Mulling over the Manifesto, Part 1

Love . . . And . . .

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

Hello Dear Friends,

This is the first of my promised reflections on the poem Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front by Wendell Berry, which has been deeply influential for me.  I’m working through it movement-by-movement, as a way to try to share the depth and power of this poem with all of you, and also as a way to go deeper into it myself, perhaps even argue with it a little. To go back to my introduction of this exercise, click here.

Before getting into what I think of as the first movement of this poem, I’d like to say a few words about the title.  Calling it a manifesto and evoking the Mad Farmer Liberation Front is, if I understand Mr. Berry on this, meant to be to a large degree tongue-in-cheek.  In fact, I think a lot of his writings have this quality, which is one reason I like them so much.  Written in 1973 (I wouldn’t be born for two more years!), I see Mr. Berry riffing off of certain elements he must have been reading about in the news, turning the language of death-dealing strident political movements into life-honoring poetry. The title makes one think about things like the Communist Manifesto that provided some of the inspiration for communism to thrive, or the Davos Manifesto which enshrined capitalism as a kind of benevolent force for good . . .manifestos were very much in the air in the 70’s weren’t they?  Since he wrote this poem, the moniker ‘Mad Farmer’ has stuck with Mr. Berry as a nickname, and he went on to write several more Mad Farmer poems.  You can even buy a book that has them all collected in one place.

So, while this poem is indeed a kind of manifesto, I think it is a manifesto that is simultaneously ridiculing other political manifestos that sought or seek to, for example, demonize some imagined evil enemy, or bring about sweeping, violent, social change through revolution, or the creation of new markets, or strip-mining of earth’s resources to extend our reach ever farther.

And, to be clear, there is no actual Mad Farmer Liberation Front.  Mr. Berry has been very forthcoming in other writings about his distrust of movements.  Hence, tongue-firmly-in-cheek. He represents himself and no one else.  So, this manifesto is a kind of anti-manifesto, a manifesto to poke fun and inoculate us against all others! I like that idea very much.

On to the first movement of the poem:  The first element that I’d like to point out pertains to the form of the first entire piece. It is written as an “If . . . Then” statement, as conditional logic: IF you do (or more accurately, feel) certain things, THEN reliable, predictable consequences will result.  Upon reflection I find it very compelling that Mr. Berry substitutes the words “Love. . .And . . .” for “If . . .Then . . .”.  That alone merits some real meditation.  Think about the difference between those two word-pair formulations.  I’m quite sure this was intentional on his part!  I think he is implicitly pointing out that, despite egotistical fancies to the contrary, (for example as represented in manifestos!) we humans do not, in fact, live our lives by logic.  We live through that which we love, protect, build, and cherish. Like Jesus says in the gospel of Matthew: “Where your treasure is, there will be your heart also.” So, “Love . . .And . . .” is a much truer human pattern, and more reliable than logic in understanding the shape of our lives and our daily living of them.

So, in this “Love. . . And . . .” formula, let’s first ask what are the prerequisite conditions Mr. Berry describes? They are twofold: first, to love “the annual raise, vacation with pay,” and wanting “more of everything ready-made”.  And secondly, or perhaps concurrently, certain fears are also part of the conditions.  At first reading, the two fears he describes (knowing your neighbors and fear of death) don’t really seem to belong together, do they? But I think they are intimately connected, really two sides of the same coin.  Fear of knowing one’s neighbors and fear of death are both fears of vulnerability and exposure, fear of facing up to our human-ness and, Mr. Berry would say, our creatureliness.  We wish to hide from the fact that we are humans and also mortal creatures; that we have neighbors, some human and many not; and that, whether we want to admit it or not, the way we live our lives affects those neighbors, and they affect us.  In the exact same way that we want to live as if we don’t have neighbors, we also want to live as if we don’t know death.  So, for example, we don’t want to be too close to where our meat is slaughtered, or our food is grown and harvested for us by migrant workers. We don’t want to be troubled by the fact that we will each, in fact, die someday.  We don’t want to be known by Death, just as we don’t want to be known by other humans.  We want control, distance, anonymity and a kind of freedom-that-is-not-freedom, but is really isolation from all that makes us fragile, dependent and beholden to other people and entirely subject to the grace of the good earth and her ways of constant renewal, and constant dying.  Lately I’ve been calling this in my mind “The Remote Control Delusion.” We want to put our head in the sand, or our face in front of the TV, and just not think about those things, as much as we possibly can.  

In other words, the extractive, destructive, far-too-wealthy, much-too-disconnected economy that all of us live in, creates conditions where many people can choose to simply want, all the time, without limit, whatever they can grab or buy or steal, by whatever method necessary.  Not only that, but people can start to “love” this way of living. They can become obsessive about it, and regard those that threaten or question it as very dangerous indeed. 

