Kesey.
These were the early days of the Bay Area counter-culture movement and the influence that had on Berry certainly can’t be discounted. Although Berry never became a full-fledged member of the counterculture movement (Berry never became a full-fledged member of any movement), he did contribute to the little-known hippie compendium One Lord, One Faith, One Cornbread (co-edited by his fellow Kentucky Stegner Fellow Ed McClanahan) and the much more famous The Last Whole Earth Catalog.
The Whole Earth Catalog was part literary journal, part survivalist catalog. They were aimed at a kind of hippie homesteader audience. Berry published his classic essay “Think Little” there. In it Berry challenges the popular Environmental Movement in terms that are consistent throughout his writings. Berry makes fun of the group dynamics of Protest: “Individualism is going around these days in a uniform, handing out the party line on individualism. Dissenters want to publish their personal opinions over a thousand signatures.”
These mass movements of supposed individualists are really ways to avoid personal responsibility and personal guilt. Berry writes, “A protest meeting on the issue of environmental abuse is not a convocation of accusers; it is a convocation of the guilty.” Berry states, “there is no public crisis that is not also private.”
But while he castigates mass movements as too abstract and advocates for personal responsibility, Berry recognizes the challenge for the individual: “What we are up against in this country, in any attempt to invoke private responsibility, is that we have nearly destroyed private life.” He writes this long before the Internet, let alone A.I. or Flock cameras. Berry urges, “For most of the history of this country our motto, implied or spoken, has been Think Big. A better motto, and an essential one now, is Think Little.”
Berry would come to national prominence only a few years later with his public battle–and actual direct debate–with Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz. Butz had infamously told American farmers to “get big or get out.” Such a policy incensed Berry and arguably his most important book The Unsettling of America published by The Sierra Club sprang from the crisis. It was the battle between “Get Big” and “Think Little.”
Berry’s new book found a prominent admirer on the American Right: Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind. Kirk reviewed the book quite approvingly, calling Berry “heir to the ‘Southern Agrarians’ of four decades ago, and worthy of them.” Kirk approved of Berry in the strongest possible terms: “Berry is possessed of an intellect at once philosophic and poetic, and he writes most movingly. Humane culture has no better friend today than he.” Berry himself was unaware of this endorsement. Some twenty years later, when I sent him a copy of the review, he wrote to me, “I don’t remember it. Seeing it now…is very moving to me.”
Kirk’s review showed that Berry had a welcome audience on the traditional Right, although that wasn’t something that Berry himself understood. In his mind, “Conservative” was something Berry associated with Earl Butz rather than Russell Kirk. However, Berry’s reputation on the Right continued to grow, and in 1994 he would be awarded the Ingersoll Foundation’s T.S. Eliot Prize for Creative Writing. The Ingersoll literary awards (there was also a Richard Weaver Award) were associated with the Rockford Institute, itself associated with the Old Right and Chronicles Magazine. In the years to follow, Berry was also championed by Crunchy Con Rod Dreher in his National Review columns and later his Crunch Con book.
But while Berry’s name grew in traditionalist circles, his primary reputation still resided on the Left. In 2011, President Barack Obama awarded Berry a National Humanities Medal. Berry followed that with the 2012 Jefferson Lecture sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. That would be capped off with an interview on PBS by none other than Official Liberal Spokesman Bill Moyers. It was a trifecta endorsement by the establishment. And yet, in 2014 Berry was the keynote speaker for a conference in Louisville co-sponsored by traditionalist Front Porch Republic and The American Conservative (including involvement by the McConnell Center).
This dichotomy somewhat captured where Berry would find himself during the last dozen years of his life. He was lauded by a segment of the (aging) Left while simultaneously being embraced by a traditionalist segment of the (younger) Right. Berry’s attention from the Right, by “Conservatives” somewhat bewildered him (and his wife Tanya). While he was willing to speak to and write for those who would listen, Berry always viewed himself as a son of the New Deal who had generally fought Republican policies like those of Earl Butz.
How, then, do we understand the legacy of Wendell Berry? He wrote in “Think Little” a half-century ago, “I believe in American political principles.” What are these principles? Berry explained more completely in his essay “Discipline and Hope”: “I wish to testify that in my best moments I am not aware of the existence of the government. Though I respect and feel myself dignified by the principles of the Declaration and the Constitution, I do not remember a day when the thought of the government made me happy, and I never think of it without the wish that it might become wiser and truer and smaller than it is.” Just so. Berry saw himself squarely within the Jeffersonian tradition of yeomanry, men and women attached to a local place with a strong suspicion of government and institutions, people who both embraced personal responsibility and membership in the interdependence of community.
In a world of AI, lab-grown meat, life in the pod, and a growing push for space colonization, Berry foresaw that perhaps the important delineation would not necessarily rest with Right and Left. He wrote in his book Life Is a Miracle, “It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” For Berry, we needed to embrace the gift and freedom to live as God’s creation.
Berry was what he always intended to be: an imperfect and independent voice who never wanted to voice the “party line on individualism.”
Alan Cornett is a writer.
