Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community

Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community

Wendell Berry argues that the apparent conflicts over sex, economy, freedom, art, and public policy arise from the destruction of community. Using the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill hearing as an example, he contends that private sexual accusations cannot be satisfactorily resolved by public spectacle or litigation when there are no witnesses or evidence. Sex is neither merely private nor properly public: it requires the mediating forms of community, whose shared standards of trust, restraint, goodwill, forgiveness, and responsibility can protect privacy while shaping conduct. Community, as Berry defines it, consists of people locally rooted in a place, its culture, economy, and nature, who intend to remain there and understand their mutual dependence. Its marriages, households, families, work, stories, and customs give sex a meaning beyond appetite or politics. Marriage joins lovers not only to each other but also to children, forebears, neighbors, and the natural world. When community collapses, sexual conduct becomes divided between private desire and public controversy; public language can discuss harassment, pornography, contraception, and disease, but cannot adequately speak of fidelity, courtesy, love, or sexual discipline. Berry traces community disintegration chiefly to industrial and global economies that subordinate local economies to outside powers. The accounts of Hawkshead, eastern Kentucky, and Ladakh show local people losing independent work, skills, property, and security as machinery, distant markets, and corporate wealth absorb their economies. Such systems promise participation and freedom while making communities dependent on people who neither know nor value them. The Luddites and Amish represent efforts to make community welfare, rather than technological inevitability or profit, the standard by which technology is accepted or refused. Industrialism, he argues, attacks sexual love as it attacks land and labor: it turns a necessary and sacred power into commercial bait. Advertising and entertainment reduce bodies to consumable objects, detach sexuality from courtship, marriage, household, fertility, and mutual obligation, and substitute self-protection for care of the other. Against this reduction, Berry invokes poetic and dramatic depictions of lovers meeting as souls as well as bodies. In Donne, Shakespeare, and Stevens, love is not mere sex but a union of body and spirit, joy and mortality, self-giving and fidelity. The marriage of Portia and Bassanio exemplifies an economy of gifts rather than profit: lovers give themselves away, make vows before their community, and accept a life joined to responsibility. Berry opposes “sexual liberation” insofar as it treats all desire as natural and legitimate while trying, inconsistently, to condemn only its worst outcomes: violence, harassment, child abuse, disease, neglect, and unwanted pregnancy. A culture that separates sex from enduring love, promises, courtesy, and restraint cannot reliably draw a line between carelessness and brutality. Litigation cannot repair the distrust produced by such conditions. Sex is inherently risky because it involves a profound giving of oneself, and its dignity depends upon reciprocal trust, not purchased devices or legal remedies. The essay distinguishes public freedom from community freedom. Freedom of speech and public law are necessary protections against political oppression, yet public liberty depends on responsibility and on an acknowledgment that error can be corrected by truth. Community freedom is more basic: a community must be free from external coercion and allowed to change in response to its own place, needs, and knowledge. Modern individualism, however, teaches people and corporations to pursue legally permitted self-interest while leaving ordinary people increasingly unable to choose meaningful work, residence, household life, or the raising of children. Berry criticizes public institutions, commercial culture, and artists who treat local communities as backward objects to be improved, exploited, or offended. He defends freedom of expression but denies that artists have a right to approval, patronage, or subsidy from communities they intentionally insult. Art necessarily moves people and therefore has moral consequences; it can strengthen a shared commonwealth or exploit the moral capital of an audience’s remaining decency. A healthy public requires vigilant distrust of power, but a healthy community requires trust, face-to-face knowledge, privacy, and membership. Public exposure of sex, he argues, does not reveal intimacy; it creates only public, degraded sex. Imaginative art can honor sexual love without violating its essential privacy by representing lovers as whole lives and souls, connected to history, consent, work, family, aging, death, and forgiveness. The dignity of the body is indispensable to freedom: its destruction prepares the way for exploitation, rape, torture, and political violence. Sexual candor can exist only within a household of trust built through promises, responsibility, and work. Finally, Berry rejects a fashionable pluralism that celebrates uprooted groups while tolerating the industrial forces that destroyed their communities. True pluralism would consist of diverse, settled local cultures shaped by their particular lands and needs. Equality before the law is necessary, but egalitarianism and tolerance alone cannot preserve either people or places. Genuine coexistence requires knowledge of local differences, ecological and cultural limits, imagination, and respect—the ability to see others, across difference, as living souls.

By Wendell Berry · First published 2019 · Genre: Essay Collection, Social Criticism, Political Philosophy · 18,755 words

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"It all turns on affection now," said Margaret. "Affection. Don't you see? " / -E. M. Forster, Howards End

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essays · agrarianism · environmentalism · local economy · community · sustainability · rural life · social criticism · economic justice · consumerism · industrialization · small farms

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