* Allan Carlson is Editor of The Family in America and author, most recently, of Third Ways: How Bulgarian Greens, Swedish Housewives, and Beer-Swilling Englishmen Created Family-Centered Economies...And Why They Disappeared. It is adapted from a lecture at the conference “The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry,” held October 20, 2007, in Louisville, Kentucky, and co-sponsored by The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, The Philadelphia Society, and The McConnell Center at the University of Kentucky.

A modest political-cultural tragedy occurred this past summer, without attracting much attention among the usual pundits.  This was the announcement that Weekly World News would cease print publication.  This periodical, readers will recall, was the tabloid faithfully found at the supermarket check-out line.  It courageously pursued the truth.  For example, it was the first publication to report that “Saddam Hussein Has Arsenal of Giant Slingshots and Dinosaurs” and also the memorable “60 Members of U.S. Senate Are Space Aliens.”  (As an aside, for readers who might be political scientists, I note that that second article does stand as an excellent explanation for recent behavior in the U.S. Senate.)

Like all good tabloids, Weekly World News also featured advice columns.  A few years ago, one caught my eye: “Improve Your Sex Life Tonight—The Amish Way.”  According to Dr. Milton Ayres of The Society for the Cross-Cultural Study of Sexuality: “The best sex starts with getting down to the basics—and there are few societies on Earth more basic than the Amish.”  For reasons of prudence, which is the supreme conservative virtue, I do not want to dwell on many of the article’s details.  However, I would like to note some of Dr. Ayres’ more specific advice to couples.  

•  “Turn off all the lights in your house.  The Amish have no electricity, which means every sexual encounter takes place by romantic candlelight.”

•  “Wear plain, modest clothing, which covers up most of your body.  All the more to intensify the feeling of discovery when....”

•  “Purchase some farm animals to keep around your yard.  The Amish are constantly around farm animals that are reproducing.  This reinforces the fact that sex is natural.”

•  “Turn off all radios and TVs...so there’s no comparison between the ‘perfect’ media fantasy people and your own romantic partner.”

•  And “[r]egularly read the Bible, a book which encourages a healthy sex life between husband and wife.”[1]

Now it is true that the sex-advice column is not a literary genre commonly associated with the contemporary poet, novelist, and essayist Wendell Berry.  All the same, I suspect he would agree with most of these recommendations, notably: turning off the electricity and lighting candles; throwing out the radio and TV; viewing the procreative barnyard as the best and most natural form of sex education, for all ages; understanding that modesty is the surest prelude to sexual joy; and holding the Bible to be the most reliable sex manual.

Still, these “basic” guides to agrarian reproductive behavior are fairly superficial.  Fortunately, Mr. Berry does discuss sexual love and procreation with more depth and with some frequency in his fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.  Recently, in fact, he has addressed sexual questions in two essays that some might call quixotic.

The first of these possibly quixotic endeavors is entitled “Rugged Individualism.”  It initially appeared in Playboy.  Mr. Berry’s intent, it seems, was to reach out to that almost mythical body of subscribers who actually do acquire the magazine to read the articles.  His essay contrasts the “rugged individualism” of the political right with that of the left.  On the right, the author says, the focus is on private property and “the presumptive ‘right’ of individuals to do [with it] as they please, as if there were no God, no legitimate government, no community, no neighbors, and no posterity.”  Mr. Berry adds that this form of absolute individualism became worse as the great corporations received the status of “persons,” also leaving them free “to do whatever they please with their property.”

The rugged individualism of the left focuses on the human body.  As Mr. Berry elaborates, this approach holds that “the owners of bodies may, by right, use them as they please, [also] as if there were no God, no legitimate government, no community, no neighbors, and no posterity.”  He finds this “supposed right...manifested in the democratizing of ‘sexual liberation.’” 

“The comedy begins,” Mr. Berry goes on, when these extreme forms of individualism meet.  The rugged individualism of the right celebrates “family values” and condemns “lust,” but has nothing to say about the profits gained through advertising that exploits lust and the other six deadly sins.  The individualism of the left, meanwhile, casts sin as a private matter and defends the environment.  However, Mr. Berry explains, the left’s notion of “environment” excludes “the economic landscapes of agriculture and forestry” and their human communities, their children and families.  This environmentalism also excludes “the privately owned bodies of other people,” all of which seem to have been turned over “in fee simple to the corporate individualists.”  The common agenda of both “rugged individualisms,” he says, is a claim to be “free” to grab as much as they can of whatever they want, while ignoring any acts of kindness, caretaking, faithfulness, neighborliness, or peace.[2]

The second seemingly quixotic essay is a “Letter to Daniel Kemmis.”  Mr. Kemmis is a former Minority Leader and Speaker of Montana’s House of Representatives, and a Democrat.  Mr. Berry’s goal here is to salvage a Democratic Party held hostage to sexual radicalism, among other recent obsessions.  “Why not just give up on the Democratic Party?” he asks himself, and answers: “Well, because of its name.”  On social matters, the author blasts “the moral timidity or incompetence of the Democrats” in allowing Republicans to confine the “values” issues to evolution, abortion, and homosexuality.

