Wendell Berry. Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story. Counterpoint, 2025. $26.00. 176 pp.
In the days leading up to the Blitz in England during World War II, British politicians did what I think we would expect them to do: They braced for the breakdown of society as the stress of Germany’s bombing campaigns on London destroyed the structures that make day-to-day life stable and tolerable. What they found, instead, was that severe mental illness seemed to decline significantly during the Blitz. And though surprising, this is far from the only example of this phenomenon. When population groups respond to disaster by displaying greater cohesion and willingness to sacrifice, diminished rates of despair and withdrawal are the natural result.
Journalist Sebastian Junger has written Tribe to explain why that happens. Junger suggests that this is because human communities become stronger and more coherent when they face a collective threat that forces them to mobilize together in order to survive. Tribe is full of arguments and supporting evidence for this thesis.
The work of Wendell Berry intersects with Junger in odd and interesting ways. One line of thought that Junger flirts with but that is taken up more fully by figures like Daniel Quinn in his Ishmael books and James C. Scott in Against the Grain is that the specific erosion of communal life tends to coincide with the adoption of agriculture by a society.
Though he doesn’t make this exact claim, you could see a very similar argument in parts of Willie James Jennings’s book The Christian Imagination in his discussion of how pre-modern societies in certain parts of the world enjoy a knowledge of their local place that is unimaginable to anyone living in modern society. According to these authors, hunter-gatherer societies, due to their extreme precarity, tend to have remarkably thick social connection amongst members along with deep knowledge of their place, all of which contribute to a deep feeling of being at home within one’s life.
This is what makes Berry’s work such an interesting conversation partner for these thinkers, particularly his latest novel Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story. As other reviewers have already noted, the “novel” in this case is semi-autobiographical since Andy Catlett is the obvious stand-in for Berry in the fictional world of Port William and Marce is Andy’s grandfather, who himself has a striking resemblance to Berry’s own grandfather. (Wheeler Catlett, Marce’s son and Andy’s father, also has many resemblances to Berry’s father, John Berry.) Marce Catlett is also the least plot-driven of any of Berry’s novels, focusing much more on largely forgotten social norms that Marce gave his life to building and that Andy was able to observe in his early years. The primary concern of Marce Catlett is the Burley tobacco program that operated in Kentucky for many decades, creating a stable system that insured farmers received a fair rate for their harvest each year, making it easier for families to stay in farming and for small farming communities to maintain their life.
The existence of that program suggests something interesting that directly challenges the arguments of Junger and others like him. For Junger, social cohesion is found in the forced precarity of pre-modern life. The challenge for us today is how to find ways of enduring and mitigating the inevitable damage to common life brought about by our abandonment of tribal life, which is the effect of certain technological changes, starting with agriculture. Politics, then, is basically the art of damage control: How do we structure our life together to mitigate the irreparable social damage caused by technological innovation? Politics might be thought of as a defensive framework for holding back dystopia and despair. In this understanding, the cost of material comfort and technological innovation is eventual social collapse, and the task of politics is to reduce the scale of that breakdown.
Berry dissents from this view in a way that is distinctly Christian, even if Berry himself doesn’t take this line of thought as far as he might. Beneath Junger’s line of thought is an implicit claim that humans will not form thick communal bonds unless material circumstance forces it upon us. This is the human tragedy: The things that make individual life more secure and stable tend to tear down communal life. Thus there is an inverse relationship between healthy communal bonds and private material security. This is where Berry–and many in the Christian tradition–dissent.
To get to the point most directly, consider the work of the 17th-century political theorist Johannes Althusius. In the opening pages of his primary political treatise, Althusius makes the claim that political society exists for the sake of making the social relations that cannot be avoided into something mutually beneficial and delightful.
The argument is something like this: There is no way for individual people to subsist in the world entirely through the strength of their own work. We eat food we did not grow, wear clothing made from materials we did not harvest or process, and live in homes we did not build. Americans, perhaps, should be especially understanding of this argument, given our nation’s own attempts to refute Althusius: One need only read something like O Pioneers to recognize that Althusius is correct, as seen in the collapses into madness or economic failure that were so common on the American frontier when people genuinely did try to live entirely from their own labor. We can’t live without each other.
And yet often these unavoidable relationships are also unjust–one side of the relationship finds a way to exploit or abuse the other, thereby profiting from their neighbor’s suffering. This is the problem politics attempts to solve, according to Althusius. Because all members of political society are bound by the natural law, which is summarized most neatly in the command to love God and love neighbor, all members of a society should seek to order their relationships together to be beneficial to one another rather than being parasitic or exploitative.
For Christians, then, human beings are inherently social creatures, which means there is no such thing as a non-political life or a life where we do not need politics. Politics is simply what we do. Christian politics are politics that recognize this fact and discern how to structure our social relationships to make them mutually beneficial.
The Burley tobacco program so beloved by Berry and central to the story of Marce Catlett is best understood, then, as a model of Christian political wisdom. It was a synthetic project designed and sustained by human endeavor that ensured that all parties in a given relationship benefitted from the work produced by that relationship. In other words, it demonstrates that social cohesion is not exclusively a product of material precarity that forces people together. Social cohesion can also be created when people determine to pursue each other’s good in common and structure their relationships in ways that are mutually uplifting. (We will have to set aside the fact that in this particular case the consumers of the crop actually did not benefit due to the dangers of smoking. That point matters, but it is incidental to the argument, since one could just as well construct a program like the tobacco program that supported other, healthier crops.)
Though that argument might seem trivial to people steeped in centuries of democratic life in which this idea can be so taken for granted that its distinctiveness is almost forgotten, it is actually quite profound. At the heart of democratic liberalism is a willingness to live with imperfect political outcomes, provided we are able to (likewise imperfectly) structure our relationships to be mutually beneficial to a certain degree. Democratic systems by their very nature accept that lifting up every voice means that some political goods cannot be pursued since they would come at the cost of justice by depriving some people of what they are due in order to give others more than they need.
It is for this reason, of course, that the bonds of democratic liberalism must be renewed in each generation. For the agreements and norms and institutions that sustain our life together are under constant threat. Sometimes it takes tragedy to remind us that we need one another and to force us to act accordingly. Acknowledging this should not turn us into a kind of Jungerian fatalist about the possibilities for common life, however. Rather, it should turn us into civically engaged Christians who see the possibilities for common life, if we are willing to pursue it and think with wisdom and discretion about how to best realize the possible goods set before us. Marce Catlett shows us that such endeavors are possible, if only we will allow ourselves to be captured by the force of good stories that show us the way.