Book Reviews
It All Turns on Affection:
the Jefferson Lecture &
Other Essays
Wendell Berry
Counterpoint: Berkeley [CA],
2012
ISBN 978-1-61902-114-3
Wendell Berry is an unusual fig-
ure in American public intellectual
life. He is someone who, although
he speaks his mind with unusual
and praiseworthy candour, manag-
es to have admirers at all points of
our pretty much fatuous ideological
spectrum. And as the first item in
this volume shows, he even receives
official recognition despite writing
many things that arein the literal
meaning of the worddeeply sub-
versive of the entire American eco-
nomic and social order.
The first piece in this book,
then, is Berrys 2012 Jefferson Lec-
ture at the National Endowment
for the Humanities. The remain-
An old stone barn in the heart of Englands Yorkshire.
ing are an interview of both Berry
and his wife, Tanya, by Jim Leach,
chairman of NEH, which was pub-
lished in The Magazine of the Na-
tional Endowment for the Humani-
ties, Berrys foreword for a volume
entitled Kentuckys Natural Heri-
tage, a short speech given at the Fu-
ture of Food Conference in 2011,
and three articles, two of which ap-
peared in The Progressive, and one
in The Draft Horse Journal.
Although this volume is short
it brings together successfully many
of the main themes of Berrys writ-
ings, especially his deep concern for
the land, but a concern never di-
vorced from the people who live on
the land. As he writes here:
Unlimited industrial prog-
ress toward cheaper and
cheaper production directly
damages land and water. Just
as directly it damages the
people who depend upon the
land and the water (p. 99).
137

Of course nobody will admit
that he supports any activity that
actually damages land and water.
The very coal companies that are
engaged in blasting away entire
mountains, causing unutterable
ecological catastrophe in the
process, like to talk about clean
coal. But Berry knows better. Nor
is his analysis based upon a super-
ficial or politically correct type of
discourse, for his view looks deeply
into history and into our actual
farming practices to find its bear-
ings. On almost the first page of his
Jefferson Lecture Berry, borrowing
the terms from Wallace Stegner,
distinguishes between boomers
and stickers. Boomers . . . are the future, and move on (p. 68).
those who pillage and run, who
want to make a killing and end
up on Easy Street, whereas stick-
ers are those who settle, and love
the life they have made and the
place they have made it in (p. 10).
Unfortunately, till now it is boom-
ers who have predominated in the
history of Anglo-America, while
stickers have been a minor theme
of that history.
It does not take much effort
to recognise the boomer qual-
ity of American culture. Books
and videos on how to profit from
any number of looming financial
disasters or alluring advertise-
ments on why and how to move
away from whatever place you
138
The Chesterton Review
are now living in to find the best
retirement locale or the city with
the most young singlesthese
are just some examples of con-
temporary boomerdom. But it
was pretty much always thus. In
1880 one B. C. Keeler published
a book, Where to Go to Become
Rich, promoting settlement in
lands west of the Mississippi. But
long before that people seeking
riches and a few of them perma-
nent homeshad already come
to Berrys native Kentucky, for the
most part with the desire to take
from the land as much as you can
get of whatever you want, charge
it to nature or your neighbor or
Berry does more, however,
than simply indulge in such fusil-
lades against exploitation. He is
not some urban, merely weekend,
environmentalist. Before all he is a
farmer, and he works a farm near
where he grew up in Henry Coun-
ty, Kentucky. So he understands
in detail what practices have de-
stroyed the land and how it might
be restored.
Early in our history, the
steep valley sides of the Ken-
tucky River and its tributar-
ies were cleared and row-
cropped. The trees were cut,
the litter burned, the slopes
broken with jumper plows,
Book Reviews
the rocks piled, the crops
planted and harvested. This
cycle was repeated until ero-
sion and depletion put an
end to it, and then the trees
were allowed to grow back
to restore sufficient fertility
to the slopes to permit them
to be cleared and cropped
again (p. 79).
