Rod Dreher's Blog, page 501

View From Your Table 2017

San Tome, Segovia, Spain

The reader writes, of last night’s dinner:

Feliz Año Nuevo from Segovia! Eating Spanish jamon, gambones, (king prawns), lamb, tartar of salmon with avacado, and foie.

Washed down with Rioja (though we are inches from the Ribeiro wine region–sorry neighbours).

And there you have it: we’re starting another year of good times and good food. Keep the pictures coming.

View From Your Table

Natchitoches, Louisiana

Let’s end this woebegone year on a VFYT high note. Above, a reader’s first taste of something very, very good:

This is my boyfriend and I having dinner at the Crawfish Hole in Natchitoches, Louisiana. He grew up here, but I did not, and this was my first time eating crawfish. My boyfriend introduced me to your blog when we started dating, so I’m pretty excited to submit a view from our table.

Thanks, and happy New Year!

We already have our first VFYT of 2017, by the way — from a New Year’s Eve dinner. Watch this space tomorrow.

View From Your Table

Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Yesterday was our wedding anniversary. We went to Ruth’s Chris steak house to celebrate, and had what I think we both agree was the best meal of 2016. (For me, the only contender was earlier this year, when a friend took me to Ruth’s Chris for the first time ever.) It is hard to describe the pure decadent pleasure of this place. We arrived a little bit early, and went to the bar to wait for our table. I ordered an Old Fashioned, which came to me in a cocktail glass the size of a small bucket, or so it seemed, and tasted … perfect. It could not possibly have been made better.

You are looking at the Platonic ideal of a steak. It came to the table sizzling in butter. If only you could see the red inside, with its exquisite marbling. One more crystal of salt would have been too much; one less, too little. And those mushrooms!

I once described oysters at Huîtrerie Régis as akin to little culinary grenades that explode with the flavor of the sea when detonated in your mouth. Similarly, with those mushrooms and the flavor of the woods, all drawn out by butter. Is there anything butter cannot do? I think not. The wine was a St-Emilion, delicious, but incredibly enough, not the star of the evening. That’s how good the steak was.

I told Julie that this restaurant is a favorite of Louisiana state legislators and lobbyists. She said this is not surprising in the least. “If you brought me to eat here, you could pretty much talk me into anything,” she joked. True. If you are ever in Baton Rouge, Ruth’s Chris is the place. Basically, your soul is warmed in butter from the moment you enter until the moment you stumble out, satisfied beyond all description.

The server kindly brought us a present from the kitchen: cheesecake with blueberries:

We were so full that we couldn’t finish it. Later in the evening, my snack at home:

This morning, I find myself so grateful for the grace in that meal last night. For many of us, 2016 was not the best year ever. A superior steak accompanied by a good Bordeaux can cover a multitude of disappointments. So 2016 ended for me on a high note — or so it seems. There are still 12 hours to go, and given the way this year is going, there’s no telling what’s going to happen between now and midnight.

Red Solo Cup Inventor Dies

Only you and the Lord need know … (Rob Hofacker/Shutterstock)

Ave atque vale:

You might not know Robert Hulseman by name but there is a good chance you’ve held his invention. The red Solo Cup is the go-to drinking vessel for picnics, parties and keggers.

Hulseman, who invented the cup, died last week at the age of 84, The Associated Press reported on Thursday.

As part of my tireless efforts in religious anthropology, I learned some years ago in Texas of the importance of the Red Solo Cup to Southern Baptist culture. I was invited to a big evening social event that was not a church social, but at which nearly everybody was a Southern Baptist. In southern Louisiana, my homeland, most of our Southern Baptists drink and don’t worry about it. Not so in Texas. Lots of them drink, but do worry about it. Hence this old chestnut:

How do you keep a Southern Baptist from drinking all your beer on a fishing trip?

Make sure you take at least two of them along.

So there I was, after a couple of hours at this fun party at a camp, wanting a beer. I joked with the hostess about how hard it was for a Catholic (as I was at the time) and Louisiana boy to go to a party and not have a beer.

“Are you serious?” she said. “Everybody’s drinking beer here. Go look in the fridge and get you one. All I ask is that you pour it into one of those red Solo cups.”

Sure enough, just about everybody had a red Solo cup full of beer, and had been drinking beer all night. I thought they were sipping Dr Pepper! I asked my wife about this later, and she said, “You don’t know about the Red Solo Cup thing?” I reckon I didn’t.

