Well, maybe it’s time to start a university system that would fit people like Wendell Berry’s, Wes Jackson’s Kathleen Raine’s, and Philip Sherrard’s papers. It’s fun trying to figure out what it would be like.
First of all, it would share some things in common with those hard-core liberal arts schools, Saint Johns Santa Fe and Maryland, and Thomas Aquinas College in California. For those not familiar with these schools, they try to educate the whole human being by not offering any majors for undergraduates except Liberal Arts, and are Great Books oriented; but St. Johns is agnostic/Nietzschean from what I’ve heard; Aquinas is hard core Aristotelian Thomist (from what I experienced). But it would have research and graduate programs, including in post Enlightenment sciences rather than just theoretical overviews (else how would a Wes Jackson fit); and it would have to be multicultural in some form (I’d love to see some of Gary Snyder’s papers in it’s distinguished archives, for example).
I find it hard to imagine that it would not have some kind of Traditionalist–Schuonian slant, since Sherrard, Berry, Raine all are somewhat in that camp. I’m assuming this about Berry, since some of his writing has tended in this direction over the last decade or so. Maybe we could get the Prince of Wales to be a sponsor! Then we’d have to get Syed Hossein Nasr into the act as well, and Ali Lakhani, and we could raid Princeton for Coomaraswamy’s papers!
Come on, folks: step up to the plate and take a swing at the fantasy!
PDGM

Oh, my. My first thought on reading your headline, Rod, was, “Good grief! What has Great Britain done to annoy Wendell Berry?”
Mr. Berry is certainly a man of principle. But since about half of the electricity used in the U.S. comes from coal at present, I wonder how many of us could stand on that same principle.

Mr. Berry is certainly a man of principle.
Well, I’m not sure even Mr. Berry can stand on that principle. Methinks he probably doesn’t really understand the reality of his own environmental footprint.
While I like lots of his views, sometimes he reminds me of that Smil quote: “Without any physical, chemical, and biological fundamentals, and with equally poor understanding of basic economic forces, it is no wonder that people will believe anything.”

mdavid,
About twenty years ago, Berry did not use any electricity, choosing to not be hooked up to electricity. So he’s at least trying to walk his talk, or was then; maybe since then he’s taken to pirating it off a neighbor’s pole or something, but I doubt it.
Also, given his own beliefs, I’m pretty sure he thinks that some form of environmental purity is an utter fiction and impossible. That said, again, he does try to walk his talk. And as Berry is a near lifelong farmer, I’m not sure how you can accuse him of not having any “biological fundamentals.”
I’m curious what you base your disparaging comments on. What do you know about Berry that we don’t?
PDGM

I find it hard to imagine that it would not have some kind of Traditionalist–Schuonian slant, since Sherrard, Berry, Raine all are somewhat in that camp. I’m assuming this about Berry
This sort of startled me. Is that assumption well-founded at all? Is Berry now tending towards whackos like Frithjof Schuon, Rene Guenon, and Julius Evola? Is his agricultural and farming theory and practice now adopting Rudolf Steiner’s ‘biodynamics’?
See, this is what scares me about traditionalists like Berry, and to some extent a Berry popularizer like Rod: this kind of traditionalism has a way of veering towards Perennialism–and all the dark, neo-pagan occultism that unleashes, even as adherents claim that it isn’t in conflict with Christian belief. Rod’s recent Berryesque jeremiad against the enemies of the Blut und Boden of his south Louisiana, while heartfelt and righteous, still was partly off-putting because it points in directions I think even he’d rather not go.
captcha: “that blazes”

K Street:
Certain phrases; his cooperation with and use of Sherrard, who was very much exposed to Schuonian traditionalist thought.
Now my take on your post: Wow,mentioning Schuon and Guenon with Evola and Steiner in the same equating sentence: that’s pretty breathtaking, and to my mind misguided if not downright ignorant.
Have you read either of those first two?
I’m curious. I have; Schuon as far as I can tell represents a serious attempt at maintaining the absolute claims of religion in a world that can no longer be inward looking and insular. Guenon I’m somewhat less familiar with but would not put him into any equation with Steiner or Evola, and would identify him as someone who is undertaking a similar, program from a more abstract intellectual place.
PDGM

