In Memoriam: Wendell Berry

The author Wendell Berry passed away a few days ago. He is one of the reasons I decided to focus on American literature in my later graduate work, and he is one of the subjects—if not the primary subject—of the dissertation I am currently writing on American short-story cycles set in small towns. In fact, I am now at the point in the process where I am most concentrating on the sections of the dissertation that have to do with Berry and his stories. He has been on my mind a lot lately, so it was even more startling and saddening than it might have been to come across his name while skimming the headlines the other morning.

Despite my long admiration for the writer ever since I first read the stories “Pray Without Ceasing” and “Fidelity” ten years ago, I have to date only read one of his novels (Jayber Crow, multiple times, if you count audiobooks as reading), a bunch of his short stories (my dissertation will have a half-chapter on the collection That Distant Land), and a bunch of his essays (all of the ones in What Are People For? and Standing by Words, as well as several from other essay collections). I have only looked at a few of his poems. The internet will be replete in the coming days and weeks with tributes to Berry from people who read his work more widely and knew it more intimately than I do, and some of the things I could say about his importance and influence would be redundant. So, right here, I will only note one thing in Berry’s writing that has left a strong impression on me, something that may not get as much attention in other tributes: namely, his idea of the tragic imagination.

In reading many of Berry’s essays and interviews to better understand and contextualize the stories I am analyzing for my dissertation, I noticed how often Berry would talk about the importance of the imagination. In the essay “American Imagination and the Civil War,” he explained that “By imagination I do not mean the ability to make things up or to make a realistic copy. I mean the ability to make real to oneself the life of one's place or the life of an enemy—and therein, I believe, is implied, imagination in the highest sense” (Imagination in Place, 2010, p. 30). Imagination is seeing beyond surface appearances and perceiving the underlying realities. It is also, as he expressed it in “Imagination in Place,” seeing things “whole” (pp. 3-4), as opposed to disparate and isolated parts. For Berry, one’s capacity for this kind of seeing is connected to one’s capacity for sympathy and compassion—and, dare I say, in a time when the concept is so controversial, empathy? He told Rose Marie Berger in an interview that 

The serious question is whether you’re going to become a warrior community and live by piracy, by taking what you need from other people. I think the only antidote to that is imagination. You have to develop your imagination to the point that permits sympathy to happen. You have to be able to imagine lives that are not yours or the lives of your loved ones or the lives of your neighbors. You have to have at least enough imagination to understand that if you want the benefits of compassion, you must be compassionate. If you want forgiveness you must be forgiving. It’s a difficult business, being human. (Conversations with Wendell Berry, 2007, p. 177)

Berry was particularly concerned that the imagination, if it is to help us accomplish the “difficult business” of “being human,” must have room within itself for accepting and assimilating tragedies. In the 1987 essay “Writer and Region”—which for me has been the most formative and important essay Berry ever wrote, and the inspiration for the direction my dissertation has taken—he argued that Americans “have hardly begun to imagine community life, and the tragedy that is at the heart of community life” (What Are People For?, 1990, p. 76). He explained that "Community life . . . is tragic, and it is so because it involves unremittingly the need to survive mortality, partiality, and evil” (p. 77). The problem is that, if we cannot imagine and reconcile ourselves to the fact that community life will always be marred by “mortality, partiality, and evil,” and then tragedy inevitably strikes, then we will not know how to cope with it. One outcome Berry foresaw in that essay is that we will withdraw from others and refuse the responsibility and forgiveness that healthy community life requires of us. He wrote that 

What is wanting, apparently, is the tragic imagination that, through communal form or ceremony, permits great loss to be recognized, suffered, and borne, and that makes possible some sort of consolation and renewal. What is wanting is the return to the beloved community, or to the possibility of one. That would return us to a renewed and corrected awareness of our partiality and mortality, but also to healing and to joy in a renewed awareness of our love and hope for one another. Without that return we may know innocence and horror and grief, but not tragedy and joy. Not consolation or forgiveness or redemption. (What Are People For? 1990, p. 78)

