Rage Against the Machine

A Review of Wendell Berry's The Need to Be Whole

Few authors have had a bigger influence on my personal life than Wendell Berry, the eighty-eight-year-old farmer, poet, novelist and land activist. I can safely say that, but for Wendell Berry, I would probably never have been trained as a regenerative farmer and applied my newly learned skills to grow my own food in my front yard. In fact, as I am writing this review, I am in the process of launching a kitchen garden coach business directly inspired by one of Berry’s essays, Think Little, where Berry explained that “most of the vegetables necessary for a family of four can be grown on a plot of forty by sixty feet.” But above all, what Wendell Berry – a rare father figure in our fatherless world – taught me, is that a human life cannot be whole without the love of a place.

The association between wholeness and the love of a place is at the heart of Berry’s decisive contribution to our national conversation about race in his new book; The Need to Be Whole, Patriotism and the History of Prejudice. In his characteristically prophetic style, Berry delivers a message of biblical simplicity: black and white Americans will remain estranged so long as our lives remain enslaved by an economy which forbids the love of a place and rewards abusing the land and our fellow human beings. But despite an entire economic organization of our society built on rootlessness and the relentless destruction of communities, we must continue to hope, because “[l]ove of country is not yet a possibility foreclosed.”

It is not Berry’s first venture into the topic of race. Already, in his 1968 essay The Hidden Wound, which came out the year of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, Berry had eloquently argued that slavery had been as tragic for white Americans as for black Americans. Despite the victories of the Civil Rights Movement over the Southern legal system of segregation, and despite the tragic efforts of MLK Jr. to address the causal relations between our race relations problems and our community-destroying economy, our history of prejudice continues unabetted. And it will continue so long as we will treat racial prejudice in isolation from our history of abuse of our land and the communities who live on it. Hence, for the same reason that no satisfactory resolution of our history of racial prejudice came out of the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement, we will find no peace so long as we will remain in the yoke of what Berry calls Faustian Economics, an economic system resting on limitlessness, waste and greed which forces us to treat the natural world and our fellow human beings as extractive resources.

Even worse, race prejudice is intertwined with a very intricate network of problems (the ecological crisis, our cultural wars, our forever wars, our fundamentally unhealthy condition, chronic economic inequalities etc.) all flowing from the same origin of Faustian Economics. And yet, all these existential problems are addressed as “special and isolatable problems calling for special or isolated solutions,” to be addressed through public solutions to be enacted by agencies or institutions, obscuring further their causal relation to Faustian Economics. This is particularly obvious when we analyze how the compartmentalization of our problems has led to a hystericizing of the antiracist, feminist and the environmentalist movements, while making them the objective allies of global capitalism, now rebranded as a force pursuing social and environmental justice – and humanitarian war.

In the tortuous domain of race relations, we can credit the actors of the grievance-based, postmodern antiracist movement for being onto something when they affirm that the races are more estranged now than they were at the time of Brown v. Board of Education, because something foundational remains unaddressed. Alas, the contemporary antiracist movement identifies the source of our problems in the abstraction of whiteness, a sure recipe for an even worse dead-end than our prior attempts at finding a resolution. Through an in-depth analysis of the manifestations of our contemporary racial politics (the movement for statue removal, the movement for reparations), Wendell Berry’s new book reveals how the incrimination of whiteness perpetuates the same tragic errors as the Reconstruction and the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement leading to the Political Correctness slope toward woke antiracism. Like these prior failures, the current postmodern, white-led, government and corporate-sponsored form of strident antiracism contributes to strengthen the grip of Faustian Economics over our lives, while it tears into pieces the central principle of non-violence at the heart of the Civil Rights Movement: the spiritual discipline against resentment. Under that principle, MLK Jr. and his companions overcame hatred of their enemy by standing up to them. But the most remarkable is that they waged war against segregation without, as Christopher Lasch put it, “ever appealing to their history of victimization in order to claim a position of moral superiority.”

In a radical rupture with MLK Jr.’s intransigent refusal to indulge in self-righteousness, the crusade against whiteness confuses equality for the unleashed expression of resentment and reproduces the same tragic errors as prior attempts at a resolution of America’s original sin. Worse, by positing that the relations among the races are to be treated as some form of winners/losers accounting of our race sins, similar to the one that followed the Civil War and led to the massive failure of Reconstruction (implying that the losses of the blacks are wholly a gain for the essentialized whites), this over-simplifying antiracism condemns itself to irrelevance and acquiescence to the forces working at the destruction of what remains of our already very diminished communities. Essentially made of empty and easy gestures, such as tearing down statues or supporting incalculable reparations, postmodern antiracism accomplishes the feat of turning the antiracist plight into a revolutionary parade essentially performed by college-educated whites, while throwing a veil upon the foundational issue of an economic conception which separates black and white further apart by making them even more dispensable… and equally replaceable by technology.

