A Place to Belong
Though written more than 30 years ago, Wendell Berry’s essays on our relationship to modern life still have plenty of insights to offer.
Review by David Clark
Wendell Berry’s latest book, Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer, might as well, for readers in 2021, be titled Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Car or Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Phone. The book objects to a technology that is now as pervasive as automobiles or telephones, and on which we are at least as dependent. It’s easy to think, then, that such a book (composed of essays written in the late 1980s) would be solely interesting as a window into the quaint historical perspective of a cantankerous novelist-poet-philosopher-farmer, but otherwise of little relevance to contemporary readers.
But that would be a mistake. The book isn’t really about computers. Berry does object to them, but the objection is intended to illustrate a more general objection to faith in technological progress, and to various other features of modern life.
The book bears the name of the first essay in the collection (first published in Harper’s in 1987). The essay is a concise, six-page statement of Berry’s own writing process and his standards for technological innovation in his own work. The “new tool,” says Berry, should be cheaper, smaller in scale, more effective, and less energy-intensive than the old tool. And it should be something that can be bought and repaired close to home, and that does not “disrupt anything good that already exists.” Computers, says Berry, do not meet these standards.
The second item in the collection is a response to five letters written by readers of that Harper’s essay. They are all critical. These letters charge Berry with misogyny (in his essay, Berry notes his wife’s role as his at-home editor) and hypocrisy. Some argue that the benefits of computers outweigh the costs. Others argue that Berry’s standards are too demanding (“I tried to imagine a tool that would meet Berry’s criteria… The clear winner is the quill pen”). None of the letters are very charitable. The men who charge Berry with misogyny, for example, grossly stereotype Berry’s wife. Berry is right to call them “audacious and irresponsible gossips.” At times, however, Berry’s reply is also uncharitable in return. “I can only conclude,” he says at one point, “that I have scratched the skin of a technological fundamentalism… At the slightest hint of a threat to their complacency, they repeat, like a chorus of toads, the notes sounded by their leaders in industry.” Berry’s eight-page reply is an amusing read, but not terribly rich in argument or insight.
Feminism has not gone far enough for Berry. It is no solution to the problem of female exploitation to replace subservience to one’s husband with subservience to one’s employer.
The third essay—“Feminism, the Body, and the Machine”—is, however, very rich. It is the soul of this collection, an essay that I have long thought to be the single best summary of Berry’s philosophy and social critique. In it Berry criticizes the state of marriage, the home, the economy, and education, as well as the prevailing attitudes toward technological innovation, sex, and the body. All themes familiar to long-time Berry readers, but here spun together in a single web.
Berry’s central objection to the state of marriage, the home, and the economy is that these things have been divorced from one another. In a flourishing marriage and home, “the spouses must understand themselves as belonging to their marriage, to each other, and to their children,” and they must in fact so belong. Such belonging is best realized when “the couple… makes around itself a household economy that involves the work of both wife and husband, that gives them a measure of economic independence and self-protection, a measure of self-employment, a measure of freedom, as well as common ground and a common satisfaction.” But the contemporary economy, and the dominant conceptions of marriage and the home are diametrically opposed to such a household economy. In its “most popular version,” marriage is “an intimate ‘relationship’ involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed,” and “the modern household is the place where the consumptive couple do their consuming. Nothing productive is done there.”
Feminism has not gone far enough for Berry. It is no solution to the problem of female exploitation to replace subservience to one’s husband with subservience to one’s employer. “It is easy enough to see why women came to object to the role of Blondie, a mostly decorative custodian of a degraded, consumptive modern household, preoccupied with clothes, shopping, gossip, and outwitting her husband. But are we to assume that one may fittingly cease to be Blondie by becoming Dagwood? … How can women improve themselves by submitting to the same specialization, degradation, trivialization, and tyrannization of work that men have submitted to?”
Just as husbands and wives have been isolated from one another and from their homes and neighborhoods, so too have children been isolated. Television screens prevent children from belonging to the household while they are home, and schools have failed to help children belong to their communities by abandoning “the old duty of passing on the cultural and intellectual inheritance in favor of baby-sitting and career preparation.”
Our present economy is highly productive, and it has made life much easier. But on the whole it has not made life better. The productivity and ease, argues Berry, has come at the cost of the things that matter most: the integrity and happiness of one’s family, community, and country; the health of the land; faithfulness to, and the pleasure of, our Creator.
Berry is surely right that belonging to one’s home and community and to the land is among the greatest earthly goods.
This little book is an excellent primer for those who have never read Berry, and a refresher for those who have. But buyer beware: as with so much of Berry’s work, the experience of reading this book is a mix of delight, captivation, and frustration. Berry’s prose is beautiful (I recommend reading him aloud). His vision of the good life is beautiful too. He is surely right that belonging to one’s home and community and to the land is among the greatest earthly goods. There is no doubt that such belonging may be incarnate in a life in which one’s family is self-employed, in which one works alongside their spouse and children, in which one is economically and socially engaged in one’s neighborhood, in which one owns real property, and in which one is close to animals and to the land. But most folks do not live such a life. Many folks could not live such a life. This will nag at the minds of many readers and lead them to wonder to what extent a person can belong in non-agrarian settings. Berry does not give us the answer to this question. What he gives us is a conception of the good life, and a model of what that conception looks like in practice in an agrarian setting. It is left to the reader to ponder whether and how this model can be appropriated in other settings—something that is perhaps especially worth pondering in the time of COVID, when folks are home more than ever, and yet longing for belonging.
David Clark is a New Englander currently trapped in the warm and sunny winters of Los Angeles, where he is completing a PhD in philosophy at the University of Southern California.
Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer was released on February 9, 2021, by Counterpoint Press. Fare Forward appreciates their provision of an advance copy for our reviewer. You can purchase a copy on their website here.
