Andrew on Berry, 1

Andrew on "The Failure of War"

Somewhere towards reading the last paragraphs of "The Failure of War," I realized I had hardly given due attention to this third essay in Wendell Berry's latest collection of essays, The Citizenship Papers. With some frustration, I experienced that painful realization of having, more or less, slept through the last about four pages of text. I remembered some of his arguments, I agreed with some and not others (Berry wonders why we think the value judgments we make when allowing abortion and capitol punishment won't bleed over from the state to individuals; we have externalized the costs of war so as to vastly under-appreciate those costs; global capitalism is the same as war - corporations, aimed at conquest, plunder lands, placing no value on the health of nature or human communities); but, I read the majority of this essay, the first time, denying the radicalism of Berry's argument.

Berry is not arguing against unilateral force, and for UN Security Council approval for war. He is not posing a plea for so-called just wars. To do war is always, Berry says, to do war on one's self. Wars damage the world. It is not OK to enter a war to conquer land, nor to assure imports of a resource; but it is also not OK to enter war as a response to terrorist attacks, nor preemptive strikes against naval bases. Berry supports no war, and that radical stance is too easily half-read, half slept-through.

Largely, I realized Wendell Berry's point while reading his well-what-do-we-do-about-it section. If war is never good, how do we proceed? Can we strive to release ourselves of the conviction that we can solve our problems with violence? Berry proposes that our current predicament of modern warfare forces this question upon us:

How many deaths of other people's children by bombing or starvation are we willing to accept in order that we may be free, affluent, and (supposedly) at peace?

And his answer to this question, a question so like Sunday morning rhetoric lost on us while we read weekday news stories, is what forced me to turn back to the start of this essay to re-read.

None. And I know that I am no the only one who would give that answer: Please. No children. Don't kill any children for my benefit.

And upon reading Berry's "Two Minds" essay, some four or five down the way, I became haunted by my reaction to "The Failure of War." In "Failure," Berry gives some faint idea of what we can do to not be dependant on force. We can emphasize self-sufficiency, quitting the import-dependency (foreign and cross-country) on food and natural resources. OK, I thought. This is a step to preserve national security, and some isolationalist positions could make war less likely.

That was my response. And it was half-hearted because I could, and cannot, escape the rational conclusion that only force can assure compliance. Only force can make a genocidal leader stop; only force can prevent crime (forced penitence giving us the name for penitentiaries); and only force, as we were so often reminded by our Leader, can assure compliance with international law. And I cannot escape a mindset that accepts this as, albeit sad, fact.

With reading "Two Minds," one comes to the full thrust, beyond glassy eyed pacifism, of Berry's "Failure of War" essay. Ending dependency on war will not come about with shifts in foreign policy. It will and can only come about with a paradigm shift in Human thinking. That needed shift is from exclusive reliance on what Berry calls the Rational Mind to a mindset that includes the Sympathetic Mind. We will dig into this more (as I'm springing this inclusion of a second essay unfairly on Lily). For now, I will quote two paragraphs. He has just explored the Sympathetic Mindset that acknowledges that one's obligation to oneself cannot be isolated from one's obligation to everything else. "The whole thing is balanced on the verb to love. Love for oneself finds its only efficacy in love for everything else."

This condition of lawfulness and this set of laws did not originate in the Rational Mind, and could not have done so. The Rational Mind reduces our complex obligation to care for one another to issues of justice, forgetting the readiness with which we and our governments reduce justice, in turn, to revenge; and forgetting that even justice is intolerable without mercy, forgiveness, and love.

Justice is a rational procedure. Mercy is not a procedure and it is not rational. It is a kind of freedom that comes from sympathy, which is to say imagination - - the felt knowledge of what it is to be another person or another creature. It is free because it does not have to be just. Justice is desirable, of course, but it is virtually the opposite of mercy. Mercy, says the Epistle of James, "rejoiceth against judgment."

The Sympathetic Mind is one that recognizes that our full humanity can only be approached with something we would, in our current socially conditioned mindsets, call irrational. With the Sympathetic Mind, "We forget whatever we know about the physiology of the brain, and we think; we forget what we know of anatomy, the nervous system, the gastrointestinal tract, and we work, eat, and sleep. We forget the therapies of 'human relationships,' and we merely love the people we love, and even try to love the others.... The Sympathetic Mind leaves the world whole, or it attempts always to do so. It looks upon people and other creatures as whole beings. It does not parcel them out into functions and uses."

I am haunted by my own stuck-ness in a mindset given me by society. And it is no fear-less thing wondering the extent to which I should allow my Rational Mind to give way to the Sympathetic Mind. But, I don't need Berry to know this is needed and right. The Rational Mind, when it is all we look to, denies our humanity.

The failure of war is a failure of human capability. Rather, it is a failure of our achieving our capability to love, to reach our human potential. I hope Berry is right, because. I hope we have a world to look forward to that escapes the trap of violence we live with now.