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Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition
"[A] scathing assessment…Berry shows that Wilson's much-celebrated, controversial pleas in Consilience to unify all branches of knowledge is nothing more than a fatuous subordination of religion, art, and everything else that is good to science…Berry is one of the most perceptive critics of American society writing today." --Lauren F. Winner, Washington Post Book World
"I am tempted to say he understands [Consilience] better than Wilson himself…A new emancipation proclamation in which he speaks again and again about how to defy the tyranny of scientific materialism" ---Colin C. Campbell, Christian Science Monitor
"Berry takes a wrecking ball to E. O. Wilson's Consilience, reducing its smug assumptions regarding the fusion of science, art, and religion to so much rubble. --Kirkus Reviews
In Life Is a Miracle, the devotion of science to the quantitative and reductionist world is measured against the mysterious, qualitative suggestions of religion and art. Berry sees life as the collision of these separate forces, but without all three in the mix we are left at sea in the world.
"I am tempted to say he understands [Consilience] better than Wilson himself…A new emancipation proclamation in which he speaks again and again about how to defy the tyranny of scientific materialism" ---Colin C. Campbell, Christian Science Monitor
"Berry takes a wrecking ball to E. O. Wilson's Consilience, reducing its smug assumptions regarding the fusion of science, art, and religion to so much rubble. --Kirkus Reviews
In Life Is a Miracle, the devotion of science to the quantitative and reductionist world is measured against the mysterious, qualitative suggestions of religion and art. Berry sees life as the collision of these separate forces, but without all three in the mix we are left at sea in the world.
176 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
About the author
Wendell Berry
324 books4,161 followersWendell Berry is a conservationist, farmer, essayist, novelist, professor of English and poet. He was born August 5, 1934 in Henry County, Kentucky where he now lives on a farm. The New York Times has called Berry the "prophet of rural America."
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April 19, 2020
Wendell Berry is a well-known author of prose and poetry; sometimes a college teacher of English (a field in which he has a graduate degree); a Kentucky farmer who tills land that's been in his family for several generations and who advocates for sustainable farming practices and environmental stewardship; and a public intellectual who thinks seriously about important social and philosophical issues. To date, this is the only one of his numerous books that I've read (though I definitely intend to read more!); but I've now read it three times, most recently because I've long really wanted to review it, and felt that because of the depth and complexity of the thought, it deserved a review written with the benefit of the freshest possible engagement. Even so, it will be a challenge to summarize it within the scope of a review.
Berry is a classical Christian believer, whose faith shapes his view of the world and universe around him and undergirds his thought. Moreover, in the present book, he's making the case that human life in the world is essentially miraculous, and that it has an inescapable spiritual dimension. That said, however, he does not base his arguments here on appeal to religious authority as such, nor present them in narrowly "religious" terms. Rather, he's arguing for a basic philosophical position, and a basic way of living in the world on the basis of that position, that can be shared by persons of a wide variety of faiths, and even by persons who have no specific faith as such, but who approach the natural and human world from an existentially humble perspective that recognizes the mystery and complexity of the universe and values individual humans, communities, and natural spaces. For this reason, although I originally shelved the book with "Christian life and thought," I think "Other nonfiction" would be the more accurate classification --not because his thought isn't Christian, but because he's writing from the perspective of philosophy, not theology, and writing to all of his fellow humans who share the common graces of conscience and ability to reason.
While this is a short book (153 pages), addressed to general intelligent readers rather than academic specialists, not burdened with scholarly apparatus and expressed in as clear a style as possible, and although it is a relatively quick read, it's not AS quick as one might initially expect. The content is pithy, and covers a lot of ground at short length, but significant depth. Berry illustrates and supports his points with examples from literature, especially Shakespeare (the first chapter has an extended discussion of King Lear --which I have never read-- and the book's title comes from Edgar's words to his suicidal father, "Thy life's a miracle...."), references to history and current events, and quotes from other serious thinkers. While he's primarily concerned with the concrete and practical side of life, he necessarily addresses some significant abstract ideas that bear on how we approach the concrete and the practical; the writing demands thought and attention. Full engagement with it can be demanding.
Published in 2000, the book is a specific response to the 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by Edward O. Wilson, much-honored Harvard Univ. biologist, secular humanist philosopher (and avowed "environmentalist") and general pillar of the intellectual establishment. In that book (which I admittedly have not read; I believe Berry represents it accurately and that his numerous quotations from it are not out of context, but in any case the viewpoint Berry describes is a common establishment party line that most readers have already encountered frequently) Wilson argues for the equation of "science" with positivist materialism and denial of the existence of anything not empirically material, for the ability of Science thus defined to ultimately explain all of reality, and for the reorganization of all human knowledge and academic disciplines into a supposedly "consilient" whole subordinated under the overarching philosophic guidance of this super-competent Science. Berry begs to differ; but while he develops his own position in response to Wilson's, his book has value, IMO, as a positive statement on its own terms, not simply as a refutation of Wilson (so it can be appreciated on its own terms whether you've read Wilson or not).
