On Wendell Berry. An introspection.

We noted the passing of Wendell Berry here on September 1, but I didn't go into much introspection on him in relation to us.  This omission was, ironically, time caused. 

I didn't have time to.

Since Berry's death I've ready comments by people, principally on Twitter, reflecting on how influential Berry was on them.  He was certainly influential on me, but not quite in the way that he was on others.  Berry wasn't the source of my world view.  Rather, what he was was the distiller of it.

I had an Agrarian mindset before I'd ever heard of Berry.  I came into Berry, in fact, because I had an agrarian mindset.  Indeed, I had an agrarian mindset before I had heard of agrarianism in a philosophical sense.  I was really a nascent agrarian by the time I graduated from high school, although only vaguely so.

By the time I had graduated from university as an undergrad, I was a full blown, if undefined, agrarian.  What I really wanted to do was to hunt, fish and garden, and be allowed to do so.  If I could have, I would have ranched.  I didn't have the means to do that, or to make my other goals my present habitus or mode of living, at least in full, although at the time wildgame provided most of my meat, and my father's garden most of my produce.  What I didn't have, was a good and steady income and the destruction of the extractive economy, which I was disenchanted with anyhow, kept me from having one.   I had already found a literary fellow traveller in the form of Aldo Leopold.

Law school seemed my only option, and so I went.

The Agrarian impulse however only strengthened during that time.  Getting out of law school in 1990 I recall telling a friend of mine that I had no ambition, as all I wanted to do was ranch.  He told me that didn't mean I had no ambition, that was my ambition.  Well, that's one of those insights that is a bit shocking when you first hear it, but it was correct.  At that time I still carried a sort of weltanschauung that required me to make something of myself in the eyes of the world, something that had been instilled by my mother.

In spite of starting practicing law, my agrarian world outlook only increased.  At that time I discovered the Southern Agrarians somehow, which was mind blowing.  For the first time, really, I learned that there others who held the same viewpoints on many things that I did. The Southern Agrarians, who are very problematic on some things, nonetheless really helped define my philosophical worldview to me and I realized that what I was, was an agrarian.

The Southern Agrarians were almost all dead by that point in time.  Only Andrew Nelson Lytle was left alive.  So the movement seemed to be dead itself, but the arrival of the Internet allowed even a very isolated person such as myself to learn who else was out there.  That lead me to Gene Logsdon and Wendell Berry.  Berry was by far the more influential.

Indeed, Berry took the world out look I had and really distilled it. There were a lot of things I believed but I didn't have the existential nature of defined. Berry did that for me.  His influence on how I sese the world was massive.

Distilling my world view didn't stop with Berry.  Sometime after discovering him I discovered the Distributist, including Chesterton, and that really completed it, basically.  I often say, when there's ears to hear it, that while not all Distributists are Agrarians, all Agrarians are Distributist.

Berry stands in my intellectual formation with Leopold and Chesterton, three men who now are at some lively gathering beyond the veil.

Berry's death is a major and tragic loss for the intellectual life of the nation.  Not just agrarianism, but the soul of the United States itself.  Berry lived life the way it really should be lead.  He was deeply Christian (he was a Baptist) and a man of letters who farmed.  He saw America for what it was, what it had become, and what it should return to.  He advocated for Christian principles and lived a Christian life, while having a deep land ethic and understanding of the land itself.  He urged us to "become native to this place".

I've never really been able to pull off what he lived and advocated.  But I may be about to.

Berry, in his youth, was an opponent of the Vietnam War in a region that was likely not opposed to it.  His departure comes during the reign of Donald Trump.

Berry, like all true agrarians in contemporary society, likely knew that what he stood for was not going to be adopted by the culture at large.  The Southern Agrarians were already lamenting the destruction of the last of agrarianism during the 1930s.  The Unsettling of America, a masterpiece, was published in 1977. Particularly after the election of Ronald Reagan, each passing year has made the plight of agrarians worse in this country, as its yielded to an unprincipled culture and greed. Restraints placed on the evolution by the law, which do exist, and by the culture, which also exist but which are greatly weakened, have nearly fallen by the wayside.

