Enough

What are we cultivating? Contemplating escape, escapism and cultural inheritances at 14,000 feet.

I miss not thinking about politics.

Politics used to be just one more section in the newspaper. Local news, business, sports, politics, weather. I also miss the days when weather wasn't news.

Our political crises have bloomed so foul it's no longer okay to ignore them. To do so (and I've tried), feels like escapism. The robberies taking place in Washington DC aren't just financial -- they're attentional. Our deserved right to not care very much about what our elected representatives are up to is being pilfered along with due process, public lands and all the rest.

Of the many misfortunes of the MAGA era, the engorgement of political attention-hoarding isn't the worst. But a country's politics, like its entertainments and commerce, should command attention only insofar as necessary for its people to have their daily bread. MAGA politics, however, are constantly running an extremely high fever. They are delirious. To ignore them would be both foolish and dangerous.

Or would it?

When attacked, isn't escape the whole point? The most obvious and necessary response?

Turns out escape and escapism aren't quite the same thing.

We absolutely must escape the straitjacket of hate and greed that Republican leadership is fitting us for. To do so requires vigilance, resistance and the courage of compassion.

To shirk these -- that's escapism. The question on everyone's mind, though, is how to best do this.

Part of the answer is looking away from that toxic bloom and toward sustenance, wherever it exists for you. Looking away when you notice the bloat beginning to sink your spirit. Looking away to protect proportionality in your personal sphere. That's not escapism; that's how we escape the terms of engagement we're being offered. It's how we make space to imagine alternatives and to recruit a new set of leaders. It's how we remember the ephemera of politics in the long history of time.

These were my thoughts as I began to read early Wendell Berry again -- accompanying him on his 1979 field trips to Peru and the American southwest, documented in the first two essays in the The Gift of Good Land. Wendell was keen to study ancient, small-plot farming practices that, for thousands of years, have sustained indigenous lifeways on suboptimal agricultural lands in the Americas.

These essays were different. Different from the headier stuff that Wendell began diving into later, and obviously different from what I've been scrolling in my Substack and NYT news feeds. This was a step back into something older and more essential than everything consuming our attention these days. It was a touching down on earth, as after a space odyssey. The sweetness of peas and beans. The texture of sod clumps falling from a pulled potato.

Compared to so many other Wendell Berry essays, there wasn't much here that inspired new thoughts or blog posts. They were more a reminder that Wendell Berry has been obsessed with just one thing his whole life: good farming.

What makes that obsession so interesting and fecund though, for him and all of us, is just how complicated a thing it is. What does good farming look like and where would we find it in modern day America? Would we even know it if we saw it? How many necessary things comprise it, and what is comprised from it? And so his obsession of one thing becomes an obsession of many things: Smallness. Diversity. Ecology. Economy. Culture. Especially culture.

People forget that the subtitle of his most famous book, The Unsettling of America, is "Culture and Agriculture." This book, The Gift of Good Land, is similarly subtitled: "Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural." Wendell Berry is America's foremost agricultural critic, but I've always read him as a cultural critic. And until I did, it never occurred to me that we cannot understand our culture without examining our agriculture. But he has always insisted on the interdependence of farming, biology and culture.

Like a household, the small farm is a human organism, and has its origin in nature and culture. Its justification is not only agricultural, but is a part of an ancient pattern of values, ideas, aspirations, attitudes, faiths, knowledges, and skills that propose and support the sound establishment of a people on the land. To defend the small farm is to defend a large part, and the best part, of our cultural inheritance.

The etymology of culture, "cultura," meaning "cultivation," has been lost from our common understanding of farming. That you can't produce food without land and culture is the bedrock of Wendell Berry's gospel. My argument, having immersed myself in this gospel for a long time, is that it's not just good food and farms that require skillful and loving cultivation. It's the foundation of everything we do in groups: our families, companies, congregations, associations, governments. Cultivation is at the bottom of all of it. That's why "culture eats strategy for breakfast." We spend a lot of time on strategy. There are many thousands of strategy consultants out there making many millions of dollars.

But culture? Culture is hard. Hard to see and understand. Hard to write about. Hard to even notice. Not a derivative of what we think but rather of what we feel and believe, and we all know how messy and unknowable those things are.

In these long-ago visits to the farms of the Peruvian Highlands and Sonaran deserts, Wendell is characteristically eagle-eyed and eloquent about the irrigation tactics, acreage limits and field resting periods that enable marginal lands to be continuously farmed for millennia. And there's plenty of complexity just in that, believe me. Or better yet, read these essays.