To summarize some of Berry's main positions in capsule form, he maintains: that human knowledge is not solely rationally deductive-empirical, but can be intuitive, emotional, and/or the product of wholistic experience over time that's not reducible to mathematical formulas or "data;" that organisms and machines are two distinctly different things, and that the former, and the world and the universe generally, are not properly conceived by trying to reduce them to the latter; that the "scientist" is not a detached observer of the "environment" but a part of it, and that the instant you set up a false dichotomy between the two you're fatally undercutting any genuine commitment to the "environment;" that humans are not mechanically or chemically determined but have genuine free will (not the "illusion" of it), which means that we make choices, and that if we don't, appealing to us to make environmentally-friendly choices makes no sense; and that while the proper goal of all sciences and arts is the healthy flourishing of humans and their communities, the goal of science as practiced in contemporary academia is maximizing the profits of the wealthy corporations that pay for the research, with results generally inimical to human flourishing. He devotes a chapter to the concept of "propriety," which he defines as "the fittingness of our conduct to our place and circumstance" (and which has a wealth of applications to present-day behaviors); and he emphasizes the importance of commitment to the local and particular, rather than grandiose subordination of the local and particular to 'globalized" operations. But there's much more content, and more food for thought, here; I've only scratched the surface rather briefly!
My read of the book this time, and writing of this review, was of course in the shadow of the current pandemic, a situation that heightens and accentuates the urgency of some of Berry's themes. The virus is a "problem" that many people are looking to Science to "solve;" but of course science had a great deal to do with creating the "problem" and the conditions under which it's spread, and deified "Science" isn't going to give us moral and spiritual resources for getting through the "problem," explaining it or making sense of its consequences in anything but a reductionist sense, or helping us decide what sort of social reality we want to build or rebuild in its aftermath. Those are things that don't call so much for technical expertise as for virtue, faith, wisdom, and community. A blog post written 20 years after this book was, and which doesn't mention Berry or this book, may seem an odd thing to link to in closing; but that's what I'm going to do, because I think Billy Coffey's conclusion there puts in simple words much of what Berry is saying here. https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog... .
Berry is a classical Christian believer, whose faith shapes his view of the world and universe around him and undergirds his thought. Moreover, in the present book, he's making the case that human life in the world is essentially miraculous, and that it has an inescapable spiritual dimension. That said, however, he does not base his arguments here on appeal to religious authority as such, nor present them in narrowly "religious" terms. Rather, he's arguing for a basic philosophical position, and a basic way of living in the world on the basis of that position, that can be shared by persons of a wide variety of faiths, and even by persons who have no specific faith as such, but who approach the natural and human world from an existentially humble perspective that recognizes the mystery and complexity of the universe and values individual humans, communities, and natural spaces. For this reason, although I originally shelved the book with "Christian life and thought," I think "Other nonfiction" would be the more accurate classification --not because his thought isn't Christian, but because he's writing from the perspective of philosophy, not theology, and writing to all of his fellow humans who share the common graces of conscience and ability to reason.
While this is a short book (153 pages), addressed to general intelligent readers rather than academic specialists, not burdened with scholarly apparatus and expressed in as clear a style as possible, and although it is a relatively quick read, it's not AS quick as one might initially expect. The content is pithy, and covers a lot of ground at short length, but significant depth. Berry illustrates and supports his points with examples from literature, especially Shakespeare (the first chapter has an extended discussion of King Lear --which I have never read-- and the book's title comes from Edgar's words to his suicidal father, "Thy life's a miracle...."), references to history and current events, and quotes from other serious thinkers. While he's primarily concerned with the concrete and practical side of life, he necessarily addresses some significant abstract ideas that bear on how we approach the concrete and the practical; the writing demands thought and attention. Full engagement with it can be demanding.
Published in 2000, the book is a specific response to the 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by Edward O. Wilson, much-honored Harvard Univ. biologist, secular humanist philosopher (and avowed "environmentalist") and general pillar of the intellectual establishment. In that book (which I admittedly have not read; I believe Berry represents it accurately and that his numerous quotations from it are not out of context, but in any case the viewpoint Berry describes is a common establishment party line that most readers have already encountered frequently) Wilson argues for the equation of "science" with positivist materialism and denial of the existence of anything not empirically material, for the ability of Science thus defined to ultimately explain all of reality, and for the reorganization of all human knowledge and academic disciplines into a supposedly "consilient" whole subordinated under the overarching philosophic guidance of this super-competent Science. Berry begs to differ; but while he develops his own position in response to Wilson's, his book has value, IMO, as a positive statement on its own terms, not simply as a refutation of Wilson (so it can be appreciated on its own terms whether you've read Wilson or not).
