A while ago I ran across a series of lectures on the agrarian writer Wendell Berry. They were delivered at a November 2007 conference in Louisville sponsored by the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Berry is one of the few cultural critics popular among the Left and the Right. Those on the Left praise Berry’s critique of corporate capitalism and his environmental commitments. Those on the Right love Berry because he advocates an organic connection to place and community and presents a strident critique of liberal individualism.
You can listen to the following lectures here (you will need to scroll down a bit):
Darryl G. Hart, “Wendell Berry’s Unlikely Case for Conservative Christianity.”
Rod Dreher, “Wendell Berry’s Politics and Prospects for Reform.”
Bill Kauffman, “Wendell Berry on War and Peace: Or, Port William Versus the Empire.”
William Fahey, “The Restoration of Propriety: Wendell Berry and the British Distributists Compared.”
Allan Carlson, “Not Safe, Nor Private, Nor Free: Wendell Berry on Sexual Love and Procreation.”
Anne Husted Burleigh, “Marriage in the Membership .”
Luke Schlueter, “Earth and Flesh Sing Together: The Place of Berry’s Poetry in His Vision of the Human.”
Wendell Berry, “Lunch with Wendell Berry.”
As I have noted before on this blog, Berry’s work influenced a lot of my thinking about Philip Vickers Fithian in The Way of Improvement Leads Home.
Although I have fully read any of his books, I have known about Wendell Berry for many years now.It strikes me that Berry very much is a man of the Right rather than the Left, largely with his emphasis on community and self-reliance. It is true that his roots are in the counterculture of the 1950s, but in fact that movement was ideologically very diverse and united only by opposition to McCarthyism and that decade’s conformity (which its members, even the most left-leaning, saw also in the Stalinist nations).
Berry would be the first person to say he is far from being “Right Wing.” If you read all his work, it is obvious. The Right has become the authoritarian/corporatist/militarist movement and not the conservative movement. Ecologist, nature conservancy, family farm and other conservationists, are conservative by nature. I once heard Berry say “I am conservative about what should be preserved and liberal about what should be changed.” Berry does have more in common with Teddy Roosevelt and Eisenhower than the Neo-cons do. But that just shows how far we have moved from the center and toward the authoritarian side of the scale. He has a lot in common with Green principles. The Greens like to say “We are neither left nor right. But in front.” They believe in real decentralization, not just everything decentralized, except corporations and the military, like the Republicans do. Many folks are surprised when they take the test here:http://www.politicalcompass.org/ They often end up in the Green portion of the graph (liberal/non-authoritarian.) So, basically, left and right have been turned into useless terms. Anti and pro-authoritarian is a better measure.
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