Patrick Deneen reflects on how Berry’s dream of local liberty calls us to political action
I owe Wendell Berry my life. Not literally, of course, but maybe in a deeper and more important sense, the life that I now lead. Considering myself truly blessed with the riches that matter, I credit Berry — the agrarian writer, philosopher, and poet, who died Monday, aged 92 — with my family’s monumental bounty.
It was sometime around 2006 or 2007, while I was teaching at Georgetown University, that I began reading Berry in earnest: his elegies for what his native Kentucky, and America, had lost in the bargain of industrial development; and how to win some of it back. I had encountered his work in passing during graduate school, as far back as the 1980s, but I wasn’t yet the person, or hadn’t yet ripened into the situation, to receive those words in the way they would hold and haunt me roughly 20 years later.
My intense attraction to Berry’s writing owed to a combination of living a low-grade unhappy existence while raising a young family in and around Washington, DC, and broader political, social, and economic conditions in the early 21st century. While I can today more clearly differentiate between those two factors, at the time they seemed inextricably combined. Our harried life — and the economic and political ecosystem that bred it, so evident in DC — seemed altogether unsustainable. Collectively, we were burning too much fuel; our empire was too far flung; we were individually and collectively too indebted; our politics was too false and performative; our technology already was threatening to undermine good childrearing; and, to top it off, my own life was too fragmented, lived partly in a DC suburb, partly on a campus where the faculty barely knew each other, and partly on congested roads between these two places that didn’t seem altogether real. At that point, Berry’s work was simultaneously an indictment and a lifeline.
