Wendell Berry and the Influencers
#TradWives and Affection
While this isn’t expressly related to creativity and middle age, allow me a short detour into our social media world. I’d love to hear your thoughts, the implications for putting ourselves online, and more in the comments (or by replying to this if you get it in your email). —AH
I’ve been turning over a line from Wendell Berry in a larger project I’m working on about a “Christian imagination” — but here I want to draw attention to the end, the economic implications of community. He writes: “As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And in affection we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy.”1
In Berry’s thinking, it is our connectedness to place and people — what he calls the membership in his novels — that enables belonging and ultimately, provides a stable and beautiful life for oneself and a contributing life for the good of the (human and non-human) world. This sort of a world is characterized by a “neighborly, kind, and conserving economy.”
I’ve also been thinking about the sorts of work we value and what we pay for. We’ll easily drop $50 on DoorDash but balk at the $5-8 month patronage of good writing or a magazine subscription. We are much less likely to spend our money on those things that promote virtue than those that numb or provide momentary comfort. (I’m not against comfort, but it cannot be the plumb line for a good life).
Where does this come from? Social media has eclipsed much of our attention and served up ads and influencers to tell us how to spend our money. Buying the cool, new gadget YouTube told you about doesn’t seem the neighborly, kind, or conserving thing to do.
Then we come to the latest influencer trend, the #TradWife.
I’m curious about the way it bypasses economic realities without being honest about where the money comes from. (These people have lots to say about it2). In presuming a level of transparency and intimacy and in promoting a back-to-the-land sort of vibe, the #TradWife on Instagram looks as if she’s promoting the sort of rootedness Berry is famous for. Yet, the land does not support her. It is her presentation of herself which supports her (or perhaps her husband’s remote work tech job as she plays farmer).
What the #TradWife — and much influencer content — really is is a promotion of an aesthetic. With muted tones, farm-fresh eggs, prairie dresses, and smiling white curly-haired children, the aesthetic is what’s for sale.
It tells us — without showing us — that hard work will make a healthy and happy home. That children are always clean and smiling. That a prairie dress will make you feel more womanly. That you too can have this life. We might not want these trappings, but we do all want a sense of belonging in the world, where we are ease with our people and our place.
The #TradWives sell us the allure of affection, the allure of rootedness to a place, the allure and dream of harmony amongst ourselves and our world — without any of their costs. They offer things that virtue builds slowly over time as something to be bought and sold, liked, and shared.
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Is this just the same “strategic intimacy” many influencers use?
In her book, The Influencer Industry, Emily Hund quotes media scholars Georgia Gaden and Delia Dumitricia who historically note how authenticity historically was used to promote virtue but now a sort of “strategic authenticity… reinforces a consumerist attitude, where the individual presents herself on social media in order to be ‘consumed’ by others.”3
Therein lies the rub. It is the #TradWife herself, embodying an aesthetic, that is to be consumed. And when people are consumed, it becomes, like a horrible thriller or Dr. Faustus or many in the novel Frankenstein: monstrous. As one OG #TradWife was quoted in the New Yorker saying: “It’s become an aesthetic, and then it’s become politicized,” she said, of the movement in its new era. “And then it’s become its own monster.”4
Both our own unfettered consumption of people on social platforms and those who profit by them, hiding their profits whilst putting themselves as objects of our consumptive gaze, are a far cry from the virtues of affection.
Wendell Berry reminds us “it all turns on affection.” Steven Garber in Visions of Vocation hits at similar themes: “to have ‘knowledge of’ means to have responsibility to means to have care for.” Knowledge leads to responsibility and responsibility leads to care . When I know, that means I’m implicated, and that means I am compelled to care; care results in action.
Berry speaks about it in the language of imagination, sympathy, and affection — but both get to the same point: Knowledge doesn’t lead to consumption but to affection and action.
Knowledge doesn’t lead to consumption but to affection and action.
What this means is that if we love the land, or a person, or a place, or a vocation we enter into love. And love always holds suffering in its hand, too. Love bears all things. Love costs.
Consumption does not grow virtue. Consumption bypasses real care and affection with yet another, quick dopamine hit.
We pay for what we love. That means we also give generously and care deeply about places, people, and things. Jesus said our hearts would be where our treasure was. I bet he was on to something.
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Tell me what this might mean for our online selves or if you share your creative work online, in the comments.