So, hail and farewell — and cheers — to Robert Hulseman, a Catholic layman who did so much to make life easier for Southern Baptists.

God-Fearing Immigrants Commit Spiritual Suicide

An Orthodox Christian reader who is part of a Third World immigrant community e-mails to say:

On your article Anti-Modern = Pro-Muslim + Pro-Immigrant…

The Conservative Party here in Canada tried a few years ago to make precisely this sort of political alliance with immigrants, which it viewed as social conservatives and potential economics Liberals (capital L), immigrants who have traditionally voted for the other more Left parties. Many of us thought it made sense – it does on the face of it – but it was one of those things that upon deeper reflection turns out to be quite mistaken.

Most immigrants come to the West not as St Paul went to Rome, putting God first, but as the Jewish masses went to Rome, putting mammon first (this is not to belittle their poverty and other suffering at home, but such suffering always existed). Immigrants come to the West drunk with Western propaganda, with an inferiority complex, mesmerised by the idol of Western civilization, more precisely the mix of individualism, unfettered economic largesse, efficiency, cleanliness, decorum, democracy, technology, work ethic, etc. Precious few of them are aware, or they don’t want to be aware, that a fundamental part of this Western civilization package is secular liberalism or modernity.

These immigrants – the religious ones, and most of them are – will try to hang on to God, but they don’t understand that their very decision to leave their own community and subject themselves to the temptations and idolatry of Rome, for the sake of mammon, has done them in. And it does. If they don’t fully capitulate, their children and certainly their grandchildren will.

So, which is more of a danger to Rod Dreher’s society, the social conservative religious immigrant next door or secular liberalism? Both – they go hand in hand – but the poor immigrant is but a pawn – having been subject to Western propaganda via TV, movies, the internet, etc., propaganda that would be the envy of a Soviet communist propagandist. He doesn’t quite know the danger he’s put himself in by immigrating, while the secular liberal elite know very well what they’re doing. They know, as one of your commenters wrote, that mass immigration breaks down traditional societies on both ends. That’s the goal of today’s ideology of globalization, similar to Marxism, to blow up tradition and build a ‘new’ society based on the fantasy of a few.

You want to fight against this… The best way is certainly not focusing on the problems immigration brings to the West – immigrants won’t listen to that. But to focus on the dangers of immigration to immigrants themselves and to their home countries.

In the meantime, praise God that some Orthodox Christian immigrants have understood this, reversed course, and tried to become St Paul in Rome, converting so many Americans, against the tide, to Orthodoxy.

The Virtual Hagia Sophia

Here is something astonishing and beautiful, sent to me by our reader James C., who has a gift for finding these things. Here’s the story from Smithsonian. Excerpts:

Twice in the past few years, Stanford scholars and scientists have worked to digitally recreate the experience of being in Hagia Sophia when it was a medieval church. Collaborating with choral group Cappella Romana, they digitally recreated the former holy building’s acoustics, and performed medieval church music in the university’s Bing Concert Hall as if it was Hagia Sophia. Their efforts are part of a multi-year collaboration between departments at Stanford that asks the question: can modern technology help us go back in time?

The “Icons of Sound” project focuses on the interior of Hagia Sophia, using recordings of balloon pops taken in the space and other audio and visual research to figure out the building’s acoustics by extrapolating from those noises. The scientists used that data to recreate the experience of being there—an experience that has been in some ways timeless for the almost 1,500 years the building has stood. But much has changed for the Hagia Sophia in that time.

More:

To recreate the unique sound, performers sang while listening to the simulated acoustics of Hagia Sophia through earphones. Their singing was then put through the same acoustic simulator and played during the live performance through speakers in the concert hall, as they also sang, making the performance sound like it was taking place in Istanbul at Hagia Sophia.

“Hagia Sophia’s unique acoustics dramatically impacts not just the sound, but the performance itself,” writes the sound company that miked the singers. “Vocalists slow their tempo to work with the nearly 11-second-long reverberation time, while isokratima (the drone chanters) subtly vary their pitch to find building resonances. As a result, to create a virtual performance, the performers must hear the space in real time.”

Read the whole thing, and watch the short film embedded in it. It is hard to describe the effect. You just have to hear it for yourself. Here are some video recordings featuring the audio from that performance. Last night, I heard them with a pair of good headphones. If you have a pair, put them on to listen to this chant. It’s one of the most ethereal, transporting things I’ve ever heard:

More here, including another short video clip. If anybody knows of a full recording of this performance, please let us know where it can be obtained.

