In his remarkable 1970 book, The Hidden Wound — an in-depth examination of the wound of racism on all of us — essayist, novelist, poet, and farmer Wendell Berry offered a nodded to the youthful rebellion of the day that was arguing vociferously for racial and environmental justice, and for the end to war. Critical of adult political and cultural leadership at the time, Berry writes, “The great moral tasks of honesty and peace and neighborliness and brotherhood and the care of the earth have been left to be taken up on the streets by the ‘alienated’ youth of the 1960s and 1970s.”
Reading The Hidden Wound recently, this passage caught my attention because I was one of those young people back then. I didn’t think of myself as alienated, just pissed off at the state of American politics, and yet full of hope for true and lasting change. In fact, at the time, I was sure that change was coming, and coming swiftly. I just knew it.
So I can’t help but wonder now why and how my generation’s passionate interest in racial and environmental justice, and in the common-sense question of peace and neighborliness, would slowly shift away from those beliefs over the coming years and more or less fall in line with the myopic focus on the primacy of individual economic gain and, for the religious type, obsession with personal salvation in the great beyond. The youth of the 1960s and ’70s may have been full of high moral idealism, but in time we didn’t get much of any of it right. In many ways, my generation not only succumbed to what writer bell hooks calls “the imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” we happily took the reins of this cultural beast — and we’ve been driving it ever since, aiming for the foothills of Mount Doom.
If The Hidden Wound is of value today, I think it lies in this question of what derails us in our collective moral pursuits. I know it’s a bit foolish to talk about a generational “we” — as if all members of each generation see eye to eye on core moral matters. But I wonder why there wasn’t — and isn’t today — a collective majority voice that insists on these matters being the central issues of our time. There’s no question, except in the minds of those who profit from questioning it (and then, I believe, it’s mostly a matter of willful self-delusion), that attention to matters of peace, love, and harmony (Jesus’s thematic trinity) would make life better all around. Less war, less poverty, less racial division, less environmental destruction, and more focus on community and mutuality and reciprocity, are clear cultural goods, are they not? So why didn’t we succeed in the 1960s and 1970s — and why haven’t we made progress since? Efforts today for environmental and racial justice feel more focused today than in recent decades, but then so does the backlash working overtime to neutralize such efforts. And the backlash seems to be winning, again.
As Berry also says, it’s tough to write objectively from within a diseased culture. So it’s hard to know how deeply the disease is working within oneself. While from a fifty-year perspective, I can see some of the shortcomings and biases in Berry’s views (i.e., his literary references that only refer to white, male writers), and I worry about the shortcomings and biases in my own writing, I encourage the reading of The Hidden Wound today. I think the book can help in our efforts to establish a cultural blueprint for evolution toward a truly just society, assuming that this is still a key goal for American society. You know, the elements that can lead us toward “a more perfect union.” “Once you begin to awaken to the realities of what you know,” Berry writes, “you are subject to staggering recognitions of your complicity in history and in the events of your own life.”
I also encourage the reading of Berry’s other seminal book of the 1970s, The Unsettling of America. It’s easy to overlook this book, thinking it’s meant for the nation’s farmers and agricultural specialists. But it’s primarily an extension of the argument Berry makes in The Hidden Wound, which is to say a thoughtful discourse designed to help us to understand what better living actually looks like. It’s asking us to shake off the mindset of the imperialists who unsettled the long-running cultural systems of North America and resettled them in their exploitative image. The result has been our ongoing history of exploitation in the name of freedom, but really in service to the exploiters’ personal wishes. The result is… well, you know: America in the 2020s, tied in knots by too much greed and fear. At the heart of this book are a few key points. One, that we really do depend upon the land, and that using it up recklessly, as we are doing, for short-term corporate profits and the convenience of those of us caught in a system, can only lead us toward ruin. Two, that the antidote to our exploiter/exploited binary is to focus on how true communities of care, kindness, and reciprocity function — then build them, nurture them, cherish them.
Berry argues that a central problem for us is that we are essentially a nation of specialists. The fact that we engage daily in the specialist work we were each trained to do in order to stay housed by and fed by (and indebted to) the corporate powers, while buying a little time of our own recreation and amusement, is a main reason why we can both see the trouble we’ve created and yet do little to address it.
The book does address agriculture, of course, as a reminder that the push for abundance of food, combined with the concept of efficiency and the economy of scale, is leading us — can only lead us — to the destruction of land and the end of abundance. Here, once again, the focus should be on supporting local communities (especially local, small farms that understand the need to protect and nurture the land). In fact, this should be a key focus on state and national government. The bottom line for Berry is that “a culture cannot survive long at the expense of its agriculture or of its natural resources.”
Ditto for the people.
The Unsettling of America predicted our current predicaments with shocking accuracy. And there have been many writers and thinkers since who have furthered this argument in various and important ways. As we enter a new year, injected with the hope that fuels so much human adventure, it would be good for us to reflect more deeply on where we have been and where we want go — and what we need to change to get there.
While it may be hubris to think my generation was going to change the world for the better in a single decade or two, it’s depressing now to realize that we’ve basically ended up driving the exploitive bus with great alacrity all these years. It pains me that my generation has collectively botched things up in the hollow name of short-term economic gain, fueled by an obsession with competition and individualism. It also pains me that, collectively, we’ve willingly given so much power to corporations, a move that makes it seem as if that only variable that matters in life is corporate profit — and that top-down economics is the way to run a democracy well. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how wrongheaded this has been.
Happiness, Berry argues, comes to us through connection, not competition. Culture is a matter of “passion for excellence and order handed down to young people from older people whom they love and respect,” Berry writes. “The definitive relationships in the universe are thus not competitive but interdependent.”
What I hope will help younger generations drive the shift toward a better version of democratic living are the many writers and thinkers among us who have stayed committed to the essential morality of cooperation, reciprocity, and community — especially those who, like Berry, have reminded us over and over that there’s no us without a healthy natural world.