Virtues of Renewal

Wendell Berry’s Sustainable Forms

Jeffrey Bilbro

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780813179421, 9780813176406
• eBook ISBN: 9780813176413
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Théorie de la critique littéraire

1

Attention

When we sit down at the dinner table, many of us now bring along our own utensil: a smartphone. If the food looks good, you can post a picture of it to Instagram; if the conversation lags, you can see what your friends are saying on Facebook; if someone asks a question, you can Google it. Even if you haven’t eaten a meal mediated through your phone, you’ve almost certainly watched others do so. Although smartphones are incredibly powerful and can make many tasks much easier to accomplish, they also reinforce perennial human tendencies toward self-absorption. So though most American adults own smartphones, many remain somewhat unsettled by the mode of community they foster. We might hesitate to agree with Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, two executives at Google, when they confidently proclaim that “the best thing anyone can do to improve the quality of life around the world is to drive connectivity and technological opportunity.”¹ The optimism behind this claim seems to assume that more “connectivity” is always better—if we have access to more information, more stimulus, more people, then we’ll be more fulfilled. Yet maybe what we really need is not more connections, but more sustaining relationships with those to whom we are already connected.

In the movement of his poems, Wendell Berry models a mode of patient, grateful attention that can foster such relationships. His desire to attend to where he is testifies to his faith that he lives in a marvelous and grace-filled place. Thus, Berry imagines heaven not as somewhere up in the sky with the saints, but right here, “this world as I know it, but redeemed / of our abuse of it and one another.”

A painful Heaven this would be, for I would know

by it how far I have fallen short. I have not

paid enough attention, have not been grateful

enough. And yet this pain would be the measure

of my love. In eternity’s once and now, pain would

place me surely in the Heaven of my earthly love.²

Berry’s poetic practice of returning again and again to the same subjects is part of his effort to see faithfully, to pay attention, and so to honor the goodness and beauty of his place.³ Attention is a particularly fitting virtue with which to begin a study of sustainable cultural forms because these forms depend, first of all, on members who are attentive to perceive and participate in the ongoing patterns of their places. Berry’s poetry reveals that attention can be a strange thing; as he attends to his place, he finds himself attended to. Attention, then, may be more complex and reciprocal than we tend to think. And it is certainly more difficult to practice in a digitally networked culture that undermines the reciprocal dynamics of sustaining attention by encouraging the techniques of distraction and surveillance.

Berry and his friend Wes Jackson argue that the health of our soil depends on a relatively low eyes-to-acres ratio, one that enables a “competent watchfulness.”⁴ The health of our communities likewise depends on our attention, and yet we often fall back on the easier habits of distraction and surveillance, which are technological substitutes for the hard but necessary work of attention. Our web of screens surrounds us with mirrors that reflect back to us our own desires and preferences, in the process cutting us off from the complex realities of our places. Berry’s poems, in contrast, model forms of attention that remind readers they are not the organizing subjects of the world. They portray his place and its members as what the philosopher Jean-Luc Marion calls “saturated phenomena,” beings who exist beyond his capacity to see, and so there is always more to which he is obligated to bear witness. Berry’s attentive witness to the life of his place deepens his participation in its cycles of death and life, and as he participates more fully, he finds himself seen—not only by the creatures with whom he lives, but ultimately by the Creator who is still at work redeeming and healing creation. Being seen by the resurrecting Creator transforms Berry so that he is better able to know and care for his place, to practice resurrection.

Distraction and Surveillance

Many cultural critics have observed that attention is being reshaped by new digital technologies, particularly the Internet and smartphones. We are now embedded in an “ecosystem of interruption technologies” that fosters a state of “continuous partial attention.”⁵ When we are at work, attending deeply to an idea or person or task, a smartphone offers the lure of easy entertainment. An infinite banquet of amusing tidbits is only a swipe away. Staying in tension with a recalcitrant reality is hard, and we have always been prone to distractions that relieve this tension by feeding us empty pleasures.

What makes digital distraction technologies particularly damaging is the ease with which they reduce other people and objects to the limits of our own desires and intentions. These technologies constantly tempt us to curate our lives in ways that put ourselves at the center of the universe; we no longer have to encounter others in their embodied complexity. The digital ecosystem reinforces narcissism by providing “a kind of self-centered distraction that reminds us that we are living, present, seen, clicked on, liked.”⁶ I can go through my day feeling as if the world revolves around me: I see the news filtered through the eyes of my friends, I count how many likes or favorites my updates generate, I order whatever I want to be shipped to my front door. In looking for the next interesting distraction, we turn our attention away from others and toward ourselves; our screens can act like the reflective pool of water in which Narcissus drowned.

