I have long admired Wendell Berry for his commitment to local community, simple living, and an honest Christian faith. As I now work on a Christian seminary committed to sustainability and social justice, I was eager to pick up his new book on politics and patriotism. This volume may be his most courageous and challenging yet. Berry thoughtfully but pointedly critiques both the ‘red’ and ‘blue’ sides of the USA’s current widening divide, urging us to focus on our immediate communities in relation to the land we are so eagerly harvesting for destruction.
Berry’s fundamental thesis is that race prejudice is deeply entwined with our modernist tendency to treat our land as an expendable resource. We have committed ourselves to an extractive economy where people suffer while the ‘economy’ prospers at our collective expense. In fact, the industrial capitalist machine purposely denigrates small-scale farming so that it can produce more and more cheap commodities that make all of us physically, mentally, socially, and spiritually sick. Only by moving away from a divisive politics of anger (yes, I’m looking at you too, liberals) can we even hope to avoid civil war and unsalvageable economic devastation.
Berry repeatedly returns to the necessity to know each other and our land as particularities – concrete and complicated people rather than resources to be used or enemies to be defeated. His observations are based in his wise survey of human behavior and in his plain reading of the radical gospel of Jesus Christ. Nonviolence and love have empirically and spiritually proven themselves superior to hate and anger in addressing our collective common-sense problems. To demonize any race or any political persuasion is only to participate in our own destruction using our enemies’ tools.
So-called ‘conservatives’ will be angered at Berry’s radical gospel that urges us to reject commercialism and the industrial profit motive at the expense of actual human beings. ‘Liberals’ will be angered at Berry’s challenge to divisive identity politics in favor of knowing each other as actual, flawed human beings. Capitalists will be angered at Berry’s critique of modern profit extractive industrialism. Socialists will be angered at Berry’s love of his country (the actual country, the soil, the dirt, the plants, the rocks) and his love of patriotism over nationalism. Berry is well aware of all this anger, and this is precisely his point. He painstakingly tells stories of people he knows and the people of history in order to prioritize our stories over our ideologies. As he says at one point,
“Because the confrontation is between two categories of people who do not know each other, it will be easy for the side of love first to understand love merely as opposite and opposed to hate, and then generalize this opposition as an allegorical battle of Love versus Hate, exchanging slogan for slogan, gesture for gesture, shout for shout. Then if nature and the rule of battle go unchecked, the side of love begins to hate the side of hate. And then the lovers are defeated, for they have defeated themselves….Love comes into our civilization—the Gospels being the source best known to me—as a way of being in the world. It is a force, extraordinarily demanding and humbling, dangerous too, for those who attempt to take it seriously.”
May we all take that force seriously, for the good of ourselves and of our planet.
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