Wendell Berry -- Plain speaker, plain writer, complicated thinker

In 1999 I interviewed the 'great moral essayist of our day' about what he thought was right and wrong about America and its culture. He was not happy and not optimistic.

Harvest of Good Thought

Wendell Berry, a plain-speaking farmer and writer, comes to Pittsburgh with a vision of a better America.

Nov. 21, 1999

Wendell Berry, a Kentucky farmer who has written 32 books of essays, poetry and prose, will speak in Pittsburgh tomorrow night. He has been called "the great moral essayist of our day" by the New York Review of Books.

In books like "The Unsettling of America" and “Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community" he angrily but lovingly criticizes America for its materialist economic system, its misdirected and amoral education system and its low-minded mass culture, not to mention its wasteful ways and its devaluation of hard work and community.

Hard to put in a political box, Berry, 65, is neither liberal, nor conservative, nor libertarian, nor populist. He doesn’t like big government, big corporations or runaway individualism.

He's against abortion and free trade, dislikes experts and elites of any kind, and has a near-religious faith in the benefits of preserving local economies and local communities -- especially farm communities.

Berry, whose family has lived and farmed in Kentucky for 200 years, has endeared himself to environmentalists for his calls for good, caring stewardship of both private and public land.

Less politically correct — and more morally ambiguous — in an age that has demonized tobacco he writes newspaper op-ed pieces defending government tobacco policies because they keep Kentucky's tobacco economy of 60,000 — tobacco farmers and their local communities — from going out of business.

Berry, who will speak at the Thomas Merton Center's annual award dinner tomorrow night at Duquesne University, was interviewed by the Post-Gazette's Bill Steigerwald.

Q: If you met somebody on a plane or a train and they asked what you did for a living, what would you say to them?

A: I would say that I'm a writer and a farmer. Not necessarily in that order, but I do make more of my living writing than I do farming.

Q: In the Irish Times on Nov. 13, they said you were a "cult figure" in America.

A: I don't think that's true.

Q: And that you were "a Kentucky farmer of tobacco, sheep and vegetables"...

A: No, heh, heh. That isn't true. I don't raise tobacco and I don't market vegetables. We have here a very rough hillside place, and we have a small flock of border cheviot sheep and some draft horses for use and we produce a good portion of our food and a good portion of our fuel from the woods. We operate a fairly elaborate subsistence economy.

Q: What is right about this country? What are the best parts of it?

A: Well, we've been incredibly blessed in a natural way by an abundance of fertile land and it's a country of great natural beauty. Of course, people describing their own country are prejudiced. All the people I know are my fellow Americans and I love some of them greatly and like a lot of them. Those people I meet I find a reason to like.

I think we're squandering a lot of what we've been given. But the natural gifts that this country has received are still astonishing. We have a great political inheritance that's specifically American that comes from the Founders and their predecessors and on down to us.

The traditions of political liberty and democracy, the Bill of Rights. All those things I'm tremendously proud of, and want to save.

Q: What is your favorite in the Bill of Rights?

A: Well I think the First Amendment is appropriately the first, and I mean the freedom of speech part. If you don't have that freedom, of course, you don't have any. That freedom of speech implies the possibility of self-correction and change.

If you can't derive the necessary corrections and changes from speech, you have to derive them from violence. And so I think the vigorous and responsible exercise of freedom of speech is fundamental.

Q: How do you define your politics?

A: I don't very often try to define myself politically. I often try to deal in detail and with just complexity with a number of issues.

I don't feel adequately described as a liberal or a conservative. I think that those labels are now virtually meaningless. I'm for conserving things that are worthy of being conserved and I'm for the maintenance of traditional liberties.

Q: Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, property — that kind of Founding Father stuff?

A: Property within limits. I don't think a few people ought to own everything. In economics, I’m a democrat. I believe in the democratic distribution of wealth and property.

Q: How is it that you have friends on both the left and the right — the Thomas Merton Center and environmentalists on one side and Chronicles magazine, the conservative culture magazine? How did that happen?

A: I have no idea. I think if you can make a friend, you ought to make a friend. I haven't purposely alienated anybody, although to take a stand on anything you risk losing friends and making enemies. I guess I've been willing to do that, although it’s not something I’ve ever done happily. I don t enjoy having enemies.

Q: In one of your books, you said you voted for Bill Clinton in 1992. Who have you voted for since 1980. Can you tick them off?

