The Anarchist and the Animist #3: Voluntary Impoverishment

Greetings Friends and Neighbors,

This is the third installment in a series of letters written back and forth between two heartbroken activists, beginning with Radical Hospitality and Mutual Aid. The story Sam tells in that second letter, Mutual Aid, could be required reading this week when the push-pull of giving thanks and shopping, charity and consumption is stirred to near frenzy and threatens to destabilize even those of us at a distance from the fray. My response to Sam’s letter is attached below, and attempts to put words to certain practices for the first time. It is offered as a gift to anyone who is troubled for any reason.

With great care,

Adam

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Dear Sam,

I am up again in the middle of the night, and I blame you entirely.  You have cast our cultural poverty in high relief with your well-told story.  Patty invites you to bump into the limits of your capacity for neighborliness.  Maybe it is that simple:  A culture is a set of shared moral instructions for neighborliness.  The health of the culture can be measured by the health of the neighborhood.  In my work, I plead for non-humans to be included in that list of neighbors before they disappear entirely.

At Brush Brook Community Farm, where we gave away soup and bread every week at an outdoor stand, I heard one question more than any other: “How are you going to get the food to the people who need it most?”  The short answer was, “We aren’t going to.  The food is offered as a gift to anyone who is hungry for any reason.  I find that I usually get hungry at least twice a day, so I figure I am invited to the table.”  The look on people’s faces told me that more explanation was required.  Finally, I found the words: “The work of the Farm is not to help poor people get rich, but rather to invite rich people to consider voluntary impoverishment as a moral, even a joyful choice in a time of cascading ecological and social troubles.”  I got a lot of push back on the term voluntary impoverishment.  “No one is going to get on board with that,” and “Are you asking people to choose to suffer?”  Also, “That is such a privileged stance to take.  Try saying that to a homeless person.”  I also heard that some people felt criticized by my work and my words, I can admit that one stung a bit.  Mostly I didn’t know how to respond, choosing instead to keep my head down—growing, gleaning, cooking and giving food away.  I had my hands full trying to convince myself to give everything away rather than save it for the dreaded rainy day.  I had my hands full trying to remember that it was already raining.

Now, with some distance from that work, I will try to explain my choice of words.  Ecologically and socially, I surely meant that the voluntary redistribution of monies and material possessions would benefit humans and non-humans, increasing the health of the neighborhood.  This seems mostly self-explanatory.  Think about reparations, and then notice how little you have seen them voluntarily enacted.  But I was also trying to point toward the hidden assumption carried in the words rich and poor: that suffering comes from our material conditions.  More wealth, power and control—more insulation from the world—results in less discomfort and therefore less suffering.  In your story about Patty, that would be a sleeping bag or your housemate’s blanket or twenty dollars.  Back to that word privilege, imagine defining privilege as “a measure of one’s insulation from their own consequence.”  And then re-consider the terms “moral poverty” and “cultural poverty.”  This is also what I mean by voluntary impoverishment.  Is it possible to voluntarily relinquish our story of winners and losers?  To voluntarily acknowledge the poverty that accrues to one who lives at the expense of others? 

If a healthy neighborhood is simply a well-attended web of consequence, then voluntary impoverishment is also voluntary entanglement.  If the neighborhood is in collapse, then entanglement sounds like a whole lot of messy work.  Remember, I was primarily trying to invite myself to consider voluntary impoverishment.  I still am, every day.  Fumbling in the dark for a switch that will turn the lights on, and slow the carnage. 

The Charity Question:  Has it always been this way?

Some interesting mail has arrived in response to this dialogue we’ve begun around food, gift, charity, class and ecology.  Emily, a university professor of religion, sent the following plea: “I have interest in retrieving the word ‘charity’ from its current malformations.”  She attached the Oxford English Dictionary entries on the two words, hospitality and charity, and the following jumped out at me immediately.  From Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, written in 1623, comes the question: Of charity, what kinne are you to me?  The entry on hospitality offers the following definition: “the reception and entertainment of guests, visitors, or strangers, with liberality and goodwill.”  We are circling around questions of neighborliness:  Who is a neighbor and who is a stranger?  And what are our moral obligations to each, accordingly?  And we ask these questions in English, and so it seems we are searching the language we were born to for a trail of breadcrumbs that might offer nourishment in a blighted time.  By 1825, in a book on morality, William Paley writes, “I use the term Charity…to signify the promoting of the happiness of our inferiors.”  Lewis Hyde, in his book The Gift, writes, “Such charity is not a gift,” but rather, “a decoy, providing [the recipient of the gift] his daily bread while across town someone is buying up the bakery.  This “charity” is a way of negotiating the boundary of class.  There may be gift circulation within each class, but between the classes there is a barrier.” (pp. 179-80) 

Beverly Littlethunder sent me the following thoughts on animism and radical hospitality, which she agreed for me to share:

As a Lakota woman I was raised to believe and honor the life in all things.  The stones are often referred to as the oldest living beings on the planet.  Generosity is an expected, and strived for, trait that ensures all have what they need.  It was never considered charity to provide for those who had less.  Our homes were always open to all.  Thanks and gratitude were given to everything we used from the soul to the plants and animals that gave up their lives to feed us.  Society today is so different.  I have to be conscious every moment of my ancestors and the values they bestowed. 

