More than ever, America is split between populist nationalism and left-wing internationalism, with little room in either ideology for anything like Wendell Berry’s vision of local patriotic devotion. Whatever we make of his ruminations, with respect to this subject it is obviously the culture which has changed over the past few years, not him.
The Need to be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice, by Wendell Berry (528 pages, Shoemaker + Company, 2022)
Word is going around that Wendell Berry’s The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice has caused something of a scandal. And we can easily understand the dismay: In his latest study of land, culture, and society, Mr. Berry not only argues against pulling down Confederate monuments, but even suggests that some of the Confederates had redeeming qualities. This is hardly a fashionable thesis in the Year of Our Lord 2023, nor is it what we would expect from a writer who received the National Humanities Medal from Barack Obama.
Then again, nobody should have been too surprised by Mr. Berry’s latest remarks. Left-leaning or no, the man has always been idiosyncratic, and has always admitted that his agrarian philosophy owes much to the politically-incorrect Vanderbilt Agrarians of the 1930’s. As Mr. Berry saw fit during his 2012 Jefferson Lecture to quote the poet Allen Tate—author of Stonewall Jackson: The Good Soldier and poems like “Ode To the Confederate Dead”—it should come as no surprise that he disagrees with those who would have Tate “canceled.”
For that matter, when we turn back to Mr. Berry’s 2007 Sewanee Review essay “The Civil War and the American Imagination,” we find him frankly observing that the Civil War “was contested so fiercely and so long by the Confederacy undoubtedly because of a truth that our federal government has never learned: people generally don’t like to be invaded.” Even though “union and emancipation were moral purposes,” he continues, we must ask “if only to keep the question open, what we gained, as a people, by the North’s expensive victory.” What follows then is Mr. Berry’s dissident accounting of the war:
My own impression is that the net gain was more modest and more questionable than is customarily said. The Northern victory did preserve the Union. But, despite our nationalist “mystique,” our federation of states is a practical condition maintained only by the willing consent of the states and the people. And secession, today, is still not a dead issue … The other large Northern objective—the emancipation of the slaves—also was achieved. But this too appears in retrospect to be an achievement painfully limited. It does not seem unreasonable to say that emancipation was achieved and, almost by the same stroke, botched … My own guess is that, after the decision was taken to make slavery an issue of war, emancipation was inevitably botched.
Mr. Berry implicitly called into question the assumption that the history of race relations in America can be reduced to enlightened Northern whites, victimized blacks, and evil Southerners. At the very least, we may ask whether people seriously interested in racial harmony and brotherhood would really have pursued these aims via John Brown’s terrorist raid, much less through a fratricidal war of attrition, which inevitably entailed bitterness and resentment.
As an example of what he rejects about the conventional view of the Civil War, Mr. Berry pointed specifically to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and what he describes as its “perfectly insane” lyrics. For Mr. Berry, the hymn encapsulates “a truly terrifying simple-mindedness in which we can still identify Christ with military power and conflate the American way of life with the will of God. I have made clear, I hope, my failure to perceive the glory of the coming of the Lord in the Civil War and its effects.… The Civil War was our first great industrial war, which was good for business, like every war since.”
So whatever we make of Mr. Berry’s recent remarks, we must concede that he hardly sprang them upon us out of the blue. True, The Need to Be Whole marks the first time he has publicly defended Confederate monuments; then again, it is only relatively recently that statues of Southern icons have been widely vandalized, pushed over by mobs, or demolished. Where the conservative establishment is content to ignore or perhaps even celebrate the destruction of the Reconciliation Monument in Arlington National Cemetery, Mr. Berry believes that extravagant expressions of hatred toward anyone—including dead Confederates—reveals a disastrous failure of imagination:
We know that in the early years of the last century Confederate soldiers were still living who cherished their memories of friends killed in the war. Widows and children of fallen Confederate soldiers were still living, and they remembered their husbands and fathers with love. I think it is a mistake to discount out of hand the involvement of those monuments with friendship, love, personal loyalty, and lasting grief. It is simply wrong to withhold all sympathy from those feelings, no matter one’s disagreement with those who felt them … I know that whatever ideology those monuments were said then, or said now, to stand for, for many who saw them half a century after Appomattox they stood for the dead. I know that their grief can be imagined. But I know also that many of us now would refuse outright to imagine, and so far to grant, the humanity and suffering of an ‘enemy,’ and to me this is the most troubling revelation of the movement against monuments. It is also frightening, for such a principled numbness foretells only more killing.
Mr. Berry then goes on to contrast the implacable hostility of the movement against the monuments with the climactic scene in Homer’s Iliad, wherein Achilles and Priam together mourn their respective losses from the Trojan War. For Mr. Berry, the painful irony is that ancient pagans were more capable of sympathizing with and respecting their enemies than are a great many modern Christians.
All that would be controversial enough. But Mr. Berry goes further, speaking up for Confederate officers like John Hunt Morgan, John C. Breckinridge, and above all for Lee. In Mr. Berry’s estimation, the last named officer exemplifies virtues 21st-Century America desperately needs. “I see Robert E. Lee’s choice of his native place and his people as commendable,” Mr. Berry insists, “and in the long run indispensable.” In stark contrast to the archetypal rootless man of our time, Lee “affirmed, obeyed, and suffered the need to defend his homeland and his people.” To highlight his point, Berry declines to call Lee “a tragic hero because, instead of a ‘tragic flaw’ in the classical sense of that term, the source of his tragedy, his local loyalty, was not to him and his people a flaw.”
Correct or not, these judgments help us understand how and why the movement against Confederate monuments has become so powerful so quickly. To be sure, it is partly because Americans have become more sensitive than ever—some might even say Pharisaical—regarding questions of equality, slavery, and racism. Yet the sudden determination to topple memorials in the South has at least as much to do with the evaporation of “local loyalty,” especially among our elite classes. “In order to go with your people,” explains Mr. Berry, “it is necessary to have a people with whom you identify and to whom you feel that you belong. To have a people in this sense you must have a place in which you and they have lived together for generations, and to which you mutually feel that you belong.” How many Americans are so situated? With extended and even nuclear families broken up, and Americans having long since grown accustomed to bouncing from one state and region to another, homeland no longer remains as a meaningful category of the consciousness. Hence it is unsurprising that so few Americans today are capable of sympathizing with the Confederate soldier, whose foremost justification was that he was fighting for his home and region.
More than ever, America is split between populist nationalism and left-wing internationalism, with little room in either ideology for anything like Mr. Berry’s vision of local patriotic devotion. Whatever we make of his ruminations, with respect to this subject it is obviously the culture which has changed over the past few years, not Wendell Berry. Whether loyalty to one’s native place and people is good or bad, as an ideal it is surely nothing new—especially not for the agrarian poet from Henry County.
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The featured image is “Autumn Roadside, Kentucky (1903), by William Forsyth, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.