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Wendell Berry’s Jefferson Lecture is online and well worth the few minutes it takes to read.  Berry almost always feels distinct from other writers; his thinking has integrity (Latin integritas, “wholeness”).  He begins somewhere near the beginning, and so his thoughts feel rooted.  He is aware that a human life is transmuted food – an astonishing mystery – and that food is transmuted dirt – mystery on top of mystery.  Berry always seems spiritual in his outlook – a direct consequence of his unreductionist materialism.  Human ideas about God, or justice, or love, or mercy, must be related and even founded on or derived from, in some astonishing way, cheese and rice, corn and tomato, food and water – in Biblical terms, bread and wine, milk and honey.  Depth and simplicity here merge.  In an essay I wrote earlier about Barack Obama I described what I look for in a thinker:

I spend a great deal of time reading old books, and I am always looking, in modern books, for the quality and depth of thought I find in the old ones. It would be delightful to find the same universal knowledge in a man today that we find in Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia – with intelligent observation on geology, climate, technology, agriculture, and social mores, guiding a philosophy of politics and making a philosophical case for man’s place in the universe.

Berry offers precisely this.

It is a testament to the rarity and value of this depth that Berry has built a following, despite his flaws.  A tobacco farmer from Kentucky, born in 1934, who has written with incoherent anger about (of all things) Anita Hill, and who takes as his theme small-town life in Kentucky, writing mostly about the past because there is now so little life in small towns, does not seem an obvious candidate for canonization, especially by liberals.  But civilization is looking for some constructive criticism right now, and having become so hopelessly complex we don’t know where to start if not at the beginning.  And there is Berry, talking about soil and food as part of one thing leading all the way to humanity and love and God.

He does get lost in the middle, as I think we all do.  In his novel Jayber Crow, the main character significantly confesses that his understanding of things peters out once he starts getting to a larger scale than his own small town:

Anyhow, what I couldn’t bring together or reconcile in my mind was the thought of Port William and the thought of the war.  Port William, I thought, had not caused the war.  Port William makes quarrels, and now and again a fight; it does not make war.  It takes power, leadership, great talent, perhaps genius, and much money to make a war.  In war, as maybe even in politics, Port William has to suffer what it didn’t make.  I have pondered for years and I still can’t connect Port William and war except by death and suffering.  No more can I think of Port William and the United States in the same thought.  A nation is an idea, and Port William is not.  Maybe there is no live connection between a little place and a big idea.  I think there is not.

I don’t find it quite so hard to connect a rural town in Kentucky with U.S. wars – in fact, I find it hard to separate them – but then again, I was born in the Empire State, of all places, and trained by Jesuits to boot.  I learned Latin from them too – imperialism and farming held hands in Roman culture – and had to know that Mars was the Roman god of war and farming.  Berry has a range, and certain things are outside it.  As a young urban person I don’t really feel that he would particularly understand me – but in a strange way it gives him a weird prophetic power over people like me: one of the questions always implicit in his prose is directed at people like myself: “How the hell did you get where you are?”  The fact that Berry himself seems not to understand makes us readers desire the answer all the more.  One of the great and underrated sources of power in prophets is not really understanding the evil they preach against.

Berry found an image which bridges the gap between Port William and world war, and to his credit in his lecture he tells us about it.  It is fundamentally the topic of the lecture, although Berry himself actually barely scratches its surface.  He tells the story of his grandfather, who one year essentially performed free labor for the American Tobacco Company, which by buying out all its competitors and forming a monopoly had so depressed the price of tobacco that Berry’s grandfather gave the ATC his tobacco crop in exchange for the cost of transporting it to the sale block.  Of course a profit was made, but that profit went entirely to the ATC – nothing went to the farmer.  In particular, the person who profited most was the founder of the ATC, James Duke.

This undoubtedly accounts for my sense of shock when, on my first visit to Duke University, and by surprise, I came face-to-face with James B. Duke in his dignity, his glory perhaps, as the founder of that university. He stands imperially in bronze in front of a Methodist chapel aspiring to be a cathedral. He holds between two fingers of his left hand a bronze cigar. On one side of his pedestal is the legend: INDUSTRIALIST. On the other side is another single word: PHILANTHROPIST. The man thus commemorated seemed to me terrifyingly ignorant, even terrifyingly innocent, of the connection between his industry and his philanthropy. But I did know the connection. I felt it instantly and physically. The connection was my grandparents and thousands of others more or less like them. If you can appropriate for little or nothing the work and hope of enough such farmers, then you may dispense the grand charity of “philanthropy.”