Particularly striking, in this respect, are Berry’s pages on the disappearance of black farmers from our farmland, which has been explained away by urban elites in a recent series of articles in publications such as The Atlantic, as a manifestation of structural racism. Wrong, claims Berry. Even though there is indisputably a history of discrimination against black farmers by the federal government, these articles attribute to the sole racial discrimination what was, for the largest part, the result of a methodical, planned holocaust of farming communities by our decision-makers under the slogan of “cheap food policy,” the “unrevoked quasi-policy of ‘too many farmers’ and the supposed need to reduce the farm population.” Not only does this incomplete reporting obscure the tragedy of agriculture after World War II and the replacement of farmers, blacks and whites alike, with technologies of war. But by implying that so many black farmers were replaced by white farmers, such oversimplifying reporting reproduces the same mistakes that plagued the Reconstruction, when all white southerners were equated with slave-owning plantation owners. Like the very largely non-slave owning white subsistence farmers who fought to resist an invasion of their homeland by the forces of industrialization and militarization, today’s white farmers are equated with winners in a purely racial conflict, negating that they can have a common plight with their almost completely extinct fellow black farmers in resisting Faustian Economics.  

The same logic has prevailed in the relationship among the sexes. The dominant brand of feminism at the time Wendell Berry wrote The Hidden Wound has shelved the universalist plight of pre-LGBTQIA++ feminists to pursue a transhumanist quest for the suppression of the differences among the sexes and the technological construction of a humanity of “gender neutral” cyborgs – with much pumping of experimental hormonal treatment into the bodies of our children.

Like the transhumanist turn undergone by feminism with cyberfeminism and gender gnosticism, the early environmental movement has morphed into a technologically promethean climate regulation project. Incriminating the entire human species – essentialized as an abstraction – for the destruction of our natural world and obscuring the multi-dimensional aspects of the ecological crisis – and the special place humanity occupies in the natural world –, the climate-change obsessed contemporary environmental movement perpetuates and expands the yoke of Faustian Economics over the land, animals and humans, offering the source of our ecological crisis as its remedy. This is a major deviation from the course pursued by the early environmentalist movement, guided by what Aldo Leopold called a “land ethics,” which sought to establish a “land-community” by enlarging “the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively, the land.” In other words, by recognizing the human species’ special duty to speak for the silent world, the early environmental movement represented a very potent challenge to Faustian Economics. Against the dominant economics premised upon the paradigm of man “as master and possessor of nature” and its limitless waste and greed, the early environmentalist movement proposed an economic project which rewards communities showing an every-day gratitude toward a benevolent nature. The latter-day Net Zero fundamentalism supported by Extinction Rebellion and the World Economic Forum alike, however, is only empowering the darkest oligarchic and centralizing forces operating in the world and the techno-totalitarian complex that supports them. Made of unaccountable supranational organizations, multinational corporations, well-funded national and multinational NGOs and subservient national regulatory apparatuses, this complex has been spreading for years an eschatological narrative and a heuristic of fear to bypass all forms of popular and parliamentary controls in the name of urgency.

And, last but not least, the past three years have revealed that the same blinders which have enrolled social and environmental justice militants into the promotion of a transhumanist techno-totalitarian order, have also profoundly perverted healthcare. The post-World War II objective of providing free or affordable healthcare to all has morphed into a promethean vision of technological liberation of human beings from the threat of disease. In the process, writes Berry, the meaning of the word “health” itself has been altered to the point of oblivion. It no longer conveys the meaning of “the natural and normal conditions of our bodies,” and has morphed into the “hoped-for-results of the use of products produced by the health industry, which thrives upon illness.” As we have seen in our recent past, this promethean vision has had the effect of transforming public health into a nightmarish instrument of social control, heralding the birth of the Biostate.

