There has been much talk of experts in the past two years—applauding them, cursing them, defending them, questioning them. It is tempting to form strong opinions based only on our current crises and today’s thought-leaders, but we always benefit from engaging with past thinking to inform our current situation. I would like to engage some thoughts from Wendell Berry’s 45-year-old work in order to gain wisdom on how to approach our current cultural situation.
I recently read my first work by Berry (and plan to go on to read much more), The Unsettling of America. The subtitle, Culture and Agriculture, is important and accurate. Berry sees agriculture as intimately connected—indeed, unified—with all other parts of life. Consequently, I found his book uniquely prescient, even though I do not currently have what others may consider a formal tie to agriculture as a day-to-day “profession” (read his book and you will see how that sentence is all topsy-turvy).
Berry has quite a bit to say about the increasing prominence and influence of experts, or “specialists,” as he calls them, in our society. Spoiler alert: He does not see this development as positive. Though written in 1977, Berry’s thinking is still helpful and applicable today as we sift through myriad “expert recommendations.” I will look at how Berry believes a culture excessively dependent on specialization is bad for both individuals and society at large, and conclude with a few steps to take in light of his words.[1]
Specialization and the Individual
Berry studied English and creative writing at the University of Kentucky and Stanford, and has written several novels and many books of poetry and essays. After his studies he moved back to Kentucky to teach and take up farming again, the profession his family had held for many generations. In this book, Berry addresses the boom of “agribusiness” and the consequent “unsettling” of America: a loosening of ties to family, land, and spirituality—the things that make us human.
In this context of cultural discussion, Berry also has much to say about the idea of specialization, starting in the second chapter, where he devotes several paragraphs to the description of life for many Americans in the era of specialization:
[A] system of specialization requires the abdication to specialists of various competences and responsibilities that were once personal and universal. Thus, the average—one is tempted to say, the ideal—American citizen now consigns the problem of food production to agriculturalists and ‘agribusinessmen,’ the problems of health to doctors and sanitation experts, the problems of education to school teachers and educators, the problems of conservation to conservationists, and so on.[2]
The implication of this quotation, which is made explicit through the rest of the work (at least in relation to food production), is the idea that humans have a universal and personal responsibility to look after their own food, health, education, and environment. He goes on to describe the state in which such an “average,” or even “ideal,” American lives:
The beneficiary of this regime of specialists ought to be the happiest of mortals—or so we are expected to believe. . . . The fact is, however, that this is probably the most unhappy average citizen in the history of the world. He has not the power to provide himself with anything but money, and his money is inflating like a balloon [Ha! Hello from 2022, Mr. Berry!] and drifting away. . . . From morning to night he does not touch anything that he has produced himself, in which he can take pride.[3]
Many of us have felt the malaise that Berry links to our modern lack of skill to procure for ourselves any of our vital interests. For this (perhaps small) sliver in history, if we are able to make money, we can be assured access to not only our needs, but many of our wants. This makes meeting our basic needs a quick exchange, rather than a slow, skill-driven process; this type of instant gratification further lowers any motivation to learn basic skills (food production and processing, basic first-aid and sick care, etc.) for ourselves.
Counter-intuitively, there is little satisfaction in the instant gratification made possible by a specialized culture. Instant gratification is a short and vacuous high; and if habitually engaged, we spend the rest of our lives reaping the mire of the come-down. “The specialist system fails from a personal point of view because a person who can do only one thing can do virtually nothing for himself. In living in the world by his own will and skill, the stupidest peasant or tribesman is more competent than the most intelligent worker or technician or intellectual in a society of specialists.”[4] Giving over the personal responsibilities and physical actualities of caring for our own bodies and souls has a corroding effect on individuals; Berry also identifies how this culture of specialization corrodes society as a whole.