James C. is in Istanbul now, making a pilgrimage to the Hagia Sophia itself. I had the blessing of being there in 2006. It was one of the greatest privileges of my life. The sense of tragedy over the fate of the great cathedral is unlike anything I’ve ever felt.

View From Your Table

Shelby, North Carolina

The reader writes:

Red Bridges BBQ, Shelby, NC. Note the bumper stickers on the wheelchair.

On a much more serious note:

Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania

The reader writes:

Last year’s Christmas was at our home in South Africa, just my wife, our two young kids, and my wife’s mom – no other family within thousands of miles. You posted our picture in last year’s “View from Your Christmas Table”, Skyping with family in North America. This year we’re back in my Pennsylvania hometown, celebrating with my parents and every one of my six siblings, plus spouses and kids of those who have them. It’s been a blessing, an unexpected joy. But the only reason we’re here at all is that back in April my wife was diagnosed with neuroendocrine tumors, a rare form of cancer. We immediately uprooted our family and moved back to the U.S. in May, abandoning our hopes and plans of a long pastorate in Durban after only two years. It’s a strange feeling – to have such joy at being here with my birth family mixed with gut-level pain at being absent from a congregation we had fallen in love with. But that’s Christmas, isn’t it? It’s not all joy and gladness – there is the labor and birth with no room in the inn, the sword foretold through Mary’s heart, the desperate flight to a foreign land. My wife’s cancer is terminal, although it is slow-growing and we expect years and even decades more for her. But this darkest of times for our family has brought more love and miracles into our lives than we knew was possible. It’s hard. It feels pretty bleak sometimes. But to experience all that love, and then to know that infinite Love was made incarnate 2,000 years ago, that He is here now – that is more than enough.

UPDATE: I apologize, readers — I forgot to resize the photo for publication. It’s fixed now.

Nonconversion Stories

It’s common to hear people say that they would believe in God if only they had some proof. What constitutes proof? Well, aside from a laboratory proof, there would be the matter of an extraordinary personal experience of the sort that, in a stroke, destroys one’s disbelief.

Many people think that a personal encounter with the divine (or at least the numinous) would convert them, but I think more than a few of these people deceive themselves. If one has the will to disbelieve, one will find a way to explain away anything. (On the other hand, if one really wants to believe, one is likely to find evidence where it is implausible, but that’s another story.)

Ross Douthat wrote a good column this week about these “nonconversion stories,” which he defines as “stories about secular moderns who have supernatural-seeming experiences without being propelled into any specific religious faith.” For example, Douthat writes about the case of the late A.J. Ayer, one of the most prominent positivist philosophers of the 20th century, who had a strange life-after-death experience that did not involve any aspects of traditional religious iconography or themes (e.g., he did not meet Jesus), and which did not result in Ayer abandoning his atheism. But he did emerge from it more open to the possibility that there is an aspect of ourselves that survives death of the body.

Here’s another one:

As a young man in the 1960s, the filmmaker Paul Verhoeven, of “RoboCop” and “Showgirls” fame, wandered into a Pentecostal church and suddenly felt “the Holy Ghost descending … as if a laser beam was cutting through my head and my heart was on fire.” He was in the midst of dealing with his then-girlfriend’s unexpected pregnancy; after they procured an abortion, he had a terrifying, avenging-angel vision during a screening of “King Kong.” The combined experience actively propelled him away from anything metaphysical; the raw carnality of his most famous films, he suggested later, was an attempt to keep the numinous and destabilizing at bay.

Verhoeven’s experience strikes me as being true to human nature, or at least the nature of some humans. His anti-theism, in practice if not in theory, is the opposite of a courageous willingness to face the truth; it is rather fleeing from a truth that one doesn’t wish to accept, because doing so would require one to change one’s life. While I never had anything like Verhoeven’s unnerving experience happen to me, it’s undeniably true that in my early twenties, I worked for years to keep religious belief at a distance. Even though I accepted God’s existence – the God of the Bible, I mean — I didn’t want to commit myself to the implications of that truth, because I didn’t want to change my life. I ran like Verhoeven ran. By the grace of God, my flight did not last so long, nor, happily, did it lead me to make trashy movies. But I understand where Verhoeven is coming from – or rather, what he’s running from.

