The Art Of The Good Life: December 2011

Mark Shiffman is a professor of humanities at Villanova. When we met last summer I asked him about his specialties. He replied: Plato, Aristotle, then listed other names in ancient philosophy. Then he added "and of course Wendell Berry!" Immediately I knew that I had made a friend (as readers of this blog will no doubt know..I am a huge admirer of Berry). Shiffman has written a wonderful essay on Berry and Aristotle that was featured in Communio, so I thought he would be a guide and and introducer to Berry's work. In addition to his writings on philosophy, Berry, and translations etc. Shiffman is an editor for the blog Front Porch Republic. What follows is his bio from that insightful website:

Mark Shiffman was born in north Florida to the son of expatriated New York secular Jews and the daughter of small town, pillar of the community southern Presbyterians. After spending much of his childhood in Alaska and California, he discovered in his Tennessee adolescence, first reluctantly and then gratefully, that more than half his heart belonged to the South. He occasionally rediscovers this viscerally when his body descends below the Mason-Dixon line from his northern exile in Philadelphia, where he has also brought his wife into exile from her lifelong home of Chicago. They live in the Mount Airy section of Philadelphia with their two sons, having moved from one of the more successfully racially integrated neighborhoods in America (Hyde Park) to one of the most.

Mark received his education from the McCallie School in Chattanooga and the surrounding mountains and trees, St. John’s College in Annapolis and the Santa Fe desert, Pendle Hill outside Philadelphia and the woods around Crum Creek, the University of Chicago and the icy prairie winds, and the Catholic Worker House and grimy streets of New York City. He is assistant professor in the Department of Humanities and Augustinian Traditions and affiliate faculty member in Classical Studies at Villanova University. He has also taught at Brooklyn College, Notre Dame, the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania. His current projects include books on the political philosophy of Plutarch and on the meaning of modern individualism, as well as a translation of Aristotle’s On the Soul (Focus Press).

1.) Who is Wendell Berry?

Well, he is a man who grew up in a small Kentucky farming town, who loved stories and imaginative literature and went off to study and become a writer. This career path took him to California, New York and Italy, but eventually he realized that in order to be faithful to what he thought was true and important, and what he wanted to portray as such in his writings, he had to return home and take up the life of farming – caring for the earth and the things that live on and from it, providing for his own family from their own labor and property in a way that makes for an integrated life.

2.) This blog is primarily interested in theology/philosophy/ecology, so is Berry a theologian or philosopher? How would you describe his work, and how does it fit in to the subject of this blog?

Berry has essentially three kinds of writings: Fiction, poetry and essays (including The Unsettling of America, which is a book-length essay). At the heart of Berry’s concerns is the fundamental philosophical question of what constitutes a good life, and a deeply philosophical criticism of the currently reigning answers. Since he believes that the earth on which and from which we live is God’s creation, as are we, he has attempted to understand thoroughly how a good life can best respond with gratitude, love and reverence to this gift.

3.) Is Berry a Christian?

Yes. You might describe him as ecclesiologically Baptist, with Orthodox sensibilities about the beauty and vitality of the created world and an implicit Catholic metaphysics.

4.) Interest is growing in Berry’s thought (both within the Church and outside of it), why do you think this is?

I think the primary reason is that he sees into the roots of enormous problems with our way of life that are becoming more and more evident and troubling. We tend to confront them piecemeal, and Berry is confronting them as a whole and showing their interconnections in ways that are hard for others to see. In doing so, Berry draws on older traditions that saw life whole and wholly differently than the modern trends of thought that displaced them and produced our world.

5.) Why did you start studying Berry’s work? What got you interested in him? Was it his essays, or his fiction?

In the late nineties, I kept making new friends who were all Berry fans, while I had never even heard of him. My wife, who is a voracious reader of fiction, started reading him. We had a copy of the collection Fidelity, and I finally picked it up one day to see what I would think of it, and proceeded to read every work of fiction he has written. Then I started in on the essays. I haven’t warmed up to his poetry much; that may or may not happen. I suppose one thing that draws me to the fiction and essays, aside from sheer enjoyment and the value of what I learn from them, is that as a professor I find them to be great teaching materials.

