The Anger of Marilynne Robinson

Though rarely categorized as angry, Marilynne Robinson exudes a righteous wrath in Mother Country as she calls Great Britain to task for the nuclear plant at Sellafield. But is anger the appropriate response to such an outrage, for her or for us?

By Justin Hawkins

When Marilynne Robinson is angry, her voice does not betray it. Her public lectures and her classroom demeanor are unfailingly marked by a gentle tone in desperate need of amplification, and a reticence to assert her own physicality. One wonders whether she so admires the collected works of various long-deceased historical personages simply because it is easier to hide oneself behind those enormous volumes when they are taken behind a lectern. She once confessed in an interview “I like to be as forgetful of my own physical being as I can.” We know her to be witty, sardonic, even eviscerating of some conspicuous foolishness—but not angry.

But in Mother Country, Marilynne Robinson is angry by her own admission, and with her own permission. She is angry that the Sellafield nuclear waste processing plant continues to spew radioactive material into the environment around it. She is angry that both American and British journalists mention in passing but do not decry this world-historic environmental catastrophe. She is angry that Greenpeace is muted in its critiques of it. She is angry that the ostensibly socialist British government has given to all onlookers yet another case study against public governance because it has not shown itself to be any better at self-regulation and democratic accountability than any hedge fund might be. Marilynne Robinson is angry, the world is full of legitimate objects of that ire, and Mother Country tramples out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.

To describe a thinker as angry is commonly thought to assign to them some vice, usually for the purpose of dismissing their concerns as hysterical, unmeasured, illogical. When we overhear the poet bidding the Muse to “sing of the rage of Achilles,” we know we are dealing with a volatile and likely unphilosophic man. This strategy is infamous yet storied when applied to women (“that nasty woman”) and African Americans (“the angry black man”). To equate anger with vice is a particular temptation for Christians since, as James the brother of Jesus tells us, “the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God” (James 1:20). But against this interpretation stands that of Aquinas who, in a long treatment of the vice of anger, offers this suggestive loophole: “if one is angry in accordance with right reason, one’s anger is deserving of praise.” Immoderate anger is impermissible. Unwarranted anger is impermissible. But anger in moderation, under the control of reason, incited against some grave evil, is not only permitted but praiseworthy. We ought, in Aquinas’s estimation, to esteem and emulate the rightly angry man, or woman, or African American. For Aquinas, the paradigm of the rightly-angry one, and the paradigm of every other properly ordered habit, is Jesus, the very one who twice snorts with anger at the graveside of Lazarus. The ravages of death, John the Evangelist teaches us, are the rightful object of anger both human and divine.

Sellafield belches enormous amounts of radioactive waste into its environs. Those same environs are populated with a citizenry that reports rates of cancer and fetal deformities orders of magnitude greater than the rest of the country.

The object of Robinson’s anger is Sellafield, a nuclear waste processing plant that operates to this day, three decades after she inveighed against it. There nuclear waste is imported from around the world and broken down into its component parts, from which plutonium and uranium are extracted. The remainder is dumped into the Irish Sea. These facts have kindled her anger, and she apologizes for that anger in both the modern and the ancient Greek sense of the word: “my writing has perhaps taken too much of the stain of my anger and disappointments. I must ask the reader to pardon and assist me, by always keeping Sellafield in mind—Sellafield, which pours waste plutonium into the world’s natural environments, and bomb-grade plutonium into the world’s political environments. For money.”

Beyond dispute are these facts. Sellafield belches enormous amounts of radioactive waste into its environs. Those same environs are populated with a citizenry that reports rates of cancer and fetal deformities orders of magnitude greater than the rest of the country. The question at issue is simply whether this correlation does, in fact, imply some causation. Robinson insists that it does, and her critics insist that it does not. But when some citizens of Cumbria, where Sellafield is located, took sand from the beach and hurled it at the door of 10 Downing Street in protest against the government’s policies there, it was removed not by the typical cleaning crew, but by workers in hazmat suits. By their protective gear you shall know them. So Robinson clipped and, under an uncharacteristic spell of paranoia, smuggled those newspaper clippings out of the country back to America, where she summarized them hastily into an article published in Harpers in 1985: “Bad News From Britain: Dangerous Chemicals, Awful Silence.” That essay is the firstfruits of Mother Country.