After my encounter with the statue, the story of my grandfather’s 1906 tobacco crop slowly took on a new dimension and clarity in my mind. I still remembered my grandfather as himself, of course, but I began to think of him also as a kind of man standing in thematic opposition to a man of an entirely different kind. And I could see finally that between these two kinds there was a failure of imagination that was ruinous, that belongs indelibly to our history, and that has continued, growing worse, into our own time.

This is a fabulous setting up of an opposition, and Berry to some extent promises to bridge the gap between the two of them – each, he implies, suffered from this “failure of imagination.”  He starts his story out well:

James B. Duke came from a rural family in the tobacco country of North Carolina. In his early life he would have known men such as my grandfather.

And then Berry veers from fact – and with it sympathy – launches into hypotheticals, and utterly refuses to humanize Duke.  The rest of his lecture’s encounter with Duke is in the subjunctive.  Berry continues:

But after he began his rise as an industrialist, the life of a small tobacco grower would have been to him a negligible detail incidental to an opportunity for large profits. In the minds of the “captains of industry,” then and now, the people of the land economies have been reduced to statistical numerals. Power deals “efficiently” with quantities that affection cannot recognize.

It may seem plausible to suppose that the head of the American Tobacco Company would have imagined at least that a dependable supply of raw material to his industry would depend upon a stable, reasonably thriving population of farmers and upon the continuing fertility of their farms. But he imagined no such thing. In this he was like apparently all agribusiness executives. They don’t imagine farms or farmers. They imagine perhaps nothing at all, their minds being filled to capacity by numbers leading to the bottom line. Though the corporations, by law, are counted as persons, they do not have personal minds, if they can be said to have minds. It is a great oddity that a corporation, which properly speaking has no self, is by definition selfish, responsible only to itself. This is an impersonal, abstract selfishness, limitlessly acquisitive, but unable to look so far ahead as to preserve its own sources and supplies. The selfishness of the fossil fuel industries by nature is self-annihilating; but so, always, has been the selfishness of the agribusiness corporations. Land, as Wes Jackson has said, has thus been made as exhaustible as oil or coal.

Berry appears to know almost nothing about Duke, and not really to want to know anything.  He treats “agribusiness corporations,” “fossil fuel industries,” “agribusiness executives,” precisely as he laments that they treat others – as “quantities that affection cannot recognize.”  He calls them, significantly, “power.”  The failure of imagination, continued throughout the lecture, is all the more striking for the fact that Berry in speaking on behalf of the humanizing power of the imagination.

To some extent this seems like acceptable retaliation – you don’t have to try to humanize the impersonal forces destroying humanity, one might say.  But Berry decided to give a human name to “power” – James B. Duke – and so he is obligated to treat him like a human being, as someone who lived, as opposed to a bundle of “would have beens.”  And in truth, these impersonal forces of which he speaks are forms of human loyalty which are open to manipulation by other human beings.  The Kentucky National Guardsmen who suppressed the revolt of Kentucky tobacco farmers against the ATC (The “Black Patch War”) probably did not personally want to be involved, but they presumably acted out of loyalties to certain ideas – law and order, chain of command, the right of the employer to dictate to the employee.  We have to figure out which of our loyalties are worth our loyalty, but ultimately all of these decisions are personal and human – they are perhaps misguided, but they exist at that intersection between life and lifelessness which Berry in theory should know more about – after all, that’s what farming is supposed to be about.

I do not hold this against Berry – he is one of our best, and as I have said, he identified the image which would lead him to further understanding.  If I were him, I’d start work on a biography or at least an essay on how James Buchanan Duke went from rural North Carolina to a New Jersey robber baron – because the fascinating thing is that Duke was not really an outsider who wrecked tobacco farmers’ Eden, but a rural Southerner himself.  And he was also part of a larger pattern of expropriation of the labor of others which has always been a part of farming.  Kentucky, at least, can boast that slaves were “never more than one-quarter of its population” between 1790 and 1860.

