Wendell Berry’s THE NEED TO BE WHOLE (Book Review, by Ron Miller)

Publisher’s Note: Thanks to our Most Likely To Secede book co-editor Ron Miller for this provocative book review of Kentucky environmentalist, poet, and philosopher Wendell Berry’s new  and possibly last book The Need To Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice.

I have always found insight and inspiration in the writings of Wendell Berry. In the dozens of provocative and eloquent works—essays, fiction and poetry—he has produced over more than half a century, this farmer-philosopher who leads a modest, exemplary life in rural Kentucky has articulated a penetrating and urgent critique of modern civilization. His moral vision transcends many of the social and political conflicts that divide us, and eludes neat ideological labels, although he is often called, and readily calls himself, an “agrarian.” He asks fundamental questions, too seldom considered, about human identity, community, and our ways of living on the Earth.

His latest book, The Need to Be Whole, is his most provocative and is sure to be controversial. Berry takes on the most explosive issue of our time—race—and examines it from his plainspoken agrarian perspective. His approach here is different from his previous work: The book is much longer, at nearly 500 pages, and rather than a collection of discrete essays it is an extended discussion of one particularly troublesome issue, with lengthy excursions into several topics—the Civil War, industrial agriculture, attitudes toward work, sin and forgiveness, nationalism vs. patriotism, the power of the imagination, among others—that often don’t seem relevant to racial issues at first but which clarify and illuminate the argument he wants to make.

The writing is also more personal and nostalgic than much of Berry’s work; though his thinking has always been deeply rooted in his home place, he spends considerable time here reminiscing, telling more intimate stories than usual. At 88 years old, perhaps Berry is giving us his swan song, and he has much on his mind that he wants to share (too much to adequately summarize in this review). He admits that some of his opinions will be unpopular, but refuses to sugarcoat what he sees as the truth.

The truth, as Berry sees it, is that human existence is too fluid, nuanced and context-dependent to capture in blanket, mutually exclusive categories such as black and white, racist and antiracist. The wholeness and uniqueness of a human life, as it is experienced in a particular place and at a particular point in history, are shattered when forced into inflexible definitions and habits of thought. Racism, or what he prefers to call racial prejudice, is not a uniform, self-contained entity but an outgrowth of intertwined social, cultural and economic realities, played out differently depending on the specific character of individuals and communities, and needing different sorts of responses accordingly. Berry writes at length about the complex historical relationship between whites and blacks in his part of Kentucky, including his own formative relationships with black people. He insists that the intimate ways in which they have worked together and known each other blurs the self-righteous moralizing about racism that dominates public discourse. He draws on his memories, on several works of fiction by both black and white authors, and historical material to demonstrate that the lived experience of the two races has overlapped in as many ways as it has diverged. He wants us to recognize individuals and their day-to-day communal life, without reducing them through polarizing epithets.

Berry asserts, as he has argued consistently over the years, that the primary source of social tension in the modern age is the triumph of “industrialism” over traditional ways of life that rooted people in face-to-face communities and on the land. He returns again and again in this book, over many pages, to the stark contrast between urban and rural ways of living and working, between a “machine civilization” and an agrarian one. Industrial values such as efficiency (cheapness), maximizing of wealth defined as quantities of money, consumerism, standardization, mobility, denigration of physical labor and ruthless exploitation of human and natural resources have corroded traditional values such as  self-restraint, neighborliness, human scale, courtesy, forgiveness, craftsmanship, and care. The subjugation of African slaves by plantation (proto-industrial) agriculture also caused the impoverishment of most white farmers and workers, just as the acceleration of industrial agriculture after World War Two forced millions of farmers, white and black, off the land. Racism, he suggests, is one expression of a much wider exploitation, and would have no reason to arise in a healthy agrarian culture. In his view, self-sufficiency combined with neighborly support, in communities that nourish moral character, brings people together.

We may reasonably question the agrarian vision. Small scale communities can certainly be small-minded, even intolerant. And even if life and work on small farms and in rural communities is as idyllic and nourishing as Berry finds it, what are the chances that the modern economy and consumer/entertainment/cosmopolitan culture can be tempered, let alone reversed? This is the world we have now, isn’t it? Yet Berry’s critique is disquieting nevertheless. Do industrial values bring out the best we can do as human beings? Haven’t we lost some essential aspects of our humanity in the pursuit of economic growth and technological wizardry? Isn’t it conceivable that our material gains are not worth the (nonmonetary) cost in alienation and violent divisiveness that mark modern society? Berry invites us to wrestle with questions such as these—not so that we will all become farmers, but so that we might look for ways to reclaim our humanity against the monstrous system that has taken hold of the world.

But in The Need to Be Whole, Berry goes further than this. He sincerely believes that the current  movement for racial justice is misguided, even pernicious, because it imposes abstract, self-righteous categories on individuals and communities, contributing to rather than alleviating the polarizing and dehumanizing tendencies of our culture. The notion of “racism,” he says, is a stereotype that obscures rather than clarifies the lived reality of race relations. Prejudice is held and expressed in varying degrees, within specific contexts and circumstances. Hurling ready-made slogans at any expression of prejudice will not heal it, he says: “Only neighborliness entirely dissolves stereotypes by setting them entirely aside.” All of us are imperfect, and we can work toward moral wholeness only within supportive communities where we are seen and accepted, sins and all. But what Berry calls “public morality” has rejected this spirit of commonality and forgiveness, replacing it with ideological combat focused on a select handful of public sins. For conservatives abortion is a defining public sin, while for progressives the chief bogeyman is racism.

