Customer Reviews

Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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"

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

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."

I think most of us share essayist Wendell Berry's frustration with the dehumanization of our lives that is a by product of the massive industrialization of the planet. Life is cheapened and the sense of the miraculous lost as we chase blindly after more and more products that glitter, and as we destroy more and more of our fellow creatures and their habitats in order to feed our insatiable appetites. But to blame science as Berry does is mistaken. Science is just a tool, and scientists, like farmers, are just tool users. The real culprit is ourselves and our politicians, our multinational corporations, our governments and our indifference. To single out E.O. Wilson, entomologist and the somewhat county philosopher and founder of sociobiology, as the whipping boy, as Berry does here, is unfair. There are better targets.

Still, much of what Berry is concerned about concerns us all, and I like his noble and emphatic style. I just wish he would concentrate on the real villains, the "military-industrial complex" that Eisenhower warned us about, which now includes, according to Berry (and I do in part agree), our universities and the medical establishment. But Berry repeatedly sprays at the wrong targets in an indiscriminate manner. He calls pollution "the most ubiquitous result of modern chemistry" (p. 20). We're all against pollution, but it is not the most ubiquitous result nor is it caused by science. It is caused by industry. The most ubiquitous result of modern chemistry is the increase in the number of people on this planet (chemistry has helped us grow more food). Our pollution of the planet is a side effect caused by the failure of our institutions to confront the problem.

Some of this book is a one-sided debate with Wilson about what belongs to religion and/or the arts and what belongs to science. Berry thinks that Wilson and modern science have overstepped. He believes that it is "a wise instinct...that some things are and ought to be forbidden to us," quoting Wes Jackson on page 76. That we ought "to say out of the nuclei" is much easier said than done. The genie will not go back into the bottle. Human beings cannot be "forbidden" by scripture or otherwise from exploring what they find interesting. It may be our undoing, but it is also our glory. Berry is understandably concerned that agribusiness and the corporation will pave over his farm and rob him and his family of their sense of place and heritage and all that is important to him. I hope they don't. But I should point out that farmers once took the place and heritage of hunter and gatherers 10,000 years ago, turning their pristine Eden into great tracts of grain and cows and horses and pigs and dogs, rats and mice and flies, thereby irrevocably altering and destroying the landscape. The diversity of Berry's farm is nothing like the diversity that existed before agriculture. Would he like to go back to that?

Berry's assertion, "...if you think creatures are machines, you have no religion" (p. 51), recalls the state of mind that says, if you don't believe in my God, you have no religion. Furthermore, Berry has now truncated Wilson's "biological machines" (which is only a metaphor and Berry knows this) to "machines," the better to ridicule anybody who would use such a metaphor. On p. 54 he avers that there is a "widespread belief that creatures are machines"; but since most people believe in a personal God, in angels, etc., I think he is wrong. There ARE people who see creatures as machines. They are dictators, some corporate CEOs and some politicians, and perhaps the people at Zacky Farms.

Also at issue is determinism. Berry quotes Wilson (p. 26) as making the point that we have the "illusion of free will" and that it is "biologically adaptive," a point that Berry does not understand (although he tried). To appreciate what Wilson is saying, perhaps it would help Berry to free himself from his Christian bearings for a moment and consider this central tenet of Buddhism: life is suffering. Given that, being able to fool oneself certainly could be adaptive. I mention this because much of Berry's misunderstanding of Wilson is due to his limited world view. He is proud of being local and not wanting to know everything, but the price he pays is that he will misunderstand others who have had different experiences and who see the world in a different, no less viable, way.

I think Berry is definitely right about the "two cultures" (C.P. Snow, 1959): "To believe that the arts can be interpreted so as to make them consilient with biology or physics is about equivalent to the belief that literary classics can survive as comic books or movies" (p. 117). Wilson's "Consilience," as noble as the idea may be, is probably not going to happen any time soon, and may be, as Berry has it, impossible (p. 95). Berry argues convincingly that the arts are qualitatively different than science and would no longer be the arts if they used the same methods as science.