I have heard people criticise
care for the environment because
they thought it inhibited eco-
nomic growth or they thought
that environmentalists cared more
for plants and animals than for
humans. But as I suggest above,
Berry understands that it is false
and silly to posit such antitheses.
For the habitat of every creature
in our home countryside is also
our habitat, and to make it less
inhabitable for other creatures
makes it less inhabitable as well
for us (p. 79). And earlier he had
said, There is in fact no distinc-
tion between the fate of the land
and the fate of the people. When
one is abused, the other suffers
(p. 18). Those who think that we
have to promote economic growth
regardless of the health of the
common dwelling place God has
given us for this life are like people
who think they must befoul their
own home in order to live in it. If
our economic thinking is so lim-
ited that the only policy proposals
that governments, think tanks and
universities produce assume that
good living for mankind requires
degrading our living space, I sug-
gest we need to do some radical
rethinking of our assumptions.
Berry is well aware of the
connection between the economy
and how a farmer treats his land.
If farmers come under adversity
from high costs and low prices,
then they must either increase
their demands upon the land and
decrease their care for it, or they
must sell out and move to town . .
. (p. 18). The logic of what capi-
talism understands by efficiency
looks at only a few of the factors
which make up an economy: it
looks at prices, as if people were
only consumers and concludes
that cheap prices are always and
everywhere a desideratum and
regards everything which might
raise pricessuch as taking care
of the land or paying producers
a fair return or workers just wag-
esas so many distortions in the
magical working of supply and
demand; it looks at overall costs
and concludes that if something
can be done more cheaply then
that must be better, even if the re-
sulting product is shoddy or our
natural environment is ruined as
a result. But Berry understands
all this, and that is why he is so
subversive, as I said above. If his
ideas were implemented the whole
139

superstructure of life that has
been erected in North America
would crumble, but not to be re-
placed by some kind of utopian
vision concocted by theorists, but
in fact by a society that encapsu-
lates what many Americans claim
they desire, and what they like to
think that their parents or grand-
parents actually possessed. That is
one of the reasons that Berry can
appeal to both conservatives and
liberals. A more trenchant critic
of capitalism and industrialism
than many liberals, but one whose
real instinct for conservation puts
to shame most conservatives, who
in fact are most interested in con-
serving progressso long as it
is the kind of progress they find
endearing and, in many cases,
profitable. Berry recognises some-
thing that conservativesif they
were really what their name im-
pliesought to understand more
than others: It is understood
that nonhuman creatures adapt
to their places or they do not live.
And for some reason that I cant
figure out, even the biologists have
excused our own species from that
obligation (p. 57). Since at least
the Renaissance, nay, rather since
the Fall of our first parents, man
has heard the whispering voice,
You shall be as gods, and con-
cluded that we are not creatures
really. Thus there is no necessity
to adapt, no limit to what we can
140
The Chesterton Review
accomplish in transforming our
surroundings to fit the whims of
our volition or our appetites. In
fact, we have no more right to
interfere in the natural processes
that God has implanted in his
creation than we do to pretend to
alter the nature of what marriage
is. One is from him as much as the
other. For they are not two, but
one, one in that all of his creation
is something given to us which we
may rightfully use only according
to the natures which the various
creatures, animate and inanimate,
each possess. To pollute the soil is
a sin akin to that of polluting the
sanctity of the marriage bed.
I do not know if Wendell Ber-
ry is aware of Chesterton and dis-
tributism or not. But if not, then
he is a self-made distributist. Who
could come up with a better sum-
ming up of a distributist society
than this characterisation of his
grandfather, who lived a few miles
from where Berry lives today?
My grandfather . . . took a
great and present delight in
the modest good that was at
hand: in his place and his af-
fection for it, in its pastures,
animals, and crops.
He did not participate in the
least in what we call mobili-
ty. He died, after eighty-two
years, in the same spot he
was born in. He was prob-
Book Reviews
ably in his sixties when he
made the one longish trip of
his life. He went with my fa-
ther southward across Ken-
tucky and into Tennessee.
