In the 2017 documentary “LOOK & SEE: A Portrait of Wendell Berry,” the great cultural and agricultural writer Wendell Berry stated:

We all come from divorce. This is an age of divorce. Things that belong together have been taken apart. And you can’t put it all back together again. What you can do, is the only thing that you can do. You take two things that ought to be together and you put them together.

I’m convinced that Berry’s simple formula constitutes one of the most important secrets to the renewal of civilization: We must put things back together. Modernity’s great illness is its fragmentation, the separation of things that ought not be separated. The Cartesian split of mind and body has implicated and replicated itself in virtually all aspects of human life, from the separation of the head and heart of the family (husband and wife) to the separation of the soul from the body of society (faith and the civil order).

Cultural renewal doesn’t occur through talk alone. But we often don’t know how to restore what has fallen into disrepair. Berry gives us a concrete and achievable goal.

But what does “putting things back together” look like in real life? This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it’s a beginning.

Put Husband and Wife Back Together

In this way we oppose the most literal divorce, which is emblematic (and often causative) of all other fragmentation. Husbands and wives must intentionally strengthen and develop their relationships. State and federal laws ought to support marriage and discourage divorce. If the marital covenant collapses, all other contracts that make society possible will also fail. We see this repeatedly in 21st-century America.

Put Families Back Together

The greatest influence we have is in our own families and homes. Families are the “first society,” both the foundation and apex of cultural structure. Families give us the community where most important things should happen: learning, loving, praying, growing in virtue, building relationships. But for the family to do its work, its members must spend time together, living a truly communal life around the dinner table, at the hearth, in the garden, in the church pew. Parents must sacrifice time and personal interests – even career goals – for the sake of intentional family time. Ideally, this family time should include not only recreation and genuine leisure, but also common enterprises and meaningful work.

Put Work and Meaning Back Together

Work should integrate with one’s values, aspirations, and family life as much as possible. The internet, for all its pitfalls, offers an interesting opportunity because of the ease with which people can work from home, serving as an antidote to the familial and economic damage inflicted by the industrial revolution and corporate exploitation that took parents away from the home. Family businesses can serve this end even more fully because they involve not just a single breadwinner, but multiple family members in a common enterprise for the good of the whole family. By reintegrating home and work, we can reconnect spouses and families, making homes places of economic production rather than just consumption. Work and life become interwoven.

Put Head and Hand Back Together

Through modern philosophy and the technological revolution, people have been uprooted from the basic realities of the world, including things like trees, grass, water, animals, and the raw materials that they produce. Man is not an abstraction or a mere “thinking machine”; he is an embodied spirit in a physical world of wonders. Schools such as the College of St. Joseph the Worker aim to re-form the healthy connection between head and hand by training young men in a skilled trade while also steeping their minds in the Christian liberal arts tradition.

But beyond college education, all of us can think about how to balance these two integrated aspects of our human nature in our lives. Intellectual workers should get their hands dirty more, while tradesman should read more books. We need to recover a sense of the objective, wholesome, raw reality of the sensory world at its most basic level, as well as, and in conjunction with, the highest aspirations of the soul.

Put Neighborhood Communities Back Together

We need less catatonia-inducing online solitude and more real-world connections with our friends and neighbors. How can we rebuild our communities if we do not even know our neighbors? Where else will lasting cultural change come from, if not our neighborhoods? As Aristotle taught, man is a social animal. This is essential to our nature and to the work of cultural restoration. Even as the internet has connected us with people on the other side of the world, it (along with globalist political and economic structures) has separated us from the man on the other side of the street, the one with whom we should have a natural sympathy because of our shared local community, and with whom we can best effect positive change.

Put Economics and Community Back Together

Our economic, social, and cultural life shouldn’t be separate spheres. We should conduct business with the same people with whom we go to church or the park whenever possible. The breaking of local social ties and the collapse of local economies accelerate one another. Our dollars ought to stay within our communities to benefit the people and institutions we actually know and have concern for, rather than impersonal and often exploitative corporations. This builds a stronger local community, more able to replicate and defend itself and its values from hostile outside influences.

Put Faith and Life Back Together

Christianity is an incarnational religion. It should not be an abstraction, nor a pious hobby confined to Sundays. It ought to permeate our entire life, including our contributions to the public square.

One does not need any special qualifications to begin to reintegrate family, community, craftsmanship, economics, education, art, faith, and politics in one’s own backyard. One need only be human.

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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.

Image credit: Pxhere