The Need to Be Whole
Wendell Berry has written a long and comprehensive book, by necessity. He addresses the roots of prejudice, race relations, cultural health, Christian practice, rural communities and the current perils of this nation. Berry, a life long agrarian, insists that the community of the land - the land and the people who tend it - is essential to every conversation about this country. That includes the conversation about the historical damages of all prejudice, including racial prejudice. Berry’s argument has many dimensions, unfolded carefully and with precision. He writes sentences with clarity and without clutter. What he calls “plain speech.” Essential to his argument is the emergency that he declares in the beginning. The land and the people are both unhealthy. That sounds obvious; yet he reminds us that we have ignored the obvious emergency for generations. We, as a people, are unhealthy because of practices that began long ago. Practices that separate people from land and community, creating patterns of abuse. These patterns injure humans of every race. It’s these unhealthy patterns that continue to define our condition. This is the emergency that we ignore. Wendell Berry argues white and black folk have suffered from these patterns of abuse. In fact, the abuse to every race is apparent to this day. This perplexes those who insist on a more narrow racial focus. He issues a persistent call to attend to the damage to the whole human community. By which, again, he means land and community. Treating our loss of health without sufficient attention to this root cause is not wise. The whole is broken. It is wisdom we are lacking.
This book continues Berry’s earlier conversation in The Hidden Wound (1969) that addressed the wound of racism and The Unsettling of America (1977) that focused on agricultural practices destroying rural communities. It’s a careful refinement of his thinking over the years about the ways racial prejudice has grave consequences for Black and white, and Native American peoples. He explores the causes of these consequences from the perspective of the land. Always the land. Literally and figuratively. For him it’s always about the land. “My point of view is from the ground-level. I judge things above the ground by their effect or influence on the ground.” This ground level view is combined with a preference for the particular over generalizations. To that end, Berry sees no value in treating particular offenses in isolation from the greater damage to the whole. The enslaved and the enslavers suffered from the same wound, not equal in consequences yet the whole is still damaged. Berry would have us consider the loss of farm land and the consequent struggles of rural communities in the same conversation as the consequences of slavery upon urban Black communities. This argument is at odds with those that treat race prejudice in isolation, requiring solutions separated from the healing necessary for the whole community.
Preferring a particular person with a name, context and social location rather generalizations about race, sex, culture he arrives at a contrarian view at every turn. He points out the history of this nation since 1492 is a “history of mistakes” that are intertwined with one another. It is not wise to assume one can offer a solution to the wounds of race prejudice, without addressing the complex reality that binds us together in our multiple wounds. To isolate one mistake forces us to ignore the others. This is foolish. Berry has no use for generalizations that are contradicted by the particular experiences of real people living on the land.
He refuses to take generalizations at their face value. Insisting on names, faces and places makes the conversations about prejudice more difficult, and necessary. Wendell Berry is a wise elder and one of our finest writers. This is an important book because of the obvious: we need to be whole.