On their return, my father
asked him what he thought
of their journey. He replied:
Well, sir, Ive looked with
all the eyes Ive got, and I
wouldnt trade the field be-
hind my barn for every inch
Ive seen.
In such modest joy in a mod-
est holding is the promise of
a stable, democratic society,
a promise not to be found in
mobility: our forlorn mod-
ern progress toward some-
thing indefinitely, and often
unrealizably, better (p. 17).
Such modest joy in a mod-
est holding presupposes and re-
quires a society that allows and
facilitates that way of living.
Farming takes place necessar-
ily in the contexts first of na-
ture and then of human cul-
ture. Land, air, sunlight, and
rain are gifts of nature. By the
instructions of our culture, we
humans use these things either
well or poorly (p. 119).
To live in modest joy in a
modest holding in our culture
frequently requires nearly heroic
fortitude and steadiness of pur-
pose. We have made an idol of
freedom, freedom to be a boom-
er, to exploit, to waste, as if that
freedom were something neutral,
something equally friendly to vir-
tue as to vice. But human nature
always creates a culture of one
sort or another, and a culture of
empty freedom will not educate
its denizens in the way of virtue.
Berry goes on immediately to say,
By the instructions of our pres-
ent culture, we are wasting or de-
stroying [these gifts of nature]. It
is not just individuals who are at
fault, but the culture that formed
them and that they, as individuals,
support and uphold.
Wendell Berry is a very im-
portant thinker who is saying
things that should have been said
by many others, and not only by
those who style themselves con-
servatives, who, one would think,
would be in the forefront of efforts
to conserve not only the land, but
ways of life associated with the
land. But there is another group
who ought to be saying, and say-
ing with more precision and con-
text, those truths which Wendell
Berry speaks and speaks and
speaks again. These are Catholics
and all who are the intellectual
heirs of Aristotle and St. Thom-
as, who should have seen that the
modern approach to farming and
to treatment of the land presup-
poses the dualism of Descartes,
the notion that matter is merely
141

an extended inert mass, and that
it is only outside forces, such as
chemical fertilisers, that have an
important and active role to play
in farming. The health of the soil
itself was of no matter, for in true
Cartesian manner it was treated
as, and soon became, just dirt. In
the distinction between soil and
dirt lies the distinction between
the philosophy of Aristotle and
that of Descartes. Berry tells the
story of his curiosity about the
disappearance of a certain small
beetle that had been common in
his childhood.
Why did they disappear?
Though I had a sort of
theory, I wanted scientific
authority, and so I presented
my question to an entomolo-
gist in the College of Agri-
culture at the University of
Kentucky. I have been pon-
dering his answer for the last
thirty or so years:
I do not know anything
about them. But I can tell
you thisthey have no eco-
nomic significance (p. 83).
No economic significance
we can say that about all sorts of
things, about soil rich in nutrients
and organisms, about streams that
children can safely swim in and
animals drink from, about farms
and country towns and villages
whose inhabitants surely are not
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The Chesterton Review
making the most productive use
of their lives, since they could earn
so much more in the city, about
anything that still hinders the all-
but-total victory of the economic
calculus and cash nexus. Our cul-
ture has defined its purposes and
organised its activity narrowly
and almost exclusively in the in-
terests of those desirous of ex-
ploiting both the world of natures
and their fellow men. There were
many who should have known
better than to have given their as-
sent, even if partial, to such a way
of thinking, but for the most part
they were silent or even complicit.
Wendell Berrys voice is a correc-
tive most necessary, even vital, if
there is to be any hope that we as a
nation can cease to live as boom-
ers and become the stickers that
we and our land so much need.
Even more than what is perhaps
his magnum opus, The Unsettling
of America (1977), this small vol-
ume brings together forcefully
the important themes of Berrys
work, important for understand-
ing him, but even more important
for understanding, and perhaps
helping to rescue, ourselves, our
children and our culture.
Thomas Storck,
Westerville, Ohio
* * *