Us and Them
In a time when everyone and everything seem divided, it’s all “us vs them.”
Wendell Berry is 88 years old. As far as I know, he continues to drive a horse-drawn plow somewhere up in Kentucky (near where my ancestor moved from Edenton after the Revolutionary War).
And he’s come out with a new book from Plough Publishing: “The Need to be Whole.” In it, he takes on the all-too-common-sensible notion that “us vs them” is all there is.
No, it is not, he gently insists. We should work hard to replace the “vs” with “and.” The former is a disjunction, predicated on violence and domination. The latter is conjunction and community – what God is Himself.
There are Lovers and Haters in this world, the old farmer writes. But these two parties aren’t locked in a cosmic struggle of one side against the other. The Haters do this and to each other in spades.
But the Lovers? They’re the ones who themselves are where conflict ends. They are the Peacemakers, the blessers of enemies, the forgivers of wrong-doers. The ones who turn the other cheek and go the extra mile.
Yes, it is obvious that this soon-to-be nonagenarian is echoing the Sermon on the Mount. All his long writing life, he’s been one of the best vocalists of that particular section in Matthew, of which Mark Twain (hardly a friend of religion) suggested his most ascerbic witticism: “I am not troubled by the things in the Bible which I do not understand, but I am troubled by those things which I do understand and which I find very difficult to measure up to.”
It’s probably true that everyone thinks that she or he is on the good side, the ones wearing the white hats, and that every argument is like high noon in Gunsmoke: the other side simply must be the bad guy as he’s saying rotten things and tricked out in the obvious bad guy attire.
But Lovers become Haters when they hate, of course. “... it will be easy for the side of love first to understand love merely as opposite and opposed to hate, and then to generalize this opposition as an allegorical battle of Love versus Hate, exchanging slogan for slogan, gesture for gesture, shout for shout.”
The Sermon on the Mount commandment to love allows for no excuses. “But what about …?” is a question that is frustratingly dismissed, if only because that question assumes a “vs” and won’t rise to the “and.”
Wendell Berry has watched, over the decades, much of his beloved land – hundreds of acres owned and tilled by over two centuries of Berry generations – abused and polluted and subjected to modern consumption. The temptation to become adversarial was overwhelming.
“My concern might reasonably have made me an advocate for ‘soil conservation,’” he writes. “But I was a native. My affection for my place was already established in my heart and unspecialized. It included the people and other creatures along with the soil, and it has become ever clearer to me that you cannot conserve the land unless you can conserve the people who depend on the land, who care for it, and who know how to care for it – the people on whom the land depends.”
“You cannot conserve the land unless you conserve the people.” Yes and yes and yes. Here, writ large, are the words of love, instead of endless opposition. Instead of “vs,” here is the language of “and.”
The language of opposition and antagonism are replaced by “native” questions – questions that can only be answered in community and for community, from inside history and for the present and the future.
"How might we imagine imposing by mere law the principles of equality and justice and love upon a society dominated in its economic life by the violent principles of individualism, competition, and greed? How might we imagine the loyalty or patriotism that could protect the life of the land and the people of any place under the economic rule of 'maximum force relentlessly applied'? What must we do for the success of the personal generosity, the common decency, the good manners that are the ultimate safeguards of equality and justice, now that we apparently have settled into permanent war as the basis of our economy? Our economy, let us not forget, defines 'equality' as the 'right' of everybody to be as wasteful, violent, destructive, consumptive, lazy, and luxurious as everybody else … “
We are all tempted by the siren call of power, to win victory at great or even any cost.
But love doesn’t consist of the defeat of enemies. The prize of love is love itself:
“ ... If you see the world’s goodness and beauty, and if you love your own place in it (no deed or title required), then your love itself will be one of your life’s great rewards."
Get this book. Do a Bible Study with the Sermon on the Mount in one hand, and this book in the other. Be a Lover, not a Hater.
Switch out “vs” with “and.”
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