But, unsurprisingly, the page that stuck with me the longest isn't about farming at all. Rather, I've been contemplating Wendell's observations of the mountain home of an Andean shepherd who worked and mostly lived on the "puna," the high-altitude ecoregion of montane grasslands and shrublands where lamas graze and potatoes are grown. The shepherd was a well-respected man with many head of livestock and a house in the village.

The hut on the puna was tiny. Four mud-chinked stone walls covered with a thatched roof. No windows. A domed fireplace in one corner with no flue and a tiny oil lamp resting on top. Dried lama and cow dung for fuel in the other corner, and a straw platform bed on the opposite side. Strips of smoked meat hung from a rope stretched across, and fleeces for bedclothes resting on a pole. The entry so low that Wendell could only enter on hands and knees.

The combination of my height and my speechlessness made me feel more than a little awkward in this man's hospitality and in his house. And yet few houses that I have been in have interested me as much. None that I have been in has so precisely - so perfectly without lack or excess - answered the need of its dweller.

"That's it," Wendell writes. "That was enough."

It's a precisely at this point that walking with Wendell goes from being a pleasure to a lesson. Because I can guarantee you that if I had been the one to visit this modest home, I would have been filled with thoughts of discomfort, insufficiency and perhaps pity. Because: culture! I'm not proud to admit it, but I will cut myself some slack for being a product of a white, westernized, Judeo-Christian colonizing culture.

Wendell, also a product of that culture but somehow transcendent of it, reacted to the space entirely differently and altogether exquisitely.

What made it enough was not just its physical properties, but the culture of the man who lived in it: his inheritance of many generations of familiarity with the country, and of the skills that have enabled so many generations to live there. To a stranger, lacking this culture, this house would be inadequate and intolerably lonely. But so, lacking an appropriate culture, is any place - or so it will sooner or later get to be.

I found this paragraph not only the most interesting in the two essays, but one of the most interesting and important in the whole of Wendell's oeuvre. It gets right to the heart of what we need, what human beings want, to the origin of wealth, and to our common mistake of always seeing trees and never forests. That is, we think things are the thing. Things are what we want. No. Culture is the thing. Culture is what we want.

The shepherd's home meets his needs perfectly because those needs are indivisible from his culture. He would not wish for a mansion; it would make no sense to him. It would not meet his needs. If he were magically transported to a North American mansion, his loss would be unimaginable --- far greater than his gain. More than his home and livestock and way of living, he would have lost his ancestors and, as I quoted Wendell earlier, an ancient pattern of values, ideas, aspirations, attitudes, faiths, knowledges, and skills. The best part of his inheritance. The established soundness of living well on and from the land.

Neither do we wish for a hut in the Andean highlands. To trade places with our shepherd would cost us many things we hold dear, like the freedom to reinvent ourselves, to seek greener pastures, to maximize our comforts and to enjoy novelties without end. Or at least the promise of all that. None of us would choose to give these away. That's our cultural inheritance. We feel it's truly ours, and we feel it's worth a lot. That's the power of culture.

But Wendell, stooping in that little hut, was not struck by cultural power, which would also be evident in a Newport estate. He was drinking in a quality of cultural consonance, which would not be. The hut, to borrow from Christopher Alexander, was perfectly fitted to the life of its owner, which was fitted to the lives of his relations, animals and ancestors, which themselves were fitted to their place on earth. Impressive as the Newport estate may be, it isn't impressive in this way. The mansion is fascinating as a thing; the hut as a note in a beautiful score.

We long to be notes not because of our culture, but in spite of it.

We are not the generator of our wishes, wants and needs, strange as that may seem. They certainly feel personal and self-created. But culture is at work on us every moment we breathe, for better or worse, adjusting several sense-gauges simultaneously, including the one called "enough."

Our culture does not help us with that one. In fact it harms us in more ways than we can imagine. Wendell knew it the moment in crawled into that little cottage, just as we know it every time we eat too much, buy too much, scroll too much or hear about the panderings and depravites of the current administration. Just as we know it from our moments of contentment, which never come from some thing but by the sense of belonging to something.

That little paragraph about the adequacy of the shepherd's hut was all Wendell had to say about appropriate culture. He was then back to noticing the herding of sheep and the carving of gourds by the locals. I found myself wishing he had written more about how culture contains all of us, our economy and our politics.

Then I realized that he did have more to say about it. For the next 45 years he's written about nothing else.