Douthat’s list of examples includes that of Exorcist film director Billy Friedkin, who wrote in a recent issue of Vanity Fair about a chilling set of events in Italy, surrounding his meeting earlier this year with famed exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth (who, quite elderly and weak, died later that summer). Father Amorth, with the permission of the possessed woman, allowed Friedkin to witness an exorcism – the first the director had ever seen – and to film it. Excerpt:

I showed the video of Rosa’s exorcism to two of the world’s leading neurosurgeons and researchers in California and to a group of prominent psychiatrists in New York.

Dr. Neil Martin is chief of neurosurgery at the UCLA Medical Center. He has performed more than 5,000 brain surgeries and is regularly cited as in the top 1 percent of his specialty. On August 3, I showed him the video of Rosa’s exorcism. This is his response: “Absolutely amazing. There’s a major force at work within her somehow. I don’t know the underlying origin of it. She’s not separated from the environment. She’s not in a catatonic state. She’s responding to the priest and is aware of the context. The energy she shows is amazing. The priest on the right is struggling to control her. He’s holding her down, as are the others, and the sweat is dripping off his face at a time when she’s not sweating. This doesn’t seem to be hallucinations. She appears to be engaged in the process but resisting. You can see she has no ability to pull herself back.”

I asked Dr. Martin if this was some kind of brain disorder. “It doesn’t look like schizophrenia or epilepsy,” he said. “It could be delirium, an agitated disconnection from normal behavior. But the powerful verbalization we’re hearing, that’s not what you get with delirium. With delirium you see the struggling, maybe the yelling, but this guttural voice seems like it’s coming from someplace else. I’ve done thousands of surgeries, on brain tumors, traumatic brain injuries, ruptured brain aneurysms, infections affecting the brain, and I haven’t seen this kind of consequence from any of those disorders. This goes beyond anything I’ve ever experienced—that’s for certain.”

I also showed the video to Dr. Itzhak Fried, a neurosurgeon and clinical specialist in epilepsy surgery, seizure disorder, and the study of human memory. He is based at both UCLA and the Tel-Aviv Sourasky Medical Center. This was his conclusion: “It looks like something authentic. She is like a caged animal. I don’t think there’s a loss of consciousness or contact, because she’s in contact with the people. She appears to respond to the people who talk to her. It’s a striking change in behavior. I believe everything originates in the brain. So which part of the brain could serve this type of behavior? The limbic system, which has to do with emotional processing of stimuli, and the temporal lobe. I don’t see this as epilepsy. It’s not necessarily a lesion. It’s a physiological state. It seems to be associated with religious things. In the temporal lobe there’s something called hyper-religiosity. You probably won’t have this in somebody who has no religious background. Can I characterize it? Maybe. Can I treat it? No.”

I asked Dr. Fried if he believed in God, and he took a long pause before answering: “I do believe there is a limit to human understanding. Beyond this limit, I’m willing to recognize an entity called God.”

 

I strongly suggest that you read the whole thing, especially to the conclusion, in which Friedkin details the “living nightmare” that he stumbled into.

And yet: Friedkin still describes himself as an “agnostic,” though one that believes in the reality of exorcism. I don’t know how he pulls that off, quite frankly. I would think that most people, having experienced the things that Friedkin has, would convert to Christianity. Yet the will to disbelieve is durable.

Then again, it’s not entirely fair to ascribe this to “the will to disbelieve.” As Douthat writes in his column:

But the implausibility of hard materialism doesn’t mean the cosmos obviously confirms a Judeo-Christian paradigm. And the supernatural experiences of the irreligious — cosmic beatitude, ghostly enigmas, unclassifiable encounters and straight-up demons — don’t point toward any single theology or world-picture.

I hope you will read Douthat’s entire column. In it, there’s a link to an absorbing account of a New York journalist who believes that she communicated through a medium with the spirit of her dead husband. Hers is a story that does not fit into a Christian structure. But you know, I can’t say with confidence that I disbelieve it. Longtime readers (and those who read my Dante book) know the story of how my grandfather’s tormented soul lingered around the house of his son, my father, for a week, until an exorcist came, and it was discovered that my grandfather could not move on until my (deeply shocked) father’s forgiveness set him free. That event doesn’t fit into a Protestant paradigm (my parents and my late grandfather were Methodists), and it can only fit into a Catholic paradigm if you consider that my grandfather was in a form of Purgatory. The exorcist, now deceased, told me at the time that he had learned from his work not to try too hard to impose a frame on these experiences. For him, it was enough to trust in the liberating power of Jesus Christ. For Father Termini, it was enough to know that a soul had been bound in some sense by unresolved business, and that true forgiveness had set that soul free to go where it was supposed to go.

