Humility

When faced with moral or environmental problems, the industrial culture searches for a set of rules that can guide us through a messy reality. Yet these codes arrogantly foreclose a complex reality and provide a false assurance of propriety; as such, they are ways of keeping the self buffered. Berry, following thinkers such as Ivan Illich and Charles Taylor, turns to the parable of the Good Samaritan for insight into the embodied, humble forms of love that would characterize a truly sustainable community. His essays practice such humility not by being deferential or meek, but by recognizing that the human condition requires us to choose and act from a position of irremediable ignorance. Worse still, we humans generally don’t act on the basis of our most careful, rational thought, but on a more gut level. The occasional, ad hoc nature of his essays evinces his efforts to walk along what he terms a “way of ignorance,” a way of approaching reality in light of our condition as finite persons. In addition, many of Berry’s essays are structured by binaries—boomers versus stickers, the industrial economy versus the Kingdom of God—that work to pry open the codes we use to foreclose reality.

Attention

Attention is a fitting place to begin a study of sustainable cultural forms because these forms depend, first of all, on members who are attentive to perceive and participate in the ongoing patterns of their places. Berry’s poetry, though, reveals that attention can be a strange thing; as he attends to his place, he finds himself attended to. Our digitally networked culture undermines these reciprocal dynamics of sustaining attention. Although the health of our communities depends on attention, we often fall back on the easier habits of distraction and surveillance. Our web of screens surrounds us with mirrors that reflect back to us our own desires and preferences, in the process cutting us off from the complex realities of our places. Berry’s poems, in contrast, model forms of attention that remind readers they are not the organizing subjects of the world. They portray his place and its members as what the philosopher Jean-Luc Marion calls “saturated phenomena,” beings who exist beyond his capacity to see, and so there is always more to which he is obligated to bear witness.

Sustaining Virtuous Forms

The introduction analyzes the different forms, values, and virtues that are embedded in an industrial economy and contrasts them with those that characterize a sustainable economy. Berry’s vision critiques the industrial grammar of specialization, competition, and capital that underlies our contemporary way of life, shaping areas as disparate as agriculture, medicine, education, science, architecture, aesthetics, and energy. Though such an approach has proven remarkably effective in some ways, particularly in its ability to solve isolated problems, Berry argues that these industrial forms of life contribute to disease, are vulnerable to disruption, and cause lasting damage to their environments. Instead, Berry challenges us to imagine more harmonious, formally complex solutions to our problems, and his standard for lasting, sustainable solutions is health. Through its formal order, health accounts for the one fundamental reality that an industrial logic seeks to ignore or conquer—death. Sustainable economies practice virtues of renewal and return, cultivating death so that it serves life in ways that are analogous to the organic fertility cycle. In this way, such economies enable their members to practice resurrection.

Practicing Resurrection

Communities characterized by the seven virtues that title the chapters of this book would inhabit their places in more sustainable, healthy ways than those marked by the fragmented, extractive mode characteristic of industrial cultures. Such virtuous communities would not provide a quick fix for the injustices and destruction of our present industrial economy, nor would they magically evade death and loss. Nevertheless, members of sustaining communities hold death in place, practice virtues of renewal, and lovingly give of themselves to others.

Fidelity

Our economy rewards those who are rootless; the well-paid Creative Class that Richard Florida celebrates thrives on geographic hyper-mobility. Yet such mobility encourages us to invest not in communities, but in our own résumés and careers, and it becomes tempting to leave behind our mistakes and the places they’ve damaged. Berry’s practice of careful revision, particularly evident in his early novels Nathan Coulter and A Place on Earth, demonstrates a patient faithfulness to develop his imaginative vision. In the case of Nathan Coulter, this entails reimagining the death of Nathan’s grandfather and making Nathan himself a more faithful inheritor of this loss. In A Place on Earth, Berry’s revisions similarly focus the novel on questions of fidelity. In the first edition, his prose provided too much explication and context for readers, exempting them from the difficult ignorance his characters endure. These revised novels do not sugarcoat the difficult work of fidelity, but they portray how fidelity enables individuals and communities to receive redemption in the midst of loss.

Gratitude

Because our digital environments so often reflect our own desires and selves back to us, because they tell us that we are at the center of the world, they can foster the perception that solving global problems depends on our own efforts. Maybe we donate money to a nonprofit, but all the while we remain removed or “buffered,” to use Charles Taylor’s term, from the actual problem. Central to the good feelings we get from helping others is the idea of credit; we want credit for the good that we do—whether in the form of recognition, honor, or self-satisfaction. Rather than merely questioning our motives for helping others or critiquing our tendency to aggrandize ourselves, Berry’s poetry proposes an even more radical shift. Instead of seeking credit, Berry’s poems acknowledge his unpayable debts. If who I am is ultimately dependent on a life I have been given, then serving others is not a choice that redounds to my credit; it’s an obligation that defines my very self. Despite our industrial economy’s pressures to work harder and accrue more credit to our names, Berry’s sabbath poems model a way of dwelling gratefully in a gift economy.

Convocation

According to Disney, you can “be who you wanna be/Anyone you wanna be.” Not only is this view of self-determination patently absurd, but it also erodes the communal dependencies that characterize healthy cultures. Berry’s fiction, however, invites us to listen in on Port William’s talk about its members, talk that defines each person through his or her relationships. The virtue of convocation that this community practices shapes individual identities in the context of their joint membership to their place and to each other. Readers may expect a free-spirited character like Burley Coulter to have little patience for the expectations and demands that his fellow community members place on him, but Burley learns to fulfill the requirements of others in his own distinctive way. As Burley answers these calls, he becomes the most vocal proponent for the Port William “membership”: “The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain’t in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don’t.” The call of another may be a requirement, even a burden, but it is also an invitation to participate in a communal, redemptive life.

Memory

Much modern technology claims to help us manage and conquer time, and yet as we use these technologies, we often become more hurried and frenetic. Rather than trying to control linear time, Berry’s fictional characters learn to participate in cyclic time. This notion of memory has rich theological and literary roots that reach to Augustine, Dante, and T. S. Eliot. Berry’s stories are often narrated by older characters looking back over their lives and stitching meaning together from disparate events; though memory is devalued in a culture where information is always accessible, it remains crucial to discerning complex coherence. Berry’s short story “Pray without Ceasing” exemplifies how this understanding of memory works out in the form of his story, enabling his characters to understand and love the whole pattern of which they are a part. Applying memory’s ability to perceive the whole pattern to ecological concerns may enable us to make decisions that are based not only on our immediate desires or the concerns of photogenic mammals, but also on the whole order. In this way, cultivating memory is a key counter cultural practice that can tune our affections to the larger pattern of creation and liberate love “beyond desire.”

Hope

Climate change discourse trades in complex statistical models that, in general, offer gloomy prognostications of inevitable disaster. The problems appear so complicated that our only hope seems to lie in massive engineering solutions that might alter global weather patterns or extract tons of garbage from our oceans. This discourse of statistics and big data either makes it seem as though individuals cannot do anything to affect the problems and hence leads to pessimism, or it optimistically implies that we don’t need to do anything because technocrats can fix the problems for us. Berry’s essays, however, sharply distinguish between optimism—which is an industrial trait founded on the belief that technological progress will continue to make our lives better—and hope—which is a virtue founded on specific examples of good work and good lives. He offers particular examples of locally adapted good work that can support authentic hope: the artist Harlan Hubbard, the poet William Carlos Williams, the farming communities of the Amish. While individual examples may seem inadequate to the scale of global problems, Michel de Certeau argues that the everyday practices these people and communities model have the power to subvert unjust systems.