And so there is the Territory of self-righteousness. It is easy to assume that we do not participate in what we are not in the presence of. But if we are members of a society, we participate, willy-nilly, in its evils. Not to know this is obviously to be in error, but it is also to neglect some of the most necessary and the most interesting work. How do we reduce our dependency on what is wrong? The answer to that question will necessarily be practical; the wrong will be correctible by practice and by practical standards. Another name for self-righteousness is economic and political unconsciousness.

Wendell Berry, “Writer and Region” in What Are People For?

This Territory is necessarily related to yesterday’s Territory of historical self-righteousness, and in fact precedes it in the text. I believe this is the Territory I am most in danger of fleeing to most often. I have desired to leave behind the concern with politics I used to have, mostly over a sense of disgust with most of the actors in that field and a feeling that all the stakes in the game are mostly manufactured and manipulated to fool us into a false anger that, in the end, benefits the rich and powerful, regardless of the ultimate policies that “win.”

Getting away from the game of politics is a good thing, but it is really easy for me to sink that into a general apathy about things societal, which is the kind of self-righteousness Berry identifies here. It is a difficult path to walk, the one between the bullshit games of our leaders, and complete indifference, but it is one I am striving to learn, in fits and starts.

There is also the Territory of historical self-righteousness: if we had lived south of the Ohio in 1830, we would not have owned slaves; if we had lived on the frontier, we would have killed no Indians, violated no treaties, stolen no land. The probability is overwhelming that if we had belonged to the generations we deplore, we too would have behaved deplorably. The probability is overwhelming that we belong to a generation that will be found by its successors to have behaved deplorably. Not to know that is, again, to be in error and to neglect essential work, and some of this work, as before, is work of the imagination. How can we imagine our situation or our history if we think we are superior to it?

Wendell Berry, “Writer and Region” in What Are People For?

Goodness, this is us, isn’t it? Especially those on the progressive side of things in the last few years: very eager to condemn the past, to declare our superiority to it, to practice a kind of historical naivety, assuming we’d always know the right thing to do, that we are above the currents of history. A healthy dose of humility, and an attitude of grace, should always attend our reading of history.

I wrote yesterday about Wendell Berry’s essay “Writer and Region”, and his reflections on Huck Finn and the failure of American society to reckon with the responsibilities of our demands for freedom. The whole essay is fascinating, and I want to take some time over the course of a few posts to reflect on the idea of the Territory that Berry establishes in the essay.

By “the Territory,” Berry means that place that modern society tells us all we must go to, the great westward land that the manifest destiny of modernity points towards, that place we are all called to go that leaves behind the ties that bind us to other people, to the land, and to the traditions that shaped us. In modernity, all such ties have no economic utility, and in fact hinder growth, and so must be escaped, and that escaping is prompted by the promise of something bigger, better, freer, and less full of responsibility for anything.

Berry draws the idea of the Territory from the end of Huckleberry Finn, in which Huck embarks on a journey to some unnamed territory west of the Mississippi and the promise of greater adventure and riches, and freedom from the strictures of life with Miss Polly. Berry is quite critical of this ending to Twain’s novel, in short calling it a cop-out for the novelist, an abandonment of the story he had been telling up to that point. Thus, Berry makes the idea of the Territory a critical one, a concept to apply to all the ways we are all trying all the time to escape our lives and become something else, even if we don’t really know what that something is.

I want to take a few posts over the coming days just to recount the seven Territories Berry illuminates in his essay. I don’t know that I’ll necessarily have comments on each one. But I’ll at least quote a relevant passage from each. Taken together, I think they serve as a strong indictment of the modern character, and our overwhelming urge – fed by modernity’s demonic drive for more and more growth and acquisition and production and greed – to abandon ourselves and remake ourselves sui generis.