Standing by Words by Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry argues that the disintegration of persons and communities is inseparable from the disintegration of language. Language becomes unreliable when speakers no longer precisely name their objects, stand responsibly behind their words, or share conventions of meaning with a community. Truthful speech must connect inward experience with outward reality; language that is merely subjective collapses into generalized feeling or self-pity, while supposedly objective language becomes evasive, abstract, and destructive. Berry criticizes language textbooks that deny standards of correctness and quality, treat language as arbitrary, and make rhetoric chiefly a means of avoiding offense. Such theories, he contends, detach words from truth, action, and responsibility. Literary discipline, especially verse, counters glibness by slowing speech and making it answerable to its subject. Poetry is not an escape into fantasy but a tool capable of presenting reality, untying knots, and opening possibilities inwardly and outwardly. He contrasts Shelley's generalized complaints and idealized freedom with passages from Shakespeare, Herrick, Dryden, and Milton, whose language gains force through tension, context, responsibility, and acknowledgment of limits. Shelley's abstract freedom produces a lonely, detached individual, whereas Milton defines freedom through piety, wisdom, justice, temperance, care for one’s own, and restraint from what belongs to another. Berry then examines the language of Nuclear Regulatory Commission members during the Three Mile Island crisis. Their technical jargon and efforts to make a reassuring press release prevent them from plainly admitting the danger confronting people. Their supposed objectivity becomes public relations: speech designed to reduce fear rather than tell the truth. Such language serves power by obscuring the human consequences of technical decisions. Purely external accounting, he argues, is impossible, because it merely makes the speaker subject to a narrower institution, technology, or ambition while shifting unwanted costs outward. The same failure appears in an account of industrial milk production that celebrates fewer cows, greater yield, and monetary savings while treating the dairy cow as a manufacturing unit. This accounting ignores the loss of small dairies, disruption of communities, soil damage, pollution, energy dependence, species loss, and the animal’s status as a living companion. Quantity is mistaken for gain because quality and the wider costs of production have been excluded. Berry proposes that human life exists within nested systems: person, family, community, agriculture, and nature. These are joined by disciplines of responsibility that must be practiced and preserved. Self-interest, human interest, and the interest of the whole household of life must be held in relation. Yet even ecological knowledge is incomplete; therefore a religious recognition of mystery is necessary. Mystery keeps every account open, restrains claims of mastery, and requires humility in action. The quality of work should be judged by how conservingly it fits within the larger order of life. Great poetry, Berry says, imagines lives beyond the self: enemies, the damned, animals, plants, streams, and stones. This imaginative sympathy is opposed to the technological and professional language he calls “tyrannese,” which speaks in percentages, categories, and abstractions that no one must personally stand by. Such language enables governments, corporations, and industries to enlarge power while claiming to improve human life. Berry criticizes Buckminster Fuller’s visions of technological destiny and space colonization as grammatically shapeless and morally aimless. They assume that humanity may go anywhere and do whatever its power permits. Against this, he sets Milton’s and Faulkner’s accounts of humanity as a creature placed within Creation, responsible to God, other people, animals, and the earth. Technology and value can meet only under restraint. Industrial expansion uproots people from local knowledge, memory, affection, and practical responsibility, replacing settled communities with dependence on centralized systems. The alternative is particular love: love for known places, creatures, people, and work at hand. Love makes language exact because it requires real knowledge, practical action, and accountability for consequences. It favors households and communities responding to immediate needs rather than institutions pursuing limitless future power or profit. Berry concludes by distinguishing technological “projection” from promise. Projection uses the future as a refuge for desire; a promise, made in love, awe, and fear, binds a person to another’s future. To promise is to speak where one stands and remain answerable afterward for what one has said.
By Wendell Berry · First published 2019 · Genre: Essay Collection, Literary Criticism, Cultural Criticism · 14,785 words
First lines
"He said, and stood . Â . Â ."
Paradise Regained, IV, 561.
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Standing by Words is listed on Textopian as an essay by Wendell Berry, dated 2019 CE.
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- Work type: Essay
- Author: Wendell Berry
- Date: 2019 CE
- Language: English
- Genres: Essay Collection, Literary Criticism, Cultural Criticism, Philosophy of Language, Social Criticism
- Length: 14,785 words
- Structure: 1 section, 164 paragraphs
- Reading fit: Difficult (College Level)
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Genres
- Essay Collection — Standing by Words is a collection of extended nonfiction essays, including the philosophical and cultural critique represented by the supplied text.
- Literary Criticism — Berry closely reads and evaluates the language, style, ethics, and imaginative power of writers including Shelley, Milton, Shakespeare, Faulkner, Thoreau, and Gary Snyder.
- Cultural Criticism — The work critiques modern institutions, education, professional specialization, public relations, technology, and the cultural consequences of abstraction.
- Philosophy of Language — Its central argument concerns the relation of words to truth, speakers, actions, objects, communal meaning, precision, and accountability.
Tags
essays · language · writing · literature · criticism · environmentalism · agrarianism · rural life · agriculture · ecology · conservation · community