Far from ushering a post-prejudice era, the movements organized around specialized “social justice” public causes (the contemporary anti-racist movement, the LGTBQIA++ movement, the Net Zero movement) which routinely and successfully lobby institutions – and largely inhabits them – have managed to become a distraction from each other while internalizing in the minds of decision-makers a whole series of new prejudices. Berry distinguishes favorable prejudices, which are condoned by the media and public institutions, supported by well-funded organized movements, and legally sanctioned, from “unprominent prejudices,” whose sufferers enjoy no prominent remedies. These prejudices, explains Berry are usually directed at “merely habits of ordinary life,” of which many were once considered staples of the American way of life, and they happen to coincide exactly with those discarded by Faustian Economics as obsolete ways of life. Including “prejudices against farmers, country people, people of small towns, white southerners, white people, people who have not attended college,” as well as prejudices against anybody of any religion, these unprominent prejudices, which Berry also calls prejudices against community, have become constitutive of the very identity of urban elites. For it is through their ritual exhibition of a “half-hysterical fear and hatred of a country named Rural America, which they have not seen except distantly and swiftly from the interstate highways or from thousands of feet in the air,” that urban elites signify their appurtenance to the class of moral elects.

Here, Berry introduces a distinction, central in The Need to be Whole, between the Nation and the country. Love of the Nation, if we could use the word love applied to an abstraction such as the Nation, leads to nationalism, while love of the [concrete] country is the province of patriotism. The book contains many reference points to explain that difference, but the most eloquent probably comes from the French writer Georges Bernanos about France after World War II. In this conflict, Bernanos saw the advent of Machine civilization, itself the product of the nationalist “modern state.” France, thought Bernanos, was “still a patrie, a homeland,” which was “quite a different thing from the economic and political organization which tends to be confused more and more with the modern state.”

Transposed to today’s America, Bernanos’ distinction describes wonderfully the dominant ethics in urban elite’s circles, where America is viewed as a “nation without a country.” Country people, i.e. the inhabitants of rural America, are viewed as “Trump voters, disbelievers in science, climate change deniers, racists, sexists, homophobes, backward ‘non college’ country people, manually working white people with dirty hands and blue collars.” Mirroring Bernanos’ observation after World War II in France, urban elites and rural Americans do not even speak a common language, meaning that the word “country” signifies two different realities depending on the place one occupies in our fragmented society. When urban Americans refer to the country, they use the word as a metaphor; “they mean the government, the economy, the military, the transportation system, and the more spectacular parks and wilderness areas: they don’t mean the actual country from which they mine their food, clothing, shelter, fuels, and ores. Their own actual country is to them a foreign and an alien land.”

It is therefore not surprising that these urban elites can fall for so many techno-utopian visions without ever measuring their dystopian implications in real life if we collectively venture in these paths, as we are doing. Everybody has heard about Google’s Director of Engineering Ray Kurzweil’s singularity, or of Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse, but much fewer people have heard about George Monbiot’s Regenesis project. A very influential vegan guru, Monbiot advocates no less than “the end of most farming” and the replacement of “most of its output with vat-grown, bacterial ‘food’ manufactured via ‘industrial biotechnology.’” In other words, as Wendell Berry’s admirer Paul Kingsnorth puts it, Monbiot’s “food revolution” ambitions is to “detach food production from the land, the farmers who work it and the culture it creates.”

The Fourth Revolution

Perhaps the most important – and longest – chapter of the Need to Be Whole locates the root of our racial separateness in the kind of degraded work that our limitless, wasteful and greedy economy glorifies as the source of value creation. Berry bases his argument upon a conversation between John Quincy Adams and Henry Calhoun, precisely about the justification of the institution of slavery, reported in a diary entry in Adams’ diary, dated March 3, 1820:

I walked home with [John C.] Calhoun, who said that the principles, which I had avowed were just and noble; but that in the Southern Country… they were always understood as applying only to white men. Domestic labor was confined to the blacks; and such was the prejudice, that if he, who was the most popular man in his district, were to keep a white servant in his house, his character and reputation would be irretrievably ruined. I said that this confounding of the ideas of servitude and labor, was one of the bad effects of Slavery – but he thought it attended with many excellent consequences – It did not apply to all kinds of labor – […] It was only manual labor [that was] the proper work of Slaves – No white person could descend to that – And [slavery] was the best guarantee to equality among the whites… I told Calhoun I could not see things in the same light – It is in truth all perverted sentiment – mistaking labor for slavery, and dominion for Freedom. [emphasis added].

There, Berry tells us, in the very foundational distinction between degrading and non-degrading work, and the confusion between labor for slavery and between dominion and freedom, lies the source of all our ills and of our many estrangements. Probably the most tragic aspect of the Civil War, explains Berry, is that by imposing the impersonal forces of industrialism, the Civil War has imposed Calhoun’s values and “pointedly disfavored Adam’s,” thereby imposing as the “dominant national ambition” the slaveowner’s vision of labor, and relegated to some kind of romantic agrarian dream – falsely equated with plantation economy – the plight of the freed slave and of the small white landowner.  

