The Earth-Loving Faithful

Can Wendell Berry save us from Peter Thiel?

History is replete with authors whose ideas sparked revolutions. Rousseau, Marx, Lenin and Frantz Fanon were writers before they were leaders. Vaclav Havel was a renown playwright and essayist before becoming a Czechoslovakian dissident and eventually that country's president. Wendell Berry's name has likely never appeared in the same paragraph with those history-shapers, however. Mr. Berry is many things, but a revolutionary ain't one of them. His writing is only tangentially political and his regard for political movements falls somewhere between the compost bin and the manure pile.

Even I, his ever-faithful walking buddy, never considered him the answer to the constitutional breakdown we're watching in this country. I've just wanted to push his ideas from the fringe toward the center, toward respectability.

But last week I read Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor's essay in The Guardian entitled The Rise of End Times Fascism and it has me rethinking the job.

Berryism is the proper response to fascism. With apologies to Wendell, who would toss me headfirst into the manure pile for eponymizing his name and doctrinizing his beliefs, it has never been more urgent to learn what Wendell has to teach, politics included.

It's been six years since I first defined Berryism in this blog. Though he has assiduously eschewed political labels and causes, the ideas are going to outlive the man. And though the ideas are timeless, their uptake is more desperately needed in 2025 than in 1995 or 1965. Besides, Wendell is in good company here: During his lifetime, Rousseau's books were burned and he was considered a misanthrope. Only after he was gone did his ideas propagate the French Revolution, child-centered education and the Romantic movement. With Berry, it's time to begin separating philosophy from biography.

The Klein/Taylor piece is essential reading for understanding what's happening in Washington DC and how we should respond. I'm going to summarize it because it's long and you may not have the time or patience for the original, though I can't recommend it enough. It concludes that we've arrived at a "choice point," and remarkably the choice boils down to Wendell Berry or Peter Thiel. Either we embrace Berryism or succumb to End-Times Fascism.

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Here's the TLDR on End-Times Fascism, according to Klein and Taylor.

The billionaires among us see themselves as god-kings, beholden to no one and nothing. Their wealth and power has, for some time, convinced them they aren't obligated to play by rules that they themselves didn't write. But until now, they were stuck -- stymied by liberal democracy, political structures and the law.

The ascendancy of Donald Trump changed all that. Where once rank elitism was mainly an attitude, it has suddenly deposited into fact. The very rich used to own politicians; now they own the US government itself and the distinction matters. Having gained control of the executive and legislative branches, they are largely free to do what they please with the actual government.

What they want is to dismantle it.

They despise taxes, not because of greed (god knows they wouldn't even feel the payments) but because of the principle. Taxes redistribute resources for the good of society as a whole (i.e. the public). But why pay if you believe that society is a contest of winners and losers and you're on the winning side? Taxes are an affront, but they hate regulation even more, because regulation actually threatens their plans. Regulation is their one true enemy -- the real cause of their "deep state" hostility. They cannot build the future they want under regulatory scrutiny.

This is why, before getting their hands on our actual country, these people were at work starting their own high-tech fiefdoms, located and designed to operate outside the jurisdiction of nation-states. They were also busy constructing exclusive bunker retreats for when societal breakdown comes, which they know is coming because they're hastening it.

These leaders don't worry about the end of civilization; they welcome it. They're manufacturing it. Because ours isn't the world they want to live in. It doesn't cater to them. They are hellbent on replacing it.

Retooling and rebranding the old ambitions and privileges of empires, they dream of splintering governments and carving up the world into hyper-capitalist, democracy-free havens under the sole control of the supremely wealthy, protected by private mercenaries, serviced by AI robots and financed by cryptocurrencies.

Why would this fly with Americans? Because the beating heart of MAGA is fear, shock, scarcity and collapse. Manipulating an antisocial response to the quite-real threats of climate change, AI, nuclear war, hyper-consolidated wealth and pandemic is not hard to do. Far-right nationalism is on the rise globally, capitalizing on the fear that is understandably triggered by these unprecedented, meta-national threats. Harden the border. Prepare the bunker. Close ranks.

"Collapse is coming" we're told, and it's worth believing. Masha Gessen's first rule for surviving autocracy is "believe the autocrat" after all, and why wouldn't we when those selfsame leaders are systematically decimating federal and constitutional protections?

Collapse is not only convenient for the fascists, it's necessary. It provides the pretext for authoritarian decision-making about who can stay, who must leave, and who will be silenced, fired, audited, imprisoned. It's why we need to accumulate critical water, mineral, and energy supplies. The Collapse Narrative makes sense of all the Trumpian nonsense -- Canadian invasions, Ukrainian mineral deals, Panama Canal control, kneecapping federal protections for public land and public health, pro-natalism, and exiling "threats" like Kilmar Abrego Garcia and Mahmoud Khalil. It's all about surviving the end-times.