Like many of Robinson’s works, the book contains no chapters, but is divided into two large sections. In the first, Robinson sees the morally outrageous policy of the British government defiling themselves at Sellafield for sordid gain as simply the most recent chapter in a long history of failures of British welfare policy. There is a family resemblance and a genealogical inheritance between “allowing the children to eat plutonium,” as she memorably puts it, and the centuries-old Poor Law, which is nothing less than “the core of British culture.” The Poor Law immobilized the destitute in the parishes of their birth, created poorhouses, institutionalized child labor, and depressed wages across the entire country. Part One is an extended social history of this law and its effects in service of a genealogy of Sellafield. Nations, like individuals, can acquire virtues and vices by long habituation. Sellafield embodies the national vice of sacrificing the health and safety of the British poor for the sake of the British GDP, the long training in which vice was introduced by the Poor Law. Part Two consists in the lurid details of Sellafield itself, taken mostly from those very newspaper clippings she secreted out of the United Kingdom to proclaim to the Americans. The combination of these two large parts of the book has the effect of decrying Sellafield by placing it in the long historical context of the British welfare state.

One wonders what the confidence threshold of harmlessness ought to be before one consents to undertaking such an irreversible course of action.

The Americans for whom Robinson wrote Mother Country have likely never heard of Sellafield. But they have heard of Chernobyl. When I visited the Ukraine at the age of fifteen, the 1986 accident at Chernobyl was sufficiently distant to be a punch line among the Ukrainians: “How do you know the directions to Chernobyl? Just drive north until your skin starts to glow.” “I can count on my fingers the number of times I have visited Chernobyl: thirteen.” But a punchline for the Ukrainians was a boon for Sellafield, because the meltdown at Chernobyl drew attention away from earlier, less catastrophic, nuclear power plant accidents. When Chernobyl became the worst nuclear accident in history, it took that title away from the 1957 fire at the Windscale nuclear plant in Great Britain. Windscale has since been renamed Sellafield. But nobody’s skin glowed at Windscale. Therefore, the defenders of Sellafield can argue: how bad can it be? It was no Chernobyl.

The 2019 HBO miniseries Chernobyl was not produced under the current administration by accident. It is an extended parable of what happens when bureaucratic face-saving, the propagandizing of science, and civilizational yes-manning face the brute realities of the physical world. No stretch of the imagination was required to see here a veiled critique of the Trump Administration, especially in the climactic speech of the protagonist and truth-telling scientist Valery Legasov before the Soviet investigating body: “[our secrets and our lies] are practically what defines us. When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember that it is still there, but it is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.” An administration puts out enough alternative facts, and pretty soon your citizens’ skin will start to glow.

For all the much-heralded success of that series, it finally succumbs to a kind of soteriology of the hard sciences. The truth-telling scientist is the hero who, with charts and graphs aplenty, brings the corrupt government to repentance. And the history books teach us that this was precisely the role that Prof. Legasov played for Chernobyl. But there would be no scientific vindicator for Robinson’s claims. The reviews of Mother Country were, in her own words, almost universally “horrible, nasty, ghastly awful.” “Here in Britain we are all criminals,” wrote Dr. M.F. Perutz, winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, summarizing Robinson’s complaint against the British people in the New York Review of Books. But, he would continue, the long history of British disdain for the poor was matched by American disdain for them (“Has she never read John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath?” he inquires of the future instructor at the Iowa Workshop) and by more widespread European disdain for the poor as well. Perutz’s argument here seems to be that particularly acute instances of malice can be mitigated by a background milieu of malice, just like the radiation contagion from Sellafield was drowned out by the background radiation from Chernobyl and from the sun.

Robinson’s concerns thus dismissed, Perutz concludes by dismissing her person: “she should have stuck to writing novels.” Decades later, precisely this line of retort continues. Donald Wittman, economist at UC Santa Cruz, responded to Robinson just this year with eerie similarity to Perutz: “I suggest that novelists should not write essays on economics and that economists should not write essays on literature.” The condescension from these replies oozes like plutonium into the Irish Sea—low grade yet ubiquitous, sufficiently incidental to be deniable by the scientist but palpable to the humanist. This reply occasioned its own series of replies from other impressively credentialed scientists who could not reach consensus on the real effects of dumping plutonium into the sea. One wonders what the confidence threshold of harmlessness ought to be before one consents to undertaking such an irreversible course of action.

In almost every single one of her responses to these critics, Robinson spends paragraphs fixing Sellafield before our eyes, describing again in detail precisely what goes on there. Ethicists sometimes note that the most morally heroic people explain their actions not with reference to ethical theory, or ethical reflection at all, but simply in terms of the brute facts of the situation: “The house was on fire and she needed help.” They speak as if, for them, the moral demand emerges spontaneously from the observed facts of the matter. Robinson’s constant retort to her interlocutors is like this. Perutz says there is no threat here. Robinson responds that they are pumping plutonium into the sea.

