FROM THE PRINT MAGAZINE:
This essay was originally published in New Polity Issue 5.2 (Spring 2024). Subscribe for all our best essays.
I have a great deal of respect for Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer and writer who has dedicated his life to the well-being of his corner of Henry County, Kentucky, often by taking principled stands against big business. I want to make that clear, because I am about to take a potshot at him. I also know that he is older now, and has less time, less vim, and perhaps less inclination to get into the weeds with carping critics. This makes what I am about to do all the less honorable. But I am going to use his example to make an important point about Christianity and forgiveness, and I think he will appreciate it in the long run, so here goes.
I run a small independent bookstore in Steubenville, Ohio. One of our spring 2024 ambitions is to have Wendell Berry’s books in stock. He has long preached precisely the kind of emphasis on local businesses, local relationships, and local resilience that represents the only long term hope for our bookstore, and for our town in general. The family bookstore, my cause, is as endangered as the family farm, Berry’s cause, and largely for the same reasons, which I will not repeat here.
Now you must understand that, being impecunious bibliopoles, we have almost no money. Adding new books to our stock costs money, which generally means I forgo taking a paycheck. But we thought that for this new year, having Berry’s books at our shop was worth it. “Find out who Berry’s publisher is,” I instructed my store’s one almost-full-time employee. “Let’s get an account with them and order some books.”
She did the research and came up with: “To get Berry’s books we have to have an account with Penguin Random House.”
I’m old enough to laugh at this. If you don’t know the inside workings of publishing, Penguin Random House is to book publishing what Amazon is to book retail. It’s the world’s largest publisher. It recently negotiated a buyout of Simon and Schuster, another corporate giant, which would have given it 70% control of the U.S. fiction market. That acquisition was blocked by the U.S. Department of Justice on antitrust grounds. It’s only a matter of time, though, now, before it reaches that number naturally. Berry himself pointed out the problem: competition doesn’t breed more competition. Competition kills competition. That’s how it works.
Penguin Random House is itself only a subsidiary of a massive international media conglomerate called Bertelsmann, which produces mostly European television and radio programs you don’t know, but its fingers are everywhere. Ever heard of American Idol? That’s them. So is Ethiopian Idol and Indian Idol, by the way. And The New York Times Magazine. And Baywatch. And Wendell Berry too, it turns out—the Kentucky farmer who refuses to buy a computer, a television, or a cell phone because he thinks they all erode local culture. The guy who writes during the daytime because he doesn’t like power companies. He’s part of the Bertelsmann-Penguin-Random House brand too, and if I want to deal with Berry, I have to go through them.
Now if you want to quibble and get into the weeds, I can do that. Berry’s publisher is actually Counterpoint LLC, which only uses Penguin Random House’s distribution services. Counterpoint’s current form was started by Perseus Book Group, which had purchased Addison Wesley, as well as Random House’s distribution services, before being themselves bought up by Hachette and Ingram; Counterpoint went independent, and has since merged with Catapult, a Koch family enterprise. Koch Industries is one of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies. (Wendell Berry very publicly reneged on his commitment to give his papers to the University of Kentucky to show the world “what [he] thought of the university alliance with the coal industry.”) Counterpoint is headquartered in Berkeley and Manhattan. Counterpoint, in other words, is a corporation.
Berry’s thoughts on corporations are easy to find. I’ll point out his essay “The Idea of a Local Economy” in particular, which we in Steubenville often use as a point of inspiration for thinking about how we should proceed:
The limitless destructiveness of this economy comes about precisely because a corporation is not a person. A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance. As such, unlike a person, a corporation does not age. It does not arrive, as most persons finally do, at a realization of the shortness and smallness of human lives; it does not come to see the future as the lifetime of the children and grandchildren of anybody in particular. It can experience no personal hope or remorse, no change of heart. It cannot humble itself. It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money.[1]
Berry has said that corporations really are the central engine for our reduction to passivity, severed from the land:
What has happened is that most people in our country, and apparently most people in the “developed” world, have given proxies to the corporations to produce and provide all of their food, clothing, and shelter. Moreover, they are rapidly giving proxies to corporations or governments to provide entertainment, education, child care, care of the sick and the elderly, and many other kinds of “service” that once were carried on informally and inexpensively by individuals or households or communities. Our major economic practice, in short, is to delegate the practice to others.[2]
Much as Berry has delegated his book selling to Counterpoint, and Counterpoint to Penguin Random House.
