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Worth reading: an interview with Wendell Berry

5 min read

Wendell Berry is an author many folks have never heard of, but boy, once you get into the right circles, you never hear the end of him. And while I haven’t read but a couple of his books, his fans’ high praise doesn’t seem unreasonable or hyperbolic. Berry is conservative when it comes to culture and community, but then holds positions on environmentalism and pacifism that are more aligned with the political left.

Festival of Faiths / Flickr

All the while, he’s a local Kentucky farmer who writes books, poetry, and has received significant awards for doing so. I have many friends today who approach Berry with the sort of awed respect that you can imagine them directing, in a previous era, to C. S. Lewis. (Don’t believe me? Just go read Andrew Peterson’s blog post from 2010 where he recounts a visit to meet Berry. It’s pretty great.)

My thoughts were directed back to Berry this week after reading a piece on Berry written by Gracy Olmstead on The American Conservative website. It’s a delightful interview in which Berry opines in his earthy, plainspoken way about the current state of politics, conservatism, community, and faith.

I love the humor that comes along with the critique, for instance, in his response to this question:

GO: You write a lot about the importance of conservation—which, really, conservatism is supposed to be about. How have conservatives lost an understanding of proper conservation?
> WB: For those who enjoy absurdities—as I do, up to a point—“conservatives” opposed to conservation are vibrantly absurd and worth at least a grin. But such conservatives have achieved this amusing absurdity by a radical and dangerous narrowing of purpose. They apparently wish to conserve only the power and wealth of the most powerful and the most wealthy. The conservation of wilderness and “the wild” seems now to be recognized as a project belonging exclusively to “liberals.” But that also is a dangerous narrowing of purpose. It is true that “liberal” conservationists also fairly dependably oppose the most excessive and sensational abuses of “the environment,” such as oil or slurry spills (in some places), surface mining (off and on, never enough), extreme pollution of air and water (mainly as it affects cities), and so on. But in fact most politicians, “conservative” and “liberal,” are the pets or juvenile dependents of the industrial corporations.

In Kentucky, for example, the Party of Coal has swallowed, digested, and shat nearly all politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike. Above all, it is still virtually impossible to interest any of the powers of politics in the economic landscapes of farming and forestry. In those landscapes the gravest and most extensive damages are being done: by soil erosion, by toxic pollution of soil and water, by impairment of the diversity and integrity of ecosystems, by drastic interruptions of the fertility cycle, by the devastation of rural communities and of our never adequately developed cultures of husbandry. There are reasons to hope for and even to foresee the coming of more honesty and better purposes—the need for a sustainable economy, the increasingly obvious failures of industrialism and corporate rule—but no extensive improvements can come easily or soon.

Or this rather pointed barb when asked about seemingly continuous wars:

I don’t believe we can hope to make sense of our modern wars until we have acknowledged that war is good for business.

On a Christian response to war and persecution of Christians:

Only a few marginal Christians have dared to think that Christianity calls for the radical neighborhood, servanthood, love, and forgiveness that Christ taught. I agree with them, and much against my nature I have tried to make my thoughts consent. I do not say this with confidence.

And this response when asked about his concerns with modern Christianity:

I don’t know when, why, or how it happened, but at some time the mainstream denominations put themselves in charge of the Sunday job of accrediting people for admission to Heaven, turning the workdays, the human economy, and the material creation over to the materialists. And so it became possible for people to commit their souls to God while participating in an economy dedicated to the swiftest possible extraction and consumption of everything it values in God’s world, with unlimited collateral damage to all creatures, humans included, that it does not value. Once this desecration of creation, of life itself, becomes conventional economic practice, then the submersion of the Gospel in nationalism and the waging of Christian warfare readily follows.

Love him or hate him, Berry is a fantastic writer, a thoughtful philosopher, a man whose thought we ignore at our own peril. I’d encourage you to go read the whole interview at The American Conservative. Me, I’m off to buy a copy of Jayber Crow.

Originally published on by Chris Hubbs