Wendell Berry
Summary
Wendell Berry (born 1934) is a Kentucky farmer, essayist, poet, and novelist whose 1977 book The Unsettling of America argued that the industrialization of American agriculture was, at the same time, a cultural and bodily disaster. Berry is not a physician, and the encyclopaedia does not treat him as one. He belongs in a reference on the history and philosophy of medicine because his critique of industrial farming developed into a sustained critique of specialized, mechanistic medicine: the doctor who treats disease but not health, the body cut loose from soil and community, the cure that preserves the disease. Berry’s argument that “connection is health,” together with his recovery of the old etymological family of health, heal, whole, hale, holy, places him among the twentieth century’s most influential lay theorists of wholeness as a medical category.
Life and Context
Berry’s writing is anchored in a particular place: Henry County, Kentucky, where he was raised (Berry, Wendell, 1977). The fourth chapter of The Unsettling of America is autobiographical and recalls his boyhood county not as generically rural but as a working farming county of small diversified farms with markets for cream, eggs, and hens, pride in workmanship, and thrift held as a forceful social ideal (Berry, Wendell, 1977). The local injury from which his larger argument grows is the dismantling of that economy through the postwar consolidation of American agriculture, which Berry calls “a work of monstrous ignorance and irresponsibility on the part of the experts and politicians” (Berry, Wendell, 1977).
The 1970s backdrop matters. The Unsettling of America appeared during Earl Butz’s tenure as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, and Berry treats Butz’s catchphrases (“Get big or get out,” “Food is a weapon,” the doctrine of “full production”) as evidence that the federal government had committed itself to the industrial reorganization of farming as policy (Berry, Wendell, 1977)(Berry, Wendell, 1977)(Berry, Wendell, 1977). Berry takes the “Get big or get out” policy to be morally equivalent to the forced removal of villagers in communist countries; the only difference, he writes, is that the American method was economic rather than military (Berry, Wendell, 1977).
Twenty years after the book’s first publication, Berry added an Afterword conceding his initial naivete: he had assumed that leaders in the schools and the government were interested in argument as a way of approaching truth, and they were not (Berry, Wendell, 1977). He added a bitter line: “This book’s tragedy is that it is true” (Berry, Wendell, 1977). The universities, in Berry’s reading, are not pursuing truth by argument but preserving the conclusion of an older, no-longer-defended argument: that the world and all its creatures are machines (Berry, Wendell, 1977).
The Health-Wholeness Argument
Berry frames the body as inextricably joined to the soil and to other living bodies, so that our treatment of our bodies and our treatment of the earth necessarily resemble one another (Berry, Wendell, 1977).
His central etymological move is brief and consequential. The medical reduction of “health” to the mere absence of disease severs the word from its older family (heal, whole, wholesome, hale, hallow, holy) and so makes it impossible to understand health as wholeness (Berry, Wendell, 1977). From this Berry draws what he treats as a clinical formula: “Connection is health” (Berry, Wendell, 1977). We lose health, he argues, by failing to see the direct connections between living and eating, eating and working, working and loving; the resulting fragmentation produces “profitable diseases and dependences” rather than care (Berry, Wendell, 1977).
Berry’s organizing image is anatomical: body, soul (or mind or spirit), community, and world form a single circulatory system; an error anywhere in the network ramifies, and the disease of a circulatory system is precisely the impairment and finally the stoppage of circulation (Berry, Wendell, 1977).
Healing, on this account, is impossible in loneliness. To be healed, Berry writes, “we must come with all the other creatures to the feast of Creation”; conviviality is healing (Berry, Wendell, 1977).
Critique of Specialized Medicine
Berry’s argument is not anti-medicine; it is anti-specialization. He calls the disease of the modern character “specialization,” defining it as “a way of institutionalizing, justifying, and paying highly for a calamitous disintegration and scattering-out of the various functions of character: workmanship, care, conscience, responsibility” (Berry, Wendell, 1977). To approach the subject of health “piecemeal with a departmentalized band of specialists” is therefore absurd; a medical doctor uninterested in nutrition, agriculture, and the wholesomeness of mind and spirit is, Berry argues, as absurd as a farmer uninterested in health (Berry, Wendell, 1977). Fragmentation is itself the disease, he writes, not the cure (Berry, Wendell, 1977).
The specialist system carries, in Berry’s reading, one foundational injury: “the isolation of the body” (Berry, Wendell, 1977). At some point, he argues, modern culture began to assume that the life of the body would be the business of grocers and medical doctors, while the life of the spirit would be the business of churches, an arrangement that sets the body in destructive conflict with everything else in Creation (Berry, Wendell, 1977). Once split, body and soul set up rival economies based on competition that exploit one another endlessly (Berry, Wendell, 1977). Contempt for one’s own body, he writes, is invariably manifested in contempt for other bodies (slaves, laborers, women, animals, plants, and the earth itself), converting the world from an ecological community into a stock exchange ruled by the misnamed “law of the jungle” (Berry, Wendell, 1977).