Berry does not trust social movements or bluntly wielded political power (he never has) to change hearts and minds, where prejudice ultimately resides. He is more concerned with the values people hold and the habits they acquire through living in community than with institutional, legal or political remedies. Under the regime of industrialism, he argues, it is essential to address the culture’s underlying values: “How might we imagine imposing by mere law the principles of equality and justice and love upon a society dominated in its economic life by the violent principles of individualism, competition and greed?” In other words, “mere law” does not address the deeper source of racial injustice. Those on the left will be impatient with this stance, of course, because it does not address their concern for structuralracism—the establishment of racial bias across social institutions from education to policing. But I think Berry’s emphasis on personal values and character provides a necessary counterpoint to progressives’ tendency to assume an excessive social determinism. The wholeness of our communal life, as he is saying here, surely includes individual as well as social dimensions.

Unfortunately, Berry’s critique of antiracist activism then goes on to make some much more problematic assertions. He calls into question the effort to remove Confederate monuments from public places, arguing that they do not symbolize racial prejudice so much as descendants’ love for their ancestors (most of whom were not slaveowners) who perished in battle, a human concern shared by descendants of Union soldiers. He seeks to rehabilitate the reputation of Robert E. Lee, whom he sees as a tragic figure, an agrarian who nobly sought to defend his homeland from invasion in the face of industrialist imperialism. And, most maddeningly, Berry trivializes the reality of plantation slavery by arguing that “wage slavery” as practiced in the industrial system is just as oppressive—the same case that southern apologists for slavery made before the Civil War.

What can we do with these ideas? Well, we can contextualize them, as Berry himself does. He dwells on Kentuckians’ experience of the Civil War; in a slave state that did not secede, the population was bitterly divided. They were southern agrarians but many were not loyal to the politics of the deep south. Berry reflects this historical tension, this need to reconcile opposing cultures and ideologies. He doesn’t celebrate the Confederacy but he wants to humanize it, to soften the image northern partisans have of it. He wants us to recognize that while the Civil War did put an end to legal slavery, it exacerbated rather than healed racial prejudice in both the south and the north, while it impoverished southern whites and freedmen alike, introduced modern methods of total war that killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of human beings, and firmly established the supremacy of the industrial-commercial-financial system that has ravaged landscapes and communities across the world ever since. He wants to dispel the stereotyped images of “good” and “bad” sides in that war (as in all wars). Let us remember, he pleads, that we are all imperfect, and then we can treat each other more humanely. “Without forgiveness,” he writes, “there can be no limit to accusation and retaliation.”

All well and good. Berry’s steadfast commitment to pacifism, reconciliation and the healing power of love is admirable. But there are some serious historical misjudgments here. The Confederacy was explicitly founded to protect the institution of slavery, and along with grieving for brave ancestors, monuments were deliberately erected during the Jim Crow era to foster the myth of the Lost Cause and commemorate the defense of states’ rights to preserve their “domestic institutions” –if not slavery then segregation. General Lee may well have faced a tragic dilemma, but he made the wrong choice: As retired Army general and West Point historian Ty Seidule, himself a Virginian educated to be a “southern gentleman” in Lee’s image, has concluded after much soul-searching, not only was Lee concerned with keeping his own slaves but was ultimately a traitor who repudiated his military oath to defend the country against insurrection. (See his 2021 book Robert E. Lee and Me for a potent critique of the agrarian Lost Cause myth.)

Finally, Berry’s use of the “wage slavery” trope is inexcusable. It is one thing to call out the corporate economy for its often shabby treatment of workers, and to claim that most jobs in the industrial economy are degrading, that they undermine self-sufficiency or a true sense of vocation. But to equate corporate employment with plantation slavery is outrageous. In the modern economy corporations do not routinely beat or torture their employees, hunt them down when they leave to find other work, or sell off their spouses or children to other corporations. Berry has developed a thoughtful agrarian critique of industrialism throughout his writings, but here he risks discrediting it with this absurd overreach. He wants to distance southern agrarianism from plantation slavery, but the fact is that they are historically intertwined.

The Need to Be Whole, then, is a troubling book, and an imperfect capstone to Berry’s long and productive career. But I am not going to adopt the strategy that Berry justifiably criticizes, and simply condemn the book as “racist” and therefore worthless. Most of its 500 pages are not directly concerned with race and stand on their own as an eloquent (if sometimes repetitive) reaffirmation of the cogent and necessary critique of industrialism that he has developed over the years. It would be a huge mistake to “cancel” Wendell Berry! I think progressive readers need to wrestle with the probing questions he raises. So do conservatives who continue to defend capitalism even as it runs amok. We should all respect Berry’s heartfelt sincerity in telling his story, situating his beliefs in his own experience of agrarian life including its racial dimension. Are we as honest about our own prejudices?