All the same, regarding the second of these issues—abortion—Mr. Berry is forthright in asserting “that I am opposed to abortion except as a last resort to save a pregnant woman’s life.”  He continues:  “[t]he crucial question raised by this practice is: What is killed?  The answer can only be: A human being.”  He wrestles with the language of a “woman’s right to choose,” and concludes that if this is a right, it is a very problematic and peculiar one.  In contrast, Mr. Berry finds the “right to life” embedded in the U.S. Declaration of Independence and in “a ‘reverence for life’ to which we are called by much instruction.”  This means that his opposition to abortion is parallel to, or consistent with, his opposition to capital punishment and to war, “especially the killing of innocent women, children, and old people.”

Concerning the third “values” issue, Mr. Berry concludes that the Democrats have been “further weakened by mishandling the issue of homosexuality.”  He blasts the knee-jerk liberalism that gives “categorical approval” to any group which once faced broad disapproval.  “[T]his is nonsense,” he declares, for some people in minority groups—just as some people in majority groups—behave in ways that should always face disapproval.  Regarding cries for same-sex marriage, he becomes something of a libertarian, arguing that state “approval of anybody’s sexual behavior is as inappropriate and as offensive to freedom as governmental disapproval.”  After endorsing equal “domestic partnership” benefits for all adults living in households—be they heterosexual, homosexual, widowed sisters, bachelor brothers, or friends—Mr. Berry adds: “Let sacraments such as marriage be the business of religion and communities.”[3]

Summoning Playboy readers to social and sexual responsibility and calling on the 21st-century Democratic Party to reclaim the mantle of family protector, which it once proudly held: these are most worthy—if arguably futile—endeavors.  Beyond them, though, Mr. Berry’s work carries rich insights into the nature and meaning of sexual love and procreation.  Importantly, he rejects three assertions common to our era: sex can be safe; sex is a private matter; and sex should be free.  Mr. Berry responds:

First, sex is not safe.  

As he writes in the splendid essay, “Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community”:  “Sex was never safe, and it is less safe now than it has ever been.”[4] Community customs, arrangements, and controls had existed “in part, to reduce the volatility and the danger of sex.”  These controls would “preserve its energy, its beauty, and its pleasure” so that the sexual act would in turn bond husbands to wives, “parents to children, families to the community, [and] the community to nature.”[5]  Whenever sex becomes “autonomous,” freed from communal restraints, and valued solely for its own sake, it also becomes “frivolous” and “destructive—even of itself.”[6]

Mr. Berry considers modern sex education in the schools and concludes: “What we are actually teaching the young is an illusion of...purchasable safety, which encourages them to tamper prematurely, disrespectfully, and dangerously with a great power.”[7]  Similar delusions, he contends, are found among adults.  Men eagerly flock to the vasectomy clinics, convinced that the procedure is “simple” and “harmless.”  For their part, infertile women desperately submit their bodies to doses of chemicals and other intrusions, oblivious to the risks involved while accepting their dangerous new status as “productive machines.”[8]

Second, sex is not private.  

Mr. Berry rejects the U.S. Supreme Court’s concept of a “right to sexual privacy.”  He writes: “It is wrong to assume that sex carries us into a personal privacy that separates us from everything else.  On the contrary, sex joins us to the world.”[9]  As the foundation of the household, as the source of children, and as the primal social unit, the sexual bond of man and woman bears powerful and necessary communal obligations.  The conjugal vows, for example, are said “to the community as much as to one another,” and the community comes to listen and wish the couple well “on their behalf and on its own.”  In return, the community’s task is to see that these lovers “die” into their union with one another, becoming one flesh through a “momentous giving.”  Mr. Berry adds: “If the community cannot protect this giving, it can protect nothing—and our time is proving that this is so.”  The consequence is the squandering of “moral capital built up by centuries of community life.”[10]

The unacknowledged victims of “sexual privacy” are children.  He writes in Another Turn of the Crank:

I know of nothing that so strongly calls into question our ability to care for the world as our present abuse of our own reproductivity.  How can we take care of other creatures, all born like ourselves from the world’s miraculous fecundity, if we have forsaken the qualities of culture and character that inform the nurture of children?