Berry mourns the damage these technologies can inflict on our communities, cautioning that they threaten our ability to love one another:

Looking at screens,

listening to voices

in nonexistent distance,

seeing, hearing nothing

present, we pass into

the age of disincarnation,

the death love finally

realized as we become

our pictures adrift,

homeless in deplaced

space of the mind only.⁷

The poem’s language focuses on the way communication technologies shift the locus of our attention away from an embodied person and toward the medium that promises to make that absent person present. And when we shift our attention, we don’t attend to those who are actually present. Berry describes the resulting loss in the ambiguous phrase “the death love finally / realized.” This phrase can, I think, be parsed in at least two ways. One way would render it as “the death [that] love finally / realized”; the loss of embodied relationship is a kind of death, one felt and mourned by love, which depends on the difficult give-and-take of incarnation. But this phrase could also be read as “the death [of] love finally / realized”; love itself dies, or at least becomes more shallow, when people relate not to each other but to simulacra. These two complementary readings inform the final image of uprooted identity. When we collapse others to their projection on a screen, we find that we have likewise flattened our own selves. For although social media allow us to quantify our relationships—to know exactly how many friends and followers we have—they do so at the risk of eviscerating these relationships, rendering love into mere connection.⁸

Nevertheless, the lure of instant gratification, new entertainment, and convenience keeps drawing us back to the mirror the Internet holds up for us. While chasing amusement along the pathways of the digital network, it’s easy to forget that we are exposing ourselves to surveillance. Surveillance is the flip side of distraction; as we succumb to the easy pleasures of distraction, we open ourselves up to and make ourselves more dependent on surveillance. The most commonly critiqued aspect of surveillance is the way in which governments, corporations, and hackers collect incredible amounts of personal data, viewing their subjects as potential terrorists, customers, or victims.⁹ Such digital manifestations of “Big Brother” are updated iterations of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon or Tolkien’s ring of power; they see without being seen, and they use the information they gather to gain power or profit.¹⁰

Yet perhaps a more insidious form of surveillance, because we think of it as voluntary, is the way in which many of us offload attention to technology; being constantly watched by various devices makes our lives easier. As Alan Jacobs provocatively proposes, our dependence on surveillance threatens to replace loving attention: “If Simone Weil is correct in claiming that ‘Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,’ then surveillance is the opposite of attention.”¹¹ Rather than undertaking the difficult work of giving myself to others, it’s more convenient to let technology keep tabs on them. The Internet of things offers to survey my surroundings for me: I don’t have to know which groceries I need if my refrigerator keeps track for me; I don’t have to decide which temperature to set my thermostat to if it automatically adjusts; I don’t have to pay attention to my body if my Fitbit monitors it for me.¹²

These examples of digital surveillance may seem innocent enough, but others are more obviously worrisome: farmers don’t have to look at their fields if their GPS-equipped tractor keeps track of where they are and how much seed or fertilizer is needed; teachers don’t have to know their students if computer programs will figure out what they need; doctors don’t need to listen to their patients if the computer will diagnose their illnesses. There can be great benefits to offloading parts of my brain to the cloud and automating rote tasks, but as we outsource more of our responsibilities to technology, we become less aware of and attentive to those around us. Nicholas Carr charts this process in The Glass Cage: Automation and Us, arguing that technologies of automation “pull us away from the world.”¹³ Relying on digital surveillance separates us from our places and communities. As we reduce our interactions with our place to data points, we become less responsive to those around us.

Trusting technology to watch over our places corrodes the bonds of mutual attention that maintain healthy communities. One increasingly common news story goes something like this: someone sees a child alone and, instead of talking to the child, calls the police. Child Protective Services then gets involved in arbitrating whether the parents were negligent or merely giving their child appropriate freedom.¹⁴ As Gracy Olmstead writes about this troubling pattern, “Concerned parents jump first to the State to care for the situation, rather than exercising any sort of personal involvement.”¹⁵ The concerned observer who calls the police never makes himself known to the child or his or her parents; like the panoptic algorithms that invisib...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Sustaining Virtuous Forms
• Chapter 1. Attention
• Chapter 2. Gratitude
• Chapter 3. Humility
• Chapter 4. Hope
• Chapter 5. Memory
• Chapter 6. Fidelity
• Chapter 7. Convocation
• Epilogue: Practicing Resurrection
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index