Berry was 93 when he died this past week.  Donald Trump, suffering from dementia in the Oval Office while nearly ruling as a dictator, is 80 years old.  Berry was of the Silent Generation (Leopold was of the Lost Generation). Trump is a Baby Boomer and virtually defines that generation, in spite of what many in it would like to believe.

Berry stood for, and will continue to stand for, the opposite that everything Donald Trump does.  He was a sincere Christian deeply in nature and the virtues of self control on al things. Trump is, at best, a faux Christian who stands for destruction and avarice. They represent the two poles that struggle for the soul of the nation, one who would anchor us in a quiet and unassuming harbor, and another who would drag us out into and down under in the tempest.

Wendell Berry, August 5, 1934 – August 31, 2026.  May the perpetual light shine upon him.

In Memoriam: Wendell Berry.

By Guy Mendes - Guy Mendes, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57041629

The great agrarian philosopher Wendell Berry has died at age 92.

A giant in the agrarian community, and a great intellect, he was an English professor, a novelist, social critic, environmentalist and dedicated Christian pacifist.

Probably more than any other figure, he defined the post World War Two agrarians in the United States.

Lex Anteinternet: Carpetbaggers and Becoming Native To This Place.

Lex Anteinternet: Carpetbaggers and Becoming Native To Ths Place.:  

Carpetbaggers and Becoming Native To This Place.

 

His life will grow out of the ground like the other lives of the place, and take its place among them. He will be with them - neither ignorant of them, nor indifferent to them, nor against them - and so at last he will grow to be native-born. That is, he must reenter the silence and the darkness, and be born again.

Wendell Berry, A Native Hill.

From the Cowboy State Daily:

Now Other People Are “Pissed” At The “We The People Are Pissed” Billboard On I-80 in Wyoming

Probably the most revealing thing in the article:

The Kahlers moved to Wyoming from Colorado about three years ago. Jeanette Kahler said they moved to Wyoming for the state’s “conservative values.”

In other words, they're carpetbaggers.

Wyoming has always had a very high transient population.  Right from the onset, a lot of the people we associate with the state, actually weren't from here, and more significantly weren't from the region.  Francis E. Warren, for example, the famous early Senator, wasn't.  Joseph M. Carey wasn't.  A person might note that they arrived sufficiently early that they hardly could have been, but this carries on to this very day.  Sen. John Barrasso is a Pennsylvanian.  Secretary of State Chuck Gray is a Californian.

This does matter, as you can't really ever be a native of the Northern Plains or the Plains if you weren't born and raised here.  You might be able to convince yourself, and buy a big hat like Foster Freiss, but you aren't from here and more importantly aren't of here.  If you came from Montana, or Nebraska, or rural Colorado, that's different.  Or if you came in your early years, before you were out of school.  

But earlier arrivals did try.  They appreciated what they found, took the effort to grasp what it was, and sought to become native to this place.

The recent arrivals don't.  They brought their homes and their attitudes with them.

They were fooling themselves that they were "Wyoming" anything.

Or were.

Recently, however, something else has been going on.  Just as the Plains were invaded by European Americans in the 18th and 19th Centuries, Wyoming is enduring it again with an invasion of Southerners, Rust Belt denizens, and Californians, who image they have Wyoming's values while destroying them.  One prominent Freedom Caucuser is really an Illinoisan with values so different from the native ones it's amazing she was elected, but then her district elected Chuck Gray as well, whose only connection with Wyoming is thin.  They do represent, however, the values of recent immigrants.

Whether you like it or not, Wyomingites have not traditionally been hostile to the Federal Government, and we knew we depended upon it.  Indeed, while one Wyoming politician may emphasize a narrative of being a fourth generation Wyomingite, and is, whose agricultural family pulled themselves up from the mule ears on their cowboy boots, and they did work hard, we can't get around the fact that the state was founded by the Federal Government which sent the Army in to kill or corral the original inhabitants and then gave a lot of the land away on a government assistance program.  

