Protecting the Common Good

Mentalities of limits and moderation foster individual identity as well as social cohesion to sustain both culture and soil. French sociologist Émile Durkheim criticized modern society’s “malady of infinite aspiration” that trades cultural renewal for a fixation on replacement and perpetual commercial agitation to acquire things. In his foreword to Of the Land and the Spirit (2008), an anthology of Walter, Lord Northbourne’s writings on ecology and religion, Berry (like Lord Northbourne) points to perennialist matters of ultimate purpose as expressed by Jesus to, “[S]eek first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness...,” in order to be provided food, drink, and clothing. Berry suggests that mastery of agriculture, husbandry, weaving, and other skills are assumed in this context, and that Jesus demonstrated faith by prayerful service to others in feeding and healing them. In these ways, literary, artistic, social, and vocational endeavors in any age represent harvests in which anyone can participate. A wide range of sustainable farming initiatives have been advocated and implemented in recent decades with varying success. Those with prospect for enduring progressive change incorporate core elements of crop rotations for soil health; improved conservation through reduced tillage and terracing of slopes; and policies that reward farmers for these practices.

Amidst the mistral winds of June 1888, Vincent van Gogh painted his Harvest (Wheat Fields) series of ten paintings which provided him opportunity to experiment with color and technique. He worked quickly, “just like the harvester, …intent only on the reaping,” and blended striking hues of gold, copper, and bronze with yellow, red, and brown. The lush expressionistic masterpiece Wheat Field with a Reaper he painted in July 1889, gleams with a swirling sea of grain in impastoed layers of yellow-orange with white highlights seen in many of his Saint-Rémy paintings. A benevolent sun stands against a sky of aquamarine and seems to shine from the canvas uninterrupted by shadow or shade. The view is from the upper story of the building where van Gogh had sought recovery and shows the field’s gray-white boundary wall without any sense of confinement. Van Gogh wrote of its “vague figure toiling away… in broad daylight with a sun flooding everything with a light of pure gold,” as a modernist expression of “sacred realism” with calm, religious hope in the face of death and his own demise.

Association of grain with life suggested humanity’s vulnerability and resiliency in passionate reds and golds composed in balanced synthesis with the greenery and browns of verdant earth. These colors he complemented by mysterious orange and blue tones of the cosmos—a palette strikingly similar to his The Resurrection of Lazarus (1890). In spite of grain’s susceptibility to ruin from fire and wind, or harvest with scythe and sickle, the fields serenely endured as tangible evidence of incomparable beauty, fecundity, and energy of the divine order. The death reaper fulfilled the sower’s purpose in the grand mysterious cycle of life.

Johann Raphael Wehle, And They Followed Him (1900), Lithograph on cardboard, 4 x 6 inches, Columbia Heritage Collection

 Tolstoy’s exposition on aesthetics in What is Art? (1897) embraces a wide range of creative expression from painting and sculpture to literature, folklore, and liturgy. He characterizes their highest forms as conveyance of the makers’ regard for human dignity and the natural world in ways that astonish, mystify, and benefit the common good. That Tolstoy points to Millet, Lhermitte, Gogol, and Pushkin as aesthetic exemplars is significant for their use of agrarian themes to present such universal values. Great painting and writing express struggle and beauty through memorable associations with ideas, people, and places. Such understanding is at risk in contemporary society at once smart and ignorant. Information technologies can be exploited to distraction for endless browsing and displace contemplation of relationships to the earth and to others. Unprecedented threats to wellbeing loom if humanity’s commons of seed for harvest becomes unalterably modified and proprietary. Enduring individual and societal flourishing in any age, as Ruskin observed when considering a sheaf of grain, requires the discpline of work and rectitude. The beneficial middle way tempers entreprenership and technology through hard decisions protecting the common good. 

The characters who inhabit Tolstoy’s stories have heroic capacity, even when cast as loners and losers. They walk familiar paths to work together in the fields and better understand the people and world around them. Among the most stirring moments in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is when landlord Konstantin Levin, who sought the full life of mind, love, and labor, joins a scythe-wielding brigade in an afternoon of great satisfaction: “He… wished for nothing, but not to be left behind the peasants, and to do his work as well as possible.” In a day of tension over progressive approaches to a more sustainable future, ancestral regard and considerations of Ruth and Boaz, muzhik harvesters, and Port William farmers offer restorative interpretations of land use and the human prospect.

     Praise God for the harvest of farm and field,

     Praise God for the people who gather their yield,

     The long hours of labor, the skills of the team,

     The patience of science, the power of machine.

