As we enter into the final stretch of yet another tedious election season it is worth considering the effects of the patterns of speech we tend to reliably fall into every four years—and patterns we increasingly struggle to leave behind after every fourth November.
The obvious corollary to the notion that we are facing "the most important election in our lifetime" is that despair is authorized if the result should go against us. Or perhaps the point is that any device we might use can now be licit given the gravity of the threat. Either way, I expect that we allow faulty premises to slip by too easily and then find ourselves attempting to triumph in an ultimately unwinnable argument.
As I continue to go back over the works of Wendell Berry, it may be that his example can offer us something when confronted by such language.
Here is the first part of a key excerpt from an interview he gave several years ago for Orion magazine:
WB: You realize, don’t you, that you’ve won this argument?
TD: What is localism’s answer to refugees? To those whose homeland is not livable anymore? Whether that place is underwater, has turned to desert, was destroyed by American imperialism and our desire for more resources?
WB: You’ve won this argument. The argument for despair is impenetrable, it’s invulnerable. You got all the cards. You got the statistics, the science, the projections on your side. But then we’re still just sitting here with our hands hanging down, not doing anything.
One of the characteristics of the machine civilization is determinism. You’ll find plenty of people who’ll tell you there’s nothing you can do, it’s inevitable. You can’t make an organization to refute that; you’ve got to do it yourself. You’ve got to cleanse that mess out of your heart. Among our own people, the only communities who’ve done that have been the Amish. Their communities have survived.
Later:
TD: Do you think that kind of deep relationship with the nonhuman world is still within us? That we can tap into that?
WB: Oh, sure it is. It’s called sympathy. Sympathy is part of imagination. We still have that capacity in us. We could see the need for it, cultivate it, and recover it. After all, a thousand years is not very long.
TD: The next thousand years will be, though.
WB: The unfortunate people who are going to live for a thousand years are going to get pretty damn tired of it. But — oh, there’s a warbler out there on the grapevine.
TD: I saw him earlier. He’s eating your grapes.
WB: No, the grapes aren’t ripe. I don’t know that bird.
Guy Mendes: What’s the yellow bird?
WB: That’s a wild canary or goldfinch, male. Purple finches are eating at that feeder. So you see, the world is still furnishing beautiful birds and flowers, and it’s showing us human goodness, and it’s making us love each other. And we would be wrong if we don’t let ourselves be happy because of those things.
I had a student one time who told me she wasn’t going to be happy until everybody was happy. I was up there on the hillside one night, thinking about that girl, wondering what would be better use of adding one more unhappy person, and I made a poem:
O when the world’s at peace and every man is free
then will I go down unto my love.
O and I may go down several times before that.
In replying to one of the pieces we ran last week, Alastair Roberts noted that the faithful presence paradigm and the owned space (or, as one reader suggested, "owned institution" which might be superior) paradigm both run the risk in different ways of defining themselves negatively through identifying some group or party they have an interest in (either positively or oppositionally) and then self-consciously shaping their community in response to that need, either to be liked by some group of non-Christians they care about or to be disliked by some group of non-Christians they care about.
Often the move toward negative definition comes from the sense of determinism Berry identifies as being part of "the machine age." I expect that the annoying and regrettable language we use every four years ahead of an election is similarly part of that age. When we become convinced that something is "inevitable" we can, Saruman like, fool ourselves into siding with it. Or we can, on the other hand, convince ourselves that this supposed inevitability has the effect of suspending otherwise normal moral norms or practices of virtue. The illusion of inevitability becomes the justification for a Schmittian state of exception, if you are a bit of a nerd and want to put it that way.
Berry's reply rips the rug out from under those who argue in such ways. The voice that tells us some undesired trend or danger is inevitable is the voice of Giant Despair, and like Pilgrim we should resist his call. Berry offers one way we can do that.
This is the point of the passage that many might find bizarre in Jayber Crow near the end of the pivotal chapter in the book, "Born." As the chapter closes Jayber pledges himself to faithfully and chastely love Mattie Chatham, a woman that is not his wife. He does this because he has just left a late night dance at a Kentucky roadhouse where he saw Mattie's husband, Troy Chatham, dancing with a woman that wasn't Mattie. Worse still, when he and Troy made eye contact, Troy made the "OK" gesture to him, which Jayber took as some sign that Troy felt they were the same and so Jayber would understand what he was doing and perhaps even approve. But Jayber didn't understand and didn't approve. And so he found himself wrestling with what it would mean to actually be like Troy and also, more fearful still, what it would mean to actually be unlike Troy.
To begin, Jayber can see that Mattie is good and capable and possessed of a wonderful interior strength and resilience and much beauty besides. He wants to believe that such a woman could be part of a healthy community, a healthy marriage, and have a faithful husband. The conclusion Jayber comes to on a late night, drunken walk to Port William, which is quite plainly depicted as a spiritual new birth in the story, is that the only way to prove that a woman like Mattie could have a faithful husband is to be that faithful husband. And so Jayber's life changes: He dedicates himself to the community Mattie loves, he makes himself available to the life of the place and answerable to it, and he gives up his car and his on-again-off-again sexual relationship with Clydie Greatlow, a woman in a neighboring town. He becomes a kind of localist monk, you might say. And what does he get for all that? He "got to live with love in his heart."
He could, of course, have simply thrown his hands in the air in despair after seeing Troy with that woman. He could've turned against the world that made a man like Troy and encouraged him in his worst behaviors and that pressed in on the virtuous Mattie. He could've become a kind of activist radical. It also would have been easy, and even justifiable in some sense, for Jayber to take a nihilist turn after that night, perhaps throwing himself even more into his relationship with Clydie and removing himself even more from Mattie's beloved Port William. He might have looked at Troy that night and concluded that Mattie's virtue is just a fool's game—a game of self-denial and duty that earns you nothing and condemns you to disappointment and pain. If there is no cost to being like Troy and no chance of the world changing such that there was a cost to being like Troy... well, why not be like Troy? That's the question Jayber Crow is trying to answer.
The only answer is that the only way to have love in your life is to be unlike Troy. And living with love in your heart—genuine, self-sacrificing love devoted to the good of neighbor—is its own reward. Once you have that straight, nothing else matters. Once you've found the life of love and submitted to its law, nothing else matters. We might invert Jesus's haunting questions in the Gospel: If you gain your soul (through submission to the law of love and ultimately to its Giver) and lose the world... what of it? The man Jesus talks about who found the treasure in the field thought nothing of selling all else in order to lay hold of that. That, I think, is Berry's answer to the problem of despair—not to solve for despair, which can't really be done, but rather to find a better and more satisfying way to live within your particular responsibilities and agency, a way driven by love, whatever else may come.
Thus: If you tell yourself that a thing is inevitable and therefore you must do x or believe y, then you will do so and feel just in your choice. But in telling yourself such things you will virtually always be attaching artificial constraints to your own agency, simply dismissing out of hand whole ways of life that might be fully within your capacity or responsibility if you'd only attempt them, ways of live that will lead you to Life himself.