Can one have an off day in giving the Jefferson Lecture (an off week or month in writing it)? I’d like to think so. For judging by the text of the lecture Berry gave in Washington at the beginning of this week, his thinking can be fairly repellent. Titled “It All Turns on Affection,” his lecture is chiefly a catalogue of Berry’s hatreds.
Thursday, May 10, 2012
Philosopher or crank ?
… An Inhumane Humanities Lecture | First Things.
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Although I just wrote a piece on Wendell Berry, pointing out where I think his strengths and weaknesses are, and yes he can be reactionary, the writer of this piece is at least as much a crank as Berry, if not worse. Dismissing Forster as a minor novelist of no merit should be your first clue.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Art on this one. (Though I can get enough of Forster pretty quickly.) I don't doubt that one can make a serious argument against what I infer Berry's lecture said; this isn't it.
ReplyDelete"Duke briefly controlled most of the domestic tobacco market through his trust, the American Tobacco Company, which the government later broke up under anti-trust laws. It seems that once upon a time Wendell Berry’s grandfather took a tobacco crop to market and, after paying the transportation costs and being forced to accept the market price and pay a broker’s commission, came home with nothing to show for a year’s work as a farmer."
Well, if the market price was set by Duke's trust, one can see how the old man might have held and handed down a grudge. Or is "market price" an absolute in economics like the speed of light in physics?
I'm not a Forster fan myself. I don't think his work is without merit, but I do think it tends to be overrated. And actually, I've never much of a Wendell Berry fan either.
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