Berry was an idealist—he had an exacting vision for what it would mean for neighbors and family members to be faithful to one another and the places they inhabit together—but his idealism was tempered by his tragic imagination. He understood his ideals could never be fully realized, and that he and others would constantly fail to live by them. But expecting the worst is a precondition for being able to face it. For example, he said in an interview with Bruce Williamson that “the ideal of loving your neighbor has to take on the possibility that he may be somebody you’re going to have great difficulty loving or liking or even tolerating" (Conversations with Wendell Berry, 2007, p. 10). Imagining the possibility of the neighbor’s transgression prepares us to finally forgive it.

Of all the things I have learned from Berry over the years and especially in the past few months, this is the insight I am most thankful for. It is related to Bonhoeffer’s warning not to impose our ideal vision for community onto actual, fallible ones, and also bears a resemblance to Tolkien’s idea of joining the long defeat. If we are to do life together, we must expect to fail and be failed, wrong and be wronged, and ultimately die on each other. Finally, we must also imagine each other as God sees us in reality: as His image-bearers, dearly beloved. As one character puts it in the story “Pray Without Ceasing,” “If God loves the ones we can’t, . . . then finally maybe we can” (That Distant Land, 2004, p. 70).

The Jedi Archives: The First Eight Posts

I’m having a lot of fun contributing to Tim Lawrence’s Jedi Archives project. Here are links to my first eight posts:

Pieces of Junk: Escapes from desert planets in the first film of each trilogy.

So Uncivilized!: Escapes from desert planets in the third film of each trilogy.

Dangerous Idealists: Similarities and differences between Obi-Wan, Mace Windu, and Count Dooku.

Doing Her Duty: Parallels between Episodes II and VIII.

Bombs Away!: The significance of the Resistance bombers in Episode VIII.

Jabba the Hutt: An Oligarchic Soul: Jabba the Hutt matches Plato’s profile of the oligarch.

The Empire Strikes Back Against a New Hope: Episodes IV and V form a chiasm.

The Force Awakens from the Revenge of the Sith: Episodes III and VII also form a chiasm.

Bonhoeffer on the Dangers of Idealism

A quick addendum to two previous posts, one at The Jedi Archives and one in this Notebook, on what can go wrong when ideals eclipse principles and relationships. There are Count Dookus and Mr. Hollingsworths in the church and other Christian institutions, too. Here’s Bonhoeffer in Life Together:

“Every human wish dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished if genuine community is to survive. He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.

“God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and God Himself accordingly. … He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together. When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.

[…]

“Christian brotherhood is not an ideal which we must realize; it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate” (pp. 27-28 and 30 in the HarperOne edition).

A Tale of Two City Rankings

In Book VIII of both Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, there is a taxonomy and ranking of different kinds of governments for a city-state. Plato names five kinds of cities and ranks them thus: 1. Aristocracy (which includes Kingship); 2. Timocracy; 3. Oligarchy; 4. Democracy; and 5. Tyranny. Aristotle’s list uses all the same terms, but it distinguishes between Aristocracy and Kingship so that there are six kinds of cities. His ranking is almost the same, too, except for one thing: he puts Democracy over Oligarchy. His ranking is: 1. Kingship; 2. Aristocracy; 3. Timocracy; 4. Democracy; 5. Oligarchy; and 6. Tyranny. So why does Aristotle break from his teacher Plato and say that having an oligarchy is a worse way to run a city than having a democracy?

The first thing to notice is that Aristotle’s Book VIII is not about politics first and foremost, but about friendship. The discussion of kinds of cities is included as an analogy for distinguishing between kinds of friendships. Aristotle ranks the cities in the order he does because he believes that a city ruled by a king is the most amenable for friendships and that a city ruled by a tyrant is the most inhospitable to friendships, because a tyrant is no friend to his subjects. In his scheme, a democracy is better than an oligarchy because in a democracy there is greater political equality, allowing for greater relational equality.