But where was the soul going? Father didn’t guess.

Anyway, stories like the ones Douthat brings up in his column unsettle me, in part because they make me aware of how contingent my own religious conversion was on cultural framing. I was first struck by a life-changing encounter with the numinous at the Chartres cathedral. But what if it had been in a Hindu temple? A mosque? A Tibetan Buddhist monastery? Today, as a committed Christian, if I walked into a holy place belonging to another religion, and had a knock-down-drag-out mystical experience testifying in some unmistakable sense to the truth of that religion (and denying the truth claims of Christianity), I would not trust it at all. I would frame it as a hallucination or some form of demonic deception testing my faith in Jesus Christ.

If I know that that would be my response (or at least hope that it would be), then how can I judge too harshly the skepticism or rejection of mystical experience of others?

I am interested to hear your stories of personal mystical experience. Did you accept it as valid? Why or why not? Did you change your life because of it? Why or why not? Did it fit your preconceived religious ideas? If not, how do you explain it?

UPDATE: A reader sends these opening lines of C.S. Lewis’s book Miracles:

In all my life I have met only one person who claims to have seen a ghost. And the interesting thing about the story is that that person disbelieved in the immortal soul before she saw the ghost and still disbelieves after seeing it. She says that what she saw must have been an illusion or a trick of the nerves. And obviously she may be right. Seeing is not believing.

For this reason, the question whether miracles occur can never be answered simply by experience. Every event which might claim to be a miracle is, in the last resort, something presented to our senses, something seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted. And our senses are not infallible. If anything extraordinary seems to have happened, we can always say that we have been the victims of an illusion. If we hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural, this is what we always shall say. What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience. It is therefore useless to appeal to experience before we have settled, as well as we can, the philosophical question.

UPDATE.2: I just remembered one of the strangest and most challenging films I’ve ever seen: a 2008 documentary called Unmistaken Child. It’s about the death of a Tibetan lama, and the search for his reincarnated self, which is discovered in a young boy. You’re thinking, “Yeah, right.” And so was I. Watch the movie, though. I didn’t know what to make of it when I saw it, and I still don’t. This kind of thing is not supposed to happen, not in my belief system. But there is a lot to have to explain away. It’s a seriously unsettling film.

Thank You for a Great Year

One of the things I cherish about this space here is the community you and I have managed to establish. I’ve had the privilege of meeting some of you over the years. Others I have never met and may never meet this side of heaven, but I feel as if I know you. Most of you would have no reason to know this, but I can tell you that privately, when some of you have been hurting, and made it known in your comments, other readers have approached me privately to ask what they can do to make things better for you. Some of the offers I have received on behalf of others in this community have been breathtaking in their generosity. Mind you, no online community can fully substitute for face-to-face community, but that should not diminish how extraordinary our little tribe is.

Every month or so, I find myself exasperated by why certain left-of-center readers keep coming back here to read and to comment, given that they seem to dislike most everything they encounter in this space. Inevitably one of those left-liberals will pay me and you all a sincere compliment by saying that as crazy as we make them sometimes, they keep returning because the conversation is unlike that you can find on most other sites, insofar as it’s civil (I moderate with a firm hand, and don’t apologize for it; if the streets are pleasant to walk down, it’s because I do a fair amount of silent policing). Plus, they say, they can encounter conservative ideas here that they don’t see anywhere else.

I really do take that as a compliment, not only to myself and to my commenters, but to what my colleagues at TAC, and our donors, have been able to accomplish. I was telling a friend the other day that since I joined TAC in mid-2011, I’ve written three books—including the forthcoming The Benedict Option—that either had their genesis in blogging here (The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, and How Dante Can Save Your Life), or, in the Ben Op case, took real shape on this blog, in my interaction with the writings of others and the comments of you readers. Any good that The Benedict Option does in shaping religious and social conservatism will be due in part to you readers and donors who have kept this blog, this website, and this magazine going.