That leads me, after just praising it, to now also dispute Mr Berry’s use of the word “love.” I’d argue that it’s not actually love of these things that Mr. Berry is describing: it’s addictive dependence. And, it’s the kind of addictive dependence that is so unconscious of its addiction, that it seeks not only to consume without limit, but to rejoice and revel in that consumption.  This kind of “love” is the pathological shadow of real love, and so is really not love at all. It’s jonesing. And yet, many of us, especially those of us in the American middle class, do just this, all the time.  We act as if anything we can buy with money is rightfully ours “because we paid for it”, and we absolutely do not want to be confronted with the simple truth that any physical objects, any food, any service, anything we buy, comes from somewhere, was made by someone, was made from earth substance and human substance, consumed resources. . .and that the making of that thing, as hidden from us as the economy makes it, still connects us inextricably to the makers.

All of this reminds me strongly of the title of an amazing album by the Australian experimental instrumental group, Dirty Three.  It is called Whatever you Love, You Are.  Really worth a listen if you’ve never heard it! This is pretty exactly what Mr. Berry is saying, I think.  Whatever you Love, You Are.  Or, perhaps: Whatever you Love, You Will Become.

 Mr Berry takes the formula even further: if we “love” these things, without limit or consciousness or any sense of the ways that our consuming destroys good places and compels good people to do our bidding, we will “have a window in our head.”  What is the nature of this window?

Our extreme, grotesque level of comfort and purchasing power enslaves other people, often in distant places where wages can be lower and environmental regulations less stringent.  But, it paradoxically also enslaves us.  We, too, become entirely unable to live our own lives freely.  “Not even your future will be a mystery anymore”.  Because we are wanting and addictively trying to satiate our wants (but never succeeding) we become completely predictable and therefore entirely exploitable, strapped as we are to consumer and education and property debt.  Our constant wanting leads to self-imposed slavery. The economic system that currently holds sway over most of the world keeps everyone, producer and consumer, tied in oh-so-tightly.  And so, no one is free.  There are, in other words and in sum, dire consequences to loving our consuming addictive death-denying neighbor-ignoring way of life.  

Now, the obvious argumentative response that one could level at this first stanza might be, “So, what?  So I have a window in my head, so what?  My physical needs are taken care of, and I and my family are well fed and constantly entertained.  And we are safe. I could even argue (and many economists do just that) that my level of consumption is ‘driving the economy forward’, which is good for everyone. So, who cares?”  Leaving aside for now the question of whether these statements are actually true at a deeper level (especially the safety claim), I do think that Mr. Berry’s formulation here leaves graceful room, intentionally, for this response.  If a person is deeply in addiction, they cannot be forced to relinquish the object of their compulsive self-soothing. So, for all those content to have a window in their head, I believe Mr. Berry is allowing them to do so, and simply stating the consequences.  Perhaps he is doing so in the hopes that some people might realize that they don’t want this, or don’t want it anymore; that in fact they do want some mystery in their lives, that they might be too comfortable and too disconnected, and that maybe they were meant to do something more than look forward to collecting next year’s raise.  This is pretty exactly the effect that this poem has had on me.  It has given me a deep, abiding desire to, to the extent I am able, distance myself from my own habitual addictive consuming; to question it, to let go of my dependency and “love” for it, and to try to find other ways to live that are more free from it.  This has become a mission I’ve voluntarily taken up, inspired by this first stanza of Mr. Berry’s poem. I still have a long way to go in that project.

I also want to say here that I don’t hear Mr. Berry condemning all of us who do earn a regular paycheck, have a pension, have retirement accounts (and it is most of us in a certain socioeconomic class!).  I have had all of these things. Many of of us do, and so one can throw up one’s hands and say, like the disciples say to Jesus when he tells the rich man to give away all he has, “Who, then, can be saved?”  The rest of the poem is going to answer this question from Mr. Berry’s perspective, so we can look forward to that.  In the meantime, I will just say that I think the key is not whether you have these things, but whether and how you love these things?  Or asked another way, what do you love more than these things?  Do you have it in you to love your neighbors more than fantasies of future wealth, or illusions of potential greater security?  Do you have room to realize that your own death will come, late or soon, and to love your life right now, and not let any amount of money or distraction or retirement planning or amusement or self-medicating get in the way of that?

I think Mr. Berry is laying out a stark, but free, choice we are all given.  We can choose to love the system that is destroying the world, and thereby become objects of control and destruction ourselves. . . or we can cultivate love for living (and dying) things that will be real, mysterious, unpredictable, free, and will not demand the card-punching of our minds.  Next time, we can start to explore what Mr. Berry’s vision for the alternative is!

As always, I welcome your responses, critiques, affirmations, anything! . . . Your engagement with me in this gift-writing-and-reading exercise that we do together here is definitely something I love deeply!

Photo of print artwork on my mantlepiece from Watkahootee Print Shop