Here’s how Wendell Berry explains the formation of the Calhoun curse we find ourselves in:

[B]y assigning specifically to slaves the manual work considered degrading, the slave-owning aristocrats degraded that work for everybody, black or white, who did it. By degrading the work, they degraded the workers. It became possible, and even irresistible, for small white farmers or sharecroppers to feel themselves degraded and insulted by the work they did and had to do, even as they were doing it […] Thus, the set of values and attitudes by which the Old South aristocrats placed themselves above the fundamental work of the world in their time, values and attitudes meant to define the superiority of a class, instituted a (so far) illimitable cycle of degradations. It degraded the fundamental work itself, in both status and quality. It degraded everybody, black and white, who did that work. And inevitably – provided that the workers consented to the aristocratic values and attitudes, -- it degraded the land on which the work was done […]

The freed slave who pled for “forty acres and a mule,” like the needy white farmer who eagerly homesteaded 160 acres, manifested a commitment to a life of sometimes difficult bodily work. This commitment, moreover, implied both familiarity with such work and belief in the worthiness of it. But the nations’ dominant ambition, increasingly from the Civil War until now, was set by the slaveowner, not by the freed slave or the white small landowner.

In his argument with Calhoun, Adams was speaking in affirmation of the value to the country and to democracy of the “plain freemen who labor for subsistence,” presumably on their own farms or in their own shops. Calhoun, speaking self-consciously as an aristocrat and in defense of his class and its values, divides human life and work into the permanent grades of higher and lower[…] Perhaps the greatest irony of our history so far is that in our public life we have favored and democratized Calhoun’s values and pointedly disfavored Adam’s.

This perversion of work itself led to a perversion of language, which Wendell Berry explores in his final chapter, entitled “Words.” Because, by a ruse of history, the victory of Northern industrialism over the South agrarianism has wound up favoring and democratizing Calhoun’s values, the most foundational words around which American life were to be organized, have stopped to mean the same thing for Americans depending on where they are situated in society.

Berry illustrates this perversion of language with the once common references of equality, freedom and humanity.

In Faustian Economics terms, equality, writes Berry, has been degraded from an objective of civic equality, where all citizens have access to places where they can meet as equals to the pursuit of credentials giving the right to treat our natural world and our human siblings as objects of extraction. In this degraded form, equality is, for most of us, the mere acceptance of worthlessness as the most common denominator of our fallen condition. What does it mean, writes Berry, “to be equal in a destructive economy, or in a society of degraded or destroyed communities? What can equality mean when life is understood as a race to the top, and when people of wealth and power see themselves as “winners” and all others as “losers”? When the economy is ruled entirely by the principle of competition, are advocates for equality asking in fact for a fair share of dominance?”

Freedom, adds Berry, is probably even in a more advanced state of decomposition than equality. In the public realm, “which is now about the only realm we have,” freedom means to be unrestrained, or free from any interference from any other will than one’s own. For a liberal, it means being personally (sexually and otherwise, but above all sexually) “liberated.” For a conservative, it means being untaxed and unregulated (free to make money at any cost). These equally hollowed forms of freedom, reminds Berry, correspond to the definition claimed by Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost. They refer to the conception of freedom of the Demiurge, who thinks freedom is to be not of this world, to be free from a natural world seen as a yoke to be liberated from, and from any form of human communities viewed, not as places where the individual can flourish, but as obstacles to the unlimited satisfaction of our unsatiable desires. This form of licentious freedom is characteristic of what the ancients called hubris and what the Christians called pride, in the sense of extreme arrogance. It is King Lear’s dream of being superhuman and Macbeth’s decision to be as freely instinctive as an animal, which are two ways for humans to become monsters.

In response to this reduction of freedom to hubris, Berry proposes a much more demanding definition of freedom, which can only prosper in communities where common life is organized around the love of a place :

If to be whole and free is to know oneself in part by knowing others, and to be at home in a place and a community where one knows and is known, this implies the further need to be self-disciplined and reasonably self-sufficient so as to have both the wholeness in oneself that is health and also freedom from being a burden or a nuisance to other people.

The degraded kind of freedom implied by the right to be unrestrained, has induced the glorification of a way of life grounded upon that particular form of social agitation called “mobility.” Yet seeing mobility as a worthy social objective carries many costs. Mobility breeds rootlessness, which leads to a lack of knowledge of a place and the lives that depend on it. And without the love of a place, atomized individuals become incapable of forming and maintaining stable communities, without which “we cannot develop local economies fitted to the natural limits, requirements, and advantages of our own landscapes.” In other words, mobility, concludes Wendell Berry, is a “polite name for a ruthless process of individualism and selfishness for some, for others separation and loneliness.”