     Praise God for the harvest of conflict and love,

     For leaders and people to struggle to serve,

     To conquer oppression, earth’s plenty increase,

     And gather God’s harvest of justice and peace.

     —Brian Wren, “Praise God for the Harvest” (1968)

Determining and Affirming Values of Care

Cultural tensions rise with proliferating perils of climate change, global food security needs, and concern about impacts on soil biomes and wildlife. Establishing balance involves mediation of the ancient urges for veneration and exploitation, and consideration of technocratic limits and trade-offs in agricultural improvement. Soil scientists estimate that no-till chemical intensive farming has reduced erosion on American farms by 40% while also creating conditions for the emergence of herbicide-resistant weeds. Yet less tillage in such systems reduces American diesel consumption by two-thirds for some 280 million gallons of annual savings. For Promethian bioentrepreneurs CRISPR gene modification and related technologies offer prospect of crop improvement although prominent biologists acknowledge that cellular arrangements can be altered in ways that are poorly understood. Reengineering life forms raises uneasy questions about the complicated relationships between the natural and unnatural, and theological distinctions between obeying God and playing God, or between earthly tenancy and proprietorship. Theoretical physicist Richard Feynman likened the complexities of modern science to a cosmic chess game at which we are only observers with limited capacity to predict outcomes regardless of worthy intentions.

Wendell Berry explores these tensions and offers a fertile field of practical recommendations for how anyone can apply the useful habits of memory, attention, and reverence. He recognizes the primacy of earth care to support all other human endeavors, and likens this to holy service: “The most exemplary nature is that of the topsoil. It is very Christ-like in its passivity and beneficence, and in the penetrating energy that issues out of its peaceableness. It increases by experience, by the passage of seasons over it, growth rising out of it and returning to it…. It keeps the past, not as history or memory, but as richness, new possibility.” In this sense the urgent partisanship in political and economic affairs becomes secondary to stewardship of land and life, and the function of healthy community for enduring fulfillment.

Whether on a Midwest farm or in a Chicago high-rise, one may live with fidelity to place by learning and practicing domestic arts and community building. Family care and homemaking need not require moving “back to the land,” though new paradigms for remote working are faciliating rural residency. In any setting folks can summon moral courage to eat together, shop locally to support practicioners of local crafts, connect young people to worthwhile endeavors, and affirm the values of environmental care. Policies and practice of self-reliance and promotion of the common good that characterized republicanism in the ancient world are relevant more than ever in an era of threatened landscapes, endangered species, and marginalized labor. Ethicist Julie Crouse characterizes Berry’s ongoing literary conversation about these matters as a “sacred harvest” for renewing the common good by promotion of connections among people, landscapes, and spirituality. In the context of farm work for participation in the market economy, or mental work for healthy imagination and discernment, Berry calls the external standard of such endeavors the “Great Economy,” or the “Kingdom of God.” The goal is to promote abiding, abundant harvests and the longterm wellbeing of individuals in community. In spite of dreams of space colonization, exploration of extraterrestial neighbors near and far has shown that, in the words of science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, “There is no Planet B.”

Berry has explored ideas of earth care most fully in his novels and short stories about the Coulter, Catlett, Branch, and other families. They dwell together in imaginary Port William, for which the author’s native Port Royal, Kentucky, serves as a touchstone. The place is not a utopian metaphor as its residents navigate with failure and success through cross-currents of old ways and modernity’s encroachments and benefits. In “That Distant Land” (1965), a rural neighborhood crew gathers for tobacco harvest in the sweltering August heat, and Berry casts a scene that resembles field laborers of ancient times: “They dove into the work, maintaining the same pressing rhythm from one end of the row to the other, and yet they worked well, as smoothly and precisely as dancers. To see them moving side by side against the standing crop, leaving it fallen, the field changed, behind them, was maybe like watching Homeric soldiers going into battle. It was momentous and beautiful and touchingly mortal.” The classical allusion is not incidental. In “The Agrarian Standard” (2002), Berry invokes lines from Virgil’s Fourth Georgic about “an old Cilician” who cares for a small plot of land that produces abundantly because of an ethic “rooted in mystery and sanctity” that values giving back to the health of the soil—an affectionate agarian stewardship for the sake of present and unborn generations.

Meaning-making in classical thought came through an honorable paideia of civic engagement and reflection. Intellect detached from action risks loss, and empathy apart from action is purposeless. Apparent in literature and art from Virgil and Horace to British Georgics, French Rustics, and Russian Itinerants, a holistic life of labor—such as Port Royal harvesting, craft,  and community, promotes personal as well as cooperative wellbeing. A related education grounded in distinctly local connectedness through stories and art, mealtime fellowship and field study offers prospect of cultural renewal.