By Matt Holdridge
In November of 2007, Bill Kauffman gave an excellent speech for ISI titled “Wendell Berry on War and Peace: Or, Port William Versus the Empire“.
For those of you unfamiliar with Wendell Berry, he is an “American man of letters”, academic, cultural and economic critic, farmer and prolific author.
The son of a tobacco farmer, Berry has written some of the best novels, short stories, poems, and essays from his farm in Port Royal, Kentucky for more than 40 years.
Berry’s nonfiction is a dialog about the life he values. The good life, according to Berry, includes sustainable agriculture, appropriate technologies, healthy rural communities, connection to place, the pleasures of good food, husbandry, good work, local economics, the miracle of life, fidelity, frugality, reverence, and the interconnectedness of life.
As Berry states in his letter, The Failure of War (1999), “In a modern war, fought with modern weapons and on the modern scale, neither side can limit to “the enemy” the damage that it does. These wars damage the world. We know enough by now to know that you cannot damage a part of the world without damaging all of it. Modern war has not only made it impossible to kill “combatants” without killing “noncombatants,” it has made it impossible to damage your enemy without damaging yourself.”
Bill Kauffman, in a speech only he could give, brings a few of Berry’s characters to life in a profound critique of empire and a robust defense of home.
This is an excellent speech that has an exceptional message. I encourage you to listen to it and perhaps share it with your friends, family, or neighbors; they may not think the same about war afterward.