Book Review: The Unsettling of America

The Unsettling of America:
Culture and Agriculture
Wendell Berry
ISBN: 0-87156-877-2
Sierra Club Books
$13.95

Book reviews are usually done for relatively new books, yet
this book has aged like a locally grown, organic, and small, family run farm
wine.  So, thirty-one years later, this
book is being included for review because of both its impact on the agrarian movement
and all of its branches as well as the theme of this issue.

For a reviewer who is part of the first generation to fully
feel the effects of the unsettling described in this prophetic book, and to
review a book written to an audience who were my parent’s age (and written
before I was born), the immediacy of the book is still not lost.

The prophetic outcry and call-to-arms issued in this book
are not lost so many years later because the agricultural problems and cultural
devolution outlined in this book are far worse, and what Berry said would happen has unfortunately
happened beyond his most mad and liberated farming dreams.

Obesity is a national epidemic, killing thousands of
preventable diseases each year.  The food
sold in the supermarket is not food grown in the ground but agricultural
products mixed, packaged, and sold like chemicals formulas.  Humane treatment of the land is secondary to
the amount of B-12 fortified in a box of artificially flavored, high fructose corn
syrup glazed cereal.  Animals are penned
and treated like bacteria in a laboratory and pumped full of pharmaceuticals
that make there way into our bodies and have begun to create super-germs that
fortunately have been staved off (so far).

The entire book is quotable, yet one quotation in particular
sums up the breath of this tome:

"But is work something that we have a right to escape? And
can we escape it without impunity? We are probably the first entire people ever
to think so.  All the ancient wisdom that
has come down to us counsels otherwise. 
It tells us that work is necessary to us, as much as a part of our
condition as mortality; that good work is our salvation and our joy; that
shoddy or dishonest or self-serving work is our curse and our doom.  We have tried to escape the sweat and sorrow
promised in Genesis—only to find that, in order to do so, we must forswear
love and excellence, health and joy.

"Thus we can see growing out of our history a condition that
is physically dangerous, morally repugnant, ugly." (12-13)

Berry
wants to connect the body back to the land, for from dust we came and to dust
we shall return.  Our very bodies are
part of God’s creation, and this is counter-intuitive to most Christians, let
alone to all the powers of the world:

"The modern urban-industrial society is based on a series of
radical disconnections between body and soul, husband and wife, marriage and
community, community and the earth.  At
each of these points of disconnection the collaboration of corporation,
government and expert sets up a profit-making enterprise that results in the
further dismemberment and impoverishment of the Creation." (137)

For Berry,
the modern industrial societies of today are the true Dark Ages.  Knowledge and specialization are meaningless
when our bodies are crumbling, our food is poor quality, our culture is
fragmented, and life is undesirable and needs to be bombarded with
entertainment and consumption in order to placate ourselves in the culture we
created.  The "Dark Ages" were dark
because there was no knowledge, but researchers are beginning to realize that
though the people might not have had access to advanced scholarship and
Enlightenment reason they were far more advanced than our history books are
telling us.

What will the history books say of the mess we have
ourselves in?  They will most likely look
at us as a people who forgot what it was to be human, and depraved ourselves as
animals and slaves to machines.  Berry, and the subculture
that is founded in his work, argue for another way to be human, the ancient
way, the normal way.  And they argue for a part of society to say "no"
to the patterns of this world and be part of the margins. Berry’s
prophecy is a warning, and we are wise to heed it.