"We Approach Our World Like a Machine"

Wendell Berry. Image credit.

In Wendell Berry’s short story “The Wild Birds,” the character Burley Coulter says, “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 pandemic has revealed just how right Burley was. My own health can’t be separated from yours. Neither can it be separated from the health of the planet. From Scientific American: “[A] number of researchers today think that it is actually humanity’s destruction of biodiversity that creates the conditions for new viruses and diseases like COVID-19...to arise—with profound health and economic impacts in rich and poor countries alike.”

But just as the pandemic has revealed how interconnected we all are, it has also exposed the extent to which we have dis-integrated and dis-membered our society. We’re all members. But too few people know it.

As a writer and farmer, Wendell Berry has plowed the same plot of Kentucky hillside for nearly sixty years. The themes he tenderly brings to life in his novels and short stories—all of which are set in and around the fictional village of Port William, Kentucky—are the same he explores with rigor and subtlety in his nonfiction and poetry. His focus across all literary forms is community built on fidelity to neighbor, creation, and Creator.

Recently, Gracy Olmstead, a friend of Strong Towns, wrote an excellent piece about re-reading Berry’s classic essay, “Health Is Membership,” in light of the COVID-19 crisis. She begins, as Berry does, by reminding us that the word “health” stems from the same root as the word “whole.” To be healthy is to be whole. Therefore, full health—“health as wholeness”—can’t be considered in isolation from the health of the “culture, community, and ecology. It rejects the separation of family from family, as well as the specialized view of the self that severs body from soul—or even parts of our body from other parts.”

She goes on:

Yet we often like to see the various parts of our world as separate entities: churches, nuclear families, schools, grocery stores, office buildings, hospitals, assisted living centers and nursing homes, apartments and townhouses all subsist in detached zones...We approach our world like a machine: divorcing ourselves from every other part, pulling apart the various strands in the tapestry.

Gracy Olmstead. Image via Twitter.

We’ve written here at Strong Towns about the problems with approaching our places as merely complicated machines rather than as complex ecosystems. Olmstead says Americans mostly approve of this segregation, because we’ve successfully “streamlined” society. "But we cannot reclaim health without considering practices that hurt those beyond and around and underneath us: in the soil, the water, the air, the neighbor’s house, and beyond.”

Reading Olmstead’s piece I was reminded of how another Kentucky writer, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, described the “heresy of individualism,” which involves “thinking of oneself as a completely self-sufficient unit and asserting this imaginary ‘unit’ against all others.” (It’s worth noting that the word for “health” is also related to the English word “holiness.”)

Individualism is a peculiarly Western, and a notably modern, development. The late rhetorician Wayne Booth said the notion of the self as an “in-dividual” (literally “un-divided one”) is only a couple hundred years old, an invention of the enlightenment. In contrast, “people in all previous cultures were not seen as essentially independent, isolated units with totally independent values; rather, they were mysteriously complex persons overlapping with other persons in ways that made it legitimate to enforce certain kinds of responsibility to the community.” They were not “‘individuals’ at all but overlapping members one of another.” This is still true in strong-group cultures around the world today. In Japan, for example, the word for “human” is ningen, which betweens “between people.”

“I believe that the community—in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures—is the smallest unit of health and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms.”

— Wendell Berry, "Health Is Membership"

It’s all but impossible to truly consider oneself apart from others, but COVID-19 is showing us how hard some people will try. “Thinking of the world reductively, or in a radically individualistic way,” writes Olmstead, “makes it easy to put individual rights, freedom, or inconveniences before collective health—because we think of ourselves as isolated and autonomous, rather than as parts of a whole.” It’s this thinking that leads some to deride the wearing of masks as cowardice or political correctness, and to the willingness to sacrifice the sick and old for the sake of the economy:

“The parts are healthy insofar as they are joined harmoniously to the whole,” Berry writes. Putting economics before community, before health, is not the answer—even while ignoring economic unhealth and fragility is not the answer. “Healing . . . complicates the system by opening and restoring connections among the various parts—in this way restoring the ultimate simplicity of their union.”

Wendell Berry is my favorite writer. Gracy Olmstead is quickly becoming a favorite too, and she has written another excellent piece. I encourage you to go read it. And after you’ve read her article, make sure to check out the interview Chuck Marohn did with her on the Strong Towns podcast last October:

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