PDGM: I’m assuming this about Berry, since some of his writing has tended in this direction over the last decade or so.
Even longer – see What Are People For? from 1990 – the essays collected within date from 1975 or so on, and quite a few refer to Coomaraswamy, Raine, Sherrard, &c.
The Traditionalist/Perennialist galaxy does have something like what the 1970s Polish dissidents called a “flying university” – see, e.g., the lecture and seminar series put on in England by Schumacher College, the Temenos Academy (the late Blakean and Indophile poet Kathleen Raine’s legacy), and the Schumacherite bimonthly Resurgence. Here in the US, you have the E.F. Schumacher Society of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, which already houses its late namesake’s library, and also hosts free online the entire 41-year run (1948-1988) of the great humanist, neo-Platonic/Indophile weekly MANAS, the charismatic force of whose largely one-man (Henry Geiger) bookish erudition is spellbinding in an almost 19th-century prophetic-pamphleteer’s way, with none of the whiffs of sectarianism that might imply – MANAS was like a Reader’s Digest for the highbrow holistic; and World Wisdom publishers of Bloomington, Indiana, leading publisher of Perennialist/Traditionalist authors, with many mouthwatering thematic anthologies in which essays by Berry are collected alongside the authors mentioned above, along with cognate writers from the AmerIndian, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian and Islamic folds, along with comparative-religion all-roads-to-Rome (so to speak) scholarly emcees and ringmasters like Huston Smith and Philip Zaleski (the latter’s annual Best Spiritual Writing anthologies are useful crossroads here).
Then you’ve got the whole “anachronist” galaxy of barn-raising, quiltmaking pietist Christianity among not just the Amish, Mennonites and Anabaptists, but in more mainline churches, one of whose literary luminaries, the almost-universally-admired-if-not-exactly-prolific novelist Marilynne Robinson (Housekeeping [1980], Gilead [2004], Home [2008]), whose deeply unfashionable 1998 essay collection The Death of Adam (run, don’t walk, to it) married a rehabilitation of John Calvin to a c. 1850 abolitionist social vision with a Melvillean literary amplitude…
So. Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes? – Dr. Spielvogel, “The Punch Line” closing Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth*, after the title character’s riotous book-length monologue before one among the couching caste.
*This comment brought to you by the makers of Eaters’ Digest Condensed Soup; and by Pullet Surprise chicken-flavor cubes: the Gold Standard in bouillon; and by Fill-Up Broth, a Kosher favorite so rich – he’s a doctor, you know – you’ll be loosening your Borscht belt in a Newark minute: you should be so full; and by Rooster Cockburn, the favorite soothing après-sol for bantam nudists who tan not wisely but too well.

PDGM: I’m assuming this about Berry, since some of his writing has tended in this direction over the last decade or so.
Even longer – see What Are People For? from 1990 – the essays collected within date from 1975 or so on, and quite a few refer to Coomaraswamy, Raine, Sherrard, &c.
The Traditionalist/Perennialist galaxy does have something like what the 1970s Polish dissidents called a “flying university” – see, e.g., the lecture and seminar series put on in England by Schumacher College, the Temenos Academy (the late Blakean and Indophile poet Kathleen Raine’s legacy), and the Schumacherite bimonthly Resurgence. Here in the US, you have the E.F. Schumacher Society of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, which already houses its late namesake’s library, and also hosts free online the entire 41-year run (1948-1988) of the great humanist, neo-Platonic/Indophile weekly MANAS, the charismatic force of whose largely one-man (Henry Geiger) bookish erudition is spellbinding in an almost 19th-century prophetic-pamphleteer’s way, with none of the whiffs of sectarianism that might imply – MANAS was like a Reader’s Digest for the highbrow holistic; and World Wisdom publishers of Bloomington, Indiana, leading publisher of Perennialist/Traditionalist authors, with many mouthwatering thematic anthologies in which essays by Berry are collected alongside the authors mentioned above, along with cognate writers from the AmerIndian, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian and Islamic folds, along with comparative-religion all-roads-to-Rome (so to speak) scholarly emcees and ringmasters like Huston Smith and Philip Zaleski (the latter’s annual Best Spiritual Writing anthologies are useful crossroads here).
Then you’ve got the whole “anachronist” galaxy of barn-raising, quiltmaking pietist Christianity among not just the Amish, Mennonites and Anabaptists, but in more mainline churches, one of whose literary luminaries, the almost-universally-admired-if-not-exactly-prolific novelist Marilynne Robinson (Housekeeping [1980], Gilead [2004], Home [2008]), whose deeply unfashionable 1998 essay collection The Death of Adam (run, don’t walk, to it) married a rehabilitation of John Calvin to a c. 1850 abolitionist social vision with a Melvillean literary amplitude…
So. Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes? – Dr. Spielvogel, “The Punch Line” closing Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth*, after the title character’s riotous book-length monologue before one among the couching caste.
*This comment brought to you by the makers of Eaters’ Digest Condensed Soup; and by Pullet Surprise chicken-flavor cubes: the Gold Standard in bouillon; and by Fill-Up Broth, a Kosher favorite so rich – he’s a doctor, you know – you’ll be loosening your Borscht belt in a Newark minute: you should be so full; and by Rooster Cockburn, the favorite soothing après-sol for bantam nudists who tan not wisely but too well.