Wyoming was formed, in part, by welfare.

The government helped bring in the railroads, helped support agriculture, built the roads, kept soldiers and later airmen and their paychecks at various places, funded the airports, and helped make leasing oil rights cheap so that they could be exploited.

No real Wyomingite hates the government, no matter how much they may pretend they do.

Populist do, as they're ignorant.

Wyoming's cultural ethos was, traditionally, "I don't care what the @#$#$ you do, as long as you leave me alone".  The fables about Matthew Shepherd aside, people didn't really care much about what you did behind closed doors, but expected that you wouldn't try to force acceptance of it at a societal level.  Wyoming was, and remains, for good or ill the least religious state in the United States.  You could always find some devout members of various Protestant faiths, and devout and observant Catholics and Mormons have always been here. But the rise of the Protestant Evangelical churches is wholly new, and come in with Southerners.  When I was growing up, a good friend of mine was a Baptist, the only one I knew, as the church was close to his house (now he's a Lutheran).  I knew one of my friends was Lutheran, and there were some Mormon kids in school.  There was one Jehovah's Witness.  In junior high, one of my friends was sort of kind of Episcopalian, and I knew the son of the Orthodox Priest.  By high school I knew the daughter of the Methodist minister.  But outside of Mormon kids and Catholic kids, the religion of my colleagues was often a mystery.

I'm not saying the unchurched nature of the state was a good thing, but I am saying that by and large there was a dedicated effort to educate children and tolerance was a widely held value.  It was a tolerance, as noted, that required people to keep their deviations from a societal norm to themselves.  People who cheated on spouses, who were homosexuals, or any other number of things could carry on doing it, but not if they were going to demand you accepted it.

And frankly, that was a better way to approach things.

Now, that's being fought over.

The Freedom Caucus group might as well have Sweet Home Alabama as their theme song, and that's not a good thing.

Labels: 2020s, Blog Mirror, Carpetbaggers, Catholic, Culture, Education, Francis Warren, Government, Joseph M. Carey, Mormon, Music, Politics, Populism, Protestant, religion, Wendell Berry, Wyoming

Agrarian of the Week, Wendell Berry

Surely known to everyone who might stop by this blog, polymath intellectual Wendell Erdman Berry of Kentucky is a farmer, a novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, and profound cultural critic.  His writings have had an enormous impact on a variety of areas, not the least of which being American agrarianism.

Last edition:

Subsistence hunter/fisherman of the week, and Agrarian of the Week, Tom Bell.

Lex Anteinternet: The idea of a vocation.

Lex Anteinternet: The idea of a vocation.: 

The idea of a vocation.

The idea of vocation attaches to work a cluster of other ideas, including devotion, skill, pride, pleasure, the good stewardship of means and materials. Here we have returned to intangibles of economic value. When they are subtracted, what remains is ‘a job,’ always implying that work is something good only to escape.

Wendell Berry.

2021 Holiday Reflections. The Agricultural Edition.

This will be an unusual post for here, as I'm doing something unusual in general.

Most years, but not all years, I post a "Resolutions" thread on our companion blog, Lex Anteinternet.  This started off, quite frankly, as being satirical in nature, but this year it's much less so.  Satire is a delicate form of humor, often ineffectively done, and this past year hasn't been very funny, so there's not much that satire would really do, for the most part, other than be super snarky.  Snark is almost never helpful.

Anyhow, this blog, which used to simply be a catalog of agrarian themed entries on Lex Anteinternet, has grown into its own a bit and now has a little original content, although not much. Anyhow, we're going to run this post independently, even though another Resolutions thread will already be up on Lex Anteinternet.

Well, two, actually.

Anyhow, this past two years, if anything, have been ones that have shown how Chesteron, Leopold and Abbey were quite right, even though they remain voices crying in the wilderness. The voices we've heard instead, most often that of an ex President and his hard core acolytes, haven't been helpful.  Maybe it's time to drag out the Vanderbilt Agrarians, Chesteron, and Wendell Berry and see what they have to say.