Finally I have to say that Berry's perception that "the conflict between creatures and machines...under industrialism has resulted...in an almost continuous sequence of victories of machines over creatures" (p. 54) seems to me to be a postmodern Luddite delusion. "Industrialism" (something closer to the real enemy, not Wilson or science) hasn't been continuously victorious at all. The standard of living in most of the world has improved, and where it hasn't, overpopulation and corruption are the better to blame. This is not to say that industrialization is not a danger and has not already greatly harmed our planet. It is and it has. But we (not Wilson, not science) are to blame for the malevolent effects of industrialization and it is we who must do something about them.

... it's the feeling that "science = technology = progress = good" put forth by Wilson that's the problem, according to Berry. He does say what's wrong with this kind of hubris--it leads us to go forward in areas that perhaps we shouldn't go. He's completely right when he says that the study of chemistry and its industrial application has done irreversible damage to the environment, and much "applied science" now goes to try to fix problems caused by earlier applied science. I understand Strickland's points in his review, but I think he's being disingenuous when he says that Berry calls for an end to scientific exploration; he doesn't. What he calls for in this book is an end to scientific exploitation, and he does so eloquently.

Wendell Berry is a gentleman. No, he's a gentle man. And he very gently but thoroughly skewers E.O. Wilson's thesis, that science explains (or more correctly, one day will explain) everything. As a scientist and artist (weird combination but nonetheless, that's me), I find the book fascinating. Wilson says that religion/humanities and science must come together. No argument there. Wilson then states essentially that the way that will happen is for religion to "learn the language of science," that is, Science is not budging. It is my experience that science is a religious tradition as entrenched in its sacred cattle as any religion.

Berry does not dispute the place of science in making lives better, as it sometimes does. He just questions the wisdom of betting our future on the hopes that science will "come up with something" to fix whatever mess we find ourselves in, be it disease (antibiotics), agriculture (petrochemicals), energy (ditto), or what have you.

If you're going to read one of Berry's books, I'd recommend "The Unsettling of America." This book is a close second. Then get "Farming: A Handbook" to see how a brilliant essayist writes poetry.

This book certainly creates controversy as the disparate ratings from one to five stars illustrates. If nothing else, that says something very good about it as a book. Indeed the ratings seem to be more along the lines of agreeing or disagreeing with Berry's ideas, rather than the usual standard I apply: how much of my short allotment of time and restricted stack of cash should be spent on a book. I think of most of my reviews along those lines, instead of engaging in a dialect with the author. Now, that being said, I really need to say I am deviating from that practice because although I think this is a five star should read (agree with Berry's updated C.P. Snow Two Cultures or not, spiritualism vs techno-engineeering or not) as a discussion centre, I think there are some writerly considerations: Berry is a poet, a much greater poet than many realize. Like other definers of an age - unacknowledged legislators true but subsequently recognized - his audience does not always realize the way his mind works words around. In his poetry a sort of slow dawning comes on the reader who does not force things along. Brisk walks in his woods will not do, instead the multiple shades of green, the distinct notes of each birdsong, the subtle shifts of a breeze on the face constitute an experience, a miracle of life. That goes on in this prose arguement as well. Reading him for a concise debate just will not work. I guess what I am saying is that the underlying premise is the undeniable point that for all of sciencethere is no such substance as life. But it's still there and that's the miracle and that's the poetry and the rational, logical, orderly prose of an essay does not manifest the miracle that is poetry. But I am thankful there is a Wendell Berry writing such books to make me think. Spend a few bucks, do some pondering, but in the end go to his poems.