To summarize some of Berry's main positions in capsule form, he maintains: that human knowledge is not solely rationally deductive-empirical, but can be intuitive, emotional, and/or the product of wholistic experience over time that's not reducible to mathematical formulas or "data;" that organisms and machines are two distinctly different things, and that the former, and the world and the universe generally, are not properly conceived by trying to reduce them to the latter; that the "scientist" is not a detached observer of the "environment" but a part of it, and that the instant you set up a false dichotomy between the two you're fatally undercutting any genuine commitment to the "environment;" that humans are not mechanically or chemically determined but have genuine free will (not the "illusion" of it), which means that we make choices, and that if we don't, appealing to us to make environmentally-friendly choices makes no sense; and that while the proper goal of all sciences and arts is the healthy flourishing of humans and their communities, the goal of science as practiced in contemporary academia is maximizing the profits of the wealthy corporations that pay for the research, with results generally inimical to human flourishing. He devotes a chapter to the concept of "propriety," which he defines as "the fittingness of our conduct to our place and circumstance" (and which has a wealth of applications to present-day behaviors); and he emphasizes the importance of commitment to the local and particular, rather than grandiose subordination of the local and particular to 'globalized" operations. But there's much more content, and more food for thought, here; I've only scratched the surface rather briefly!
My read of the book this time, and writing of this review, was of course in the shadow of the current pandemic, a situation that heightens and accentuates the urgency of some of Berry's themes. The virus is a "problem" that many people are looking to Science to "solve;" but of course science had a great deal to do with creating the "problem" and the conditions under which it's spread, and deified "Science" isn't going to give us moral and spiritual resources for getting through the "problem," explaining it or making sense of its consequences in anything but a reductionist sense, or helping us decide what sort of social reality we want to build or rebuild in its aftermath. Those are things that don't call so much for technical expertise as for virtue, faith, wisdom, and community. A blog post written 20 years after this book was, and which doesn't mention Berry or this book, may seem an odd thing to link to in closing; but that's what I'm going to do, because I think Billy Coffey's conclusion there puts in simple words much of what Berry is saying here. https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog... .
October 11, 2021
Wow. I didn't think the whole thing totally ruled, but there are certain quotes that are probably going to stick with me forever. He just has a different point of view than I’ve ever encountered. He values the particular; certain places, specific people, particular animals, distinct things. In this sense, he is across the spectrum from me. I am a child of the 80’s, heavily influenced by American consumer culture. I value the big and novel. I think epic trips rule with towering mountains, large states and even big animals. I like moose more than birds and mountains more than streams and certainly an adventurous trip more than the routine of everyday life. I want to love particular "mundane" things. Berry knows more about that than I. He'd rather stay in one place his whole life and fully appreciate its depth and richness, then briefly skim all the world without a deep understanding of any place in particular. The mundane scares the hell out of me, but this guy revels in it. Wow.
August 13, 2012
As a scientist and a university faculty member, I found some parts of this essay stinging. Nevertheless, I found, on the whole, much of the commentary cogent and useful. At first, this essay seemed like some form of Luddite treatise. But what actually emerged was a well thought out challenge to the primacy of science in the modern world. Although the author issues this challenge directly at the Ecologist E. O. Wilson, in response to Wilson's thesis entitled Consilience, Wendell Berry rarely misses an opportunity to broaden his attack against Science (with a capital S). Nevertheless, I found the points of attack well articulated and rarely gratuitous.
In sum, this text made me (actually, allowed me) to look at science from a fresh perspective. Such opportunities are rare, when one has been in a given field for many years. For this, I am indebted to this author.
In sum, this text made me (actually, allowed me) to look at science from a fresh perspective. Such opportunities are rare, when one has been in a given field for many years. For this, I am indebted to this author.
December 20, 2008
Gotta give this one 5-stars just for sheer audacity. Berry takes on modern science and its materialistic and mechanistic world view, and he has E.O. Wilson and his book Consilience in his sights. Berry suggests that something is lost when we only focus on the reductionist perspective at the root of modern science. We are, he is suggesting, more than can be explained by modern science, and he suggests the dominance of the modern scientific paradigm represents a threat to those ineffable or irreducible characteristics that make us uniquely human.
We are, he is suggesting, more than machines:
"The most radical influence of reductive science has been the virtually universal adoption of the idea that the world, its creatures, and all the parts of its creatures are machines--that is, that there is no difference between creature and artifice, birth and manufacture, thought and computation" (p. 6).