Indeed, that will be our first resolution for agrarians, farmers, would be farmers, and just folks in general.

1.  Check out Berry, Abbey, Leopold, or Chesterton

The current pack of yappers is offering little in the way of deep content, and a lot of what they have to say about anything is outright destructive.  Every now and then something of value is stated, but it's hard to hear it in the general mess of things.

Let's be honest.  Almost all of the current "we need to go in this direction" is at least a little bit misinformed.  If you aren't grounded in what's real, any wind can blow you over.

Doing a little reading of some grounded folks would be a really good start in things.

And things be Wendell Berry, Edward Abbey, Aldo Leopold and G. K. Chesterton would be really good starts.

2.  Cut out the citations to the "I’m a billionth generation farmer/rancher" in the wrong context, and don't support it when its made in the wrong context.

This is one of a couple of posts here that are really directed at a very narrow few, rather than the majority of ranchers. 

Actually, it's not directed at ranchers at all, but rather at the rancher ex pats. Those who hail originally from the soil, but now no longer are working it.  For those who descend from prior generations of ranchers and are still in it, the more power to you.

I've posted on this already, but it really doesn't matter if your great-great-grandfather broke the sod in Niobrara County in 1890 if that doesn't mean you are in agriculture today.  And it doesn't make you royalty.  And. . .

3. Knock off the "agriculture is a hard way to make a living" line

Now, I want to be careful here.

Agriculture is a hard way to make a living, because of economics.

What it isn't, however, is a hard way to live.

This has been on my mind, to the political year, anyhow, but it recally came into the forefront of my mind again recently listening to an episode of  Wyoming:  My 307.  It was the one on ranching, which you can find here:

RANCHING IN WYOMING

In it, it had a long session pondering "why do we do this?" which arrived at a very interesting conclusion, that being "it's a vocation".

I think there's something to that.

But, we ought to be careful thinking that somehow because we're out in nature, and nature is a bit rough, that we're suffering. Far from it.

I've been a lawyer, a solider, worked on drilling rigs, a writer and a stockman in what now amounts to a whopping 45 years of working (I started working for pay at age 13).  So I think I know a little about work and what hard work is, and isn't. And what work is like for most people.

Somewhere at some point in time somebody fed a line of crap to agriculturalist that their work is uniquely difficult in an existential sense.  Perhaps in a physical sense, that's somewhat true, but there's plenty of other dangerous physical work that puts you out in all kids of weather.

And most modern work is, quite frankly, utterly meaningless.  Most Americans don't like their jobs, as no rational scientient mammal would like most of the jobs that now exist. 

What agriculture isn't is something that makes you work more hours per day than other people, particularly professional people, in  horrible conditions.  Not even close, quite often. And the working conditions and nature of agriculture are far better than that for most other people.  If you think that your job is somehow worse than a computer engineer in a cubicle, you are fooling yourselves massively.

Indeed, this sort of whining, and that's what it is, really needs to stop.  It's self deceptive.

Indeed, its harmful it two ways.  It's self-delusion and makes us think that, if we believe it, we are really working a lot harder than other people, when in fact that's just not true, and it also causes us to force children off the land for a better "town job" that won't be better.

Almost everything about life in the towns and cities is worse.  We ought to realize that.

If you doubt it, leave the ranch or farm and go into town.  You can't come back, and you'll regret you left.  Pleantly of people will line up to take your place.

4.  Having land doesn't make you "landed" nobility.

This, I'll note, is also directed at a narrow few, not the broader majority, of those in agriculture.

Something really disturbing has developed in the US over the past century in which those lucky enough to be born in to agriculture sometimes sort of regard themselves as petty nobility in a way.  It expresses itself in all sorts of odd ways.

Now, I don't want to suggest this is common.  

Most farmers and ranchers aren't this way at all.  But you'll see examples of it where people in agriculture will express a degree of contempt, on rare occasion, about average people.  It feeds into the thing above, in a reverse fashion, in that there's a sort of "we work hard for a living" without realizing that a lot of other people do as well.

