An alternative conservative

Modern Age, Summer, 2003 by Jeremy Beer

The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, edited and introduced by Norman Wirzba, Washington, D.C.: Counter-point, 2002. 352 pp.

THE PUBLICATION OF The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Berry's Unsettling of America, a cultural defense of small-scale farming that is justly regarded as an agrarian and conservationist classic. Since 1977, Berry has been a prolific novelist, poet, and essayist--as well as a full-time farmer--and he has won a surprisingly broad following.

The extent of Berry's mainstream acceptance can be ascribed to his willingness to criticize big business, environmental depredation, and (especially earlier in his career) organized religion. But in fact, Berry's is a voice profoundly at variance with prevailing prejudices. If he is a critic of globalization and an economy dominated by multinational corporations, he is also a withering critic of big government and distant bureaucracy. If he is an environmentalist, he is also a humanist--one who argues eloquently against artificial contraception. If he is a critic of institutional Christianity, it is precisely because the Christianity he has most intimately known is heretical in its stark separation of body and soul. In short, Berry is much more subversive, and much more conservative, than some of his public seems to realize.

The foundation of Berry's critique is his unyieldingly anti-individualist and anti-liberationist conception of freedom. He mocks the therapeutic view that each of us is called to reach his "full potential as an individual." His social and political philosophy rests on an explicit rejection of the modern idea--and ideal--that freedom consists in maximum personal liberation from external constraints, including the constraints of community, tradition, and nature. That "one has the right to be freed from any objectionable condition by any means" is to Berry a dangerous doctrine. Individual autonomy, the goal to which it points, is impossible: "there is only a distinction between responsible and irresponsible dependence." Far from being autonomous, the self is a social creation. "[W]e are not the authors of ourselves .... Each of us has had many authors, and each of us is engaged, for better or worse, in that same authorship."

But as Berry realizes, the doctrine of the autonomous self is in the ascendant, and not only among "certain liberationist intellectuals" and other elites. Americans by and large, Berry believes, construe freedom as a "license to pursue any legal self-interest at large and at will ...." This conception of freedom is instilled and reinforced by the schools, the entertainment industry, and the spokesmen for our corporate economy, all of which instruct Americans "to free themselves of all restrictions, restraints, and scruples."

As Berry is at pains to show, our attempts to liberate ourselves from the particularities of place and tradition have not had the expected effect of increasing the sum total of our happiness. Personal liberation, for example, lies at the root of the modern "identity crisis." That such a crisis exists should not surprise us, for the self is inextricably tied to its participation in self-transcending relationships and institutions like "marriage, family, household, friendship, neighborhood, community," relationships and institutions notably in decline. That these institutions are the mediators of genuine freedom is demonstrated by the fact that their disintegration has led to a decline in the number of meaningful choices available to individuals. Berry relentlessly and imaginatively makes the case that, though we have more than ever the power to choose our own paths, we are also more than ever the subjects of distant bureaucracies and anonymous corporations. The consumer choices available to us are trivial compared to the more robust freedom found in the political power and economic security once conferred on us by our social bondedness.

The costs of our individualistic quest for autonomy have been profound, and Berry's list is not so different from those of other cultural conservatives:

   divorce, venereal disease, murder, rape, debt, bankruptcy,
   pornography, teenage pregnancy, fatherless children, motherless
   children, child suicide, public child-care, retirement homes, nursing
   homes, toxic waste, soil loss, ... pollution, government secrecy,
   government lying, government crime, civil violence, drug abuse,
   sexual promiscuity, abortion as "birth control," the explosion of
 garbage, hopeless poverty, unemployment, unearned wealth.

And for Berry--again, like most cultural conservatives--a primary source of that disintegration has been the destruction of communal freedom through the centralization of state power. In order to protect and serve its constitutive communities, he claims, the state must account for and respect local differences--otherwise it will necessarily destroy those communities which are intrinsically local and inhere precisely in their particularities. Genuine community freedom would include the right to decide what will and will not be taught in a community's schools. Unfortunately, our public schools, precisely because they are not really under community control, often attempt "to improve the community by shocking or offending it." Consequently, it is "possible that the future of community life in this country may depend on private schools and home schooling."

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An alternative conservative

Modern Age, Summer, 2003 by Jeremy Beer

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