On its face, The Unsettling of America is a polemic against industrial agriculture. It makes many arguments that you’re probably familiar with:

• Industrial agriculture pursues short-term increases in production at the expense of long-term soil health
• Industrial agriculture promotes monocropping, which reduces soil health, makes crops more vulnerable to pests, and increases the fragility of the food system
• Industrial agriculture relies heavily on fossil fuels—both for synthetic fertilizers and for transportation of products over long distances
• Industrial agriculture promotes the sale and consumption of unhealthy foods

But when Unsettling was published in 1977, most people hadn’t heard these arguments. The general vibe was that America was applying its scientific and economic muscle to the problem of agriculture and it was absolutely crushing it.

So Unsettling is an important book because it helped kickstart many of the anti-industrial agriculture movements that are much larger today: organic farming, farm-to-table, and farmers markets are just a few examples.

But sometimes “important” books can be dull. If we’re already saturated with Berry’s arguments, do we really need to read the primary source?

In this case: yes!

Unsettling is a fascinating book because Berry’s argument is not borne of the typical hippie-themed “save the planet” attitude of his era. In fact, Berry was a conservative Christian farmer from Kentucky—not exactly your prototypical barefoot Berkeley-type.

His invective against big agriculture is actually just a small corollary of a much broader philosophical argument: Western society’s analytic tendencies of specialization and quantification have undermined the interconnectedness of society and the planet, with many unhappy consequences.

According to Berry, there is a single Absolute Good: health.

Health, for Berry, has a very expansive definition that includes the idea of wholeness¹ and interconnectedness:

“That absolute good, I think, is health—not merely in the hygienic sense of personal health, but in the health, the wholeness, finally the holiness of Creation, of which our personal health is only a share.”

Unsettling, Chapter 9

Berry doesn’t really spend much time arguing this point directly. Instead, the entire book is a laundry list of disasters that have occured because we’ve balkanized our lives and destroyed the natural wholeness of the world. I guess if non-wholeness is bad, wholeness must be good!

I already feel like I’m losing you. You suspect that this review is about to devolve into an arcane exploration of Aristotelian ethics.

But I assure you it is not! There are actually some very practical criticisms that Berry makes about Western culture and equally practical cures.

Western society is too specialized

In our efforts to understand the world and control it, post-Enlightenment Westerners have split apart all sorts of complex systems. They’ve done this because it makes those systems easier to understand, easier to regulate, and easier to control.

Berry lists a bunch of different domains where Balkanization and specialization have caused trouble:

1. Academia: Subjects like “food systems” have been broken apart into special departments for agriculture, economics, medicine, nutrition, chemistry, biology, and ecology. Each department is only concerned with its own narrow view of the world.
2. Business: Capitalism ensures that business only care about revenue, so they ignoreall the ways they might be negatively impacting the wider world (ecological damage, worker abuse, consumer safety, etc.).
3. Our personal lives: Instead of living integrated lives where work, family, friends, recreation, food, and physical health are all intertwined, we have siloed each of these domains and made all of them less joyful in the process.
4. Our identities: The 20th-century obsession with the self, autonomy, and identity has encouraged us to be independent, self-reliant, and free from the societal bonds that humans have historically had to their community, geography, family, and vocation. This has led to s surge of discontent and loneliness.
5. Expertise: Specialization has led to doctors who receive no training about nutrition, farmers who have no concept of soil health, and software engineers who can’t explain how a computer works. This leads to bad outcomes, like doctors who can perform bypass surgeries but can’t recommend the healthy diet that would avoid the need for such surgeries.

We specialize because we have the wrong goals

As previously mentioned, the Absolute Good—according to Berry—is health: creating integrated, balanced systems.

But systems are complex, and as human societies have grown we have tried to manage this complexity by making them legible². This often means swapping qualitative goals for quantitative goals.

• Instead of optimizing farms for sustainability we optimize for output
• Instead of seeking truth, academia seeks to publish well-cited papers
• Instead of