Citizenship Papers

Here’s a photo I took in Philadelphia a few months ago, on a trip with my husband:

The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union. “The love of Power is so alluring that few have ever been able to resist its bewitching influence,” it reads.

Now, here’s the cover of Wendell Berry’s Citizenship Papers, published in 2003:

The first essay, “A Citizen’s Response to ‘The National Security Strategy of the United States of America,’” helps set this collection of “papers” on the rails of conscientious objection — not just to “the Bush doctrine,” but to the rise of the “military industrial state” in general. It’s fitting that its cover should resemble the Articles (as displayed in Philly, that is), because it urges a return to the fundamentals of democracy, freedom, decentralized power, and the importance of the land originally so ingrained in American ideals. Citizenship Papers reads as another Declaration of Independence, this time not from the king of England, but from the captains of industry and globalization that now threaten what’s left of the independent American spirit.

I’m a few years late in reading it, but I really liked this book — even though parts of it went against my grain. Such is the way of political discussion, and this book contains its share. (The Way of Ignorance, which follows this one in order of publication, also struck me as more obviously political than other of Berry’s work.) But it’s a testimony to the book’s quality that though I don’t share all of Berry’s politics, I find these essays absorbing and challenging, for several reasons:

• There is no one who writes more compellingly about agrarian life than Wendell Berry. I, who live in a Northeastern suburb and know nothing about sheep, find myself intensely interested in the question of how you breed animals that will thrive in a particular place, and intensely saddened at the description of “animal factories” that raise much of the food on the grocery store shelves. On some subjects Berry paints with a rather broad brush, but when it comes to farming he writes with particularity and love.
• There is no one with greater integrity on the subjects of the decline of rural life, the need for thriving local economies, the joy and necessity of local food production, the urgent state of ecological health, the interposition of corporate middlemen between ourselves and our land, the values of diversity and thrift and inherited local knowledge… Wendell Berry has been living and working on his Henry County farm since I was in around 6th grade. His life is of a piece with his books, and is an expression of the ideals he so eloquently defends.
• Even where I disagree, I am willing to listen to someone so thoughtful and honest… and human.

This book contains 19 essays. The highpoints, for me, were “In Distrust of Movements,” which points out (not for the first time) the inadequacy of -isms; “Two Minds,” a superb essay delineating the qualities of the Rational Mind highly prized by industry, and the Sympathetic Mind of the true agrarian; and “Still Standing,” a revisiting of the tenets of the twelve southerners in I’ll Take My Stand that traces the ultimate fate of the book and the lasting integrity of its principles. I also liked the way Berry returned more than once (as he does again in The Way of Ignorance) to the need for neighborliness and cooperation among the different branches of the conservation movement — ranchers and wilderness preservation groups in particular. Berry has been writing for so long that he commands a large following from a variety of conservation groups. In this book he uses that “political capital” (much though I dislike the term) to urge the kind of dynamic that will help to bring organization without turning the movement into an “environmentalist system.”

After 40 years of devoting his pen to the practical and spiritual importance of agrarian life, and its decline at the hands of industrialism, Berry has a front row seat on what he calls “the losing side.” The number of farmers continues to dwindle. Land continues to be destroyed. At the same time it’s apparent that now a new generation of writers are joining in, and a movement — or set of movements — is growing in favor of saving things worth saving. I admire him for refusing to give way to hopelessness. “I am not looking for reasons to give up,” he writes. “I am looking for reasons to keep on.”

At the end of the essay “Tuscany,” Berry recounts a dream. I’ll close with it, for it’s emblematic of our human predicament as seen through Berry’s eyes:

I dreamed that the industrialists had at last contrived the ultimate answer to the human longing for flight. They had built an enormous airplane, an aeronautical Tower of Babel. All the world’s people who wished to escape the limits of earthly life were invited to take passage, at the cost of all their earthly rights and properties. In their millions and billions they came aboard, and the plane took off. But two unforeseen circumstances were immediately evident. Even so large a plane could not carry enough fuel to fly indefinitely; sooner or later it would have to land. But the violence of its departure had destroyed the runway. While the escapists circled the globe, free of their ancient limits and restraints, but running out of fuel, a small ground crew worked frantically to rebuild the runway, hoping to bring the wanderers safely down to earth again. My dream did not give the outcome.