Just when we thought that Wendell Berry had run out of deep ends to jump off of… The man never ceases to surprise.
To paraphrase Edward R. Murrow, “There is laughter in the halls of the University of Kentucky tonight.”

Seriously Rod – Berry kicks butt? I’d bet the U of K is more concerned about losing donors who give them money – like the coal people who built a dorm for them. Berry’s taking his papers away may cause them some small embarrassment – but since it won’t cost them any money they won’t really care.
Yeah I think Berry can be ridiculous sometimes – the whole typewriter thing ignores the fact that it took a whole lot of energy to produce that typewriter too – so there is nothing sacred about eschewing the computer for the typewriter. I do think though that his whole issue with coal is the mountain top mining – which is pretty horrendous. Yes we will use coal but there must be a way to get it that doesn’t require leveling the state of Kentucky.

Scott Lahti,
Thanks for your suggestions and corrections and additions; “What are People For” was one of the books I was thinking back to. Berry keeps pretty interesting company for a Baptist churchgoer.
Of course we’d have to include at least some of the German low church pacifists; I like them, as I’ve said before many a time; their belief in a wisdom and a power beyond that of mere humans and states marks them as in touch with what is real.
While we’re adding names, we have to put some Eastern Europeans, such as Czeslaw Milosz, as well as the Czech philosopher Erazim Kohak, who hearkens back to various Czech ancestors he mentions in “The Embers and the Stars.”
I’ll end with a wonderful poem by Milosz, whose papers may be at Cal Berkeley, and should be liberated from there for this new university. Here’s the poem.
“Incantation”
Human reason is beautiful and invincible,
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It establishes the universal ideas in language,
And guides our hand so we can write Truth and Justice
With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
It puts what should be above things as they are,
Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.
It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master,
Giving us the estate of the world to manage.
It saves austere and transparent phrases
From the filthy discord of tortured words.
It says that everything is new under the sun,
Opens the congealed fist of the past.
Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia,
And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.
As late as yesterday, Nature celebrated their birth,
The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit.
Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.
—– Berkeley, 1968

I am constantly amazed by the knowledge of folks who read this blog. Thanks for an informative discussion so far.
captcha: tarzan re-

I think Charles has it right above; UK may regret losing the eclat that having Wendell Berry as a friend gives them, but I doubt they will lose much sleep over it.
As Erin points out, far too many people are dependent upon coal for electricity, jobs, healthcare, etc. to jump off the deep end with Mr. Berry.
I abscribe nothing but the best motives to him, but I do have to wonder what sort of modern-day Confucius “cancels” a friendship. Rod, I know what you mean, but “kicks butt”? In what sense is picking up your toys and leaving the sandbox kicking butt?

It seems too bad that Berry decided to withdraw those papers and place them with another institution because this means that researchers wanting to work with his materials will have to drive or fly to a second location. It’s ironic, in other words, that his decision implies additional use of fossil fuels and all that goes with that. Also, the University Press of Kentucky has shown a commitment — unique, so far as I know, among academic presses — to a Berryesque agrarianism. Other university presses may champion ecological themes, but not, specifically, a way of life centered on wisdom and sustainable farming. Perhaps this could have offset the university’s objectionable behavior.

An unfortunate headline, I believe. When a man of Mr Berry’s stature ends a life-long relationship it is not the equivalent of President Obama kicking McChrystal’s butt but something much more profound.
Never a headline-grabber, the deep meaning Wendell Berry’s action is better understood and respected as the considered act of a man whose humility has been as profound as his purpose.
lou
http://lougold.blogspot.com

Thanks or that wonderful poem, PDGM. I’m a big fan of Milosz’s but hadn’t read that one.
Good for Berry, I say.

