The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry

by Wendell Berry

The rugged individualism of the left believes that an individual’s body is a property belonging to that individual absolutely: the owners of bodies may, by right, use them as they please, as if there were no God, no legitimate government, no community, no neighbors, and no posterity. This supposed right is manifested in the democratizing of ‘sexual liberation’; in the popular assumption that marriage has been ‘privatized’ and so made subordinate to the wishes of individuals; in the proposition that the individual is ‘autonomous’; in the legitimation of abortion as birth control – in the denial, that is to say, that the community, the family, one’s spouse, or even one’s own soul might exercise a legitimate proprietary interest in the use one makes of one’s body. And this too is tragic, for it sets us ‘free’ from responsibility and thus from the possibility of meaning. It makes unintelligible the self-sacrifice that sent Thoreau to jail.