Finished reading: The Need to Be Whole by Wendell Berry 📚

In my review of Race: Challenge to Religion, I mentioned a thought project I’ve been undertaking with a friend, around how to build up a positive model of patriotism. This book, subtitled “Patriotism and the History of Prejudice,” tackles those questions directly.

I’ve read Wendell Berry before; his book Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community is on my list of all-time favorites. If The Need to be Whole continues to stick with me as it has in the few weeks since I’ve finished it, then it might end up on that list, as well.

The author asserts thats racism is the founding sin of the United States, and that a culture of slavery still pervades our exploitative economic system, and also that b) a proper rooting out of that sin requires us to engage with, and have compassion for, confederate citizens in the slave-owning south whose home was invaded by the U.S. Army. This was a tough pill to swallow when I opened the book; but Wendell Berry’s shockingly good writing and excellent ability to navigate nuance brings his perspective into full comprehension over the course of the book.

It’s an extremely “offline” book; in that it does not fit neatly into the sides drawn for common online arguments. Last year’s New Yorker piece on Wendell Berry, posted in advance of the book’s publication, described it as “contains something to offend almost everyone.”

My experience of the progressive movement (currently as an employee of the Sierra Club ), has involved participating in a lot of societal critique, and critique of the structures which maintain the unjust status quo (namely, the United States government and economic apparatus). As such, I’ve at times found taking pride in my country to be at odds with my desire to change it. In this book, I find the proper articulation of what it means to do both:

“The right motive for work, as I believe I know also from experience, is love. Love, to begin with, clears the mind of the oversimplifying, mind-destroying emotions that prepare us to make war. When our minds are clear, out eyes are free to look around and see where we are, and who all and what all are there with us. We then can see both the damage we have done to our country and its remaining great beauty. We can see that we are not on “the planet” but in one of its places that, with care, can be intimately known. Love for that place shows us the work that it asks us to do in order to live in it while seeing to its need, and ours, to be whole.”

This idea of “oversimplifying” ourselves is a concept the author introduces on the preceding page and returns to throughout the book. I think there is something to be argued here in favor of the “offline”-ness of the book, that in rejecting the oversimplification inherent in the type of communication that happens online, the author and the reader are able to cultivate the love and nuance necessary to rebuild, in intimate relationship, our exploited land and communities.