Having analyzed how the Calhounian curse has perverted even the basic meaning of values such as equality and freedom, and bred a system of social hierarchy based on the ruthless form of restlessness known as mobility, Berry goes on to demonstrate that even the very word “human” has ceased to be a common reference:

If some people were too good to do bodily or “degrading” work, then there had to be other people to whom such work was appointed. This was a division of long standing in the Old World. For some of our ancestors, it was reason enough to cross the ocean. In the New World the European migrants were comparatively free and equal. But at least some of them had brought the pride and sloth that informed them that some work was too degrading for the better people to do. To some of our ancestors, it was obvious that Adam’s burden properly should be borne by black slaves. And so we revived the debilitating, the truly degrading, idea that some people were good only for doing other people’s work. Thus the doctrine of “labor-saving” was established in the United States.

The first reduction, then, was from human in the full, fine sense of the term to the category of human-as-work-animal. Under the rule of industrialism, there was a further reduction to human-as-industrial machine, and then, by a merely logical progression, to the displacement of the human-machine by a machine.

This is where we are now, in the final stage of the reduction of our human condition, where we have lost our reverence for the kind of plain life which does not fit perfectly within the grid laid out for the rule of the Machine. If you want a good example of how the very notion of a life worthy of being lived has been shrunk to the mere organic life, look no further than the extraordinary extension in Western legislatures of the scope of application of euthanasia and assisted suicide to cover sufferance due to mental illness, and even to poverty (Canada, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg).

Far from creating a world populated with supremely autonomous individuals, our economy built on hubris and waste has degraded our natural world to levels making it unfit to sustain human life for much longer. It has generated a world of destroyed communities, and bred a world of narcissistic individuals, obsessed with the protection of their psychic comfort, and perfectly prepared for the advent of the Machine.

In the past three years, the loss of reverence for life implied by Machine rule has gone in higher gear. With the Covid crisis, Faustian Economics has led the Hobbesian anthropological project at the origin of liberal civilization — to remake man — to its horrific conclusion. As Matthew Crawford has pointed out in a very important essay, Covid Was Liberalism’s End Game, the Great Covid Scare brought liberalism’s deep contradictions into plain view. Covid, writes Crawford, accelerated what had previously been a slow-motion desertion of Lockean liberal principles of government, premised upon a vision of human subjects as “rational, self-governing creatures” who rely on experience and common sense as a guide to reality. We were already conditioned by Lippmanian neoliberalism and behavioral economics to view ourselves as vulnerable beings, who could only be saved from our congenital backwardness thanks to the care of a vanguard of experts working for large-scale public and private organizations, nudging us to make rational decisions. But the Covid culture brought the Hobbesian pessimistic anthropological project to new heights.

By substituting the most primal fear, the fear of death, to the desire of ever increasing material comfort as the foundation of common life, the Covid culture ties our very survival, and not simply our gluttonesque pursuit of material comfort, to blind trust and servile acceptance of experts’ “priestly form of authority.” The hideous message from the Covid crisis is extremely simple, “Accept the expert-led Machine rule… or die!” This is the Calhounian curse and the Hobbesian pessimistic anthropology led to its most horrific logical conclusion.

But Wendell Berry, among other voices, exhorts us to refuse that false choice between the Machine and death, which is in fact an acceptance to conduct our lives as if we were already dead. Loving the land, not escape from it, is our way out of it. And we can start now! Here is, in his own words, Wendell Berry’s hopeful conclusion:

By imposing slavery upon the world, we have enslaved ourselves. Now all of us, rich and poor alike, are living as slaves of mammon in a sickened world. As little as half a century ago, more freedom was available to us than we have now. Even so recently there were choices that we were free to make, which now cannot be made. Not now or for years to come can we choose to be free of filth and poison, or to be as healthy and whole as we naturally want and need to be.

We are now reduced to one significant choice. We can take our stand either on the side of life or on the side of death. This will never be presented to us as one large and final choice, but only as a succession of small choices, continuing to the seventh and the seven-hundredth generation. Because we have not forgotten all of our true heritage or lost all of its records, signs and relics, we can begin to imagine how this would be. By a long persistence of human choosing, not of human life but of the world’s life, which is both its and ours, everything would be changed: how we would live, how we would work. If we worked for the world’s life, in good faith, with sufficient love, and knowing how our work would become good. It would become beautiful. It would make us happy, and not with the future happiness of political promising. It would make us happy as soon as we began to do it.

Wendell Berry
Shoemaker & Company, 528 pages | Published October 4, 2022