Wendell Berry: Embracing Limits in a Limitless Age

As Timothy P. Carney argues in Washington Examiner, the tension between technological dominance and traditional living may define our era’s central moral question.

The columnist recounts meeting a fellow Catholic homeschool parent—a defense industry worker married to a former classical school teacher—who described his philosophy for preserving Western civilization as the “Mullet Approach: Business in the front, party in the back.”

The “business in the front” meant maintaining American technological and military supremacy through artificial intelligence and advanced weaponry. The “party in the back” referred to large Catholic families gathering in community to raise children in the faith, attending Mass, teaching Latin, and building authentic human connections.

While attending to toddlers and teaching classical languages may not match everyone’s definition of revelry, Carney understood the deeper point: the good life these families enjoy depends on a very different kind of life operating behind the scenes—one arguably driven by different values altogether.

The Berry Question

The death of Wendell Berry brought these reflections into sharper focus. Berry, the renowned agrarian writer and cultural critic, profoundly shaped Carney’s thinking during his college years when he worked as a farmhand in Vermont and consumed Berry’s writings in his downtime.

Though Carney once dreamed of farming, he eventually returned to upper-middle-class suburban life—a existence made possible, he notes, by actual farmers who produce abundant food so efficiently that Americans can obtain all necessary calories for a small fraction of their income.

The uncomfortable parallel emerges: whether upper-middle-class suburbia or the traditional large-family Catholic communities of today, the good life appears to depend on an abundance that most participants are not actively producing themselves.

Limits Define Humanity

In a 2008 Harper’s essay, Berry wrote compellingly about humanity’s need for limits—not as necessary evils, but as defining features of human flourishing. As earthly creatures, people must live within natural boundaries defined by place, ecosystem, and watershed.

But as humans, Berry argued, people may choose to respond to these necessary placements through self-restraints expressed as neighborliness, stewardship, thrift, temperance, generosity, care, kindness, friendship, loyalty, and love.

The good life, in Berry’s vision, is fueled precisely by self-imposed limits. This raises an awkward question for modern conservatives: should we celebrate how technology—in weapons systems, artificial intelligence, or industrial agriculture—pushes natural limits so far away that our culture’s wealth and power seem nearly boundless?

Berry offered both pragmatic and moral arguments for limits. The pragmatic case warns that today’s abundance carries future costs, like a farmer depleting topsoil for short-term harvest gains. The deeper argument holds that humans suffer genuine moral harm when attempting to live without limits.

The Limit-Destroying Urge

Much of the modern project, Carney observes, centers on destroying limits. A quick search of legacy media archives reveals telling headlines celebrating how traditional boundaries around family definition and institutional roles are being “redrawn” and transcended.

Both the sexual revolution and modern capitalism promised liberation from constraints. Perhaps this creates protective space where families and communities can establish their own meaningful limits. Or perhaps the limit-destroying impulse cannot be so easily contained or directed.

Berry made clear in his writings that he viewed this grand limit-destroyer as nothing less than demonic—a force fundamentally opposed to human flourishing.

For Carney, artificial intelligence now looms as the latest and perhaps most powerful limit-destroyer on the horizon, threatening to reshape not just economic systems but the algorithms that increasingly govern modern life.

The question remains whether American conservatives can maintain the “mullet approach”—securing traditional community life behind walls of technological supremacy—or whether the very technologies deployed for protection will ultimately corrode the limits that make authentic human community possible.

With information from Washington Examiner