6.) Could you describe Berry’s main project?

Berry’s main project is to shock us out of the mass hallucination that we can continue to exploit natural resources to fuel an economy of endless growth, an economy that uses our own tax dollars to develop an infrastructure of transportation that destroys our communities, that we can sell our lives to the forces of corporate productivity, and expect to end up with anything other than ruination of the earth that sustains us and the communities that make our lives lovable. The nonfiction does this through critical dismantling of the idols and slogans and aesthetic influences that shape our delusions. The fiction does this by depicting a more integrated life, and putting into high profile the poignancy of the impact that these various forces of destruction have on the conditions that make that life possible.

7.) What makes his work unique in the world of the novel and in the world of the contemporary essayist? Is there continuity between his thought in his essays and his novels?

There is definitely continuity, and each genre helps you understand the other in a deeper and more comprehensive way. His uniqueness as an essayist is that he sees deeper into the coherence of our troubles than just about anyone, and especially sees the central place of the loss of properly-scaled agriculture in the unraveling of our economies, ethics and social lives. What makes him unique as a novelist is the same thing that prevents him gaining due recognition in the world of sophisticated literati: He celebrates the life of simple self-sufficiency in fidelity to small places.

8.) Who are some of Berry’s main influences? How does he continue or break from their work?

Berry studied with Wallace Stegner and has had constant conversation with Wes Jackson, so I suppose these are two major influences. He has some continuity with the Southern Agrarians, but does not share their sympathies for the aristocratic civilization of the old south, and is much better on racial questions. He doesn’t often mention Faulkner, the giant of southern fiction who also sets all his stories in one fictional county. One might say Berry is the anti-Faulkner, celebrating the independent yeoman farmer rather than exploring the tragic fate of aristocratic planters and slaveowners.

9.) Berry’s novels all are set in the same place. What is the setting and why is it important to his work, I mean, why does Berry set his novels in the same location?

The setting of the fiction is basically the town he grew up in. The continuity is essential for his fictional aims. The more we read the fiction, the more we understand how the lives of these characters are interwoven across generations, and how the stories of their lives passed down the generations enable other characters to understand what a fulfilling and whole life can be in this place, as well as the frustrations and limitations that have to be reckoned with in order to love the place, the life and one another well. Different characters exhibit different virtues, and one comes to understand both how to admire their excellences and acknowledge the standards they set for others, and also to what extent their flaws have to be tolerated for the sake of the excellences they accompany.

10.) Can you give a brief description of Berry’s themes? Please consider: place, story, agrarianism, and community (add others you think are necessary).

A place is not just a location. It is the living legacy of work done on the earth in response to the productive possibilities and limits of the location, and the community built over generations that is able to respect the limits of human scale that make love and endurance possible. It must revolve around self-sustaining agriculture and husbandry, and the personal loving relationship to the land and its long-term health must not be destroyed by mechanization. Thus Berry’s agrarianism resists the ways in which economies of scale, profiteering and technological imperatives destroy the proper practices of agriculture. This kind of farming is communal, and this kind of communal work generates stories that teach the virtues and forbearances necessary for its continuation, and makes space in the common work and rest for passing these stories along. You might say the deepest themes are loving one another within the order of God’s creation and in light of the reality of sin, and the concrete requirements in productive communal life for doing that well.

11.) Whom has Berry influenced? Could his work be used to engage contemporary philosophy and theology? If so, how?

Berry has influenced many people in theology, political theory and social criticism. The American editors of the Catholic journal Communio have largely embraced his thought and developed its theological dimensions, and I have tried in the article I wrote for them to clarify some of the deeper philosophical implications. I think everyone knows that Michael Pollan has been strongly influenced by Berry in his criticisms of American agricultural policy and practice. Most of the bloggers at Front Porch Republic have been strongly influenced by him as well.

12.) You have written a marvelous essay on Berry’s vision of economics. How is it similar and dissimilar from the ancient philosopher Aristotle? How does Berry’s economic imagination differ from our current American imagination concerning economics?

