We Will Berry You
The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice
by Wendell Berry
Shoemaker and Company, 2022; x 513 pp.
Wendell Berry, a poet, novelist, and philosopher well known for his protests against mechanized agriculture and for his defense of the “land ethic,” is not a thinker one would immediately associate with Ludwig von Mises, and indeed, in economic theory the two are far apart. But there is nevertheless a passage in Mises’s Socialism that is central to Berry’s concerns.
The passage I have in mind is this:
When society’s existence is threatened, each individual must risk his best to avoid destruction. Even the prospect of perishing in the attempt can no longer deter him. For there is then no choice between either living on as one formerly lived or sacrificing oneself for one’s country, for society, or for one’s convictions. Rather, must the certainty of death, servitude, or insufferable poverty be set against the chance of returning victorious from the struggle. War carried on pro aris et focis [for hearth and home] demands no sacrifice from the individual. One does not engage in it merely to reap benefits for others, but to preserve one’s own existence.
Berry uses a similar idea to explain and defend the South’s standpoint in the Civil War, but he does not do so in the way one might expect. Far from extolling the virtues of antebellum slavery, he condemns it as a grievous sin. In this connection, he makes an interesting criticism of John C. Calhoun, who deemed manual labor beneath the dignity of gentlemen, fit only for slaves. Berry argues that it was in part the unwillingness of elements among the Southern planter elite to acknowledge the virtue of
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