What kin are you to me?  Are you a neighbor or stranger, alive or not alive?  Where do I look for moral guidance or instruction? 

Charity, in its modern incarnation, might answer these questions by saying: “Access to material wealth is determined by inheritance and hard work and arbitrated by the market, a zone where moral considerations do not steer the ship.  As long as you play by the rules, the market gods will make room for you on the ship, and over time you might even get to have your own room.  Don’t spend too much time looking over the side at the people treading water in the icy dark.  But if you do look over and you are dismayed and you determine you can spare a blanket or a shirt, by all means throw one down to them.  But the real work is to expand the ship: to build more rooms and manufacture more blankets and more shirts.  Generosity spills from a full pocket, not an empty one.”

Voluntary impoverishment responds to the same questions by turning to the person sitting next to you on the upper deck and saying, “The ship is sinking and I am terribly afraid.  I don’t know how to swim.”

As an anarchist, I am guessing that you might call the sinking ship Capitalism or The State.  As an animist, I use Modernity for the ship and Civilization for to the shipbuilding impulse, the drive.  I am guessing that neither of us has adequate names for the water, or for the labor of swimming. 

Voluntary impoverishment asks, “Is there is anyone left who knows how to swim?  Why is the ship constructed in such a way that there is no direct access the water except by jumping?  Is there anyone who even knows how to jump, or how to fall?  Is there anyone who remembers what water feels like on your skin?”

Stories and Spells:  Can you learn how to swim by pretending you are in the water?

When I caught the tail end of the Food Not Cops lunch distribution at the parking garage the other day you introduced me to two of your unhoused friends and then told them we were going to try to write something together.  The woman sitting next to me leaned in and, with the smell of booze on her breath, whispered, “The world needs to read something written by Sam.”  I agree with her.  My end of this bargain we’re calling The Anarchist and the Animist in Conversation is to file a report from the countryside on the health of the neighborhood.  The animist perspective.  The problem is that the landscapes here in Northern Vermont and New York are looking pretty good because we get almost all of our stuff from somewhere else.  In this regard, rural places no longer differ greatly from urban places.  Wendell Berry describes the situation with these catastrophic words:

We seem to have forgotten that there might be, or that there ever were, mutually sustaining relationships between resident humans and their home places…[In] the absence of such relationships, almost everywhere in our country and in the world….we have become the willing parasites of any and every place, destroying the source and substance of our lives, as parasites invariably do.(The Art of Loading Brush, pp. 103-4)

What does this parasitism look like on the ground in the places where our stuff comes from?  One study finds that, over the past fifty years some two-thirds of non-human wild vertebrates have been wiped from the planet.  And what does parasitism look like in practice?  In another study, a group of MIT students looked at the carbon footprint of a range of US lifestyles in comparison to global averages.  To their surprise, even the least consumptive Americans—a homeless person, a monk, and a child—have relatively high environmental impacts.  For example, a homeless person in the US still has more than double the global average and eight times the carbon footprint of a resident of Bangladesh.  The average American out-consumes the Bangladeshi by a factor of forty.  I share these studies only to suggest that the magnitude and intractability of the current dilemmas—the conditions for which you use the term “hellscape” and for which I use the image of the sinking ship—threaten to paralyze the collective imagination. 

In your letter you wrote that Patty wanders the streets at night, afraid that if she sleeps she will die of exposure.  In her night wanderings she stops to clean and organize the gift pantry in your front yard.  In my writing I attempt to notice and describe the night labors of the non-humans as they wander their home landscape in search of shelter.  And so maybe the fertility of this dialogue between us could be found in this exchange:  Patty asks you for a sleeping bag.  She’s been sleeping outside and she’s so damn cold.  You’re too busy.  You give her twenty dollars instead.  You tell me the story.  We discuss the ecological consequence of more sleeping bags in the world and our wretched complicity in patterns of violence.  You don’t try to convince me that we need to get Patty a sleeping bag before we consider the rapid disappearance of the non-humans.  I don’t try to convince you of anything either.  We find that our hearts can break open a little bit wider as we wade into a conversation that begins to feel like a communion.  You tell me that you’ve been weeping.  I tell you I’m jealous, that my tears just won’t come.  We start writing. 