Berry’s economic vision is, I would say, more similar to Aristotle’s than to nearly anyone’s, though Aristotle’s is never so thoroughly worked out because, unlike Berry, he does not have to confront the errors and delusions of a thoroughly worked out and implemented alternative vision. Our current obsession is the growth of the national economy, which is supposed to provide security and convenience of living; but we are finally having to realize that this growth is premised on two falsehoods: that the things that make corporations profitable will contribute to a sound economy, and that we can pursue happiness as detached individuals joined to others by relationships that issue only from willed consent and contractual agreement. These are principles first given shape by Locke, the father of liberalism, but they rest on an assumption propagated by Hobbes: that there are no intrinsic, natural standards of what is good, to which we must conform our desires and wills, but rather that we call good whatever it is that excites our desires. Berry, like Aristotle, recognizes rather that there are natural goods that are the necessary anchors of a fulfilling life, and bogus seeming goods that erode the foundations of a good life. The goods that shape a good life are those that provide a household with a degree of independence in providing for itself (the products of agriculture and handcrafts) and those that shape and express human excellences of the family members and allow them to share in cultivating excellence (like playing music and sharing in conversation and work). If we untether our lives from these natural goods and pursue the arbitrary objects of desire excited in us by advertisers (whose interest is in stimulating desires for unnecessary and unsatisfying things), then our lives cease to have a natural shape, and we pursue one damn thing after another, and in the first place money, which has no natural limit. We do this usually along isolated paths that disconnect us from others, and we become more concerned about extending the length of a life that can never find rest than about cultivating the virtues that make life whole.

13.) Would you say that Berry’s vision is practical?

Yes, in two senses. The first is the practicality of a non-fictional utopia. The wholeness of life that Berry envisions and depicts is not simply imaginary, but is mostly lost to most of us. We can live in such a way as to recover elements of it, for example by having a home free of electronic forms of entertainment, by cooking together, by gardening together, by supporting local food production and local family businesses whose owners and workers we can come to know and trust. I shop every week at a local farmer’s market, and if I happen to be short of cash, I know my regular vendors well enough that they’ll trust me to pay later. That’s very practical.

In the second sense, our future may look a lot more like our past than like our science-fictions. Cheap oil is disappearing. Small farmers in this country are already finding it more cost-effective to use animals rather than tractors. Berry’s vision can serve as a guide and stimulus for recovering a more natural way of life and understanding the fullness of its dimensions.

14.) I have taken a reading group through “The Unsettling of America.” One concern regularly brought up is that Berry is romantic about pre-industrialized life. Is this sentiment true? Is there a danger of romanticism in Berry’s thought, if not, why?

Well, in the cultural sense, Romanticism is the anxious and dissatisfied critical reaction to enlightenment liberal rationalism, and so not such a bad thing. But there is a real concern, namely that by being encouraged to love something we can never have or approximate, we will be soured on the life that it is possible for us to live and thus end up more unhappy than we might have been due to our unrealistic fantasies. Or these fantasies can merely serve an escapist need, and distract us from the miserable lives we go on living. Is this a problem with Berry, or with us?

I think Berry is pretty realistic about pre-industrial life, although he will stress the goods and virtues that compensate for its dissatisfactions in a way that may seem lopsided. I can’t recall reading much about toothaches in his novels. Harvests can be bad, local economies can be vulnerable to severe weather, and so on. Not every person who finds small town life suffocating is deranged. But I think the final word has to be that we don’t often realize how disastrous for our lives the modern global economic system has been, and especially for our households. Berry makes us confront that in its many facets, and that can be an overwhelming reckoning. So I think the charge of “romanticism” is partly a psychological self-defense.

15.) Could Berry’s ideas really ameliorate the environmental crisis? If so, how? Could his ideas on agriculture work to feed a growing human population?