Berry’s diagnosis of the medical-industrial complex is direct. “The doctor who is interested in disease but not in health is clearly in the same category with the conservationist who invests in the destruction of what he otherwise intends to preserve. They both have the comfort of ‘job security,’ but at the cost of ultimate futility” (Berry, Wendell, 1977).
He extends the argument to the cosmetic and identity-management industries. The “identity crisis” is, on Berry’s reading, a disease of the modern period that follows the disconnection of body and soul; its true treatment would be the restoration of these connections, but the fashionable cure of “finding yourself” through autonomy preserves the disease (Berry, Wendell, 1977). The same pattern governs body image: the standard of health has been replaced not by another standard but by very exclusive physical models, narrow ideals against which most actual bodies are branded defective, and the resulting suffering produces “a helpless dependence on cures” sold by the cosmetics industry (Berry, Wendell, 1977). The disintegration of the household into “the exercise of purchasing power” produces a sexual division that Berry treats as a wound suffered inescapably by both men and women (Berry, Wendell, 1977).
The economic indictment is unsparing: “Our economy is based upon this disease” (Berry, Wendell, 1977). Its aim, in Berry’s reading, is to separate people as far as possible from the sources of life (material, social, and spiritual), to put those sources under the control of corporations and specialized professionals, and to sell them back at the highest profit (Berry, Wendell, 1977).
Agriculture and Medicine as One Critique
What gives Berry’s medical argument its force is that he is not making a separate argument about medicine. The diagnostic terms are imported directly from his diagnosis of industrial agriculture. Where his agricultural argument distinguishes the exploiter (whose standard is efficiency) from the nurturer (whose standard is care), the doctor uninterested in health and the conservationist who invests in strip-mining are both placed in the exploiter category (Berry, Wendell, 1977)(Berry, Wendell, 1977). The same society that produces conservationists who invest in strip-mining, Berry writes, “must inevitably produce asthmatic executives whose industries pollute the air and vice-presidents of pesticide corporations whose children are dying of cancer” (Berry, Wendell, 1977).
Berry’s agricultural critique uses health as its standard throughout. The agricultural crisis, in his analysis, is not a matter of supply and demand to be remedied by policy or technology. “It is a crisis of culture” (Berry, Wendell, 1977). The principle that one American farmer feeds himself and fifty-six other people is, by Berry’s reckoning, “a triumph of technology” but not of agriculture; it has been made possible “by the substitution of energy for knowledge, of methodology for care, of technology for morality” (Berry, Wendell, 1977). The model “farm of the future” exposes what total control excludes: pests, parasites, diseases, climatic fluctuations. “This resistance, in the soil and in the lives that come from the soil, is what we call health.” For total control, Berry concludes, “we have given up health” (Berry, Wendell, 1977).
The recurring intellectual authority for Berry’s joining of agriculture and medicine is Sir Albert Howard, the British agricultural scientist who articulated the “Wheel of Life.” Berry reads Howard’s life as the parable of a fragmentary intelligence seeking wholeness, a researcher who came to treat “the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal, and man as one great subject” (Berry, Wendell, 1977). Under what Berry calls the discipline of unity, Howard could no longer ask “What can I do with what I know?” without also asking “How can I be responsible for what I know?”, and so knowledge and morality come together (Berry, Wendell, 1977). Howard’s Wheel of Life recurs in Berry’s discussion of energy use, where the cyclic biological pattern is contrasted with the linear, stockpile-able pattern of fossil-fuel agriculture whose wastes “typically become pollutants” (Berry, Wendell, 1977).
The soil, in Berry’s most condensed claim, “is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life” (Berry, Wendell, 1977). The damages of present agriculture, Berry writes, all come from regarding the life of the soil as an extractable resource and treating living things as machines; once people too are regarded as machines, “they must be regarded as replaceable by other machines” (Berry, Wendell, 1977).
Berry traces the governing modern metaphor for the body and the earth alike to the machine, which displaced an older pastoral metaphor that “clarified, and so preserved in human care, the natural cycles of birth, growth, death, and decay” (Berry, Wendell, 1977). By the machine metaphor, he writes, “we have eliminated any fear or awe or reverence or humility or delight or joy that might have restrained us in our use of the world” (Berry, Wendell, 1977). The mechanization is total: “it is impossible to mechanize production without mechanizing consumption, impossible to make machines of soil, plants, and animals without making machines also of people” (Berry, Wendell, 1977).