You know when people say “oh, but his typewriter cost energy too” they sort of miss the point, IMHO. Sure – and so would a whole bunch of pencils. But the attempt to use radically less energy, to identify a viable way of of life, to not be complicit with something like the kind of coal exploitation that is doing so much harm in Kentucky isn’t an attempt at moral purity – something Berry explicitly denies as even possible – it is an attempt to come up with something else. There is no non-destructive life, only less destructive. And if we don’t come with less destructive very soon, we’re going to be in big trouble. Maybe this isn’t the right answer – but besides speaking, all Berry can do is say “I don’t want to lend intellectual legitimacy to things I deplore.” IMHO, if everyone out there did as much, we’d be in a much less serious situation as a people.
Sharon

Ken,
Well, it’s one of my favorites of its kind, and it raises to the fore one of Milosz’s strengths.
He is someone who truly *lived* the horrors of the 20th century, and whose poetic art and inherited tradition–intellectual and spiritual and artistic– allowed him to digest these experiences without his being destroyed.
After reading Milosz (and perhaps some of the other Polish poets from the postwar period), it’s hard to go and read American postwar poetry, which seems (in my limited experience) weak and lacking in seriousness.
When I taught at a large and prestigious research university (in a marginal position, I might add), I had a typed copy on my door. Perhaps that’s related to why I no longer teach there!
Sharon,
You saved me from having to make the same comment, and I’m writing too much on this thread! Thank you.
PDGM

so if he didn’t like them straying from their traditional land grant university role then why place his papers with them in the first place. Too bad he is going to deny UK students (undergraduate and graduate) access to his materials because he doesn’t like what UK is doing

Wendell Berry did WHAT? Aw dang… I guess I have to send one of the boosters to Costco for plain old Charmin, instead.

PDGM and Sharon – you both missed the point of my post – which is pretty much the same as yours – people will object and dismiss Berry because they think his stands are hypocritical or impractical – note Erin’s comment re: coal as an example – but as I noted – that it is not impractical or hypocritical to consider that we could use energy without leveling whole mountain ranges to get at the energy. I do think that is what Berry is saying when he removes his papers from UK. I don’t think he suffers from delusions that any person can escape some use of energy. While I recognize that is important for him to do – to think it is going to push UK to reconsider their position on accepting millions from the coal industry or becoming a research University – is dreaming. If Berry’s papers had a multi million dollar endowment attached to them – well then UK might get upset – otherwise – it is a minor embarrassment to them.

PDGM, such a higher-education model already exists, and that’s what Berry is trying to point out. In the mid- and late-19th centuries, the Morrill Acts established the land-grant universities to benefit the “industrial classes” in their pursuits and professions. They broadened the university curriculum’s then-focus on the classics to include agricultural and mechanical arts (including engineering, mathematics, other sciences.) They were supposed to be specifically for *the people of the state.* That’s what Berry objects to; that corporate interests are being placed over the interests of the *people* of Kentucky, whom the land grant universities are supposed to serve. The money quote:
These gigantic institutions, increasingly formed upon the ‘industrial model,’ no longer make even the pretense of preparing their students for responsible membership in a family, a community, or a polity. … The American civilization so ardently promoted by these institutions is to be a civilization entirely determined by technology, and not encumbered by any thought of what is good or worthy or neighborly or humane.

If the University of Kentucky really wants to be taken seriously as a research institution, then the removal of Berry’s papers is the best thing that could have happened. The extremely slight, if any, embarrassment of him removing them is a candle to Sun of the embarrassment that the University had from having his papers there in the first place.

Stefanie,
No, such a form of educational institution does not exist. What I am writing about is an educational system that would have modern science but also have the built in hierarchy for limiting or reining it in where necessary, through a clear understanding of what human beings are, and are for. And the land grant universities clearly do not have this; they simply reflect the ethos of the moment, in which the gods of Progress and Money are all currently all powerful.
I’m not even sure that such a form of university is really possible in the world, as opposed to in the mind, or whether in reality one would inevitably end up with a bifurcation between the St. Johns/Thomas Aquinas Colleges on the one hand, and the hodge podge chaos/whoring after money and power (as opposed to wisdom) that is the modern university on the other hand.
Regards,
PDGM