Toward a healthy community

An older interview with Wendell Berry

Toward a healthy community: an interview with Wendell Berry - essayist, author, and poet - Interview
Christian Century, Oct 15, 1997

Wendell Berry lives on a hillside farm in his native Henry County, Kentucky. He has written more than 30 books of fiction, poetry and essays, including, Another Turn of the Crank (essay and A World Lost (novel). Berry has a passionate love for the land and a concern that people live in responsible relationship with the land and with one another. In his essays he links a scathing criticism of the much-touted "global economy" with a call to renew and sustain local communities. Berry urges his readers to consider how their decisions and lives affect the community's land, its local economy and its future. We spoke with him about economics, the city and his understanding of community.

Several times in your writing you describe your hometown, Port Royal, Kentucky. What's happened there? How has it changed, and what forces have been at work behind that change?

Throughout my lifetime, my community--like every other community in the modern world--has become more and more peripheral to its own consciousness. And this does not imply that there is a center that has moved away. In the modern world there is no center; every place is peripheral.

Why has witnessing this change had such an impact on you?

Because (to put the narrowest construction on the question) I want to live in a good place, and I know that people can't live in good places unless they know where they are and pay the closest, kindest attention to what they do there.

My little community is no different from virtually any other little community in the modern world. It doesn't grant enough importance to itself. It concurs too much with the general assumption that every place is peripheral.

You seem to have in mind the idea of a good or healthy community. What are the elements of such a community?

First, the qualities of a healthy community don't include perfection; I don't think that there have been any perfect human communities. If you talk about the virtues of a given community, you must also discuss its problems and evils. A good community is one in which people understand that in order to have certain good things, they have to have them in common. That's ale [sic]

What is involved in trying to maintain or recover such a community?

Loving one another, taking care of one another, being thankful for the gifts of heaven and earth and our human forebears, taking good care of those gifts. In short, we must do good work; we must have a good economy.

How do you define "economy"? Your understanding seems to be different from the understanding of economics as the study of moneymaking.

Economy is our way of making a living. It connects the human household with the good things that sustain life. This involves the money economy and many other things that our present idea of "economics" excludes: good work, good care of the materials and other gifts of nature, faithfulness to one another in all relationships.

What's wrong with "thinking globally"?

You can't think globally. You can only think in detail. "Global thinking" is a distraction from thinking.

Consumers are glad for and dependent upon food products that can't be raised in their own regions. What's wrong with depending on farmers 2,000 miles away for our food?

As distance increases, knowledge declines. How many of us can know the real costs--economic, ecological, social, cultural--of food produced 2,000 miles from our homes?

Some people choose the city because they want to be somewhat anonymous--at least as compared to life in a small town. Do you respect this choice, or do you fad that the evils of the city's dependency outweigh its positive qualities?

There are lots of good reasons to want to live in the city. I understand these; I've lived in cities and I'm obviously dependent on cities. No country person who has thought through the rural economic predicament can assume that we're independent; we're not.

But I don't respect the desire of anybody to live anonymously. Eventually people will have to acknowledge their dependences. They'll make it anonymously to the point where they fall down in the street. Somebody with a name will need to pick them up.

Some modern people think of themselves as "autonomous." They've found a way to live while (or by) ignoring critical dependences. This is an illusion, and I don't respect it. I hope people will give up the superstition that they can somehow get away from the problems that they're making.

Wherever they live, if they eat, people have agricultural responsibilities just as they have cultural responsibilities. Eating without knowledge is the same as eating without gratitude. What's the use in thanking God for food that has come at an unbearable expense to the world and other people? Every eater has a responsibility to find out where food comes from and what its real costs are, and then to do something to reduce the costs. All of us are now dependent on lots of products the origin of which we don't know and can't learn.

How can our cities take steps toward becoming self-sustaining?

It's hard to see how a megalopolis could ever have an intimate relationship with its tributary landscape. A megalopolis, by definition, couldn't have this relationship because it depends entirely on long-distance transport. I can't offer a blueprint for solving the whole problem, but in some places there are imaginable solutions.

For example, we have a considerable food-producing capacity in Kentucky and we don't have very large cities. We need to ask, 'What that we eat here are we not producing here?" and then, "What that we eat could we produce here?" To the city people we country people need to say, "What do you eat that we can produce and that you would buy from us?" We must work in increments, doing little jobs, solving little problems. I see more and more people who are willing to do these small but important tasks. People everywhere can help just by recognizing the existence (in-escapable except by death) of the land-based economy, and then by trying to understand the terms of their dependence on it.

You've said that you're kept awake by a "difficult hope." Can you see specific examples on the American scene of a revived interest in creating community?

All over the place. What we're seeing that's tremendously hopeful is an attempt to revive the principle of local economy--especially, right now, the principle of local food economy. Although the global economy devalues these local economies, it also opens niches in which they may be able to survive. The global economy does not serve locally grown food. But here in Kentucky, the Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative Association has revived its old Commodity Growers Cooperative to market locally grown food to local people. Eventually this co-op hopes to market all rural products.

Small farmers would have a better chance to survive if they dealt with people they knew, and who knew them--rural or urban neighbors who would value them for their ability to grow products that are needful and good.

Can you give us an example of how you and your wife, Tanya, make domestic economic decisions?

So far as we can, for things we don't produce here at home, we like to deal with locally owned businesses. Even so, outside our home economy, we're as economically ignorant as most people.

You often celebrate the health and solidarity of the Amish and their relationship to the land. What's your understanding of their religious foundation?

The Amish are pacifists. That's an extremely important difference between them and the powers that be. They're not interested in making war. This means, among other things, that the focus of their life is the community and the church.