Berry’s etymology of agriculture itself supports the joining of farming, culture, and worship: the word means cultivation of land, and cultivation is at the root of both culture and cult. Tillage and worship are bound together (Berry, Wendell, 1977).
Health as Standard
In the long ninth chapter, “Margins,” Berry pushes the health-as-wholeness argument toward its strongest formulation. The health of a farm, he writes, is as apparent to the eye as the health of a person; both give “the same impression of abounding life” (Berry, Wendell, 1977). From this he derives an identity claim: “Health, then, does not ‘come from’ independence or ‘lead to’ it. Health is independence.” A healthy farm sustains itself “the same way that a healthy tree does: by belonging where it is, by maintaining a proper relationship to the ground” (Berry, Wendell, 1977).
Berry then argues for perfect health as the only proper standard for medicine and agriculture. We desire (our bodies desire) to be perfectly healthy; “to be three-quarters or seven-eighths healthy is not an ambition that ever occurs to us” (Berry, Wendell, 1977). The point, he insists, is not that perfection is humanly attainable but that without the vision of perfection we cannot know how healthy we are or strive in the right direction (Berry, Wendell, 1977).
The book’s culminating absolute, near the close of the ninth chapter, is the formulation that ties Berry’s argument together: having exploited “relativism” to the point of having no deeply believed reasons for doing anything, Americans must ask whether there is, after all, an absolute good against which to measure their work. That absolute good, Berry concludes, “is health, not in the merely hygienic sense of personal health, but the health, the wholeness, finally the holiness, of Creation, of which our personal health is only a share” (Berry, Wendell, 1977).
Berry’s positive vision is correspondingly modest. He calls for a dispersed land-owning citizenry whose lives are shaped by economic interest, love, work, family loyalty, memory, and tradition: “an agriculture based upon intensive work, local energies, care, and long-living communities” (Berry, Wendell, 1977). The Amish stand throughout the book as the one American community Berry knows of who have answered the question “Can we forbear to do anything that we are able to do?” in the affirmative; they are “the truest geniuses of technology, for they understand the necessity of limiting it” (Berry, Wendell, 1977)(Berry, Wendell, 1977). From their example Berry draws his recurring paradox: “we can make ourselves whole only by accepting our partiality, by living within our limits, by being human, not by trying to be gods” (Berry, Wendell, 1977).
Method: Experience versus Experiment
Two methodological distinctions in The Unsettling of America are useful to a history-of-medicine reader. The first is Berry’s distinction between experience and experiment. Experience, he writes, “tends always toward wholeness because it is interested in the meaning of what has happened; it is necessarily as interested in what does not work as in what does.” The experimental intelligence, by contrast, is interested only in what works and “tends toward radical oversimplification, reducing the number of possibilities” (Berry, Wendell, 1977). Berry warns that this kind of intelligence, severed from cultural value and the restraints implicit in it, “is at least potentially totalitarian” (Berry, Wendell, 1977).
The second is Berry’s epistemology of change. Reform, he argues, cannot come from the orthodox center, because “one who presumes to know the truth does not look for it.” It will have to come from the margins, like the prophet who returns from the wilderness with cleansed vision (Berry, Wendell, 1977).
Berry recovers Jefferson’s conviction that farming, education, and democratic liberty are indissolubly linked, and that “Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens” (Berry, Wendell, 1977). Against this standard Berry indicts the failure of the land-grant colleges, which whittled down the original 1862 Morrill Act mandate “from education in the broad, ‘liberal’ sense to ‘practical’ preparation for earning a living to various ‘programs’ for certification” (Berry, Wendell, 1977).
Reception and Standing
Berry’s argument has been “much and sometimes vehemently disagreed with,” but, as he wrote in the 1995 Afterword, it “has never been answered, let alone disproved” (Berry, Wendell, 1977). He attributes this less to his own argument than to the fact that events have continued to confirm it (Berry, Wendell, 1977). He notes that the universities have not engaged the argument because they are committed in advance to the proposition that “the world and all its creatures are machines” (Berry, Wendell, 1977).
Berry’s place in a reference on the history of medicine is therefore not as a physician or a medical theorist in any technical sense. He is a lay critic whose decades-long polemic against industrial agriculture became, in its seventh chapter, one of the more sustained recent restatements of an old position: that health is wholeness; that wholeness requires connection of body, community, and place; and that any medicine that severs these is contributing to the disease it claims to treat.
See Also
Sources
All claims cite evidence cards from:
- Berry, W. (1977/1995). The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture (Third Edition with Afterword). San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. [Source ID: berry-unsettlingamerica-1977]