The food supply question is a hard one to answer. There are many studies saying that we not only have to continue with industrial farming to feed the growing population, but must make it even more “efficient” than it has been, mainly through genetically modified crops. My suspicion is that many of these studies don’t take account of how much cultivable land there really is. Millions of acres in the US are devoted to growing inch-high grass. Certainly small scale farming with less pesticide and chemical fertilizer would ameliorate the environmental crisis. So would decreased use of tractors, not to mention leaf-blowers. Ultimately what we need is a way of life that is not premised on constant use of automobiles. We may be compelled to it before long.

16.) What is your favorite novel by Berry? How about your favorite essay or collection of essays?

My favorite novel is probably Hannah Coulter, though I think The Memory of Old Jack is the most beautiful and artistically successful. All the essays are good. Maybe my favorite is “The Total Economy”; that and “Quantity vs. Form” do a good job of spelling out the economic vision and its moral dimensions.

17.) If I wanted to start reading Berry today, where should I start? Could you suggest a helpful reading plan through his work?

Start with the short story “Fidelity” and then Hannah Coulter or Jayber Crow. Read some essays from Home Economics, What are People For? or Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community. Read the rest of the short stories (all collected in That Distant Land), some of which are very funny. Eventually read all the novels, and of course at some point The Unsettling of America which you’ve already read. I’ve never been drawn by Berry’s poetry enough to get absorbed in it, so someone else would have to make recommendations about that.

18.) How has Wendell Berry’s work been important for your philosophical work?

While I’ve always loved the farming life and appreciated the decency and good sense of farmers, and have supported and understood the benefits of organic agriculture, reading Berry made me realize the centrality of the fate of farming to all the social and cultural developments that interest me as a political philosopher. It was only because of this that I was able to understand the meaning and importance of the classical notion of economics as the art of maintaining a well-ordered household. So in that sense his work has made my understanding of the conflict between ancient and modern philosophy more complete.

19.) Has he been instructive for your faith?

Again, by way of deepening and clarifying what was already partly there. Berry has helped me see better how deeply at odds our exploitation of the world for profit really is with the love of God’s creation and thus with our gratitude to the Creator. There are obvious moral problems with social relations based on the madness for money, and there are obvious environmental problems with exploiting the earth, but recognizing how at bottom these are problems in our relationship to God’s creation and a disordering of the love that should flow through it to God requires a very different perspective on our lives.

20.) What about your household? Has reading Berry changed the way your home functions?

We’ve always been a low-tech (television-free) and home-cooking household with conservationist habits, and we don’t have enough ground right now to garden more than herbs. The main change has been a greater determination to support local and sustainable agriculture and to have a better understanding of where our food is coming from. We get our eggs from friends who supply 20 or 30 customers, and our milk from a dairy within 15 miles of our house.

21.) Simply put, why should anybody read Wendell Berry? Especially, why should a person of faith read him? More particularly, why should the academic theologian or philosopher read Berry?

Berry is one of the wisest authors of our age, who will deepen and sharpen the vision of any thoughtful reader for what is happening to us and how to cope with it. His faith both informs the ultimate grounds of his vision and limits the desperation it can generate. He teaches us about hope and love, and joy. When books are a delight to the heart and soul and improving to the mind, they are treasures for everyone, especially when they turn our attention with fresh eyes to the choices and habits of our daily lives in a way that brings them into focus in relation to the great tradition of wisdom about the human condition.

22.) Lastly, how would you describe Berry’s vision of the good life?

Well, imagine how our lives would have to look if we didn’t have petroleum, electricity or corporations, and if we didn’t spend them accumulating money and avoiding death and dirt. Or just read Hannah Coulter.

Mark, Thank You So Much! This has been another installment of the "Contemporary Thinkers You Should Read," and let me suggest that this interview is not only about Berry, but about Mark. Read his work too, for he is an accomplished, wise philosopher. Take a look, specifically, at his communio article on Berry and Aristotle.

The Art Of The Good Life

Purpose of this blog

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Favorites of 2011

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Theologians on Film: BibleDex

Monday, December 19, 2011

Theo-Blog links for you to read, and ponder.

Thursday, December 1, 2011

Interview with Mark Shiffman: On Wendell Berry (Contemporary Thinkers You Should Read)