A: No, and l don’t know if I’d tell you if I could remember.

Q: OK. Who would you like to see become president in 2000 and why?

A: I haven't made up my mind. Again, if I had made up my mind, I don't know if I'd tell you or not.

Q: Who are your American political heroes? Jefferson seems like an obvious one.

A: Jefferson is a figure I return to in my thoughts, but I don't entirely approve of his rationalism, his progressivism. I think less of those things than he did.

But he was right, I think, about education. He was right about agriculture. He was right in his idea that the small farmers are the most precious part of a state — at least in my opinion he was right. But I've also admired and read about his great opposite, John Adams....

I think you may have the idea that I'm only some kind of political writer, but I'm not. My greatest heroes are not politicians.

Q: Who are your heroes then?

A: Poets, artists, farmers. People who have been exemplars in my own personal life. The politicians I mentioned are important to think about, but I'm not a politician and I can't model my life on politicians.

Q: You are critical of a lot of contemporary American society — the consumerism, some of the morality, certainly the economics, government policies....

A: My criticisms are fairly specific. Virtually all of them have to do with our disposition to waste things I think we're going to need, including moral capital.

Q: Can you elaborate on that — moral capital?

A: Well, I think that people are using up moral capital that they are not contributing very much to. I don't think we're paying enough attention to our children. We're not paying enough attention to our spouses. And I don't think we're paying enough attention to our communities.

You can't abuse your neighbor yourself and depend on other people to believe that you should love your neighbor as yourself. That's what I mean by using up moral capital.

Q: When you refer to these "wasters of moral capital," who are they specifically? Hollywood, big corporations ...?

A: I don't see movies very often. I don't see television, except by accident. What I see doesn't impress me as being worth very much in any respect.

Q: You'd really be annoyed if you saw a lot of it.

A: I don't try to see it, but what I can't help seeing is informative enough of the quality of it. You have to see it in places — barber shops and other people's houses. It's at a pretty low ebb. The public media are famous for their violence. And from the testimony I hear, video games are. Children's games. That’s a terrible way for a culture to proceed, it seems to me.

Q: Obviously you don't think there's some giant conspiracy of people who've decided this?

A: No, I don't think it's a conspiracy. Nobody has decided on this, people have just decided to reduce everything to the lowest common denominator, because it's less strenuous that way, or it's easier that way, or it's more profitable that way.

If you want to be true to human nature in the highest sense, you've got to stretch. And you've got to urge your children and students to stretch. If you're a politician, and you want to be true to that kind of human nature, you've got to urge your constituents to stretch. You can't just cater to their whims and vices.

Q: Is there a solution to the problems you see?

A: I don't have any master plan or big solution and I would be deeply suspicious of anybody who claimed to have a master plan or big solution. I don't think that's how a person should work.

Q: What are your core principles that guide what you think about sex or community or the economy or the land?

A: My core principles are to speak as plainly as I can and to try to keep my word as best I can and to waste as little as I can and to be as peaceable as I can.

Q: Are you trying to urge people to live the kind of lifestyle that you and your family have lived?

A: No. I'm not offering myself as a model to anybody. I'm doing my work, that's all.

Q: What do you have to say to those people who live in the suburbs of Pittsburgh or in Manhattan?

A: I'm a country person. I see that the country is being badly mistreated by economic policies, agricultural policies, that cause the land to be polluted and wasted and country people to be impoverished. An economy that pays people in the land-using economy too little for their work.

What I would ask of the people in cities and suburbs is to take responsibility for the proxies they've given to other people to raise food and produce other products for them, and learn something about what's involved and try to understand their personal economy and take responsibility for it. It's a big order, but it's a necessary thing.

Q: Think about where their food comes from....

A: Know where their food comes from. Not think about it, know. Learn. And if they attempt to do it, they'll find out that it's virtually impossible to learn where all their products come from.They would have great difficulty tracing them back to the land-based economies where they originate, in mines and forests and farms.

Q: On the issue of tobacco, you say you don't farm it but...

A: I've written an essay on tobacco and I think the thing for me to do is to refer you to it. I'm not going to talk briefly about tobacco because it's a complex subject and it's easy to sensationalize. If you want to know what I think about it, you can read my essay "The Problem of Tobacco" (in "Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community").

Q: Are you generally optimistic about the future?

A: No, I don't think there's any reason to be optimistic. I think there's plenty of reason to be hopeful, because there are examples of good work to be found.