Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition [Hardcover]

Wendell Berry (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 16, 2000

A thought-provoking and concise rebuttal to E.O. Wilson's Consilience. In his best-seller Consilience , E.O. Wilson presented a blueprint for the reconciliation of science with religion and the arts. In a carefully measured response, Wendell Berry demonstrates that Wilson's reconciliation is nothing more than the subjugation of religion and art by science, which alone, according to Wilson, would set the boundaries of discourse among the three disciplines. Berry argues that religion and art are not subject to the reductionist and materialistic assumptions of modern science, and cannot be contained within its boundaries or explained by its explanations. He says the aims of science have become hard to distinguish from those of industry and commerce, and he advocates a new Emancipation Proclamation to free life itself from enslavement by the corporations and their scientific underlings.The aim, according to Berry, is not consilience among the disciplines, but rather conversation. He concludes his argument by suggesting a number of changes in thought which would enable such a conversation to take place.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

As a poet, novelist, and farmer, Wendell Berry has worked and written in favor of tried and tested ways, rejecting the notion that the modern is always to be preferred over the old. Technology may have its uses, he has insisted in books like The Gift of Good Land, but what matters more is the crafting of sound human communities and of self-reliant living. Religious faith lies at the heart of Berry's unapologetically old-fashioned program. Faith, which supposes that life is full of unpredictable mysteries, stands against much of modern science, an opposition that Berry explores in Life Is a Miracle. Taking particular issue with entomologist E.O. Wilson's recent book, Consilience, which maintains the supremacy of scientific explanation over religious conjecture and supposes that science will one day be able to answer every question about the hows and whys of life, Berry revisits C.P. Snow's "two cultures" thesis to observe that science and religion address different kinds of necessary questions. "Science cannot replace art or religion," he writes, "for the same reason that you cannot loosen a nut with a saw or cut a board in two with a wrench." Against science's "false specification and pretentious exactitude," Berry notes quietly that the more he observes his own little corner of the planet, a small Kentucky farm, the less patient he is with reductionist, materialist explanations of the way things work--for here, and everywhere, "life ... is unique, given to the world minute by minute, only once, never to be repeated."

Berry's slender essay offers a thoughtful repudiation of an increasingly technological--and, some would say, soulless--culture. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly

Living for almost 40 years on a family farm in Kentucky has led Berry to place a high value on local knowledge born of a long and affectionate engagement of the intellect and imagination with a particular place. To readers of his poems, novels (Memory of Old Jack, etc.) and essays (The Unsettling of America, etc.), it will be no surprise that in his latest essay collection, he argues cogently and passionately against the proposition E.O. Wilson puts forth in Consilience, that our best hope for preserving the biosphere lies in linking facts and fact-based theory across disciplines under the hegemony of the natural sciences. Though a conservationist, like Wilson, Berry strongly believes that the materialist prescription for what ails usAecologically, culturally and spirituallyAwill simply bind us more tightly to the often destructive, profit-driven triad of science, technology and industry. It will also move us further away, avers Berry, from what he sees as the sense of propriety that calls on us to base our thoughts and actions on our inescapable interdependency with the planet's other life forms. Berry also opposes the belief underlying Consilience, that scientific analysis can ultimately explain everything: "to reduce the mystery and miracle of life to something that can be figured out is inevitably to enslave it, make property of it and put it up for sale." In opposition to this view, Berry proposes evaluating our behavior and work on how they affect "the health and durability of human and natural communities." To do that, he contends, we must go beyond Wilson's empirical knowledge to imaginative knowledgeAto knowing things "intimately, particularly, precisely, gratefully, reverently, and with affection." Agent, the Spieler Agency.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 124 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint Press (May 16, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582430586
• ISBN-13: 978-1582430584
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #749,505 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

62 of 70 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very moving, very salient, June 2, 2000

By 

Nick Bauman - See all my reviews

This review is from: Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (Hardcover)

At a time when we seem to have forgotten that there is more to life than what can be proven, measured, quantified and sold, Wendel Berry asks us to realize that determinism cannot "learn" the most valuable lessons about life.

