POLITICS

I hope you will first take the time to watch this interview with Wendell Berry. It will be worth it. If only to hear an old master's gravelly voice and to see his watery eyes as he reads aloud the words he has written.

I believe that nearly every decision we make each day is a political one. I waffle sometimes on this. Maybe it is an overstatement. Maybe not. The fact is, public policies affect everything about our lives whether we are aware of them or not. If we are not aware of such things, then this non-decision is still a political choice -- a choice to not be engaged. I am not just talking about overtly political things like bumper stickers and yard signs and Facebook posts. I am talking about the mundane decisions we make about where we shop, what we eat, what we wear, what we see and what we ignore, and even what we ask of our children. Realizing that each of our decisions are political is to acknowledge that everything we do each day is dependent upon other people and that each of our choices affects other real human beings and other real places in the world.

I can think of no other writer who lives this acknowledgement out through his art as much and as well as Wendell Berry. It begs a question, in fact. What exactly is the responsibility of the writer in the public sphere? Does the art alone speak for itself? Or does the creator of it bear some burden of using her craft and notoriety to further along a more public discourse?  I cannot answer these questions, but they are good thoughts on which to chew sometimes. There are other writers who produce far more overtly political work -- I am thinking here of Berry's fiction; his nonfiction is as straightforwardly political as can be done -- but who largely choose to retreat from the world and to disengage from discussion of the issues raised in their writing, much less to participate in any activism centered around them. I concede that a very large part of the creative process involves a retreat into oneself, a solitude that forces disengagement and that this is both necessary and important. Yet for Wendell Berry, there is no other choice than "to make common cause with [his] place." Which, for him, means that if he sees that something is happening to his place that should not be, he has to do something about it, not only through his words, but also through deliberate action. It is an obligation that stems from his faithfulness to the place and to his neighbors. It is this faithfulness that is expressed so beautifully and in all of its complexity in his stories about the fictional community of Port William. To make such a choice, to live in fidelity with a place, is to take up a certain obligation.

"We don't have a right to ask whether we're going to succeed or not. The only question we have the right to ask is, what's the right thing to do? What does the earth require of us if we want to continue to live on it."

The obligation comes also from something else for Berry. He connects clearly here his writing and his activism and the daily choices he makes with a belief in something larger than himself that drives him and drives his work.

"People of religious faith know that the world is maintained everyday by the same force that created it. It's an article of my faith and belief that all creatures live by breathing God's breath and participating in His spirit. And this means that the whole thing is holy, the whole shooting match. There are no sacred and unsacred places, there are only sacred and desecrated places."

He may speak gently and his fiction and poetry oftentimes follow a quiet and soothing rhythm, but as he expresses in this conversation and as his work and life show plainly, he is actually asking us to see the world in a radical way. He explains that he has tried through his writing to "map out the grounds of a legitimate and authentic hope." This is no easy thing. Berry speaks forcefully here of the sheer difficulty of it, the unknowing that comes with it, and the immense patience that is required.

A deliberate choice that Berry made long ago was to come back to a certain place, a rural place. And those of us who live in rural places know what it means to choose to stay in those places. What Wendell Berry says about this explains why that choice is also a political one.

"The fact that we in our families know the history of people having to leave the country because they couldn't make a living there is the history of rural America. But that they left because they couldn't make a living is an indictment of our land policies. The idea that you have to go somewhere else, that you have to leave a fertile country in order to make a living, is preposterous. And it's the result of the wrong idea of what we mean by making a living in the first place. To make a living is not to make a killing, it's to have enough."

Follow that last sentence all the way to its philosophical endpoint, and it changes everything.