I ask you: “If we have ample information about our complicity in patterns of ecological and social violence, why don’t we just stop participating?  What keeps us from jumping ship?” 

I will try to pull a few threads from your letter and braid them together.  You wrote, “revolutions in the past have tended to create stronger rulers, not weaker ones.  Instead, anarchism is the practice of acting, as best we can in the current hellscape, as if we were already free.”  A whole book could be written on our conceptions of freedom alone, but that will have to wait for another day.  For now, I will ask “What does it means to act as if?” In my first letter I described animism as “an attempt to proceed as if they are all alive.”  There’s that “as if” again.  It sounds like we are both pretending that certain things could be so, and calling that activism.  I wonder if you would agree with that characterization?

Do you remember Beverly’s description of the Lakota teachings?  “Our homes were always open to all.  Thanks and gratitude were given to everything we used from the soul to the plants and animals that gave up their lives to feed us.”  While that story exerts a powerful magnetic draw, even Beverly admits that it is difficult to hold onto those teachings—call them swimming instructions—when all we can see is the ship in all directions.

I am proposing that “the rulers” we want to overthrow aren’t any more real than the ship’s captain or even the ship itself.  As we approach them at full speed, dressed in our battle gear, they turn sideways  and silently disappear.  And yet the shipbuilding story has us actively poisoning the very air we breathe.  The story of the ship has consequence because we act as if it were so.  Isn’t it interesting that we use the term “make-believe” to mark out stories that aren’t real?  Here is a make-believe story from old Europe.  Call it a fairy tale, or call it swimming instructions. 

The Ungrateful Son

Once a man and his wife were sitting outside the front door with a roast chicken before them which they were going to eat between them.  Then the man saw his old father coming along and quickly took the chicken and hid it, for be begrudged him any of it.  The old man came, had a drink, and went away. 

Now the son was about to put the roast chicken back on the table, but when he reached for it, it had turned into a big toad that jumped in his face and stayed there and didn’t go away again. 

And if anybody tried to take it away, it would give them a poisonous look, as if about to jump in their faces, so that no one dared touch it.  And the ungrateful son had to feed the toad every day, otherwise it would eat part of his face.  And thus he went ceaselessly hither and yon about in the world.

What kin are you to me?  Are you a neighbor or stranger, alive or not alive?  And where shall we look for moral guidance, Sam? 

This story was written down by the brothers Grimm some time in the first half of the nineteenth century in what is now Germany, a landscape where some of my ancestors are buried.  The Grimm brothers’ work could be described as anthropological fieldwork in their own land, an excavation of the fading oral folk tradition.  They were looking for the stories that rooted their culture to its home ground. 

The story warns: a magical spell will befall you if you deny hospitality to the one who has raised you.  Replace “the man’s father” with “the wild,” and you can see that the world the story warned of has now largely come to pass.  How else can one make sense of a whole population actively destroying the source and substance of their lives?  A toad that must be fed every day lest it eat part of your face—is it not a brilliantly prophetic description of the civilizational project? 

Sam, I have a hunch that our work of giving food away functions primarily as an attempt to set the conditions for spell-breaking, as much for the gift giver—that would be you and me—as for the receiver.  The spell is woven like macrame from stories of superiors and inferiors, of alive and not alive, of private ownership over other bodies—stories that portray humans as inherently greedy rather than inherently forgetful.  The old fairy tales are replete with accounts of magic spells and the intricate work of their untying.  Different skills are required to loosen knots than to wage war. 

That quote from Wendell Berry about parasitism begins with the line, “We seem to have forgotten that there might be, or that there ever were, mutually sustaining relationships between resident humans and their home places.”  Berry suggests that spells can be undone by acts of remembering.  Can we remember our capacity for radical neighborliness by pretending that we have it in us to behave in such a manner?  I will leave you with a stunning quote from one of my teachers, Stephen Jenkinson.  I trust you will see your work reflected in the lines. 

….a spell breaker is a master practitioner of welcome, not of banishment.  He or she is an innkeeper, a publican, not a cop, not a private security wonk or a mercenary.  If you are to be a spell breaker, you learn generosity, not parsimony…..That is the radical etiquette of spell breaking.  And from this practice and tuition you begin to see the architecture of the spell come into view.  It is miserly, retributive, grasping, trafficking in poverty and in hope and hopelessness….Like a Monsanto of the mind and heart, it maintains ownership over what it claims to give away for the benefit of others….You don’t starve a spell to death.  You feed it to life. (Come of Age, p. 240)

Sam, this letter has broken me in its writing, and despite what I said earlier, I don’t blame you in the least.  I am grateful to see the work anew in the words you’ve asked me to gather to describe it.  And I eagerly await your reply. 

Your friend,

Adam