Thoughts on Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America
Years ago, Joel Salatin, the owner and operator of The Polyface Farm in Virginia, wrote in his book You Can Farm, if you want to farm, you’re going to have to stay home. No farm was ever successful when there was not anybody on the farm taking care of things.
Jordan Peterson, in one of his talks on marriage said, “Marriage is two imperfect people saying, ‘I’m not going anywhere! I’m staying put for better or for worse.’”
This theme of staying put has popped up in my life again and again. Hambricks have had a tendency, like most Americans, to be migratory. Patrick Hambrick came to this country in the pre-revolutionary war years with his cousin, Roger Day, from County Claire, Ireland. They were deck-hands on a ship, docked in Virginia. The ship set sail back to England, on Christmas day in 1700, without Patrick and Roger. They both chose to make a home in America.
The Hambricks (also Hambricks) then migrated in two main parties over the generations. One went south and the other went west. The largest concentration of Hambricks and Hamricks to this day resides in West Virginia.
My lineage went south, concentrating in Georgia. After being raised in Georgia, and through military service living in New Jersey, Texas, Korea, and then inter-coastal waterways of the Southeast for short time, I went to Florida, and now, Missouri. We have now lived in Missouri longer than any other place I’ve ever lived. It is only in the last few years I feel as if I am actually growing.
If you never take root, you never flourish.
Berry addresses this tendency to always intending to be somewhere else in the first chapter of The Unsettling of America. Yet, he doesn’t dwell on that tendency, he quickly acknowledges “another tendency: the tendency to stay put, to say, ‘No farther. This is the place.’”
When I suggested this book for the book club, I instructed the other members to watch out for three themes in Berry’s writing: God, blood and land. Embedded within those themes is the overarching theme to stay put. Why? Because, those three themes are our sources and the idea of staying put simply means to stay connected to our sources.
In the information age, there is a longing for connection. The word connection is bandied about like a mystical flail with no chain anchoring it to anything of substance. Recently the creator of the documentary The Social Dilemma was interviewed by Joe Rogan. The discussion was on how messed up we all are with our obsession with social media, and the solution to this social dilemma is connection. We need to reconnect with each other on a human level.
What the heck does that mean? Connect with exactly who, and exactly how?
The answer is nothing new. It’s as old as human civilization itself. Our need for connection is the same now as it has always been. We need to connect with humanity via our sources of God, blood and land. The alternative of connecting around ideology, identity and the environment has led us into the disaster we have suffered through especially in the last two years.
Community used to be built around a people’s common interest in their spiritual beliefs (God), their family (blood), and their place (land). These are the sources of our existence, and they must be cherished, nurtured and defended. Any enemy that might invade and separate us from our God, our blood and our land was to be battled against for the sake our existence and sustenance. No one in their right mind desires to be extinguished, eliminated or forgotten.
God, the creator is the source of all things. Without your family you wouldn’t have come into being. From the dust of the ground you came, to the dust you will go.
In this modern day of remote work, abundant food-stuff, virtual reality, and hypersonic travel, even an avowed atheist can, at minimum, understand and relate to one’s connection to personal, spiritual beliefs Most people, regardless of a history of abuse and neglect can relate to the connection to one’s kin.
But our awareness of a vital connection to the land itself has somehow been successfully wiped from our conscience.
If the devil’s most powerful tool is to distract us from important and real and true things, then he has most certainly been successful at distracting us from our connection to the land.
This is ultimately the theme of Wendell Berry’s body of work.
By “land,” if it hasn’t already been made clear, Berry isn’t referring to patriotism, or nationalism. Land means land, the literal dirt that your feet are standing on and that you call home.
Your land is a gift from God, and it deserves to be taken care of and cherished, and if you do violence to it, there are going to be consequences.
Berry’s argument is not one of environmentalism, and neither is it necessarily and anti-capitalist argument. It is that success is is most successful when it is achieved through natural means.
What has taken place in our world in the last two years is anything but natural. We have been mandated by our rulers to stay home from church because corporate worship and assembly might infect someone or cause us to be infected (separation from God).
We have been instructed and mandated to spend Thanksgiving and Christmas away from our families because preventing a case of COVID is more important than connecting with our loved ones (separation from Blood).
Our work has been categorized as either essential or unessential, and the unessential are cut off from their source of meaningful service to the community, displaced, evicted, foreclosed upon and locked away in a nursing home. In response to this oppression, many have chosen to vacate their home state for a freer state (separation from Land).
The Unsettling of America was a foretelling of what happens to a society when they forget who they are, what they are and even where they are, and it is for these reasons I believed reading this book would be so timely for us and our book club.