Despite Berry’s blind spots, I consistently feel that he is articulating the moral questions of our age.  His “Christianity and the Survival of Creation” has such moral and theological depth to make the risible “Authentic Magisterium” of the Catholic Church seem like the Shuffleboard Club of the Titanic.  His brief salvo “The Pleasures of Eating” is still the best essay on “the food movement” – written almost twenty years before it started.  He is endlessly quotable, on most of the important issues of the day.  He is critical of the Christian Churches but no Darwinist either – “Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.”  In other words, he is an actual thinker.

And by putting affection at the heart of his worldview, he is preaching real Christianity, the sort which appears to be uninteresting to churches.  It is opposed to disposability and wealth which seem to be conquering the world.  The two great themes of our age are garbage and money, and Berry is really resisting:

But now, three-quarters of a century later, we are no longer talking about theoretical alternatives to corporate rule. We are talking with practical urgency about an obvious need. Now the two great aims of industrialism—replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy—seem close to fulfillment. At the same time the failures of industrialism have become too great and too dangerous to deny. Corporate industrialism itself has exposed the falsehood that it ever was inevitable or that it ever has given precedence to the common good. It has failed to sustain the health and stability of human society. Among its characteristic signs are destroyed communities, neighborhoods, families, small businesses, and small farms. It has failed just as conspicuously and more dangerously to conserve the wealth and health of nature. No amount of fiddling with capitalism to regulate and humanize it, no pointless rhetoric on the virtues of capitalism or socialism, no billions or trillions spent on “defense” of the “American dream,” can for long disguise this failure. The evidences of it are everywhere: eroded, wasted, or degraded soils; damaged or destroyed ecosystems; extinction of species; whole landscapes defaced, gouged, flooded, or blown up; pollution of the whole atmosphere and of the water cycle; “dead zones” in the coastal waters; thoughtless squandering of fossil fuels and fossil waters, of mineable minerals and ores; natural health and beauty replaced by a heartless and sickening ugliness. Perhaps its greatest success is an astounding increase in the destructiveness, and therefore the profitability, of war.

In 1936, moreover, only a handful of people were thinking about sustainability. Now, reasonably, many of us are thinking about it. The problem of sustainability is simple enough to state. It requires that the fertility cycle of birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay—what Albert Howard called “the Wheel of Life”—should turn continuously in place, so that the law of return is kept and nothing is wasted. For this to happen in the stewardship of humans, there must be a cultural cycle, in harmony with the fertility cycle, also continuously turning in place. The cultural cycle is an unending conversation between old people and young people, assuring the survival of local memory, which has, as long as it remains local, the greatest practical urgency and value. This is what is meant, and is all that is meant, by “sustainability.” The fertility cycle turns by the law of nature. The cultural cycle turns on affection.

He uses the book Howards End to speak about the kind of affection and integrity we require, and he does so wisely.  “The root of the problem,” he says, “is always to be found in private life.”  Reform will come from the home.

And his use of the word “affection” explains really what is meant by a home.  Many people told me, when I was looking to buy a home, that I should look for something which would go up in resale value.  I did no such thing, in the end.  I looked for something I could love, something which could actually receive my love.  I looked in the Catskills not because it was the best place in the world, but because it was the one I loved the most.  That was reason enough, and I have not regretted the purchase for a minute.  We all find ourselves drawn by love and affection, but there are always other people who tell us not to heed such things.  I think they are wrong.

The Latin for this love is caritas, the Christian love commanded of us.  It means “dearness” – the affection for and loyalty to certain things.  The example I use of it is Francis and the lamb of Ancona – Francis once became enchanted with a little lamb, and carried it about with him until he finally gave it to a convent.  Later the nuns of the convent made him a tunic of its wool, which when Francis saw he cried – from this affection, this love – “and invited all who stood by to share in his happiness.”

We cannot really create such love in our lives – it is not granted to us to choose the Christ-image which will evoke the love in our hearts – but we can promise to be loyal to it when it enters.  I remember one time when someone told me that my idea of Christianity – that there was a God, and he was found and served by loving – was “what everyone thinks.”  I said, “Really?  Do you think that everybody thinks or lives that way?”  And she replied, “Well, no, probably not, actually.”  If only.