These prescient essays are drawn from a 50-year campaign on behalf of old-style US agrarianism
The writer who maintains that “progress” is a sham can always be fairly sure of a hearing. After all, whatever the wonders of its gadgetry, no advanced society has ever quite been able to convince a substantial part of its populace that present and future have the edge on an endlessly mythologised past. Much less certain is the political context of this ardent backward glance. GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc’s interwar era “Distributist League”, for example, was the last genuinely reactionary political movement in the UK (with the possible exception of Ukip). It brought together a bizarre coalition of traditional Conservatives, keen on individualism and self help, and left-leaning radicals eager to defend small property holders against the oligarchs.
In the end Chesterton’s mock-medievalism – his idea that we should all be much better off with a pig than a radiogram – defies most of the classifications of contemporary politics. In his brief introduction to The World‑Ending Fire, Paul Kingsnorth makes the same point about Wendell Berry’s half-century campaign on behalf of old-style US agrarianism, the sanctity of the dairy farm and the sharecropper’s 40-acre plot. From one angle, Berry (born 1934), with his sonorous, preacher’s style and his horror of colonising concrete, looks like an arch-conservative, and yet money, markets and corporatism are forever looming into his sights. From another, he looks like a classic eco-lefty pitting himself against the big battalions of agri-business, and yet his assaults on individualism, rootlessness and urban snobbery will be enough to leave most leftwingers feeling deeply uncomfortable.
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