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What Are People For? · 11 of 11
What Are People For?
Human Flourishing HIGH

The Territory and the Beloved Community

What Are People For? Wendell Berry
escape return community tragedy maturity regionalism forgiveness

Key Principle

American culture's central failure is the pattern of escape -- "lighting out for the Territory" -- rather than accepting the burden of return, maturity, and responsibility to community. The Territory is not merely geographic but moral and imaginative: any evasion of communal life's difficulty. The counter-movement is return to what Berry calls "the Beloved Community" -- "common experience and common effort on a common ground to which one willingly belongs." This return requires the tragic imagination: the communal capacity to recognize, suffer, and bear great loss without despair.

"Without that return we may know innocence and horror and grief, but not tragedy and joy, not consolation or forgiveness or redemption." -- Wendell Berry, Essay: Writer and Region

Why This Matters

The Territory is self-reinforcing: escape prevents imagining community; lack of communal imagination makes return impossible; permanent exile breeds bitterness. Berry identifies seven forms of evasion: (1) retribution against one's origins, (2) self-righteousness, (3) historical self-righteousness ("The probability is overwhelming that if we had belonged to the generations we deplore, we too would have behaved deplorably"), (4) despair (declaring what is objectionable "inevitable"), (5) the national/global point of view (attending to nothing in particular), (6) abstraction ("a regionalism of the mind"), and (7) artistic primacy (treating subjects as "raw material"). Each is a version of the same refusal: the refusal to accept the tragedy inherent in communal life.

The stakes are clear: "We want to be free; we want to have rights; we want to have power; we do not yet want much to do with responsibility." American culture has arrested at adolescence. "Boyhood and bachelorhood have remained our norms of 'liberation,' for women as well as men. We have hardly begun to imagine the coming to responsibility that is the meaning, and the liberation, of growing up." Without the return, American art and American life remain permanently immature -- capable of depicting innocence and horror but not the harder thing: responsible adult community life.

Good Examples

The Tragic Imagination: "No community can survive that cannot survive the worst." Community is the only context in which tragedy can be experienced rather than merely suffered as private grief. Berry points to Twain's late despair about "the damned human race" as the consequence of a writer who escaped to the Territory and could never return. Without the tragic imagination -- the "communal form or ceremony" that "permits great loss to be recognized, suffered, and borne" -- loss accumulates as bitterness. (Essay: Writer and Region)

The Communal Dimension of Fishing in Maclean: In Maclean's A River Runs Through It, fishing is "not a rite of solitary purification" but "a rite of companionship." Berry reads it as tragic because of "our inevitable failure to understand each other" and triumphant because "we can love completely without understanding." This is the model of community Berry advocates: not based on agreement or comprehension but on shared presence and love that persists through failure. (Essay: Style and Grace)

Memory as Pattern on Country: Memory must be "a pattern upon the actual country, not a cluster of relics in a museum." The invisible (cultural, remembered) landscape and the visible (physical) landscape must verify and correct each other. "Alone, the invisible landscape becomes false, sentimental, and useless, just as the visible landscape, alone, becomes a strange land, threatening to humans and vulnerable to human abuse." This grounds the return: one must physically inhabit what one remembers and remember what one inhabits. (Essay: Writer and Region)

Counterpoints

The forgiveness requirement is genuinely hard: Return to community requires "the most difficult and the most necessary" magnanimity: "forgiveness of human nature and human circumstance." Berry acknowledges this is the hardest demand he makes. Many communities are genuinely toxic, and the instruction to return and forgive can sound like an instruction to accept abuse. Berry's answer is that forgiveness is not acquiescence but the refusal to let injury become the permanent condition of relationship. The tension remains unresolved. (Essay: Writer and Region)

Regional vs. provincial is a razor's edge: Regional writing is "at the center of its own occasion" without self-consciousness about cultural centers. Provincial writing "glances over its shoulder at literary opinion." But Berry insists "Every writer is a regional writer, even those who write about a fashionable region such as New York City." The metropolitan center is a region "under no constraint to see itself as such," which allows it to treat all other regions as raw material. The writer who returns to a place risks being dismissed as provincial by a center that refuses to recognize its own regionality. (Essay: Writer and Region)

Community can calcify: Berry's Beloved Community could become a closed system resistant to the stranger, the newcomer, the dissident. Berry does not address this directly in these essays, but his emphasis on forgiveness and tragedy as constitutive of community suggests he would resist the tendency. A community that cannot forgive cannot survive; a community that excludes the difficult is already in the Territory of self-righteousness.

Key Quotes

"We want to be free; we want to have rights; we want to have power; we do not yet want much to do with responsibility." -- Wendell Berry, Essay: Writer and Region

"Common experience and common effort on a common ground to which one willingly belongs." -- Wendell Berry, Essay: Writer and Region

"The test of imagination, ultimately, is not the territory of art or the territory of the mind, but the territory underfoot." -- Wendell Berry, Essay: Writer and Region

"It is a tragic rite because of our inevitable failure to understand each other; and it is a triumphant rite because we can love completely without understanding." -- Wendell Berry, Essay: Style and Grace

Rules of Thumb

  • When you find yourself despising a place or community you came from, check for the seven forms of the Territory -- especially self-righteousness and historical self-righteousness.
  • Community is not agreement but shared ground. The capacity to love without understanding is its foundation.
  • Memory detached from physical place becomes sentimental; place detached from memory becomes vulnerable. Keep both alive together.
  • "The test of imagination, ultimately, is not the territory of art or the territory of the mind, but the territory underfoot." Ground your thinking in the actual.

Related References