And that’s just my own personal part in this project. TAC publishes all kinds of essays, columns, and reviews, all of which (we hope) push against the status quo, from the Right. We have been at this for almost 15 years, and though it would be a mistake to say this magazine was pro-Trump (though we have published some pieces favorable to the President-elect, and others unfavorable to him, we favor no candidate or politician), it is certainly true to say that TAC has been patiently laying the groundwork for this transformative moment in American politics. I anticipate that the work we at TAC do will become more prominent and more important in the year to come. I hope we can count on your support as readers—and as donors.

We run a tight ship here at TAC. True story: when our new editor Bob Merry called an editorial meeting in DC recently, I flew up to DC from Baton Rouge for it. At Reagan airport, I took the Metro into the city rather than Uber or a taxi, because it would save the magazine money. That act of frugality drew a friendly chuckle in the office, and I tell you that not to praise myself for being cheap (I’m not, at least when I’m spending my own money), but to let you donors know that we really do take seriously our obligation to you to be good stewards of your trust. TAC is not the pet project of a billionaire, but the common initiative of its writers, editors, and board members, and a wide array of donors, big and small, who believe in the work. It’s hard to express the gratitude I have to you all for your support. And I know I speak for my colleagues when I say that.

This is a trust that we cherish, and one that, from your end, has to be renewed yearly. We need your support to do what we do. Happily, TAC‘s network of supporters is expanding, which allows us to plan for more cultural coverage in the year to come, and to stage a variety of conferences and initiatives, among them a few events tied to my forthcoming book The Benedict Option. We’re even working with our friend J.D. Vance, author of the #1 New York Times best-seller Hillbilly Elegy, to create an event. J.D.’s terrific memoir was arguably the political book of the year, and rocketed to national prominence after a July interview with him here on TAC went viral.

Now J.D. Vance is moving back home to Ohio to involve himself in public policy, and to get to work on helping solve the economic and social problems that bedevil working-class folks in his home state — the kind of people who were invisible to many Americans until Hillbilly Elegy (3,340 Amazon reviews, almost all of them five-star) broke big, and these forgotten people shocked the world by helping elect the most astonishing American president in our history. I wouldn’t be surprised if Vance, a  reform-minded young Republican, launched a consequential political career. You TAC readers and donors can take satisfaction in knowing that you played a key role in opening that door.

Please stick with us, and help us open more doors in 2017. Donate now.

(If you would like to make a donation by check, you can make your check payable to American Ideas Institute, the foundation that publishes The American Conservative, and mail to: the American Ideas Institute, 910 17th Street, NW, #312, Washington, DC 20006-2626. Thank you.)

What Wendell Berry Gets Wrong

Here’s a truth-telling essay from (the excellent magazine) Plough Quarterly by writer Tamara Hill Murphy — a fan of Wendell Berry, but one who is bothered by what Berry chooses to omit from his fiction. Excerpts:

The dissonance with Berry occurs when I consider other family tales buried under the agrarian beauty. These are stories of shattered relationships, addiction, job loss, abandonment, mental illness, and unspoken violations that seem to separate my kinfolk from the clans in Port William. In Berry’s fictional village, readers occasionally witness felonies, infidelity, drunken brawls, and tragic deaths, but all of them seem to be told in a dusky, warming light.

The pleasure I experience reading a novel set in idyllic Port William, before war, agribusiness, and corporate industrialism pillage the town, turns quickly from a nostalgic glow to an ugly flame. I agree with the author’s animosity toward institutional and human greed, but I’m troubled by the apparent evils he chooses to overlook. Berry seems to cast mercy on certain kinds of frailties and judgment on others. As a loyal reader, this double standard agitates me: I become a mad reader of the Mad Farmer.

More:

Berry’s body of work lauds an unadulterated ecosphere. How does he reconcile glossing over (or at least hiding from his reader’s view) the ugly dysfunctions that often prosper alongside the natural beauty of such villages and pasturelands? The stories I grew up hearing and observing provide an alternative cast of characters to the Port William community. I’ve seen firsthand not only the ornery nature of such characters but also the ingrown thinking that sometimes flourishes in out-of-sight locales. For example, there’s the good country farmer I watched with my own eyes fist-beat his son. They seemed to keep their farm by the mad farmer’s standards, but that did not make them good. I tiptoe around extended family members who fought their whole lives like Jayber Crow to avoid answering to “the man across the desk,” yet leave a trail of fractured relationships in their wake.