There is another way, of course, though I don’t need to explain it much. Berry’s writings would constitute a good nest egg for a new publishing house, headquartered in Kentucky, dedicated to using Kentucky workers, Kentucky paper, Kentucky ink, Kentucky writers, and working with small bookshops of the sort that represent Berry’s actual vision. Steubenville itself has two such publishers, Hildebrand Press, which publishes books by Dietrich von Hildebrand, and Emmaus Road Press, which started with the writings of Scott Hahn but has grown since. Neither have a distributor. When I order books from them, I drive up to their warehouse and put their books in my car, or someone brings them down personally. (They also do ship books, of course.) I’m sure they are dependent on other corporations for all sorts of things. But they are fighting Wendell Berry’s fight, within the book industry: for what is local.
I see a deeper meaning in all this. C. S. Lewis began Mere Christianity by talking about people quarreling, which he describes as the kind of fuss people make when someone accuses someone else of being in the wrong. He says we cannot escape this sense of right and wrong, of being under a moral law. Most religions offer a code to live by. But Christianity offers a code no one lives by, and notes that no one ever can, even to the point of denying the existence of the “good” human being. “Why do you call me good? No man is good but God alone.” Lewis:
These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.[3]
This pattern repeats over and over again: we know what is right, we do not do it. Not long ago, a philosopher friend of mine came into the store. His main work is on the philosophy of money, and he has been working here in Steubenville to create more principled ways of investing money. He takes it seriously, and has done a great job of moving money toward small businesses and away from those massive corporations that are the normal targets for investment capital. He bought a few books here, and took out his credit card to pay for them. “You surprise me,” I said. “You write all this stuff about money and keeping investments local, and you’re paying with a card! Do you know that my shop paid $5,000 in card processing fees last year? That’s money that could have been in my family’s hands, and instead it went to giant financial services corporations. $5,000 means nothing to them. $5,000 means a hell of a lot to me—I’ve got five little kids to support.”
“Yeah I know,” he said. “I of all people should know this.”
I’m no better. I try to have cash on hand, but I use my debit card frequently, and for the business, I use it basically all the time, because of the supreme ease it offers when doing accounting. This whole essay contains attacks on corporations, but I use them over and over, including for the computer I’m using to write this essay. I bet Wendell Berry sends less of his money to corporations than I do. I’m just using his expressed idealism as a way to call him out to live more by his ideals. But I share in whatever hypocrisy he can be charged with. When we examine our own actions honestly, a vast gap opens up between ourselves and righteousness, which we cannot by any effort repair. It is a gap that only God can span; and hence the Lamb of God, and the sacrifice of Calvary.
One of the words that Christianity gave the world is hypocrisy. In Greek it is a term for the actor’s art, and playing a role; it is Jesus who uses it of those who censure others while pretending they are not implicated in the evil of the world themselves. We still need people to censure the evils of the world, and be idealists. But the price of idealism is hypocrisy. The older I get, the more I see it, and the readier I am to forgive. Indeed, the real reformers, the ones who are most agitated about a problem, often gain their energy from the moral contradiction of being utterly implicated in the very sins they condemn.
I can blather on about corporations, but my own bookshop sells books on Amazon. The previous owner had made most of his money selling on Amazon. I have cut our dependence on Amazon in half in a year, but I still use it because I sense that I have many books that I will not be able to sell any other way, and I desperately need the money. Amazon takes huge fees—last year they took a thirty percent cut of our sales on their site—and that’s money I’ve sent to them. I am looking for some way to extricate myself from this tangle, but the principle remains: we are all of us implicated, in systems and evils we cannot find a way out of. To be a member of a society is no way to be pure. We support a thousand evils in every direction, and feed the beasts that will eat us in the end. At times, it can make you hate yourself: as Lewis writes,“We know that if there does exist an absolute goodness it must hate most of what we do.”
This is why the Christian religion is so important to the world. Yes, we must fight and struggle for the ideal, but in the end the ultimate answers lie in God’s atonement and love for us, and in our love and forgiveness for others who are just as implicated as we are. Wendell Berry is a bearer of that message in his books, which is why they transcend even his idealism. But we do desperately need his ideas. And so when his children or friends found the new Port William Press, mine will be the first bookshop to drop Penguin Random House and make a phone call—or maybe even write them a letter—to place an order.
John Byron Kuhner is the owner of Bookmarx Books, an independent bookstore in Steubenville, Ohio. He is the former president of SALVI, the North American Institute of Living Latin Studies, and author of a biography of Vatican Latinist Fr. Reginald Foster, forthcoming from Paideia Institute Press.
Notes
Wendell Berry, “ The Idea of a Local Economy,” in The Future of Nature: Writing on a Human Ecology from Orion Magazine, ed. Barry Lopez (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2007), 324–25. Originally published in Orion Magazine, 2001.
Ibid., 320.
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1960), 7.