Make America Whole Again
"We have tried to escape the sweat and sorrow promised in Genesis — only to find that, in order to do so, we must forswear love and excellence, health and joy." -- Wendell Berry
Creak. Whoosh. Creak. Whoosh.
The cool breeze whispers through the pines as I sit on the creaking swing, my almost 2-year-old son nestled in my arms. The scent of pine needles fills the air, mingling with the earthy aroma of the forest floor. Sunlight filters through the branches, casting dappled shadows that dance with our movement.
In this moment, everything feels whole—connected, harmonious, just as it should be. The world narrows to the rhythm of the swing and the warmth of my son against my chest. This is what presence feels like. This is what wholeness means.
But most days, I'm far from here.
Most days, I'm confined within climate-controlled spaces, eyes glued to screens, participating in what Wendell Berry calls the "disease of the modern character." This disease has a name: specialization. But beneath specialization lies an even deeper malady—our human delusion of sovereignty, our conviction that we stand apart from and above the natural world.
Creak. Whoosh. Creak. Whoosh.
The Cult of the Future
In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis reveals this delusion through the words of his fictional demons who seek to destroy their human "patients" with temptations:
"The Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity... We want a man hag-ridden by the Future—haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth—ready to break the Enemy's commands in the present if by so doing we make him think he can attain the one or avert the other."
This obsession with the future—this belief that tomorrow's technology will solve today's destruction—has become our new religion. Our faith in technology has become boundless, creating a limitless technology dependent on a limitless morality—which Wendell Berry reminds us is no morality at all. We sacrifice our wholeness, our health, our very world on the altar of this imagined future.
"Our obsession with security is a measure of the power we have granted the future to hold over us," Berry reminds us.
Creak. Whoosh. Creak. Whoosh.
The Fragmentation of Everything
Like most of you, I’m not a farmer.
I'm a professional, a knowledge worker meticulously trained to excel at one thing.
So you too may feel as I did reading Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America — it was like a sudden gaze into a mirror, reflecting a grotesque version of myself.
He describes the modern man:
"The beneficiary of this regime of specialists ought to be the happiest of mortals—or so we are expected to believe. All of his vital concerns are in the hands of certified experts. He is a certified expert himself and as such he earns more money in a year than all his great-grandparents put together... Yet, this is probably the most unhappy average citizen in the history of the world."
He also demonstrates the fragmentation and fracturing of the specialists world:
“The specialist… knows one thing thoroughly and fails to consider its relation to other things. He may know everything there is to know about a certain chemical, and yet have no idea what effects it might have on soil, water, air, or human health when used in farming. The specialist mindset fractures knowledge and responsibility, removing the sense of moral consequence from work.”
Surrounded by conveniences and expertise, we touch nothing we have produced ourselves.
Our air, water, and food contain toxins — but we feel no moral obligation to fix these things. His haunting portrayal shows modern humanity as anxious and helpless — and we should be.
It turns out that Wendell Berry's warning about specialization has proven prophetic.
Dr. Casey Means, in her recent bestselling Good Energy, observes that the average American consults over 20 different types of doctors before they die, with more than 100 medical specialties available.
This surge in specialization has coincided with worsening health outcomes.
Something Is Deeply Wrong
The evidence of our fragmentation surrounds us:
At the root of this disaster lies our belief that we are sovereign in the universe. "We have come to see ourselves as her [Earth's] lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will," said Pope Francis. "The violence present in our hearts... is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life."
We fragment ourselves into ever-smaller pieces, trusting that specialization holds the answers to our problems.
But as Dr. Means emphasizes: "The siloed view of diseases, symptoms, and specialists harms us because it fails to recognize the connected nature of the body, as well as the body's connection to everything around it—from sunlight to food to soil to air."
Creak. Whoosh. Creak. Whoosh.
The Reverse Movement
We cannot heal ourselves while remaining disconnected from the sources of health. What we need is a movement back toward human-scale work, back toward the dignity of physical labor, back toward knowing our neighbors and feeding our communities.
We need a movement that works towards human flourishing instead of our direction towards human destruction.
It’s what Wendell Berry has coined “The Reverse Movement.”
We need a reverse from:
Most fundamentally, we need a reverse movement from our delusion of sovereignty in the universe to a humble acceptance of our role as creation's stewards who seek out what is best for human flourishing.
This isn't about rejecting all progress, but about progressing toward something tangible and true: the small, the local, the physical, the present. It’s identifying and reversing the destructive movements that have torn us apart in our country.
Berry reminds us, this path isn't simple:
"We are all to some extent guilty of the sins we condemn... We are all involved in what we seek to correct. There is no escape into personal purity... The most serious weakness of our solutions to public problems may be that we have come to expect too much of them. We have increasingly handed over to public institutions various aspects of our private lives which we no longer feel able or willing to cope with ourselves."
This reverse movement calls us to rebuild what Berry calls "membership" - the complex web of relationships between people, their work, their land, and their communities.4
It means young people returning to small towns not to escape work but to find it. It means lawyers learning to garden, doctors raising chickens, programmers joining volunteer fire departments.
It means rejecting the myth that we can think our way out of problems that require us to work, to sweat, to participate in the physical world, when we don’t need to escape it in the first place.
The Path to Wholeness
This healing begins with rejection—rejection of our delusion of human sovereignty, rejection of our cult of the future, rejection of the myth that bigger means better. But rejection alone isn't enough. We must also embrace:
Rejecting the Cult of Progress
Rebuilding Local Relationships
Recovering Wholeness
"To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd," says Berry.
The same could be said of health, community, and the natural world. We cannot heal while remaining disconnected from the sources of health.
Facing the Challenges
I acknowledge that shifting away from specialization and modern conveniences isn't easy. Our lives are entangled in systems that value efficiency over well-being. But every small step counts:
Start Small: Begin by growing a portion of your food or visiting a local farmers' market.
Educate Yourself: Read about sustainable practices and holistic health.
Build Community: Find like-minded individuals who share these values.
As Dr. Means observes: "Western culture has sterilized and de-sanctified the awe-inspiring mysteries of the human experience, has separated our lives from nature, and has robbed the health journey of joy and awe."
I couldn’t agree more.
Creak. Whoosh. Creak. Whoosh.
The Work Ahead
The swing's rhythm continues as my son leans into me.
This moment—this deep connection to place, to family, to the tangible world—is what we need to multiply a million-fold. Not as an escape from modern life, but as its essential foundation.
Making America Whole Again isn't about launching another movement with bumper stickers and branded solutions. It's about recovering what our hubris has cost us—our connection to land, to community, to purpose.
As Berry notes: "It cannot be fully accomplished in a generation. It will probably require several generations—enough to establish complex local cultures with strong communal memories and traditions of care."
The sun sets. The shadows stretch long. The work of healing—ourselves, our communities, our land—awaits.
This isn't a call to reject progress but to redefine it. It's a call to embrace the present moment, to acknowledge our place within creation rather than above it, to build communities that can sustain us and future generations.
Creak. Whoosh. Creak. Whoosh.
Will you join this reverse movement? Not as another single-issue campaign, but as a fundamental reorientation of how we understand our place in the world and journey together to work and ensure we see humanity flourish.
Let's Make America Whole Again.
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Executive Director HDR on a bun, LLC
2 周Excellent article Tim! It's interesting that Berry left New York City to move back home and buy a farm in Kentucky rejecting exactly what he and you are talking about By the way...you write this beautifully!