But Perutz is not content merely to condescend; he wants also to identify a double-standard, a favoritism, perhaps even some jingoism: “Her account would make one believe that social deprivation has never existed in the United States.” Of course this is a distraction; Robinson’s recent social writings have focused almost entirely on the social deprivation of the United States. And even Mother Country makes it clear that her object is America, not Britain. She speaks of America when she laments that “we have sacrificed our humanity to preserve countries that connive in the production of the worst sort of explosives and toxins and their release into the environment. There is nothing pleasant in this fact. It has no place in the story. When the Russians hear all the prattle about Western values they must surely assume they permit plutonium dumping. Who can argue? It may be more than their absolutist history that prevents them from being converted by the force of western example.” Robinson here takes up the mantle of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Whittaker Chambers, who both proclaimed to the West that the corruption there was not categorically different from that in the USSR.

But Perutz’s criticism does contain this kernel of insight: Robinson’s barbs against the United Kingdom are not those of the loyal opposition, but those of a daughter of Britain’s greatest rogue colony. They are the critiques of an outsider. When she insists that Sellafield is little more than the result of British national pusillanimity—“Britain has never had to justify to its people the possession of nuclear weapons on any grounds other than their assuring that the country would continue to cut an impressive figure on the world stage. It has never had to excuse the slovenliness with which the great enterprise was gone about on any grounds other than Britain’s littleness and poverty”—it is clear that her target is not Sellafield, but something rather like the entire character of the British nation. But Britain is not her home. Prophets are not without honor except in their hometown, but hometown prophets at least have the credibility of calling their own house to repent. But in Mother Country, Robinson is the Taylor Swift of environmental degradation, who upbraids and obsesses continually about the malfeasance of her former lover, to whom she no longer has any real allegiance.

This is something that Robinson has largely remedied in her subsequent writing. Robinson is interested in Britain, but she is obsessed with America. It is America where she makes her home and where she sets her novels. America is now the most common target of her barbs. She writes now not to the Gentiles, but to the wayward tribes of the house of Israel—not to remedy the maladies of faraway locales, but to make more perfect the union in which she makes her own abode.

Yet the method by which she chastises America is not the same as that by which she once chastised the British. By grounding continued environmental degradation in the long history of Britain, Robinson ascribes to Britain a path dependency of diminution; these evils, according to her long historical genealogy of the Poor Laws, are woven into the very DNA of the United Kingdom, and therefore entirely predictable, if not inevitable. The deep origins of these evils are in the annals of British history.

It is significant that she never speaks this way about America. In her jeremiads against America, its failings are never fulfilments of a long destiny, but rather deviations from its essential identity and its original promise. In this way, Robinson’s treatment of America is far more metaphysically Christian than is her treatment of Britain. It seems that, for Robinson, America’s being is interchangeable with its essential goodness, and its multitudinous deficiencies are privations of that being, and incidental to it. Robinson can imagine an America with even more existence than it has now, with liberty and justice for all, a society of citizens in rather constant rapture at the dignity and luminosity of their fellow citizens. It is true that this is not the America we now inhabit, but repentance is always possible when we fall from the purportedly original and historic greatness of the nation.

Robinson’s is an Americanism without blinders and a gratitude without idolatry. She writes an encouragement for Americans to view themselves with altogether less groveling than that to which they are accustomed:

 

“Americans abroad hope so wistfully for approval that they are in effect seduced by the least acceptance, and dashed by the slightest rejection, a weightless people incapable of seeing and judging, as if stuck forever in the most desolate straits of adolescence, merely wishing to be liked and accepted, considering the world well lost if, before the lights go out, they have a murmur of approval from some foreign person.”

 

But Mother Country was published in the summer of 1989, right before the Berlin Wall’s fall inaugurated an era of unchallenged hegemony by the United States. One no longer observes Americans with an inferiority complex at the Eiffel Tower, the Coliseum, the Great Wall, nor does one see any hints of groveling in their garrulousness and physical girth, nor in their expectations that every person they encounter address them with greater English fluency than they themselves possess. Americans won the world in 1989, and every American tourist since then has been taking a global victory lap. Some of them still refer unironically to Freedom Fries. None of them has ever heard of Sellafield.

