The late Wendell Berry’s writings helped revive the localist tradition. Credit: Library of America
I owe Wendell Berry my life. Not literally, of course, but maybe in a deeper and more important sense, the life that I now lead. Considering myself truly blessed with the riches that matter, I credit Berry — the agrarian writer, philosopher, and poet, who died Monday, aged 92 — with my family’s monumental bounty.
It was sometime around 2006 or 2007, while I was teaching at Georgetown University, that I began reading Berry in earnest: his elegies for what his native Kentucky, and America, had lost in the bargain of industrial development; and how to win some of it back. I had encountered his work in passing during graduate school, as far back as the 1980s, but I wasn’t yet the person, or hadn’t yet ripened into the situation, to receive those words in the way they would hold and haunt me roughly 20 years later.
My intense attraction to Berry’s writing owed to a combination of living a low-grade unhappy existence while raising a young family in and around Washington, DC, and broader political, social, and economic conditions in the early 21st century. While I can today more clearly differentiate between those two factors, at the time they seemed inextricably combined. Our harried life — and the economic and political ecosystem that bred it, so evident in DC — seemed altogether unsustainable. Collectively, we were burning too much fuel; our empire was too far flung; we were individually and collectively too indebted; our politics was too false and performative; our technology already was threatening to undermine good childrearing; and, to top it off, my own life was too fragmented, lived partly in a DC suburb, partly on a campus where the faculty barely knew each other, and partly on congested roads between these two places that didn’t seem altogether real. At that point, Berry’s work was simultaneously an indictment and a lifeline.
Early in 2009, I, along with a small group of friends who felt similarly beset, established the online journal Front Porch Republic, a publication inspired by Berry’s vision of a more integrated, rooted, genuine, frugal, and modest life lived in a nation that mirrored these commitments. The publication became prominent enough to receive both praise and denunciation, the latter especially by those who thought that Berry (and all of us) were full of sanctimony but short on realism and practical solutions to the crises we lamented.
While the authors at Front Porch Republic riffed on Berry’s recurring themes of home, community, limits, rootedness, and local liberty with concomitant stewardship, most of us recognized the lacuna between what we wrote and how we lived, a gap that underscored the power — but also the distant purity — of Berry’s witness.
It wasn’t just the haunting beauty of Berry’s writing that appealed to so many of us; it was the apparent seamlessness of what he wrote and how he lived his life: farming the same hillside that his family had stewarded for generations. The more the small group of us wrote of the natural fittingness of localism, small scale, community, and generational continuity, the more the daily practices of much of our lives stood as an accusation against our words.
Like several of my fellow “Porchers,” I sought a change, one that eventually led me to seek another academic position outside the imperial city. In 2012, I packed up our now-not-quite-so-young family for the Rust Belt and surrounding cornfields of South Bend and Notre Dame. There, and still, we own a historic home a short walk to campus, surrounded and known by neighbors who are also professors, fellow parishioners, and people of local renown. I’m certain that had I not been reading Berry during those years, I would likely still be a trebuchet’s fling from the White House and perhaps even wielding the influence that is often ironically attributed to me. Instead, I revel in a yard that is effectively an extension of campus, and have burrowed my way into a thick network of overlapping friendships.
It’s difficult to say what might have happened to me and to our family had we remained, but today, our sons have since twice-over made us grandparents. All of our children have stayed local by American standards, living reasonably nearby in the Indianapolis area with jobs that don’t implicate them deeply in the imperial project. On a purely personal level, I can’t imagine a better outcome — and why I say that I owe Berry this life.
Yet since then, the wider social, political, technological, and economic landscape — the one I apparently escaped — has, if anything, gotten worse. We are more disconnected than ever. Our politics seems not just broken, but shattered. Our economy is teetering on collapse. We are technologically on the verge of the very opposite condition of humane engagement in our work that Berry commended, not only eschewing labor with our hands, but increasingly relying on machines to do our thinking, too. More bombs are exploding around the world than any time in most of our lifetimes, with the potential not only for a world war, but a nuclear apocalypse, drawing nearer than ever. The idea that one could escape these deepening pathologies was always a pleasant delusion.