This is a part of a new (generally) weekly series on creativity and a generative life, based off my reading. Earlier pieces include: On Generative Work, Creating Amidst the Machine, On Boredom, and Women, Work, and ‘Women’s Work’
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For more of my work, check out The Willowbrae Institute, my books (Finding Holy in the Suburbs and A Spacious Life) and The Cartographers Podcast (where we’re talking about formation, technology, suffering and hope).
Wendell Berry, It All Turns on Affection: The Jefferson Lecture and Other Essays, 14.
Take one: Anne Helen Peterson about the self-annihilation qualities of the movement. This piece in Salon about the movement and “right-wing” Christianity. Haley Stewart asks if we’d be happier as TradWives?
Qtd in Emily Hund, The Influencer Industry, 36. The “strategic intimacy” is from Gaden and Dumitricia.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-trad-wife
I think it's hard in the suburban setting to create a life that is based on rooted affection because rootedness isn't characteristic of suburban living. I lived in the NC suburbs for 20 years and only once ran into someone I knew at a store or shopping mall. People came for jobs, then moved on to better ones elsewhere. Even the physical character of the community was in constant transition: this month's daylily farm was next month's earthmover convention and two months later, a new crop of apartments was beginning to poke up from the red clay soil.
I moved back home to small town Maine eight years back and discovered that the semirural town where my family has a 3rd generation farm was also being turned into a suburban community. Fewer and fewer people lived "in" it; more and more were living transiently "on" it. They left their newly constructed houses in the morning to drive 30 or 60 or 90 minutes to work and returned long after what I'd consider supper time. The downtown is filled with restaurants (although mostly not corporate brands) and the kind of boutique shops where you can pay $300 for a table lamp. The amenities I grew up understanding to be part of what government supports are now fee-based weights on family budgets: singing in the school chorus, performing in the school plays, going to the summer morning recreation programs that used to be a weary mom's summer respite.
I can still find remnants of our small town life here. The guy who lives in the condo a few doors down? His mother grew up down the road from the farm where my mother grew up. Those cool paintings in my kitchen and stairwell? They're by my middle school friend Margaret. Ed. in my square dance club, is the father of a childhood friend of my church's worship pastor. Garden club friend Jeanne's son went to prom with my sister. Almost everyone knew my Uncle Percy and worked his blueberry fields. Almost everyone knows my brother Don ("He's such a great guy!") The guy who fixes my car (from a big garage attached to his house) won't let me walk home while I wait for the repair but drives me ("They're crazy out there in this weather. I don't want you to get hit.") And I quite often run into people I know at the supermarket or downtown.
This is, to me, the stuff of an authentic life built on affection for a place and its people. But it can only happen when people choose to live in their place and to make its people their own.
When I lived in Boston, one of my friends accused me of living in the city as if it was a village. But I loved my neighborhood. I loved knowing that if I walked in the park at 615, I'd see Dan walking clockwise around the pond, and if I walked the opposite direction at 645, I'd see Keith. I loved running into people I knew at the hardware store or the ice cream shop or the subway station. To me (and I think also for Wendell Berry), that's what it means to be rooted in place. And I've never managed to do it in the suburbs.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot. How do you share things online in a way that does not presume a level of intimacy that is not appropriate? What’s the line between honesty and vulnerability, and self exploitation?
I do think that everything becomes more complicated once there are things like sponsorships involved. As I’ve processed through how to set up the paid subscriptions on my health/wellness/food Substack, I considered using affiliate links. But for me, anytime I see an affiliate link or sponsorship, it automatically calls into question all the other information that person is presenting. I feel jaded and deceived. So, I think perhaps one way of having integrity is with a much more straightforward subscription model instead of using ad revenue. You ask people to pay for your knowledge and trustworthiness, and in return you (hopefully) don’t exploit them? I get that affiliate links are just how the internet works, and it’s marketing. But I’m so tired of it, and trying to sort through the BS to try to find information.
We lived on a ranch owned by very wealthy individuals in Wyoming for a year. My husband was the caretaker for the property, and I inwardly seethed about every single bit of the beautiful, glistening “farms” that I knew had whole forces of people running them, cost impossible amounts of money…
So I think about this often — will what I write cause another person to stumble? How often can I pull back the curtain and show the help? Show the team that allows this to happen, show what I don’t do because of this? There’s a few homesteaders I have followed that I really respect because they are transparent and their houses are muddy, and they have real life and take good care of their animals and don’t pull silly tricks. And they have boundaries!