I'm interested in the ability of the Amish to put their community first, and to ask of any proposed innovation, "What will this do to our community?" They're willing to answer that question in the most practical ways, which means that there is no distinction between their economy and their religion; in their daily work they practice their faith. This is unlike any other community or church that I know in the United States.

Is it possible, given the centrality of the religious foundation, to apply a kind of Amishness to the rest of the society?

Most of us, now, can't be Amish. But some of us who aren't Amish have begun to ask the Amish question about the effects of innovation on the community, and to resist the modern divorce between economy and religion--which is really just a version of the devastating old dualism of body and soul.

What is your religious background?

I was raised as a Southern Baptist. But I've always felt myself an outsider to the sects and denominations.

You've written about your frustration with itinerancy in the rural churches, saying that pastors are moved too frequently. Is this still true?

The denominations tend to use country churches to subsidize the education of preachers. Young "ministerial students" come to our little towns, many genuinely interested in being ministers, some even worth listening to. But just as they are about to get to know us, and get used to the fact that we're not going to become much better very soon, they get their degrees and off they go. It's a kind of teenage emotional rhythm that we're on here with the preachers. They come, and we love some of them very much. But they don't stay long enough to get past their illusions about us, or long enough for us to get past our infatuation with them. (Some, of course, "depart without being desired.") Most of these country towns have never been preached to by a preacher who knows them thoroughly and loves them anyway. I see some signs that this may be starting to change--at the initiative of individual ministers and congregations.

Is there a role for the church in building the kind of community that you describe?

This raises a problem that I can hardly define, let alone solve. Churches, sects, organized religions, denominations all come into being and cohere (insofar as they do) by agreeing on issues of doctrine and ritual, and by excluding all who don't agree. We know what a bloody business this is. Christians, ignoring their specific instructions to the contrary, have been including and excluding, killing one another and also people of other faiths, virtually from the beginning. The "church"--in its organized forms--has always loved itself for excluding, and sometimes for killing, unbelievers and heretics.

Christianity (in its Western forms, at least) has also tended to exclude nature--the body's life and all that it depends on. Which is to say that it has not been interested enough in our economic life. It has been too easy to be "a good Christian" while destroying the world that (we are told) God loves.

Moreover, I think that most modern Christian churches have entirely lost their artistic tradition. You couldn't tell from nearly all the sermons I have heard that there is in English a great Christian literary tradition that includes sermons. And it is a wonder how much modern church architecture is either brutally ugly or rather tackily pretentious.

Does the church, having pretty well excluded the great commonwealths of nature and human culture, yet have a role in building communities? I certainly hope so, but I'm as doubtful of the church as I am of myself. How are we to live up to what we've been given?

I think that if Christians quit worrying about being "Christians" or church members and just undertook to do what Christ told them to do--love one another, love their enemies, take care of the helpless and the friendless and the unworthy and the no-account--then the "church" might sooner or later dissolve into something much better.

Edward Abbey warned conservationists that saving the world was "a good hobby." The same may be true for theologies and creeds. A church that believed in nothing and forgot all its own tradition and history would be perfectly worthless, of course. All the same, the human mind too readily imposes on God and becomes owlishly knowledgeable about his mysteries, when it needs to be humorous and forgiving. Which, of course, some Christians have sometimes been.

Our time increasingly requires of us the same free-hearted neighborliness, the same practical charity, that the Gospels require of us but the churches generally do not. The churches generally sit and watch and even approve while our society hurries brainlessly on with the industrialization of child-raising, education, medicine, all the pleasures and all the practical arts. And perhaps this is because religion itself is increasingly industrialized: concerned with quantity, "growth," fashionable thought and an inane sort of expert piety.

From where I'm looking, it seems necessary for Christians to recognize that the industrial economy is not just a part of a quasi-rational system of specializations, granting the needs of the body to the corporations and the needs of the spirit to the churches, but is in fact an opposing religion, assigning to technological progress and "the market" the same omnipotence, omniscience, unquestionability, even the same beneficence, that the Christian teachings assign to God.

What sustains you?

Well, youth did for a while! But I have been extremely fortunate in my friends and allies, and in my family: my parents, my wife, my brother, my children. Also (I'm almost afraid to say it) there are more people on the "side" I'm on than there used to be. All these small local efforts add up to something very encouraging.

I'm interested in how people ought to act in order to preserve the fundamental needs and the fundamental pleasures of life. Anybody interested in that question could be fascinated for two to three lifetimes without any trouble at all. The questions themselves sustain me.

Do you see yourself in a prophetic role?

No indeed! I have only taken part in a conversation that living people must carry on with the past, with books and with one another. I'm a writer, in some sense a spokesman, but I have said nothing, as an essayist at least, that didn't come out of that conversation.

What is the connection between your fiction and poetry and the public themes of your essays?

All my work comes from my loves and hopes. My essays come from a desire to understand what I love and hope for and to defend those things; they pretty much constitute a single long argument in defense. This has sometimes been laborious and dutiful work, and I have sometimes grown very tired of it. My work as a fiction writer and poet, in spite of the difficulties always involved, has been increasingly a source of pleasure to me--it is my way of giving thanks, maybe, for having things worthy of defense.

Is your writing nostalgic?

If you're making a criticism of the way things are, then you have to contend with readers who need to find a way to dismiss you. One easy (and silly) way to dismiss my argument is to call it nostalgic. There are indeed things in the past that I look back upon with love. But I know that the past does not return. I have been a steadfast critic of the past and certainly of my own inheritance from the past. History demonstrates certain possibilities, both good and bad, that we had better not forget. But my argument will stand or fall by the validity of its concern for the preservation of necessary things. I've tried to learn from the waste or destruction or ruin of some things that we might have inherited from the past, and that we need now.