Mr. Berry muses that this indifference toward human children might be a by-product of the modern regard for productivity, since children are not very productive.  Or it might be the fault of an economy that now commonly requires both parents to work outside the home.  Or it might be a consequence of the broad commodification of family bonds.  “Whatever the reason,” he continues, “it is a fact that we are now conducting a sort of general warfare against children, who are being aborted or abandoned, abused, drugged, bombed, neglected, poorly raised, poorly taught, and poorly disciplined.”[11]

Mr. Berry also qualifies the claims of privacy relative to the body.  While acknowledging the obvious “right of any person to control his or her own body,” he focuses on the limits of this right.  Referring specifically to abortion, he states: “if you can control your own body only by destroying another person’s body, then control has come much too late.”  On the same issue, he acknowledges the argument that the fetus is not a child until it can live outside the womb, yet responds: “every creature is surrounded by such questions of dependence and viability all its life.  If we are unworthy to live as long as we are dependent on life-supporting conditions, then none of us has any rights.”[12]

More broadly, Mr. Berry concludes: “In dealing with our own fertility and its consequences, we are not just carrying on personal or private ‘relationships.’  We are establishing one of the fundamental terms of our humanity and our connection to the world.”[13]

And third, sex is never free.  

“Sexual liberation is as much a fraud and as great a failure as the ‘peaceful atom,’” Mr. Berry declares.[14]  He is equally dismissive of the idea of sex as “recreation,” or more properly “re-creation”; he writes: “thinking to claim for [sex] ‘a new place,’” advocates “only acknowledge its displacement from Creation.”[15]  Free and recreational sex actually feed into the matrix of the industrial economy, where the result is superficiality.  As Mr. Berry notes in a recent essay: “This is an economy, and in fact a culture, of the one-night stand.  ‘I had a good time,’ says the industrial [just as the recreational] lover, ‘but don’t ask me my last name.”[16] 

Rather than freedom, the disintegration of the household through “sexual liberation” has produced a novel form of bondage.  The new overlords, Mr. Berry says, are the sexual specialists—sex clinicians and pornographers—“[b]oth of whom subsist on the increasing possibility of sex between people who neither know nor care about each other” and who also “subsist on our failure to see any purpose or virtue in sexual discipline.”  American culture grants to these “technologists of fertility” the “powers of gods and the social function of priests,” despite their scorn for community ties and cultural responsibilities.[17]

Mr. Berry’s work highlights other themes that explore sexual love and procreation.  Notably, he stresses the close bond between human and agricultural fertility.  An early poem, “The Broken Ground,” tells of the fertility initiated by the plow in the soil:

The opening out and out,
Body yielding body:
the breaking
through which the new
comes, perching
above its shadow....
bud opening to flower
opening to fruit opening
to the sweet marrow
of the seed.[18]

Mr. Berry underscores that physical love is not enough to sustain an intimate relationship.  In order to last, human sexual life “must enflesh itself in the materiality of the world—produce food, shelter, warmth or shade, surround itself with careful acts, well made things.”  True sexual love also binds these lovers into “the cycles of fertility and the seasons,” into “life and death,” where they find the “deepest solemnity” and the “highest joy.”  More broadly, just as “agricultural fertility is...the survival of natural process in human order,” natural human procreativity finds its ordered setting on the small, function-rich farm.[19] 

Sexual love, Mr. Berry adds, also expresses the wild side of human nature.  Sex is “part of the world’s wilderness; it is part of our wildness.  To say that we must be careful of it is not to say that we must make it tame, but rather that we must not damage it or ourselves by ignorance or foolishness.”  Put another way, this physical wildness of humans needs to be recognized, channeled, and cherished as part of our being.[20]

Another remarkable aspect of Mr. Berry’s work is the critical attention he gives to birth control, rare among non-Catholic writers.  He calls modern contraceptive practices “horrifying” not only because “we are relying so exclusively on a technology of birth control that is still experimental,” but also because “we are using it casually, in utter cultural nakedness, unceremoniously, without sufficient understanding, and as a substitute for cultural solutions.”  In this culture of contraception, women must submit to “a technology of chemicals” found in “the pill.”  Meanwhile, men turn to sterilization, which he calls the most troubling form of birth control, for “to give up fertility is a major change, as important as birth, puberty, marriage, or death.”

