I’ll be completely honest, I did not finish this book entirely, as I didn’t agree with many of Wendell Berry’s conclusions. However, that being said, there’s plenty of stuff I do find very interesting that deserves highlighting.

Several notes from reading just a bit of Wendell Berry’s Unsettling of America

• Berry meant for this book to be a “criticism of modern or orthodox agriculture” but it ended up as more of a “review,” as if agriculture was to be ever “finished” so would human society.
• Criticism requires a subject that is “finished” – interesting idea
• Farmers began being taken for granted in the 1970s, and measures were being taken to find new work for excess farmers
• Big farmers were supposed to get bigger, which led to catastrophe.
• Arable land was already in trouble when the second edition of this tome released in 1986. Berry saw a day where farmers would have to rent from big business to farm. We’re not there fortunately, not yet…
• To “succeed” means joining the class of the exploiters.

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Some quotes:

“One of the peculiarities of the white race’s presence in America is how little intention has been applied to it. As a people, wherever we have been, we have never really intended to be.” – Wendell Berry

“The members of any established people or group or community sooner or later… become the designated victims of an utterly ruthless, officially sanctioned and subsidized exploitation.” – Wendell Berry

“We are divided between exploitation and nurture… a division not only between persons but also within persons.” – Wendell Berry

“We are all to some extent the products of an exploitative society, and it would be foolish and self defeating to pretend that we do not bear its stamp.” – Wendell Berry

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More notes from the Unsettling of America, the second half of chapter one and all of chapter two…

We can’t let the fertility of our soil become an unrenewable resource like oil or coal. “It may not happen. It need not happen.  But it is necessary to recognize that it can happen “

“Food is not a weapon.”

I hate to say it, and I was certainly thinking this at the time: it most certainly is a weapon, but I agree that it shouldn’t be. It’s manipulated by a handful of corporations, and so much is needlessly wasted while millions starve.

Berry on salesmanship: “The craft of persuading people to buy what they do not need, and do not want, for more than it is worth. ” 

“We have lost sight of the profound communion – even the union – of the inner with the outer life. “

“Power can be disposed morally or harmlessly only by thoroughly unified characters and communities.”

This is an ideal, which I don’t think is realistic unless you happen to have truly outstanding individuals willing to take up either political office or other positions of high standing in community hierarchies. Another profound idea worth exploring nonetheless.

“… wanting good government in their states, they first established order in their own families; wanting order in the home, they first disciplined themselves…” Confucius, the Great Digest

“People who thus set their lives against destruction have necessarily confronted in themselves the absurdity that they have recognized in their society. They have first observed the tendency of modern organizations to perform in opposition to their stated purposes.”

“The good of the whole of creation, the world and all its creatures together, is never a consideration because it is never thought of; our culture now simply lacks the means for thinking of it.”

A common problem I tend to have with Berry in his work are his sweeping generalizations. To say it is never a consideration is a vast overstatement. However, it is the state of mind for many laymen who live in urban and suburban areas never concerning themselves with the nature of agriculture and country life. So while he’s not wrong in his idea, he states it in such absolute terms to such a degree that it sounds absurd even when the message he’s trying to get across is a good one.

I give Berry credit for some keen observations that are surprisingly prescient even when this book was originally written in the late 1970’s.

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Being a Vermont resident since September 2020, I was thrilled to see Wendell Berry quote a farmer from Wolcott, Vermont. His name was David Budbill, and I expect he is long gone by now. But he offered up an interesting idea that Berry shared from their conversation. 

Budbill suggests, in the 1970s, that city dwellers were already taking “the Terrarium view of the World: nature always at a distance under glass. “ 

Especially here in Vermont in 2022, I’ve noticed that many former farm fields lay “abandoned to weeds and bushes” because they are “too steep or stony or small-featured to be farmed with big equipment.” 

According to Budbill and Berry, this has been a problem in Vermont for fifty years now…

“Man can and has survived without petroleum, but he can not live without food ” – former assistant secretary Richard E. Bell

That quote seems incredibly obvious and self-evident, but Berry’s point is that people were thinking more about the future of oil (he wrote this during the oil crisis of the 70s) and not paying attention to the industrialization of agriculture… in that small farms were being bought up or squeezed out. This is one of the major themes of Berry’s book; he sees this development as a major dilemma.

This last quote is particularly fascinating.

“Food is a cultural product; it cannot be produced by technology alone. ” – Wendell Berry

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Lots of notes from just the first half or so of Chapter 5 of “The Unsettling of America” – lots of potential topics to write on in here.

• The domestication of absence
• Cottage industries 
• Homes once were not generalized, but rather specialized. 
• Having a “generalized sense of worldly whereabouts” in the modern world
• The idea of the “vagrant Sovereign” concept, which started with European colonialism 
• The idea of a “manufactured paradise” 

Some Wendell Berry quotes to consider:

• “Is our nest a place of consumption only or is it also a place of production?”
• “Having placed ourselves in charge of Creation, we began to mechanize both the Creation itself and our conception of it.  We began to see the whole Creation merely as raw material,  to be transformed by machines into a manufactured Paradise.”
• “The industrial Paradise is a fantasy in the minds of the privileged and the powerful; the reality is a shambles…”
• “We long ago gave up the wish to have things that were adequate or even excellent; we have preferred instead to have things that were up to date. “
• “When supposed future needs are used to justify misbehavior in the present,  as is the tendency with us, then we are both perverting the present and diminishing the future.”

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“Nowhere is there a question of the advisability of basing so large an enterprise [as factory farming] on credit, or the influence of routine indebtedness on a people’s character. Nowhere is there a suspicion that there might be any worth in the old rural virtues of solvency and thrift.” – WB on the 1970s “agricultural revolution”

“The genius of American farm experts… they can take a solution and divide it neatly into two problems.”

“Such ideals as honesty or generosity or gentleness or symmetry do indeed have an influence on the future, but we recognize them from what they must resist; they survive in culture, in community, and in the characters of people. They are known and valued not because they have been modeled, but because they have been exemplified. The specialist, on the other hand, is interested only in the model, never the example… interested in the future… not in its history.”

“If human values are removed from production, how can they be preserved in consumption? How can we value our lives if we devalue them in making a living?”

This is an extremely good point, and while I see Berry as going WAY overboard in his own ways, he’s not wrong.

“If we do not live where we work, and when we work, we are wasting our lives, and our work too.” – Wendell Berry

I actually sort of have no choice but to agree with this, because well, I do live where I work, and I have for over a decade.

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Notes from Chapter 6 of Unsettling of America

“Energy is eternal delight.” – William Blake

“The length of our vision is our moral boundary.” Wendell Berry 

“The curious idea of a destructible infinity…” hmm…

“The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.” – Wendell Berry

“There is an inescapable kinship between farming and art, for farming depends as much on character, devotion, imagination, and the sense of structure, as on knowledge. It is a practical art.” Wendell Berry

“Can we degrade all forms of essential work and yet expect arts and graces to flourish on weekends?” – Wendell Berry. [Good question, sir.]

This is a good book, but in this chapter, there was an underlying theme of “worship” and “mystery” which threw me for a loop. 

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From Chapter 7:

“The Creation is bounteous and mysterious, and humanity is only a part of it – not its equal, much less its master.” – Berry

“A human has no right to destroy what he did not create.” – Berry (I find this a very interesting statement.)

“Intellectually, we know that these patterns of interdependence exist; we understand them better now perhaps than we ever have before; yet modern social and cultural patterns contradict them and make it difficult or impossible to honor them in practice.” – Wendell Berry

… I got frustrated with some things Berry said after this, and rather than deliberate on why, I’ll just end the notes here.