Being Shaped by Forms
Paul Riffon, MA, PhD candidate, Saint Louis University, St. Louis, MO, Bon Secours Mercy Health, Toledo, OH
In the modern world, division has multiplied in global culture. Both medicine and religion seek to foster a regaining of wholeness. Regaining wholeness is central to the vision and work of Wendell Berry, who argues that wholeness is most fundamentally found through one’s practices, more than a belief asserted.
Recent public health and bioethics initiatives have sought to address such things as the epidemic of loneliness and the climate and nature crisis in a holistic manner. Such grand undertakings admit the fact that what is needed is more fundamental than a mere initiative or movement can address. What is needed is a restructuring and reorientation of society to rebuild social and ecological relationship. In short, a new society. The question remains: what will inspire the vision for this new society? Will it simply be the efficient solution to loneliness or reducing the carbon footprint? This vision is not fundamental enough.
Recent trends in public health and bioethics that seek to address the epidemic of loneliness and the climate and nature crisis cannot do so by thinking big or seeking The Objective:
which was the destruction of all enemies,
which was the destruction of all obstacles,
which was to clear the way to victory,
which was to clear the way to promotion,
to salvation,
to progress (from Wendell Berry's poem The Objective)
In this address, I borrow from two seminal essays of Wendell Berry in which he outlines a vision for a new society: Poetry and Marriage and Poetry and Place. This new society isn’t ‘new’ per se. It is old. It’s just that it’s fallen out of favor, another victim to The Objective. In marriage as in poetry, Berry insists, the given word implies the acceptance of a form that is never entirely of one’s own making. When understood seriously enough, a form is a way of accepting and of living within the limits of creaturely life. The order of nature proposes a human order in harmony with it.
In the Western world’s unexamined striving toward progress, the wisdom of the forms that made up the cultural lifeworld were also tossed out – marriage, child-rearing, but also within the artforms, poetry and song. These ‘forms’ are constitutive of the human person, argues Wendell Berry. They carry with them the wisdom of cultures past. They orient us through beauty. They caution of vice and the appetite unchecked. They bequeath virtue once one is formed into the realization that being a tyrant in a marriage hurts both the tyrant and the spouse. To enter into the form of marriage is to quiet the ego and attend to the good of the other. Refusing to enter into the form of marriage is damaging for the family and, by extension, society. Likewise if a farmer approaches the land based on what he can get from it rather than what the land needs, he refuses to enter into and be shaped by the form.
The new movements to address loneliness or the ecological crisis, in their failure to honor the forms of the cultural past, also fail to address the appetite of the mind. The body’s appetites are capable of being satiated, but the mind is always hungry. Wendell Berry cautions against utilizing the abstract in any movement, no matter how laudable the goal. Ideals become ideology; objects give way to The Objective. Anything is justifiable when the goal is achieving The Objective. The counter-balance to the human tendency to satiate the mind’s appetite for The Objective is, simply, knowing and belonging to your place by entering into natural forms. The wisdom of Berry’s approach is rooted in respect for the religious wisdom of the past which reveals that, without humility and respect, the same will to power which first initiated the epidemic of loneliness and ecological crisis will no doubt be operative in any new initiative to address them.
Recent public health and bioethics initiatives have sought to address such things as the epidemic of loneliness and the climate and nature crisis in a holistic manner. Such grand undertakings admit the fact that what is needed is more fundamental than a mere initiative or movement can address. What is needed is a restructuring and reorientation of society to rebuild social and ecological relationship. In short, a new society. The question remains: what will inspire the vision for this new society? Will it simply be the efficient solution to loneliness or reducing the carbon footprint? This vision is not fundamental enough.
Recent trends in public health and bioethics that seek to address the epidemic of loneliness and the climate and nature crisis cannot do so by thinking big or seeking The Objective:
which was the destruction of all enemies,
which was the destruction of all obstacles,
which was to clear the way to victory,
which was to clear the way to promotion,
to salvation,
to progress (from Wendell Berry's poem The Objective)
In this address, I borrow from two seminal essays of Wendell Berry in which he outlines a vision for a new society: Poetry and Marriage and Poetry and Place. This new society isn’t ‘new’ per se. It is old. It’s just that it’s fallen out of favor, another victim to The Objective. In marriage as in poetry, Berry insists, the given word implies the acceptance of a form that is never entirely of one’s own making. When understood seriously enough, a form is a way of accepting and of living within the limits of creaturely life. The order of nature proposes a human order in harmony with it.
In the Western world’s unexamined striving toward progress, the wisdom of the forms that made up the cultural lifeworld were also tossed out – marriage, child-rearing, but also within the artforms, poetry and song. These ‘forms’ are constitutive of the human person, argues Wendell Berry. They carry with them the wisdom of cultures past. They orient us through beauty. They caution of vice and the appetite unchecked. They bequeath virtue once one is formed into the realization that being a tyrant in a marriage hurts both the tyrant and the spouse. To enter into the form of marriage is to quiet the ego and attend to the good of the other. Refusing to enter into the form of marriage is damaging for the family and, by extension, society. Likewise if a farmer approaches the land based on what he can get from it rather than what the land needs, he refuses to enter into and be shaped by the form.
The new movements to address loneliness or the ecological crisis, in their failure to honor the forms of the cultural past, also fail to address the appetite of the mind. The body’s appetites are capable of being satiated, but the mind is always hungry. Wendell Berry cautions against utilizing the abstract in any movement, no matter how laudable the goal. Ideals become ideology; objects give way to The Objective. Anything is justifiable when the goal is achieving The Objective. The counter-balance to the human tendency to satiate the mind’s appetite for The Objective is, simply, knowing and belonging to your place by entering into natural forms. The wisdom of Berry’s approach is rooted in respect for the religious wisdom of the past which reveals that, without humility and respect, the same will to power which first initiated the epidemic of loneliness and ecological crisis will no doubt be operative in any new initiative to address them.