While it may be self-indulgent for me to speak of Berry through the prism of my own experience, it is, in fact, a very Berryean engagement. Much of the appeal of his writing lay in the challenge of living up to his example. I suspect that my own experience of Berry’s influence may be representative. His writing played an immense role in choices made by me and my wife that improved our family and communal life. But those improvements have taken place in a world that — at least, by Berry’s standards — has considerably darkened, a world worming its way to catastrophe.
How, then, should we assess the work and life of such a remarkably influential and yet ineffectual figure?
Hours after Wendell Berry died, my social-media timeline was full of anecdotes about the man and eloquent quotes from his writing. The irony wasn’t lost on me and, I suspect, many others: so many who credit Berry with shaping their worldview and their way of life were posting their testimonies online. These testimonies rose from keyboards and smartphone screens into a virtual realm that Berry himself famously shunned.
Among the essays for which Berry was most famous was a 1987 Harper’s Magazine article headlined “Why I am Not Going to Buy a Computer.” Berry’s Luddite antipathy to modern machinery, especially the gnostic features of modern computing, was as widely reviled as admired. As he counseled in his poem “How to be a Poet,”
Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
As I write this in my air-conditioned house on a scorching humid late-summer day, on the latest version of an Apple MacBook Air, occasionally checking my email and social-media feed, I simultaneously agree in principle with Berry, even as I recognize that his Luddite ways aren’t for me. Those who expressed their admiration for Berry on similar devices thus implicitly acknowledged the limitations of his public witness.
If pressed, most would acknowledge the pressure of undeniable reality: we live in a modern world, and it’s nearly impossible to live without what have become its attendant necessities: electricity, mechanization, nuclear energy, drone warfare, internal combustion engines, air travel, computers, internet, suburbs, finance, even globalization to some extent. And therein lies the rub for the legion of Wendell admirers: most of us simply can’t, and certainly won’t, follow Wendell’s footsteps into agrarian simplicity and even primitivism.
We may harbor a romantic streak against the machine, but most of us live in “the real world.” Many readers who admire his words have sought to emulate his example up to a point, but most — all but a very few, like the Paul Kingsnorths of the world (and even he will take a plane to give a talk at a Front Porch Republic conference) — simply acknowledge that modernity has its own logic and demands.
How, then, to “be like Wendell”? In the Aughts, especially, there was a palpable shift in the conservative world toward what Rod Dreher coined as “the Benedict Option.” Young traditionalist intellectuals (and older ones, like myself) increasingly condemned the failed “conservatism” that ran from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, pointing to the ways that Milton Friedman-inspired free-market economics and uniparty liberal imperialism ended up undermining the stable conditions necessary for the flourishing of traditional ways of life. With the election of Barack Obama in 2008, most conservatives saw little hope for a political reversal, now faced with a hostile anti-religious ruling class. The existing conservative settlement looked like just another iteration of progressive liberalism, only with a slightly lower speed limit.
Recognizing such daunting obstacles to ideals of civic virtue, economic localism, and republican care for the home front, politically difficult-to-classify figures who called for an increasingly anti-political “retreat” rose to prominence. On the academic side, there were the likes of Alasdair MacIntyre, Stanley Hauerwas, and David L. Schindler. More accessibly, Wendell Berry loomed large. And even more popularly, there was Dreher’s Crunchy Cons, published as a book in 2006, his various blogs, and, a decade later, The Benedict Option. My own book Why Liberalism Failed appeared against this backdrop and concluded with a reiteration of localism amid the wreckage.
Seemingly a rejection of the Republican Party Reaganism, “the Benedict Option” and similar projects were, in fact, Reaganism’s mirror image: an anti-government, anti-political stance that strove not to reduce the size of government through electoral victories, much less to orient the government toward the common good, but to pay government no mind at all. Instead, the focus was on living locally, being communal, attending to one’s church and family, and seeking as high a degree of personal integrity amid the temptations of modernity.
