The Need to Be Whole is, by Wendell Berry’s own admission, a “pondering and ponderous book.” Approaching 500 pages, the ponderousness comes in part from Berry’s abhorrence of shadowy language that might allow some assumption to crawl under the back fence and set up shop. Any word with the suffix –ism calls for a page or two of squaring up. And yet, the book’s ponderousness holds into a coherency, and the length is perhaps unavoidable, even satisfactory, on a complicated subject such as racism. There are no simple solutions in such a subject, and anyway simple solutions are suspect. So the ponderousness also comes as a relief, knowing that, finally, here is a voice that is not oversimplifying the problem and suggesting some kind of governmental or political fix.
Dorothy Wickenden wrote a profile of Wendell Berry for a February 2022 issue of The New Yorker. In it, Berry discussed this upcoming book. He knew it would not be a very nice book, and he said he didn’t want to offend against “truth and goodness” but the [Need to Be Whole] “at times certainly does offend, I think necessarily, against political correctness.” Tanya, Berry’s wife, told him, “It’s too late to ruin your whole life.” That sounds promising.
What sets the book apart from other books on racism is the uncomfortable idea that slavery and its aftermath was not the work of some political wingnuts, or not some aberrant milieu defined by an especially ruthless people, but simply the product of the American attitude to occupy, to exploit, to conquer, to operate as if there were no limits. We should have seen this insight coming. This is Wendell Berry speaking, after all.
“I do not think of the chattel slavery of the antebellum South as a problem that is isolatable or unique. The more I have read and thought about our history…the more plainly I have seen that old-time version of slavery as one of a continuum of violent exploitations, including other forms of slavery, that has been with us since the European discovery of America. It has been our history’s dominant theme.” (42)
Slavery, he is saying, is one more manifestation of doing what we have always done and are still doing. And we will not heal and be whole until we grub out some of these deeply flawed American attitudes. They are bound up in the way we treat our land and our communities. In a few cases they are written into our laws. It is bound into some of the very views and laws that are trying to end racism. Challenging America’s political identity thus may come across as highly unpatriotic, which makes it disappointing for both liberals and conservatives. But neither party, he says, is sinless.
“A properly educated conservative, who has neither approved of abortion nor supported a tax or regulation, can destroy a mountain or poison a river and sleep like a baby. A well-instructed liberal, who has behaved with the prescribed delicacy toward women and people of color, can consent to the plunder of the land and people of rural America and sleep like a conservative.” (176)
If you are familiar with Berry’s work, his solutions are predictable and deceivingly simple: Good work, clear language, and love. These three elements seem to resurface through Berry’s work, and they come now as no surprise. For every chapter of criticism, there is a chapter laying out a solution, and not in a bullet-point style, but in a way clearly calls upon us to occupy our life, to love our neighbors, and do the work that loves our neighbors.
It is on this kind of hope for community that Berry hangs his hope. Of course, with global politics and global trade, which results in spiritual and physical displacement, it is a difficult community to develop. But we must try. We need to love our communities, love the villains alongside the saints. We need to learn to work together and live together, disagreeing on things, but place the cohesion of the community over individual ideas. Bring the people you dislike down to eye level and you find them remarkably human, with a wife and kids; just another person in search of a life. That simple act breaks down the political and racial boundaries we so often try to construct.
Berry has a deep distrust for “movements, anti-movements, or anti-anti-movements.” He has tried to avoid partisanship all his life, which has given him his reputation for reasonableness and sanity, but which can also make him infuriating to anyone looking for quick solutions. I suspected that I would find sections of the book that I would like and others that would hurt. I suspect almost everyone else would also. That is the nature of the book.
In character with Berry’s agricultural metaphors, he says we must “heal” this “wound.” Have your ever put forth effort to heal a wound on your body? You can aid it, and you can lessen the pain. But the healing is done over time, and it is done by forces out of your control. We will never heal completely, nor very soon. But attempting to do what we can, in Berry’s closing words, “would make us happy, and not with the future of political promising. It would make us happy as soon as we began to do it.”