Mr. Berry denies any affection for the “self-hating, self-congratulatory Victorian self-restraint” of decades or centuries past.  Instead, he praises inherited cultural mechanisms of sexual self-control.  In one essay, Mr. Berry points specifically to the Hunza people of northern Pakistan, where the women left their husbands’ beds until each new child was weaned, so spacing their children about four years apart.  He directly praises breastfeeding as a natural method of child spacing (while speculating that this durable form of home production became unfashionable in America precisely because the corporations could find “no way...to persuade a woman to purchase her own milk”).[21]

On the broad question of human fecundity, Mr. Berry rejects the charge that “there are too many people.”  Contemplating the “unsettled,” depopulated American countryside, he is sure that this is not true of the United States.  Moreover, he fears the implication of the term “over-population,” for it implicitly summons a dangerous calculation of “who are the surplus.”  The real environmental problems, he asserts, are those “technological multipliers” that artificially increase the negative footprints of some peoples on the world.  The obvious response for them is to live simpler lives.[22]

Finally, Mr. Berry does provide positive visions of procreative sexual love.  For the man, it means recovering the tasks of husbandry, “the work of a domestic man, a man who has accepted a bondage to the household.”  This husbanding man is “both careful and humble.”  He is ready “to keep, to save, to make last, to conserve,” and to suborn his personality to his home, to his wife, and to his children.  He must become in this way a home-maker.[23]  In the novel Hannah Coulter, Mr. Berry gives expression to this natural urge: 

The possibility that among the worlds wars and sufferings two people could love each other for a long time, until death and beyond, and could make a place for each other that would be a part of their love, as their love for each other would be a way of loving their place.[24]

Mr. Berry raises up several of the farm women in his fiction as models of sexual fulfillment.  For example, he describes young Hannah Coulter on a walk: “She feels good.  She feels full of the goodness, the competency, of her body that can love a man and bear his children, that can raise and prepare food, keep the house, work in the field.”[25]  Mr. Berry also offers as example Minnie Branch: “a large, muscular, humorous” woman who could butcher hogs, shoot a fox, split firewood, and wring a hen’s neck and who “conceived and birthed as faithfully as a good brood cow, welcomed each newcomer without fuss, prepared without complaint for the next.”[26]  And, in my favorite of Mr. Berry’s short stories, “A Jonquil for Mary Penn,” he provides the example of Mary and Elton Penn:

That she was his half, she had no doubt at all.  He needed her.  At times she knew with a joyous ache that she completed him, just as she knew with the same joy that she needed him and he completed her.  How beautiful a thing it was, she thought, to be a half, to be completed by such another half!  When had there even been such a yearning of halves toward each other, such a longing, even in quarrels, to be whole?  And sometimes they would be whole.  Their wholeness came upon them as a rush of light, around them and within them, so that she felt they must be shining in the dark.[27]

Or, as Weekly World News would have phrased the same point: “You really haven’t lived ’til you’ve tried sex [agrarian style].”[28]

Endnotes

1  Angus Fenwick, “Improve Your Sex Life Tonight—The Amish Way,” at http://www.weeklyworldnews.com/features/ revelations_story.cfm?instanceid=47840 (3/10/2003): 1-2.

2  Wendell Berry, “Rugged Individualism;” republished in Wendell Berry, The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays (Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005): 9-11.

3  Wendell Berry, “Letter to Daniel Kemmis,” in Berry, The Way of Ignorance, pp. 141-44.

4  Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992, 1993): 142.

5  Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, pp. 120-21.

6  Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (New York: Avon, 1978): 117, 131.

7  Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, p. 142.

8  Berry, The Unsettling of America, pp. 133-34.

9  Wendell Berry, Another Turn of the Crank (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1997): 82.

10  Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, pp. 138, 143.

11  Berry, Another Turn of the Crank, pp. 78-79.  Emphasis added.

12  Ibid., pp. 80-81.

13  Ibid., p. 82.

14  Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, p. 142.

15  Berry, The Unsettling of America, p. 117.

16  Wendell Berry, “The Whole Horse,” in Eric T. Freyfogle, ed., The New Agrarianism: Land, Culture, and the Community of Life (Washington, DC: Island Press-Shearwater Books, 2001): 64.

17  Berry, The Unsettling of America, pp. 132, 135.

18  Wendell Berry, Collected Poems, 1957-1982 (San Francisco, CA: North Point Press, 1984): 25.

19  Berry, The Unsettling of America, pp. 117, 130, 132.

20  Ibid., pp. 117, 130; Berry, Another Turn of the Crank, pp. 81-82.

21  Berry, The Unsettling of America, pp. 115, 132-135.

22  Wendell Berry, Home Economics (San Francisco, CA: North Point Press, 1987): 149-50.

23  Berry, The Way of Ignorance, pp. 96-100.

24  Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter (Washington, DC: Shoemaker and Hoard, 2004): 67.

25  Wendell Berry, The Memory of Old Jack (San Diego and New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1974): 103.

26  Wendell Berry, A World Lost (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1996): 55.

27  Wendell Berry, “A Jonquil for Mary Penn,” in Fidelity: Five Stories (New York and San Francisco: Pantheon, 1992): 79.

28  Fenwick, “Improve Your Sex Life Tonight—The Amish Way,” p. 1.  In this article, the last two words of the sentence are “Amish style.”