Specialization and Society
Berry sees the complexity of a society built on specialization as oppressive.[5] More importantly, excessive specialization fragments a society to the point that the moral responsibility for knowledge applied becomes a specialty itself, relieving the rest of us from the burden of bearing it. Berry sees the immediate cause of this fracturing in the structure of the “universities,” as they are inaccurately named:
It is suggested, both by the organization of the universities and by the kind of thinking they foster, that farming shall be the responsibility only of the college of agriculture, that law shall be in the sole charge of the professors of law, that morality shall be taken care of by the philosophy department, reading by the English department, and so on. The same, of course, is true of government which has become another way of institutionalizing the same fragmentation.[6]
Institutionalizing fragmentation goes against the grain of the universe. “The Creation is one,” Berry says, and we can wholeheartedly agree, since “for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist” (1 Cor. 8:6 ESV). Creation is unified because the Godhead is unified.
Of course, any time that we buck God’s created order, we are subject to the consequences. The consequence of fragmenting knowledge—and by extension, life—is that spheres of life come into competition with one another, weakening the whole in the end. “But if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another” warns Paul in Galatians 5.
Devouring itself is exactly what our society is doing. In agriculture especially but in other ways as well, the source of life is devoured rather than protected. The health of the soil is not cared for, so outside input is required to produce artificial fertility in the land. The two sources of our cultural wisdom and inheritance are out of reach: Our elderly are shut up in homes, out of sight; our history is buried in jargon and ideology. The source of health and fertility for our physical bodies is obscured by the confusion of—sometimes contradictory—recommendations on types of food to eat and therapies and pharmaceuticals for our ailments. The result is a quagmire of factions each championing the superiority of their own pet specialty with no one responsible for the moral results.
Toward Generalization
Part of the solution is to see, acknowledge, and act on the unity of reality. Berry says, “if we conceive of a culture as one body, which it is, we see that all of its disciplines are everybody’s business, and that the proper university product is therefore not the whittled-down, isolated mentality of expertise, but a mind competent in all its concerns.”[7] That outcome is one original intention of a liberal arts education—to produce a mind “competent in all its concerns.”
Such an education is liberal because it provides a person with the tools to free him or herself from the need for a teacher. It liberates the whole world to him; he needs no expert to interpret the meaning of what he sees, for he has the power of thought and skill of reasoning to discern for himself what is true, good, and beautiful, informed by the community of which he is a part and the cultural tradition that has been passed down to him. As Charlotte Mason observes, “the chief responsibility which rests on [us] as persons is the acceptance or rejection of ideas.”[8] This is a responsibility that we abdicate when we leave all the important thinking to, so called, experts.
Procuring for yourself and your children a liberal arts education is an over-arching goal that can turn the tide—at least in your own small community—toward a unified culture and away from fragmented specialization, but there are also small, tangible steps to take even today toward taking up some of that universal and personal responsibility for yourself of which Berry speaks. Cooking from scratch; growing your own food or purchasing food from someone that grows it; learning to treat ailments at home with food or herbs; and curating a home library are not easy or simple activities, but attempting them is a vital step in reclaiming a sense of personal responsibility and broadening the scope of subjects in which we have some level of competence. “We can simplify our society—that is, make ourselves free—only by undertaking tasks of great mental and cultural complexity.”[9] Any worthwhile task is not easy, but it is rewarding.
Conclusion
Berry’s work addresses problems and issues distinct to his historical moment, but many of the problems he faced persist today, and the wise thinking he engaged in continues to inform us as we confront our own historical situation. Exploring some of Berry’s thoughts on the effects of undue specialization can encourage us as we seek to “take every thought captive to obey Christ” and “put all things under his feet” (2 Corinth. 10:5; Psalm 8:6).
[1] Some specialization is beneficial and necessary in society. No man is an island, and we benefit from the particular strengths and training of others, just as they benefit from our own areas of special interest and expertise. However, our current cultural situation is such that we would greatly benefit from putting less stress on expertise and specialization, highlighting instead the unity of Creation and knowledge and the benefits of letting the disciplines dialogue with one other.
[2] Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (Berkely: Counterpoint, 1977), 22.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid., 23.
[5] Ibid., 49.
[6] Ibid., 47.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Charlotte Mason, A Philosophy of Education (Living Books, 2017), xxxi.
[9] Berry, 49.
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