My grandmother’s father – a Port Williamesque man – abandoned my grandmother when she was eight because his new wife didn’t like her or her older sister. Their country village, apparently, did not reject him for his decision – going so far as to make him an elected official. They likely tended their own gardens, gathered their own eggs, and milked their own cows. Their love for land and place did not require a father to love his own daughter. The authenticity of their economics did not guarantee a purity of heart.

She goes on to talk about J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, and how Vance, from personal experience, shows how family dysfunction gets passed down despite economic conditions. Murphy wants to know how Berry, who has “a meticulous understanding of symbiotic ecological systems,” can fail to understand how depraved human will can poison families and communities.

Read the whole thing.  She also notices something else about Berry: how he seems to pass harsh judgment on every generation since the Depression who embraced modernity in any way. Were the people of the olden times really so much more virtuous? she asks.

I appreciated this essay so much, because like Murphy, I am a great admirer of Wendell Berry’s, and agree with much of his diagnosis. He and my late father were born in the same year, and though Berry is a far more discerning student of human nature than my country-man dad was, they both shared a strong sense of idealism about the rural agrarian world that shaped them.

Daddy just could not accept that there was anything much wrong about that world. His idealism blinded him to its worst flaws. For example, he just didn’t see the unspeakable misery and injustice to which that social order condemned black people. It’s not like he didn’t know it was happening. Rather, he accepted that that’s just How Things Are. Over the years, he would tell me good stories about the old days, but he would also tell me stories of various cruelties he witnessed, or knew of. These things too were part of that world, and that social order, but he could not bring himself to pass judgment on any of it. Unlike Wendell Berry, an intellectual, my dad didn’t pass judgment on modernity; he passed judgment on those who abandoned home.

That would be me, and young people like me. Until reading Murphy’s essay, I hadn’t realized how much Wendell Berry reminds me of my dad, with his unyielding sense of morality. I find Berry a more sympathetic character than my father, but that’s because Berry is a writer, like me, and has a writer’s gift for expressing things persuasively. Funny, but if my dad were a writer, he would have been pretty close to Wendell Berry. Late in Daddy’s life, I gave him Jayber Crow for Christmas. He loved it, and said it reminded him of his childhood.

To be clear, Berry does not write about agrarian utopias. But as Murphy says, the sins and failings of Berry’s characters tend to manifest in “a dusky, warming glow.” In my adult years, I learned from older people in my hometown of some truly horrible things that happened in the old days — things that were done by upstanding citizens, and that everybody knew was happening. Nobody said anything. This kind of thing still goes on, a fact to which I can attest. It’s as if having to admit that these things happen would destroy the image people need to believe in about themselves and their community — so they imagine themselves to be more or less innocent, and serious sin to be something outsiders do.

I’ve been thinking about something close to this over the course of this week. If you read Little Way, you’ll remember that Ruthie admitted to her best friend on the night before her sudden death that she and her husband had not once discussed the possibility that she might not survive cancer. She had been living with Stage Four cancer for 19 months, and they never talked about it. I don’t think most people are like that anywhere, but that’s how my family was about things that are unspeakable. In retrospect, I believe my dad had this magical view that Starhill was a kind of Eden where people were justly rewarded for doing the right thing, and those who failed to do the right thing suffered. So, when my golden girl sister, who did not betray her family by moving away, was struck by terminal cancer, my father felt at levels he could not articulate that the metaphysical order had been violated.

I’m not saying that he wished I had died and she had lived. Even if that were true (which I truly don’t believe it is), he would never have admitted such a thought to his mind. But it honestly is the case that to my father, I ought to have been the one punished for succeeding in the world beyond the borders of West Feliciana Parish. Ruthie thought so too. That Ruthie suffered and died while I prospered — well, it meant the world was thrown off its axis.

I apologize for this diversion. All of this has been on my mind since Christmas Day, in part because I read Terry Teachout’s wonderful essay about watching digitized home movies from childhood at Christmas. He writes, in part:

[M]y parents are dead now. So is everyone in my father’s family. So are my mother’s parents, and all but one of her siblings. And so, of course, is the simpler, less knowing world of my youth that is enshrined in those faded movies, the self-confident age of Eisenhower and Kennedy, of three TV networks and tuna casserole with crumbled potato chips on top, of films and newspapers and Books of the Month that everyone saw and read and believed. It lives only in memory, and on the screen of my MacBook.

