The Whole of the Moon
With Wendell Berry, Iain McGilchrist & Special Appearance by the Waterboys
Early in his new book, The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice, Wendell Berry writes that “among the necessary and least dispensable words in our language are those by which we name our values.” He follows with a partial list of these words: “Truth, Justice, Mercy, Forgiveness, Peace, Equality, Trust, Hospitality, Generosity, Freedom, Love, Neighborliness, Home, Reverence, Beauty, Care, Courtesy, Goodness, Faith, Kindness, Health, Wholeness, Holiness.”
Berry, a poet-novelist and a Kentucky farmer from a family of farmers, draws these values from the soil, from his recognition of the sacredness of all life. Devoted as he is to place and to his farm, he’s keen to focus on the particular, on the raindrop and the sprout of corn. But he’s always got an eye on context, on the complex interconnections among the political, spiritual, historical, geographical. In other words, he sees the whole and the particular.
My father’s family lost their Kentucky farm in the 1920s to the forces of disconnection, mechanization and industrialization Berry has spent his life opposing, forces that hide views of the whole and erase life from their algorithmic fantasies and sterile spreadsheets. The Kentucky connection first led me to Berry years ago.
Berry’s list of values makes a pretty good prayer or mantra. The words themselves lighten the soul. They are not spoken enough these days, though we know the values have survived dark times before. They are alive in hearts here and elsewhere.
When I read Berry’s list of words, though, I can’t help but be disappointed that they remain largely absent from our politics and public conversations. Here’s are lists of the most frequently used words by Democratic and Republican politicians. With one exception—the word “Care” makes the list of words used by Democrats—explicit words for our values aren’t found in the lists.
The first thing to jump out to me from these lists is the word “thing.” Most of the words are “things,” or something more than that but referred to as things. This isn’t good. The habit of reducing the interconnected organic processes of the world to disconnected, isolated , machine-like things is a pernicious characteristic of the mechanized industrial West. Both Berry and philosopher and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist tell us that.
McGilchrist cites Berry saying, “Our understanding of creatures and our use of them are not improved by calling them machines.” Machines—things— are easily replaced, and their isolation and replaceability help hide the big picture, the whole of life, from view. Follow this path and we can become like the singer of the Waterboys’ song, “The Whole of the Moon.”
I saw the rain dirty valley
You saw Brigadoon
I saw the crescent
You saw the whole of the moon
McGilchrist’s incredible work has to do with functions of the right and left brain, but that is a vastly complicated subject we can barely touch on here. He writes that evolution produced the two core brain functions and that we need both of them to function together harmoniously.
For instance, creatures of all kinds need to focus on the immediate, what they are eating for instance. This is, largely, a left brain function. At the very same time, they need to keep alert to the big picture, to the whole, to the broad world around them. Lest they be eaten. This is the world of the right brain. Innocent enough. The trouble comes when the left brain, manipulator of things, usurps the role of the right. Harmony in their work is lost. We see the bloody claw but lose sight of the whole of the moon.
McGilchrist explains, “Our dominant value—sometimes I fear our only value—has, very clearly, become that of power. This aligns us with a brain system, that of the left hemisphere, the raison d’etre is to control and manipulate the world,” We’re all too familiar with a world dominated by this part of the brain as McGilchrist describes it:
Social cohesion, and the bonds between person and person, and just as importantly between person and place, the context in which each person belongs, would be neglected, perhaps actively disrupted, as both inconvenient and incomprehensible to the left hemisphere acting on its own. There would be a depersonalisation of the relationships between members of society, and in society’s relationship with its members. Exploitation rather than co-operation would be, explicitly or not, the default relationship between human individuals, and between humanity and the rest of the world.
Wendell Berry, the farmer, as remote from McGilchrist’s study and laboratory as he could be, shares the vision but from a different perspective:
I will say, from my own belief and experience, that imagination thrives on contact, on tangible connection. For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it. By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world. As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy.
In the 2000s, I was privileged to work in Berkeley with neuroscientist and political language guru George Lakoff. He recommended a path away from these dangers. George understood that use strengthens the connections in our brains. If we want to reignite our imagination, we need to use it. If we want to broaden and deepen our understanding of our values, speak them. And, importantly, If we want others in the world to share our values and act on them, say them out loud. Let’s put words for our values on the lists of words most used in public life.
It would overstate the case to say values are totally absent from politics today because the political world has its storytellers and values can be communicated through stories that never name the value shown or touched upon. Nonetheless, I think we can agree that our political conversations are, generally, morally sterile or, these days, often hateful.
If we want to change the world, we’ll first have to change our words. Try these. Out loud: “Truth, Justice, Mercy, Forgiveness, Peace, Equality, Trust, Hospitality, Generosity, Freedom, Love, Neighborliness, Home, Reverence, Beauty, Care, Courtesy, Goodness, Faith, Kindness, Health, Wholeness, Holiness.”
Note: Berry and McGilchrist explore broad and important territory in their work. I’ve drawn on just a very small part of it, as important as I believe this small part to be. I’d be doing them a disservice if I led anyone to believe this to be any kind of summary or outline of their main themes. It’s not.
I love your writing.
And I listened to This is the Sea my entire senior year of college.