In Citizenship Papers, writer and farmer-prophet Wendell Berry tells of his distrust of movements. They “lapse into self righteousness and self-betrayal” and it adherents too easily deny other the rights they expect themselves. For Berry the movements aren’t radical enough. And they fail because they try to address effects instead of causes.
In the end, says Berry, the movements fail because they believe “that the trouble is caused by other people; they would like to change policy but not behavior.” The task before us, he says, “to enlarge the consciousness and the conscience of the economy.”
Three conditions for Wendell Berry to join a movement
“Undoubtedly some people will want to start a movement to bring this about. They probably will call it the Movement to Teach the Economy What it is Doing—the MTEWHD.”
Despite his unease with movements, if three conditions are met, Berry agrees to participate. The first is that movement has to abandon all hope of solving problems piecemeal. “Water quality for example cannot be improved without improving farming and forestry, but farming and forestry cannot be improved without improving the education of consumers—and so on.”
Berry’s second condition is that participants “take full responsibility for themselves as members of the economy.” To teach the economy what it’s doing, we first have to look at our own lives. “This is going to have to be a private movement as well as a public one…. to make good economic sense in our own lives, in our households, and in our communities.”
Finally, the movement has to be poor, with “cheap solutions” that are available to all. This is because “the availability of a lot of money prevents the discovery of cheap solutions” and “attracts administrators and experts as sugar attracts ants.” In the end, the movement should be nothing less than daily practice by its adherents.
Photo: Guy Mendes, Wikimedia.
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