Why does this fly with Christians? Because, perversely, it isn't the end-times they focus on, but what comes after -- the Rapture. No creation without destruction. Except that this version of fascism doesn't have much to say about what it's creating. Traditional fascist visions imagine a utopia for the cleansed and the pure. What makes this flavor of fascism "End-Times," according to the authors, is the lack of any city-on-a-hill vision. These ideologues only look back, only preach defense, and define the deserving in the narrowest possible terms. The Vice President recently explained on Fox News that Christianity isn't actually about loving your neighbor, it's about the medieval concept ordo amoris which means you first love your family, then your neighbor, then your community and then your fellow citizens. It's a bastardized version of Christianity where there is no mercy, no charity, no public, and no debt of any kind to anyone outside your bunker.

This is as dire as it sounds. Klein and Taylor call it a governing ideology of "monstrous, supremacist survivalism," a "final refuge for those who find it easier to celebrate destruction than imagine living without supremacy."

To bet against the future on this scale -- to bank on your bunker -- is to betray, on the most basic level, our duties to one another, to the children we love, and to every other life form with whom we share a planetary home. This is a belief system that is genocidal at its core and treasonous to the wonder and beauty of this world.

To stop this nihilistic descent, they write, will require a movement, built by us and for us "across our many differences and divides," and to this planet. What's new here is the emergency. Whereas it was once described as "long" by Jim Kunstler, because causes and effects were so distant, it's now evident that our house truly is on fire. It's also clear that we're the only firefighters we've got.

This is the "choice point" that the authors speak of. A future is being constructed by those currently in power which is wholly incompatible with what I, you, or Wendell Berry want for ourselves, our children and every living creature on this planet.

It's a "choice point" because our planetary resources cannot sustain this survivalist vision alongside our current ways of living, as wasteful as they are. This new world requires an all-out assault on the Earth and all its life forms on a scale we can scarcely imagine.

The only way to build a techno-feudalist world run by AI, crypto-currency and robots, is to drill, mine and burn what's left in the fossil deposits of this planet. The consumption of energy, minerals and water necessary for the billionaires' project to succeed will incinerate the planet. "The fact that their profits are predicated on planetary devastation helps explain why do-gooder discourse among the powerful is giving way to open expressions of disdain for the idea that we owe each other anything by right of our shared humanity." Also, Mars.

An unspeakably dismal choice is being made before our eyes and without our consent: machines over humans, inanimate over animate, profits over all else...This is the last great heist, and they are getting ready to ride out the storms they themselves are summoning – and they will try to defame and destroy anyone who gets in their way.

If we don't consent to it, how do we stop it? This is where Wendell Berry has so much to offer. Berryism may be difficult, but it isn't complicated. It starts with getting clear about what the fight is about, and what's at stake.

For starters, it's the inverse of End-Times Fascism. It's humans over machines, animate over inanimate, and most things over profits. Wendell's celebrated refusal of television, tractors and computers, long seen as stubbornly archaic, could be reinterpreted as a fervent renunciation of materialism and a symbolic refusal on the part of all human beings to capitulate to the machine, much like Francis of Assisi's radical act of stripping naked to announce his rejection of all earthly possessions in service to God.

Wendell's lifelong fight for farmers and small enterprises who take part in building soil health, food and community bonds is the antithesis of the billionaire zombies gigantism and nihilism, and that of their corporatist armies.

Most of all though, his refusal to budge from his home place despite every reason to give up or give in provides us the reason and resolve to dig in and fight. Not for a country or nation, which Wendell continually reminds us is an abstraction, but for our ability to live decent lives that are necessarily bound up with the lives of others, known and unknown, human and nonhuman, who live nearby.

Berryism teaches us to stay. It teaches that we are blessed beyond comprehension to have this Earth as our home and our host, in all her unfathomable diversity and bounty. That our Rapture could be here and now, were we to finally stop fantasizing about the better future and begin the long process of learning what it means to be settled where we are, at this very moment and for all the moments to come.

This is where Klein and Taylor end their remarkable essay, acknowledging that what's needed is an alternate story to End Times Fascism. It's not a new story at all, actually, but a very old one. It's the oldest story, rooted in indigenous cosmologies, animism and every culture and faith tradition on earth - not of separation and supremacy but of interdependence and belonging, "faithful to the troubled earthly reality in which we are enmeshed and bound." We just need a version of it that makes sense to our troubled western minds.

They land on the neologism "hereness," -- a new word, perhaps, but an old idea that no one has written about more beautifully, or adhered to more faithfully, than Wendell Berry.

It's "hereness" that Klein and Taylor want to see us rally around, not provincially, but universally -- as a human right that is ours inalienably, to live in dignity wherever we are, in whatever body we inhabit, free of nationalism and rooted in solidarity.

To have a hope of combating the end times fascists, with their ever-constricting and asphyxiating concentric circles of “ordered love”, we will need to build an unruly open-hearted movement of the Earth-loving faithful: faithful to this planet, its people, its creatures and to the possibility of a livable future for us all. Faithful to here.

There is no better way to put it, and nothing else for us to do. This is our work. It has been our work for a very long time. We're in real trouble if we don't get after it. And it's the very essence of Berryism, a radical ideology still waiting to be born in America.