Wendell Berry's book is the best argument I have read against the "religion" of scientism practiced by our culture in quite some time. The Enlightenment is dead, and unfortunately many in and out of science refuse to acknowledge it. Mathematical rationalism that was thought to be the best access to ALL human knowledge and wisdom during the Enlightenment. Modern science emerged as the standard bearer of the Enlightenment towards this lofty goal, replacing all other epistemologies. By the mid-twentieth century, epistemologies like philosophy, theology, and mythology were seen as either arcane or trivial - certainly unscientific (sic). E.O. Wilson (one of my favorite biologists) in CONSILIENCE writes at the apogee of this thinking and yes, faith. In CONSILIENCE Wilson wishes to either ignore or concretize the divine - I can't quite get which. Much of our culture does pretty much the same. Wendell Berry's argument is that we must look past scientific description and look deeper into the world around us to achieve wisdom and appreciate the "depth of the world." The superstition (actually a religion to my mind) that Berry argues against is the notion that through science we can come to understand it ALL, which is called scientism. Yet, Berry acknowledges and celebrates science's value to our culture from a practical and philosophical perspective but warns us against relying on it for moral judgment. Scientism lacks soul, spirit - it is a cold "religion" that does not acknowledge the deep mystery of the universe, because this mystery is just another problem to be solved by measurement and experiment. Berry's implicit argument is that no moral culture can arise from it. Science is but one way to come to understand our place in the universe, and we are warned in Berry's book that we should not unduly privilege it since science cannot come to an understanding of the divine aspects of existence.

Berry argues for the primacy of life and the need to understand and accept life's ultimate mysteries. More specifically, he engages in a elocuent polemic with E.O. Wilson's attempt at a "theory of everything" as presented in Wilson's "Consilience". This is the "modern superstition" referred to in Berry's subtitle: that the world is ultimately knowable.
Before entering into debate with "Consilience", Berry sets the context for his essay in a majestual chapter on "Propriety", which he understands as an awareness of our interconnectedness and of the centrality of having consciousness of contexts and environments (biological, social, and cultural). He sums it up this way: "The idea of propriety makes an issue of the fittingness of our conduct to our places or circumstances, evn to our hopes. It acknowledges the always pressing realities of context and of influence; we cannot act speak or act or live out of context." He goes on to point out that when we speak of, for example, "environmental crises" we acknowledge this standard, and thus, we raise, willingly or not, the issue of propriety.
Berry is a fine writer whose prose projects the author's personality wonderfully. I encourage anyone reading this to also read some of Berry's poetry -- outstanding.
I sincerely believe that all HS and college students should read this book as a prologue to their education. It should be read alongside Wilson's "Consilience".

Though the subtitle on this book has changed, Berry does in fact challenge the modern superstition that science provides the grounds upon which all knowledge should be based. Using Edmund Wilson has a foil, Berry makes at least three important contributions.

First, he challenges Wilson's "biophilia" by pointing out that science cannot adequately account for all knowledge. Being human is more than the working of biophysical processes. There is a mystery in being human, a mystery that causes us to love, fear, rejoice, and grieve. There is a place for both religion and the arts in giving alternative avenues of and explanations for knowledge.

Second, Berry challenges science's hubris, by pointing out that science, by its nature, seeks to dominate and to tyrannize all other forms of knowledge. Particularly when supported by the military-industrial complex, science has a vested economic and cultural interest in drawing all knowledge under its umbrella, allowing it to set the public agenda and to draw upon the common wealth. By reconnecting with local communities where the influence and consequences of all "original discoveries" can be seen and felt in concrete ways, science will be chastened and can once again provide valuable services.

Finally, Berry seeks a means for reuniting the "two cultures," science and the arts. Using his relationship with scientist Wes Jackson as an example, Berry points out that the tools of community (science and the arts) must used within a shared context: the land and its health. Ironically, the recreation of one whole culture will happen in self-sustaining local communities, with their local histories and local languages. America only will be "one" when the "many" local communities are affirmed, supported, and cherished.

This is a valuable addition to the Berry corpus and is perhaps the most synthetic essay he has written since "The Unsettling of America." I recommend it very highly.