Yet as the Obama years unfolded, misgivings began to grow: would the government leave the “crunchy” traditionalists alone? Would conservative churches be allowed to step away from the culture wars, attending mainly to their flock while eschewing the political melee? Would traditional peoples who sought to cultivate their own gardens escape the apparently encompassing and inescapable logic of modernity?
Dreher’s Benedict Option — relying heavily on Berryean themes — was written in expectation of a Hillary Clinton victory and set out to provide a strategic roadmap for a lengthy period of likely political oppression. (That book was more or less rewritten for the Biden years, under the title Live Not By Lies, which, predictably, sold much better).
Yet actual rural America — Berry’s fellow Kentuckians, if not his readers, who generally deplored Trump and still do — had other ideas. They supported a political alternative: fight the oppressive progressivism not by retreat to crunchy enclaves, but rather forcibly take over the machinery of the federal government and advance policy that might advantage those whom modernity had sought to discard.
Berry’s appeal, once appearing inevitable, palpably fell off, as the energy among conservatives moved instead to debates over not whether, but how, to deploy the levers of government to advance conservative ends.
Yet even this new project — a populism comfortable with the use of state power — is now in tatters. At least for the time being. The Trump era is beginning to wind down. The denouement is accompanied by a worsening of the undisciplined and even disastrous policy decisions — and the attendant increase of diversionary “trolling” — that were so evident in Trump’s first term. Thus, the attention now being paid to Berry’s work amid his passing seems oddly less than coincidental. Many are likely to conclude that, whatever the limits of our ability to pursue “the Berry Option,” there is no real choice but to seek to preserve our shrinking enclaves.
Then again, this was all along a misreading of Berry — or at least, a partial and pinched reading. One driven to a significant extent by a particular set of political and social conditions in the Aughts and 2010s, an echo of deep-seated conservative beliefs that politics seem to hold nothing but a worsening of all the modern perils that Berry warned against and lived in opposition to.
Berry could and often was contemptuous of political figures. In one of his most famous poems, “The Mad Farmer’s Liberation Front,” he wrote the oft-quoted lines:
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
In Port William — the fictional Kentucky town that formed the setting of nearly all his fiction — there appears to be little, if any, need for politics. The “membership” is largely governed by custom and affection, and what politics there is comes at the intervention of distant warmakers, meddlers, and the collusion of national politicians and absentee economic overlords. A strong anarchist streak marks Berry’s thinking.
However, that is not the sum and total of his thought. He understood that the old ways wouldn’t easily survive in modern times; to defend what was being destroyed, and even approximate what might not be simply revived, would often require the support of more distant (if difficult-to-realize) political action. While many of Berry’s admirers were likely to embrace the mantra “politics is downstream of culture,” Berry himself knew such a stance was a dangerous oversimplification. Farmers with dirty hands couldn’t afford such purity.
Two examples come to mind. First, there is Berry’s depiction of an older, vibrant economic localism in a nearby town to his own, New Castle, Ky. That vibrancy, however, is illegible without accounting for what it took to defend it in relatively modern times — and still, only for a while, only provisionally. The upshot is that Berry recognized the ways in which local culture was decidedly downstream of politics. As recounted in his essay “Leaving the Future Behind: A Letter to a Scientific Friend,” included in his 2017 book The Art of Loading Brush, Berry enumerates the local offerings of New Castle of 80 years ago.