And yet Robinson loves these Americans. In her 2015 essay “Fear, she prefaces her excoriation of her countrymen with a profession of allegiance to them: “I defer to no one in my love for America and for Christianity. I have devoted my life to the study of both of them. I have tried to live up to my association with them.” Perhaps this is one reason why so many have felt nurtured and comforted by Robinson’s writing after Mother Country. Marilynne believes in us. We might look at our neighbors, or our classmates, or our social media nemeses, and wonder whether her faith in them is rather misplaced and romantic. But it still does stir the soul to have someone believe in us like this. Her belief in the promise of America and the potential of Americans, but disappointment with much of the actuality of America, allows Robinson’s political philosophy to consist largely in comparing America to America, and finding it deficient. The presumption in each of these critiques is that America does not suffer the same kind of path dependency that England does. We Americans are free to mend, and to sabotage, our own efforts. Or, at least, we ought to act as though we are thus free. Sellafield is the result of British national pusillanimity, but Robinson believes we ought never treat Americans as though they are pusillanimous:

 

“Put aside the notion of country and imagine 320 million souls who happen to be passing their mortal time on this continent. Why should we discourage them from major aspiration? Say 15 percent are black, 51 percent are women. Is it at all consistent with their aspirations to be told that whatever their gifts, an ultimate mediocrity awaits them?”

 

She learned this, no doubt, from Emerson: “Treat a man as he is, and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he could be, and he will become what he should be.” But surely this psychological feature is as true for the British as it is for the Americans. After Mother Country, she seems to have learned her Emersonian lesson well, and she no longer attributes the flaws of her opponents to their deep history.

To hear a full-throated vindication of America is a rarity these days, among both Left and Right.

That Robinson is a devotee and a theorist of America does not mean she has no critiques to offer of it. Yet in her critiques of America she speaks not of continuity, but of rupture: “there has been a fundamental shift in American consciousness. The Citizen has become the Taxpayer.” But it is significant that this deviation in America’s trajectory is a shift, and not a fulfillment, of America’s original vision. The profit-seeking that Sellafield incarnates, and which can be traced back to its Poor Laws, is present also in America, but only accidentally. So she insists that rapacious capitalism is not a distinctively American invention, and that what made America for so many decades the liberator of Europe and the desire of the nations was not monomaniacal self-interest, but a liberality that established and preserved national parks, built and funded public universities, created and maintained a vast and sprawling interstate highway system, passed the Homestead Act (which she describes as being “like Deuteronomy” because of its emphasis on the inalienable possession of property), the Land-Grant College Act, and the Civil Rights Act. That may all be true. It may also be true that the logic of scarcity and monetization that underlies much of our life together is a deviation from that original vision, not its culmination. This all we may admit. Still, it is those latter forces that seem to have the ascendency both in Britain and also in America today. We might imagine the Reverend Boughton looking daily at the baby pictures of young Jack, full of childhood buoyancy and promise that never once causes us to think that he might one day break his father’s heart and flee from him into the far country. But the longer Jack stays away, the less likely it seems he will return.

After all, to hear a full-throated vindication of America is a rarity these days, among both Left and Right. On the Left, the 1619 Project is an attempt to identify America’s origins with slavery. On the Right, a new and noxious postliberalism holds that the project of America went wrong right out of the gate with its First Amendment, which allows its citizenry to pursue distinct and incompatible accounts of the good. Robinson seems to deny both of these arguments. America is a tradition whose luminaries are Edwards, Melville, Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman. It has its own distinctive culture and thought and tradition which ought not be reduced to mere mediocrity even while there can be no defense for the many historic evils that America has wrought upon the world. Still, for Robinson, those evils were deviations and historical accidents, and not the natural, path dependent outworking of America’s civilizational logic.

As the divergence between Robinson’s ideal of America and the reality of America becomes more pronounced, we might ask with Aquinas at what point right reason demands that our response be nothing short of anger.

Nevertheless, it is far from obvious what kind of utility this historic contextualization of America might be for present social struggle. It is no more obvious why contemporary America should be vindicated on account of our history, than why contemporary Britain should be vilified on account of theirs. In the decades since Mother Country, the grounds for Robinson’s hope for America seem increasingly to be historical, rather than contemporary. In her 1998 essay “Wilderness,” she deploys Sellafield again, but this time not primarily as an illustration of British governmental malfeasance, but as one sign of looming climate catastrophe around the entire globe. There she writes that “those who are concerned about the world environment are, in my view, the abolitionists of this era, struggling to make an enlightened public aware that environmental depredation is an axe at the root of every culture, every freedom, every value.”