Memories are especially important at this time of year, to me and, I suspect, to most people who have put youth behind them. “‘I miss.’ That sums up Christmas for me.” So said a fortysomething friend of mine the other day, and I knew what she meant. How could I not? I miss my mother and father. I miss my aunts and uncles. I miss the old wooden swing on the porch of my grandmother’s house. I miss the Christmas presents and sliding boards and carefree vacations that my father loved to film. I miss the shadowless summer afternoons (“Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language,” Henry James once said to Edith Wharton) when there was nothing to worry about, when my parents did the worrying behind my back and let me assume that all was right with the world.

On my family’s Christmas Day, we sat in my late sister’s living room — the one in which she dropped dead on an early fall morning five years ago — and watched old movies of our family from the turn of the century. Ruthie looked so young and vital. She had a decade left to live, but the thought that she would ever die was, well, unthinkable. The family depicted on those videos was so happy and united. It wasn’t a perfect family, and we all knew that. But we were not aware of how deep the fault lines were, and how one day, nearly everything would break along them. Had we been able to confront those faults in ourselves, and in the character of our family, with honesty and charity, we might have weathered the trials that came. But we weren’t, so we didn’t.

Yet I hate it, really hate it, when people propagate the opposite lie: that because the ideals were unrealistic, everything was bad. I know people like that, people who never have a good word to say about their family or their church or their hometown, because they believe they have been failed by these people and places. I have a friend, A., who remembers her late father as nothing but a tyrant. For years I assumed this was true, until I spoke to her niece, who was raised by the man, her grandfather, after her mother burned out. The niece said that she doesn’t want to dispute Aunt A.’s memories, but in her experience, A.’s tyrannical father was the stern but protective substitute father who gave her the only stability she ever knew in her childhood — and for that, she’s grateful. The thing is, I believe that both A. and her niece are telling the truth about their experiences. Which is the “real” man in question? Both, probably. That is not satisfying. I imagine that A. would say that her niece implicitly devalues her (A.’s) suffering. I also imagine that the niece would say that A., for her own reasons, unfairly maligns the memory of a flawed man who was her protector in her vulnerable childhood.

He who controls the memory of the past controls the present. One of the most extraordinary movies I ever saw was the Tim Reid film version of the Clifton Taulbert memoir Once Upon A Time … When We Were Colored. Taulbert’s memoir, like the movie on which it is based, recalls the author’s childhood in Mississippi during the 1940s and 1950s. It doesn’t deny or downplay the reality of segregation and KKK violence, but it very much refuses to allow that dark reality to overshadow the good times he had with his family and community. The film ends with the Taulbert character leaving the South for the North, and more freedom and opportunity. What I found so amazing about the movie was its refusal to indulge in easy moralizing about the old South. As wicked as white supremacy was, it did not poison everything.

This is one reason I love Berry: he finds and celebrates the forgotten virtues of old, small places that have been abandoned by people like me, and by the people who create contemporary culture. But Murphy’s essay makes me wonder if one reason I love Berry is that he appeals to the poetic version of my family, my home, and my cultural history, the one that I wish to believe. It is not a fantasy, but it is not the whole truth either, as Murphy rightly says. Or, to put it more bluntly, I wonder if I love Berry because he presents the unflinching (but unfair) judgment my father made on me in a way that I find acceptable — which is to say, in a way that aestheticizes and raises to the level of poetic the judgment I pass on myself.

I wonder if all of us need to idealize a place, a people, a history — idealize it either positively or negatively (which is to say, demonize) — in order to feel that we live on solid ground. A novelist has to do this, certainly. His view of the world, as expressed through his work, comes through both in what he says and what he chooses not to say. Music is not just sound, but the absence of sound between the notes. Most of my friends who love Wendell Berry are, like me, academic or otherwise literary types who are not living a Berry-approved lifestyle, but who wish they were. Berry’s work calls forth from within them a nostalgia for a place they’ve never been, nor have most of us.

I’ve been closer to it than most, and I can tell you, small country towns are no more virtuous nor more vicious than big cities. Both Little Way and How Dante Can Save Your Life were about coming to terms with this in mid-life. Which is to say they were really about confronting the ideals on which one has built one’s understanding of the world and oneself for the illusions that they always were, and trying to sift through the rubble to find a more truthful and life-giving future.  It was strangely liberating to read Tamara Hill Murphy’s essay, because she made me face the fact that reading Berry makes me feel that I have failed him in some way. Maybe the problem is not entirely with us, but also with Wendell Berry. That’s a heretical thought, at least to me, but a useful one.