He saliently attacks biotechnology, enviro-engineering and many of the modern technological fields that attempt at a reductive view of nature and our relationship to it.

I will treasure this book long after the software I have written is turned to dust.

The only complaint I have is that Berry is constantly apologizing for his "lack of expertise" in the sciences he criticises. Mr. Berry, if you are reading this, you need not worry about your expertise. Indeed, it is the mark of a true scientist that she be more interested in what a person has to say than whether or not they have the "credentials" to say it. You keep talking, I wan't to listen! "Thy life is a miracle. Speak yet again"

35 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A miracle with a message., June 12, 2001

By 

G. Merritt (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (Hardcover)

We are living in times of despair, Wendell Berry observes, when "most work is now poorly done; great cultural and natural resources are neglected, wasted, or abused; the land and its creatures are destroyed; and the citizenry is poorly taught, poorly governed, and poorly served" (p. 57). We are withdrawing our trust from politicians, professions, corporations, the educational system, religious institutions, and medicine (p. 94). In this compelling, 153-page essay, Berry offers his critical response to Edward O. Wilson's 1998 "scientific credo" (p. 25), CONSILIENCE (which I have not read). Wilson's book spins the popular superstition "that science is entirely good, that it leads to unlimited progress, and it has (or will have) all the answers" (p. 24).

The title of Berry's essay is taken from KING LEAR: "Thy life's a miracle. Speak yet again" (IV, vi, 55). Whether in his poetry, fiction, or essays, miracles happen when Berry puts his pen to paper, and this book is no exception. He argues that Wilson's attempt to integrate science with religion and art is nothing more than an attempt to subjugate those disciplines to the materialistic objectives of science. "It is bad for scientists to be working without a sense of cultural tradition," he writes. "It is bad for artists and scholars in the humanities to be working without a sense of obligation to the world beyond the artifacts of culture" (p. 93). Moreover, to experience life is not "to figure it out" or to understand it, "but to suffer it and rejoice in it as it is" (p. 9). "To reduce life to the scope of our understanding (whatever 'model' we use)," Berry writes, "is inevitably to enslave it, make property of it, and put it up for sale" (p. 7).

In Berry's view, the priorities of science have become synonymous with the goals of industry and commerce, and he advocates emancipating ourselves from corporations, "whose appetites for 'growth' [seem] now ungovernable" (p. 15). He writes: "It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines" (p. 55). He encourages us to "shift the priority from production to local adaption, from innovation to familiarity, from power to elegance, from costliness to thrift" (p. 12).

The thread of wisdom that runs through these times of despair is that "life is a miracle, absolutely worth having, absolutely worth saving" (p. 45).

G. Merritt

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Changing course, October 14, 2006

By 

Patricia Kramer (Madison, WI USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (Paperback)

I just returned from The Prairie Festival at the Land Institute in Salina,
Kansas where I heard Wendell Berry speak. At least two speakers at the
Festival said they had changed the course of their lives after reading words
written by Wendell Berry.

In this book, I found such life changing words in sections 6 - 8. I got
bogged down however in the first sections discussing E.O. Wilson's work
"Consilience". I slowly made my way through sections 1-4 and found much
to think about but decided to skip section 5. I was then delighted to find
the style of writing Berry has used in many of his other books (and in his
talk).

"We should give up the frontier and its boomer "ethics" of greed, cunning,
and violence, and, so near too late, accept settlement as our goal. Wes
Jackson says that our schools now have only one major,upward mobility,
and that we need to offer a major in homecoming. I agree, and would only
add that a part of the sense of 'homecoming' must be homeMAKING, for we
now must begin sometimes with remnants, sometimes with ruins."

"The time is past, if ever there was such a time, when you can just
discover knowledge and turn it loose into the world and assume that
you have done good.
This, to me, is a sign of the incompleteness of science in itself-which
is a sign of the need for a strenuous conversation among all the branches
of learning. This is a conversation that the universities have failed
to produce, and in fact have obstructed."