Permit me to quote at some length: “In those days New Castle was self-assured, as no small rural town can be today. It was advertising itself as a place to come for needed goods and services. Here is what it had to offer: 4 grocery stores, 2 dry goods stores, 2 jewelry stores, 1 hardware store, 1 hardware and novelty store, 5 garages and filling stations, 1 seed store, 2 coal dealers who also offered livestock feed and general hauling, 1 shoe repair shop, 2 cream stations (where farmers sold their cream), 1 appliance shop, 2 barber shops, 2 beauty shops, 1 hatchery, 5 doctors (who made house calls), 1 veterinarian, 1 drugstore, 1 restaurant, 1 hotel, 1 tourist court (“modern log cabins”), 2 funeral homes, 2 blacksmith shops, 1 newspaper and job printing shop, 1 pool parlor, 5 lawyers, 1 bank, 6 insurance agents. That is 55 stores, shops, trades, and services….”
He concluded: “New Castle was a lively place in 1946, commercially and socially…. [Moreover], virtually all of its varied and thriving economic life in 1946 rested upon the farms and farm households that surrounded it.”
While America was still considerably rural in the mid-20th century, already for decades urbanizing forces were at play. Somewhat later in that same essay, Berry explained how the rural community was able to remain vibrant well into the midcentury: the local farm cooperative was only able to succeed due to “the New Deal’s tobacco program, when a government loan ‘against a crop’ made it possible for a regional grower’s association to buy, store, and resell any tobacco that did not bring the support price, and to pay the grower at the warehouse. The Burley Tobacco Growers Co-operative Association … [kept] many thousands of farmers at work and decently paid for more than sixty years.” And it was during those years, thanks to the assistance of a more distant government, that localism thrived.
What destroyed that vibrant and free (if indirectly subsidized) market of local businesses? Its destruction occurred quickly when that same federal government retreated and allowed large-scale economic powers (cheered by lucre-driven politicians) to consolidate, eliminate inefficiencies, and steamroll a way of life in the name of progress and plenty. “Republican corporate Christian capitalists” endorsed a laissez-faire policy of “get big or get out,” while “liberals and Democrats” adopted “a policy of neglect, of not-thinking, of faith in technology.” The result can be seen all over the nation’s rural towns and small cities like New Castle: blighted downtowns with vape (or pot) shops, Dollar General stores, and maybe — if the town is lucky — a grimy Chinese restaurant.
Berry, in other words, understood that healthy local communities could only be revived and thereafter flourish in a nation oriented to a necessary long-term vision of husbandry, stewardship, and local culture. Beginning in 2009, along with his friend Wes Jackson of the Land Institute, Berry called for a “50-year Farm Bill” that would move national agricultural policy away from fixed monocultures conducive to large-scale mechanized farming, and shift instead to prioritizing a variety of perennial crops that would encourage smaller-scale farming and an attendant local culture like the one the author described in his 2017 essay.
Relying simply on “the market” wouldn’t incentivize the long-term mentality necessary to resist quick-profit, extractive forms of farming. Nor can the “self-regulating” market account for the long-term costs in erosion and soil depletion, not to mention the ongoing destruction of vibrant local cultures. Interestingly, then, in the very span of time that Berry’s writings inspired an increasingly apolitical stance among disillusioned conservatives, Berry was proposing a way of moving beyond the increasingly mindless dichotomy of “government versus localism” and seeking ways to depict a mutually beneficial relationship between the two.
This was not to say that Berry was naïve to the ways that centralized government could, and often did, act contrary to the interests of local communities. But in his words and actions, Berry underscored that the values he extolled would require a political dimension in addition to the always inspiring, sometimes impossible call to live intentionally, with greater care for our local places and communities.
Berry, then, still has much to teach even his admirers, especially those rightly disillusioned with our politics of the past half-century. Living locally — even leaving DC — is in many ways an improvement. But it won’t suffice if the nation’s decisions effectively destroy the places worth living in. Without minimizing the Mad Farmer’s insistence that we “denounce the government,” we should also recall what follows: “Embrace the flag. Hope to live in the free republic for which it stands.” Though his pen is now still — and I pray on the other side once again to hear his loud unrestrained guffaw at a ribald joke — here and now we should strive to take the full measure of what he tried to teach us, and would teach us still.
Patrick Deneen is a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame and the author, most recently, of American Odyssey.
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