I'll be frank that the last two items are sort of in reaction to a current political campaign.  I'm not going to get into the pluses and minuses of the merits of any candidate, but something about the videos of the campaign really strike me the wrong way for their strong rancher pull.  I'm tired of people appearing on political ads in cowboy hats arguing that you need to vote for somebody because they came from an agricultural family that knows what real values are.  It's insulting.

5.  Support getting people into agriculture.

The worst enemy of ranchers in the west are ranchers and by extension this is true about agriculture in general.  Agriculturalist decry those who regard their units as big public parks, which they should, but at the same time they don't do anything to try to help average people get into agriculture.

The reason for that, in no small part, is that it would mean a big personal sacrifice.  We could support legislation that made agriculture and agricultural land tied to actually working the land as your real and sole occupation, but we don't as that would massively depress the value of the land. It's that value that operates against us in the first place, as it means the Warren Buffets of the world become the only one who can afford the land.

We could pull this up by the root and cut it off at the head.  If we really think we're special and the real examples of the common men, we should.

6.  Think local and organize.

My entire life I've heard complaints about the midstream in agriculture.  The price of beef goes up, and cattle on the hoof do too, and the very few packers there are reap the rewards.  It's hard on consumers, and it's hard on ranchers.

I'm sure the same is true in other fields of agriculture as well.

Well, enough of that. We know it's unfair, so what we have to do is to replace the middle men with processors of our own. We could do it.  

Indeed, some agricultural enterprises, like sugar, do in fact do just this.  But it should expand. Co-ops for this purpose, organized to process for the member's benefits and not their own, would be ideal, and could more than compete with the big packers.

7. Think Agrarian

Modern agriculture suffers heavily from the worship of materialism that intruded heavily into the 20th Century and, along with it, specialization of everything.  We in agriculture often hear of "monocultures", but we almost all do just that.

Our predecessors did this much less.  Up into the mid 20th Century it was really rare to find ranches that didn't also farm a little bit, for the table, and every rancher hunted (often illegally) as well.  Farmers were the same way. A wheat farmer in Kansas was a wheat farmer, but he was probably also taking some game with a shotgun and probably kept a few pigs for the table,, and so on.

We have the resources and could lead the say on that, and indeed, some do. But the real banner carriers on this sort of thing shouldn't be people in the "homestead" movement, who are mostly chopping up big parcels of land to the ultimate detriment of everyone.

8.  Know who is your friend and who isn't.

This doesn't apply to everyone either, but I'm sometimes surprised how some in agriculture can be hostile, intentionally and unintentionally, to those who aren't, but who want to enjoy something on the land.

"No Trespassing" signs and "No Hunting" signs are signs to locals that they aren't welcome. Signs stating "This Land Leased To Outfitter" are the same thing, except they show that the lack of welcome has been monetized.

Bills to privatize wildlife are the ultimate acts of hostility. Falling in second are bills to transfer public lands into private hands.

We should realize that there are people who are genuinely hostile to agriculture.  The local newspaper publishes op ed articles by members of an organization that definitely is.  There are a lot more people who aren't in agriculture than who are, and we tend to forget that, as for most of us most of our friends are in it.

Given this, at some point we really risk public hostility.  Shut access off to the land, and next thing you know you'll be seeing "tax ag land like other land" and things of that nature, and you are out of business  and out of cash.

It doesn't really take that much to be friendly to people.

Likewise, for some reason those in agriculture often support entities and operations that are land destroying.  I've never understood that, indeed as we'll often complain about the same entities if they're on our places.  

9. Think really local.

None of us are here forever.  Try to keep that place, and keep the familiy in it.

People do a lot of things for a lot of reasons, but every time I encounter somebody, and I do fairly frequently, who ends up telling me "I grew up on a ranch", and I find them working as a lawyer, doctor, accountant, or whatever, I think it's a tragedy. That shouldn't have had to happen.