In 1989, Wendell Berry delivered a commencement address at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine. With the aim of saying “something useful about the problems and opportunities that lie ahead” of the graduates, he started with a quotation from As You Like It, when Orlando says, “I can no longer live by thinking.”
Berry explains:
He is ready to marry Rosalind. It is time for incarnation. Having thought too much, he is at one end of the limits of human experience, or of human sanity. If his love does put on flesh, we know he must sooner or later arrive at the opposite limit, at which he will say, “I can no longer live without thinking.” Thought – even consciousness – seems to live between these limits: the abstract and the particular, the word and the flesh.
From this starting-point, Berry offers some cautionary notes about the tendencies of “public movements of thought” which
quickly produce a language that works as a code, useless to the extent that it is abstract. It is readily evident, for example, that you can’t conduct a relationship with another person in terms of the rhetoric of the civil rights movement or the women’s movement – as useful as those rhetorics may initially have been to personal relationships.
(As an aside, it should not escape notice that Berry’s point hits a little different – as the kids say – in this time of ideological polarization, with friendship and kinship strained through the mesh of one or another set of abstract categories.)
Berry’s main quarry in his speech was an abstraction favored by the environmental movement: planetary, an adjective which is “desperate and useless exactly to the extent it is abstract.” It is useless because it affords no opportunity actually to do anything: “Nobody can do anything to heal a planet,” says Berry. “The adjective planetary describes a problem in such a way that it cannot be solved.”
The problems that matter, in the relationship between human beings and our various environments, are to be found at the local scale, down in the weeds of particularity. Berry speaks of “our problems, as they are caused and suffered in our lives, our households, and our communities,” which have “attracted very little intelligence.”
To the extent the environmental movement is caught up in abstractions like planetary it has entirely failed in its mission. As Berry asserts, “the environmental movement has not changed our parasitic relationship to nature.”
Working somewhere between the abstract and the particular, the word and the flesh, what are we to do? Anyone who knows any of Berry’s various works could probably guess.
The question that must be addressed, therefore, is not how to care for the planet but how to care for each of the planet’s millions of human and natural neighborhoods, each of its millions of small pieces and parcels of land, each one of which is in some precious way different from all the others. Our understandable wish to preserve the planet must somehow be reduced to the scale of our competence – that is, to the wish to preserve all of its humble households and neighborhoods.
Among his final admonishments to the graduates of the College of the Atlantic, Berry urges them to
understand that no amount of education can overcome the innate limits to human intelligence and responsibility. We are not smart enough or conscious enough or alert enough to work responsibly on a giant scale.
I have been following the work of Wendell Berry since I was an undergraduate in the late 1980s, and I have consistently found his work humbling and somewhat unsettling. He has held up a mirror to my own life and work, and what I have seen there has made me squirm.
It seems to me that Berry is essentially correct in much of his thinking: his consistent attention to doing good work at home, to neighborliness and care, to households well suited to the given landscape on which they depend.
I saw the appeal of such a life when I was young, but chose a different path: becoming an academic philosopher, living and working in the ostensibly cosmopolitan setting of a major metropolitan area, juggling abstractions the livelong day. Coming back to Berry’s work troubles my conscience: Did I chose well? Might I have done better taking some other path, one that would have kept me closer to the ground?
Instead, I live and work in that tension. I can always count on Berry, among others, to remind me of the limits of abstraction, the vital necessity of attention to untamed particularity.
In older posts on this blog I started writing about sustainability, but that line of research has lain fallow, until now. Here is an opening: part of the problem with sustainability is that, like planetary, it is too abstract to be useful. It too often serves as a kind of code, a shibboleth for distinguishing allies from adversaries.
So, what does sustainability look like on the ground, in the context of a particular landscape, a particular household?
Reference: Berry, Wendell. “The Futility of Global Thinking.” Harper’s Magazine, September, 1989, 16-22.
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