But there is a way of reading her invocation of the abolitionists as apocalyptic. While the British abolitionists were able, through legislative cunning and moral fortitude, to show Britain the error of her enslaving ways, the American abolitionists did not succeed on the strength of their speeches nor on the visibility of their battered bodies. They won through a war, the ghastly ghosts of which still haunt us. And Sellafield still spills. Shall it, too, have its Gettysburg and Antietam? Robinson likely invokes the abolitionists to say that the resources native to the tradition of liberal democracy are sufficient to match the challenges that face it. But in America, the abolitionists only succeeded after they went to war. Persuasion did very little.

As early as 1992, Robinson realized that Mother Country was having rather little effect: “I’ve just also never encountered any sense of accomplishment as far as actually sensitizing people to the issue.” Here she is a forerunner to the frustrated environmentalist. At least Jeremiah was warned by God beforehand that his pleas and entreaties would go unheeded; today’s prophets of doom come loaded down with data and measures and visuals, but the hearts of the people are no more stirred by science than they were by the voice of God. Robinson bemoans that “the world’s most favored public, our own, is educated thoroughly and badly, starved of information, and flattered as to its own importance. While it is made incompetent in the use of the power it has. There is no agora, where issues are really sorted out on their merits and decisions are made which, at best and worst, give permission to political leaders to carry out policies the public has approved. This model assumes information of a quality that is by no means readily available to us. It assumes a reasonableness and objectivity which allow information to be taken in and assimilated to our understanding, and in this we are also thoroughly deficient.” Has there been some deviation from this pattern since the publication of Mother Country? Have the calls of the prophets been heeded here? And if they have not, what validates Robinson’s stalwart faith in us Americans?

So we are left then with these facts. Robinson sees the abolitionists as her inspiration, but the abolitionists did not succeed through politics. She has written in anger, and she has encountered no evidence that her anger was unwarranted. She has sounded the alarm, but none have heeded it. In his What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?, Frederick Douglass, perhaps the greatest of all American abolitionists, famously grounds some of his hope for America in its youth:

“[The reformer’s] heart may well beat lighter at the thought that America is young, and still in the impressible stage of her existence. May he not hope that high lessons of wisdom, of justice and of truth, will yet give direction to her destiny? Were the nation older, the patriot’s heart might be sadder, and the reformer’s brow heavier. Its future might be shrouded in gloom, and the hope of its prophets go out in sorrow. There is great consolation in the thought that America is young.”

But America is no longer so young and so malleable. And if it is true that nations, like individuals, can acquire character through long habituation, then the longer America cultivates and treasures its vices, the more difficult it shall be to wrest beauty from it. As the divergence between Robinson’s ideal of America and the reality of America becomes more pronounced, we might ask with Aquinas at what point right reason demands that our response be nothing short of anger.

What feels most incongruous in returning to Mother Country after reading so much of Robinson’s subsequent thought is that the anger that spills from its pages has not produced much political radicalism or even warranted pessimism in her writing over the intervening decades. She has largely stopped writing about the British government. Yet in her subsequent social writings we still find an optimism about America, as though there is nothing wrong with democratic governance that cannot be solved by what is right with democratic governance. Yet Sellafield continues belching pollutants into ponds and placentas alike along the English seacoast, now thirty years after she sounded the alarm. The indictment leveled then has new plausibility now in this era of a pandemic which witnesses billionaire wealth-accumulation simultaneous with a looming eviction crisis: “Why do we persist in assuming that any government has the welfare of the mass of its people as an object, where neither history nor present experience encourages this idea?” Why indeed. The technical term that western political theory provides us to describe a regime that governs for its own, private good, and not the good of all, is tyranny. Are we to understand that Robinson believes us still to live and labor under tyranny, as those vaunted abolitionists so clearly did?

In Mother Country, Robinson gives us moral marching orders: “we must find a political and moral clarity that will enable us to address the starkest problems of survival, if the world is to have any hope.” But that was thirty years ago. And yet Sellafield still spills and the earth still warms. Political and moral clarity are nowhere in sight and, if Robinson is correct, neither is any real attempt to solve, or even to ameliorate, the starkest problems of survival. Incompetence and moral degradation at that level ought to make us angry.

Justin R. Hawkins is a PhD Candidate in Christian Ethics and Political Theory at Yale University. You can contact him, or read more of his writing, at justinryanhawkins.com.