At
last, something that happens far too rarely--a vigorous reply to my earlier
post here.
Over
the course of several weeks I have been posting my observations on Jake
Meador's book, "What Are Christians For? Living Together at the End of the
Age." In the post linked above I suggested that with his emphasis on
Whiteness, Meador had switched his long-standing frame of reference from the
agrarian-ruralist Wendell Berry to the race-centered Willie James Jennings.
Meador, who obviously knows more about the oeuvre of Wendell Berry than I,
replied with a post here explaining that
Berry and Jennings are largely copasetic:
This part of Berry’s work is not as discussed amongst Berry’s many conservative admirers, but it is worth remembering that he is in many ways a man of the old left. He’s more Pete Seeger or Arlo Guthrie than paleocon. This is forgotten today because that version of the left has basically disappeared, bombed out of the narrative by centrist neo-liberals and then utterly ignored by today’s successor ideology. Yet in many ways I think that version of the left is one of the best things to arise in America’s political history. And I would like to see it regained.
If
Meador is right about Berry, and I suspect he is, then we share much in common
as my appreciation for the work of Charles Sellers (albeit only a brief
reference in a blog post here) and Christopher
Dawson (here) might suggest.
More of my skepticism of the entirely happy relationship of America and the
market here and here.
But
Meador goes further than connecting Wendell Berry to nineteenth century Progressivism. Quoting a length from Berry, Meador
observes that
The book that made Mr. Berry famous, The Unsettling of America, is a robust critique of land theft and the styles of farming that European settlers brought with them into the Americas. Here’s one excerpt that is broadly representative:
One of the peculiarities of the white race’s presence in America is how little intention has been applied to it. As a people, wherever we have been, we have never really intended to be. The continent is said to have been discovered by an Italian who was on his way to India. The earliest explorers were looking for gold, which was, after an early streak of luck in Mexico, always somewhere farther on. Conquests and foundings were incidental to this search—which did not, and could not, end until the continent was finally laid open in an orgy of goldseeking in the middle of the last century. Once the unknown of geography was mapped, the industrial marketplace became the new frontier, and we continued, with largely the same motives and with increasing haste and anxiety, to displace ourselves—no longer with unity of direction, like a migrant flock, but like the refugees from a broken ant hill. In our own time we have invaded foreign lands and the moon with the high-toned patriotism of the conquistadors, and with the same mixture of fantasy and avarice.
Then later:
The Indians did, of course, experience movements of population, but in general their relation to place was based upon old usage and association, upon inherited memory, tradition, veneration. The land was their homeland. The first and greatest American revolution, which has never been superseded, was the coming of people who did not look upon the land as a homeland. But there were always those among the newcomers who saw that they had come to a good place and who saw its domestic possibilities. Very early, for instance, there were men who wished to establish agricultural settlements rather than quest for gold, or exploit the Indian trade. Later, we know that every advance of the frontier left behind families and communities who intended to remain and prosper where they were.
I
submit that Meador is correct: Wendell Berry anticipated the sensibilities that
Meador, channeling Jennings, characterizes as Whiteness: "a profound loss
of geographical place-ness (estrangement from nature') and community, and their
replacement with an autonomous imposition of the will of individuals over land
and other peoples."
With
this introduction, I wholeheartedly recommend that folks read the entirely
of Meador's post
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