Searching for wholeness in a nation fractured by capitalism and … – Kansas Reflector

Wendell Berry beloved for his novels (Jayber Crow), short stories of Americas rural past, essays on ecological responsibility (What Are People For?) and his memorable nature poetry (The Peace of Wild Things) brandishes a bias that challenges conventional thinking. That attitude reveals itself in the middle section of his insightful new book, The Need to be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice.

Berry compares racism to puritanism, but in a twist he defines prejudice as our cultural preference for industrial wage slavery instead of policies that favor smallholders who build communities and engage in genuine homemaking.

The nations dominant ambition to never dirty our hands in mind-numbing physical labor inspired slave owners and sparked the Civil War, he asserts. Berry lauds as a true patriot Gen. Robert E. Lee, who was offered leadership of the Union army, for his refusal to raise his hand against his birthplace, his home and his children. He is also critical of the North for introducing the industrial concept of treating everyone as replaceable by machines as well as promoting the nascent concept of nationalism.

Slavery was indefensible, Berry states, but his hottest anger in this new book is reserved for industrialism that loosed a virulent racism across the nation and brought about the next era of wage slavery. In his view, the Civil War was a battle between industrialism and agrarianism.

Seen as an agrarian, pacifist and eccentric Christian, Berry has often spoken up for the dispossessed. The Need to Be Whole continues the work he began in The Hidden Wound (1970) and The Unsettling of America, (1977) which explored how the wealth of the mighty few who govern this nation was built on the underpaid labor of others. In Kansas, we may feel echoes of this resentment when we hear elites referring to our homeland as mere fly-over country.

Berry has been a frequent guest speaker at the Land Institute at Salina and counts as a friend Wes Jackson, founder of that research facility that explores and promotes perennial, diverse and regenerative agriculture. Sarah Smarsh, the fifth-generation Kansan who wrote Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, has defended Berry from criticism by leftist economist Paul Krugman writing in the New York Times.

Born in 1934, Berry hails from Henry County, Kentucky a border state in the Civil War where he farms and writes (more than 50 books so far). Hes one of the few writers reminding us that country life is far more complex than most believe, that industrial progress is PR, and that living in the country and working with the land represents a rightful existence.

Both sides of Berrys family had cultivated the same land for generations and counted slave owners among their ancestors. He grew up working alongside hired Black laborers on his grandparents farm, gleaning from them many of the pleasures and skills and responsibilities of farm work. Its this section of his book, examining his familys connection to slavery and his revisionist interpretation of history, that raises eyebrows.

The Need to Be Whole poses Berrys old question yet again: How can we live among our fellow creatures in a way that is honorable, just, and as sustaining of our souls as of our material needs? wrote Daegan Miller in Slate on November 5, 2022.

Berry began The Unsettling of America with this observation, continued Miller: One of the peculiarities of the white races presence in America is how little intention has been applied to it. As a people, wherever we have been, we have never really intended to be.

He traces the conflict of two different tendencies that he sees as defining American history: the exploitative one characterized by the pioneer, the trader, the land speculator, the extractor, the investor, the tycoon and stock trader and the nurturing one exemplified by small, subsistence family farms as well as small shops and stores (smallholders). The exploiters stick around in one place as long as theres easy profit to be made, but the nurturers stay put. Berry seems to be casting American history as a conflict between capitalism and something more social, communal, and rooted in the earth, what he calls agrarianism.

We are now reduced to one significant choice, Berry writes. We can take our stand either on the side of life or on the side of death.

This extended synthesis of the history of agriculture, the history of race and the history of work is something new for Berry, who argues that violence is so far our historys dominant theme, that the willingness to exploit people is never distinguishable from the willingness to destroy the land and that our race problem is intertangled with our land and land use problem, our farm and forest problem, our water and waterways problem, our food problem, our air problem, our health problem.

Everything is connected, he observes, and what connects it is exploitation. That represents both Berrys despair, but also his hope. For if everything is connected through the violence of American-style capitalism, then it can be reconnected according to love not rustic sentimentality but the radical love that Berry learned from his conversations with the late writer bell hooks, a fellow Kentuckian.

Miller notes that this elemental conflict between capitalism and agrarianism drives the tension in The Need to Be Whole, with Berry recounting the staggering loss of topsoil; the concentration of agribusiness sometimes enabled by collusion with researchers at land-grant universities; the increased reliance on heavily polluting, toxic fertilizers and pesticides; deforestation; mountaintop removal; climate change the whole litany of environmental costs.

Berry details how attempts to modernize agriculture, driven for 50 years by the federal governments policy of get big or get out, has led to the virtual elimination of Black farmers as well as the devastation of a once more or less independent rural culture.

Berry may be guilty of conflating the legacies of slavery and romanticizing agriculture and rural life. Nonetheless, if we want to understand the backlog of resentments exploited by todays right wing, it behooves us to explore the linkages he presents between our deeply fractured society and our history of disdain for those who do manual labor, as well as our utter disregard for those who want to practice loving husbandry of soil, air, water, plants and animals.

Suppose that our economy should attempt to found itself upon peace and thrift instead of war and waste, Berry writes. Such changes, perhaps necessary to our mere survival, cannot be possible until the good of families and communities can outweigh the malleable and spongy claims of public interest and individual freedom.

Dave Redmon is a retired journalist and educator reared in southeast Kansas and living in Manhattan. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.

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Searching for wholeness in a nation fractured by capitalism and ... - Kansas Reflector