But Plato’s Book VIII—like the entirety of Republic—is about justice. Moreover, it is not about justice in the city first and foremost, but about justice in the soul. All the discussion in Republic about how to form a just city is incidental and analogous to the driving question of how to be a just man. Plato ranks the cities in the order he does because he believes that an aristocracy corresponds to a soul that is most ruled by wisdom (leading to justice) and a tyranny corresponds to a soul that is most ruled by lawless appetites (leading to injustice). In his scheme, an oligarchy is better than a democracy because an oligarchy corresponds to a soul that is ruled by necessary appetites (more just), and a democracy corresponds to a soul that is ruled by unnecessary appetites (more unjust).

What I’m suggesting is that, if they had to choose between a democracy and an oligarchy, Aristotle would prefer to live in a democracy because that’s where he would hope to find better friendships, and Plato would prefer to live in an oligarchy because that’s where he would hope to find greater justice.

Granted, it would be misrepresenting Aristotle to drive too great a wedge between friendship and justice, because in Book VIII of his Ethics the two are inseparable. For him, justice in the city and the health of friendships in the city rise and fall together. Aristotle writes that “friendship and justice would seem to be about the same things and to be found in the same people. For in every community there seems to be some sort of justice, and some type of friendship also. … And to the extent that they are in community, to that extent there is their friendship, since to that extent also there is justice” (p. 152 in Hackett Third Edition). And he says later on that “Friendship appears in each of the political systems, to the extent that justice appears also” (155). Moreover, Ethics Book IX argues that the just person is a friend to himself.

Still, Aristotle does place a higher value on friendship than on justice, because he holds that friendship “is most necessary for our life. For no one would choose to live without friends even if he had all the other goods” (141). Moreover, “friendship would seem to hold cities together, and legislators would seem to be more concerned about it than about justice. … Further, if people are friends, they have no need of justice, but if they are just they need friendship in addition; and the justice that is most just seems to belong to friendship” (141). For him, if friendship comes first, justice will follow: “Justice also naturally increases with friendship” (153). 

Conversely, Plato does seem to place a higher value on justice than on friendship. He would rather be alone if that was the cost of being just. Whereas Aristotle says that “no one would choose to have all other goods and yet be alone” (176), Plato’s Republic repeatedly emphasizes that the true philosopher will often be misunderstood, maligned, and isolated. Indeed, Plato’s teacher Socrates, the protagonist and main speaker in Republic, was executed by Athens because he chose convictions over company. Socrates refused to recant his beliefs to regain friendships with the city’s leaders, because that would have made him an unjust friend to himself.

All this fits with the general tendency in both Aristotle’s and Plato’s thinking about the good life, visualized in Raphael’s painting The School of Athens. Plato is pointing up, but Aristotle’s hand, while not pointing down, is almost level. Plato lives for his ideals, but while Aristotle also has his ideals—he wants to be a just man just as much as Plato does—he wants them to be grounded in community, because “good people’s life together allows the cultivation of virtue” (177).

Some More Dangerous Idealists

In my most recent post for the Jedi Archives, “Dangerous Idealists,” I wrote about how Obi-Wan, Mace Windu, and Count Dooku fall along a spectrum that illustrates how idealism can put someone on a dangerous path toward sacrificing people and principles for the supposed greater good. Two classic works of American literature that I read in the past few months also dramatize this temptation and its consequences.

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852), the narrator Miles Coverdale joins a nascent utopian community that is doomed from the start—but not, as the reader would expect, because of flaws in its own ideals or the failure of its members to live up to those ideals, though those are issues at Blithedale, too. Instead, the community is ruined chiefly because a prominent member is a more inflexible idealist than everyone else at Blithedale and his ideals are opposed to theirs. Mr. Hollingsworth is a philanthropist who came to Blithedale, it turns out, not because he believes in its vision but because he wants to seize its land for his own social-reform project. He is so convinced of the righteousness of his own cause, he either does not see or does not care about the unrighteousness of lying about his intentions and betraying other idealists. As more than one character realizes, Mr. Hollingsworth will abandon a friendship as soon as he realizes the friend cannot be made into a cog in the machine he would build. But the worst consequence of his zeal is not the communal and relational costs, but the cost to his own soul. As Coverdale summarizes at the end of the novel:

“The moral which presents itself to my reflections, as drawn from Hollingsworth’s character and errors, is simply this:—that, admitting what is called Philanthropy, when adopted as a profession, to be often useful by its energetic impulse to society at large, it is perilous to the individual, whose ruling passion, in one exclusive channel, it thus becomes. It ruins, or is fearfully apt to ruin, the heart … I see in Hollingsworth an exemplification of the most awful truth in Bunyan’s book of such;—from the very gate of Heaven, there is a by-way to the pit!” (p. 243 in the 1983 Penguin edition). 

As the adage goes, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. In fact, Hawthorne’s novel warns that the greater the intentions, the greater the peril, since “the higher and purer the original object, and the more unselfishly it may have been taken up, the slighter is the probability that they can be led to recognize the process by which godlike benevolence has been debased into all-devouring egotism” (71). The word “egotism” is key. It isn’t actually true that Hollingsworth lives for his ideals, though he may have started that way. He lives for himself. To apply C. S. Lewis’s tripartite terminology in The Abolition of Man, when the idealist Head suppresses or cuts out the relational and principled Heart, the Head won’t be able to subdue the self-seeking Belly on its own.

The language of Head and Heart is a good segue to the other novel I have in mind, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). (I only just now realized this novel was published exactly a century after Hawthorne’s. Uncanny!) In fact, Ellison uses the terms “head” and “heart” frequently enough that I wonder if he had read The Abolition of Man, which came out a few years prior.* At one point, the unnamed narrator who calls himself “an invisible man” gives an impassioned impromptu speech about an elderly couple being evicted from their apartment. He says of the woman that “She’s let her religion go to her head, but we all know that religion is for the heart, not for the head” (p. 278 in the 1995 Vintage International edition). His speech draws the attention of a Socialist-type organization called the Brotherhood, who want to use his oratory to build inroads into the Black community in Harlem—although some in the Brotherhood are worried his speeches are too emotional, even anti-intellectual. One of the brothers says his debut rally speech “was the antithesis of the scientific approach. Ours is a reasonable point of view. … The audience isn’t thinking, it’s yelling its head off” (350, italics added).

For the rest of his time with them, the Invisible Man will be at odds with the organization because he is not willing to sacrifice the claims of the Heart for the agenda of the Head. The leader who recruited him, Brother Jack, believes that “There’s hope that our wild but effective speaker may be tamed”—hope that the Head can subdue the Heart—so “For the next few months our new brother is to undergo a period of intense study and indoctrination under the guidance of Brother Hambro” (351). Later, Brother Jack is even more explicit: “you were not hired to think. … you were hired to talk” (469-470). But the indoctrination fails. The Invisible Man cannot stop thinking in ways that run counter to a rigid ideology that has no real sympathy for his own people. Ultimately he realizes the Brotherhood does not care about him or the Black community at all except as pawns in a much larger game. Brother Hambro tells him at their last meeting that “there’s nothing to be done about [the violence in Harlem following the death of a Brotherhood member] that wouldn’t upset the larger plan. It’s unfortunate, Brother, but your members will have to be sacrificed” (501). Brother Hambro goes on to say, “We follow the laws of reality, so we make sacrifices” (502). To the Brotherhood, only the Head—or more specifically, the heads of the Brotherhood committee—has access to “the laws of reality” and the wisdom to know how to obey them. The Heart is expendable, as it was for Mr. Hollingsworth, and once again the result is not enlightenment and progress but manipulation and betrayal.

[*Here are two suspiciously Abolition of Man-like statements spoken by people in the Brotherhood: [1]  “You have to be pure in heart and you have to be disciplined in body and mind” (394). [2] “At the proper moment science will stop us. And of course we as individuals must sympathetically debunk ourselves” (505).]