Curing Babylon

One may seriously question whether agrarian principles have anything value to say to the corporate and consumerist culture of contemporary America, or whether rustic philosophers and poets should be dismissed dreamers out of touch with reality. Lewis P. Simpson observes that World War II made impossible the recovery of the rural society he refers to as Old America. The war “had concluded in the technological holocaust created by American atomic bombs, a demonstration of the disintegrative principle far more awesome that the deluging of the Tennessee Valley [by tva ]. The Agrarian movement was by this terrible moment in history far past any con ceivable revival.” That sounds final. Even contemporary defenders of prop erty and rural life acknowledge that most battles have been lost and that there are now fewer vestiges of that traditional life left to be defended. short drive into the country reveals treeless subdivisions sprouting in corn fields; and, even on the farms that remain, hedgerows are bush-hogged edge-to-edge planting. Wendell Berry writes that “we agrarians are involved in a hard, long, momentous contest, in which we are so far, and by a consider able margin, the losers.” It is also undeniable, however, that secular consum erism offers nothing to build a life or raise a family on, and some thoughtful people look for better ways to live, seeking forms of human society that fully human.

In 1938 Donald Davidson published a prophetic indictment of mass cul ture entitled The Attack on Leviathan. In defending traditional sectional and regional cultures Davidson writes,

The artists have been among the first to realize that some of the dilemmas of an industrial civilization may be downed or avoided by reaffirming the ties, local and native, which were once only shackles to be cast off. In its undeniable nostalgia this sectionalism contains a realistic answer to the question: Whom shall my soul believe? Worn out with abstraction and novelty, plagued with divided counsels, some Americans have said: I will believe the old folks at home, who have kept alive through many treacherous outmodings some good secret of life. Such moderns prefer to grasp the particular. They want something to engage both their reason and their love.

Wendell Berry is an artist who all his life and in several genres has eloquently opposed Leviathan, “the tyranny that wears the mask of humanitarianism and benevolence,” and he has defended the local and particular. Among modern men of letters he has insistently and nearly singlehandedly articulated the agrarian hope for viable rural communities in which not every person is a farmer, but in which each manufacturing project “should be formed and scaled to fit the local landscape, the local ecosystem, and the local community, and that it should be locally owned and employ local people.” In novels and stories concerning the Port William membership, in poems celebrating the arts of husbandry and wifery, and in essays philosophical and polemical, Berry has given readers a largely coherent and compelling picture of the beauty and seriousness of domestic life attached through generations to a rural place—its joys, its dislocations and natural shocks, communities that understand and accept the “scale of human competence.”

In a literary life that has so far resulted in more than fifty well-crafted books, it is fitting that Berry and the various instances of his passionate sanity should receive the attention and tribute of the thirty essays brought together by Jason Peters in Wendell Berry: Life and Work (University Press of Kentucky, 2007). This volume, consisting of reminiscences as well as critical and analytical essays on Berry’s writing by poets, critics, philosophers, political thinkers, and farmers, is part of Culture of the Land: A Series in the New Agrarianism published by the University Press of Kentucky that “considers the health of habitats and human communities together.” Being honored by a collection like this one must give pause to a writer frequently described as an American Jeremiah, for true prophets are not typically treated so well; but it must also bring comfort by confirming Berry’s hope that the agrarian agendum “is still in effect; it is well understood and...