In response to that model he suggests that, "life, like holiness, can only be known by being experienced" (p. 8), and that "Our daily lives are a daily mockery of our scientific pretensions" (p. 33). And again, "Directly opposed to this reduction or abstraction of things is the idea of the preciousness of individual lives and places" (p. 42).
The book does bog down a bit in the middle, but then there will be a line like this to catch your attention:
"To define knowledge as merely empirical is to limit one's ability to know; it enfeebles one's ability to feel and think" (p. 103).
Or this:
"'Survival value', it seems to me, must deal in minimums, since any species dependent upon maximums would be too vulnerable to survive. The human race has survived because of its ability to survive famine, not because of its ability to survive feasts" (p. 110).
Or this:
A work of art says what it says in the only way it can be said. Beauty, for example, cannot be interpreted. It is not an empirically verifiable fat; it is not a quantity (p. 117).
We are, he is suggesting, more than machines:
"The most radical influence of reductive science has been the virtually universal adoption of the idea that the world, its creatures, and all the parts of its creatures are machines--that is, that there is no difference between creature and artifice, birth and manufacture, thought and computation" (p. 6).
In response to that model he suggests that, "life, like holiness, can only be known by being experienced" (p. 8), and that "Our daily lives are a daily mockery of our scientific pretensions" (p. 33). And again, "Directly opposed to this reduction or abstraction of things is the idea of the preciousness of individual lives and places" (p. 42).
The book does bog down a bit in the middle, but then there will be a line like this to catch your attention:
"To define knowledge as merely empirical is to limit one's ability to know; it enfeebles one's ability to feel and think" (p. 103).
Or this:
"'Survival value', it seems to me, must deal in minimums, since any species dependent upon maximums would be too vulnerable to survive. The human race has survived because of its ability to survive famine, not because of its ability to survive feasts" (p. 110).
Or this:
A work of art says what it says in the only way it can be said. Beauty, for example, cannot be interpreted. It is not an empirically verifiable fat; it is not a quantity (p. 117).
January 14, 2023
This is Wendell Berry’s critical response to Edward O. Wilson’s Consilience, written in 1998. I remember reading Consilience in ‘98 or ‘99, and wasn’t terribly impressed either.
Berry notes that “despite [Wilson’s] pretensions to iconoclasm, Mr. Wilson speaks for a popular scientific orthodoxy. His book reads as though it was written to confirm the popular belief that science is entirely good, that it leads to unlimited progress, and that it has (or will have) all the answers.”
Berry ably demonstrates the incoherence of Wilson’s materialist and empiricist presuppositions, showing that once you determine that free will is an illusion it becomes nonsensical to even attempt an argument to persuade others to your viewpoint. These are not original observations, but they bear repeating nonetheless.
More interesting are his thoughts about how the Arts cannot simply be subsumed into the Sciences as Wilson seems to imagine. Berry brings CP Snow’s The Two Cultures into the discussion, arguing that each of these camps are evaluating different yet complementary truths.
Berry also reminds the reader of the unanticipated yet inevitable drawbacks to the relentless march of technological “progress.”
Highly recommended.
Quotes:
“You cannot translate a poem into an explanation, any more than you can translate a poem into a painting or a painting into a piece of music or a piece of music into a walking stick. A work of art says what it says in the only way it can be said. Beauty, for example, cannot be interpreted. It is not an empirically verifiable fact; it is not a quantity. Artists and critics and teachers and students certainly ought to notice that some things are beautiful and some are not; they ought to ask, and learn if they can, the difference between beauty and ugliness; they should learn how beautiful things are made and how things are made beautiful; but they might as well not ask what are the equivalents of beauty in ideas or pulse rates or dollars or ‘ordinary language.’ 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.”
“Mr. Wilson's spokesman ‘the empiricist’ hauls out, as if he had thought of it himself,the most popular ‘environmental’ cliché about Christianity: ‘With a second life waiting, suffering can be endured—especially in other people. The natural environment can be used up.’ This little platitude has passed from mouth to mouth for years, chewable but not swallowable. It is untrue. Nobody who has actually read the Gospels could believe it. It ignores the very point of the Incarnation. It ignores Christ's unfailing compassion for sufferers, whom He healed, one by one, as they came or were carried to Him. And there is nowhere in the Bible a single line that gives or implies a permission to ‘use up’ the ‘natural environment.’”
“The ‘cutting edge’ is not critical or radical or intellectually adventurous. The cutting edge of science is now fundamentally the same as the cutting edge of product development. The university emphasis upon productivity and innovation is inherently conventional and self-protective. It is part and parcel of the status quo. The goal is innovation but not difference. The system exists to prevent ‘academic freedom’ from causing unhappy surprises to corporations, governments, or university administrators.”
“What were they afraid of? What were their ‘deep-set repugnances’? What did they mourn? Without exception, I think, what they feared, what they found repugnant, was the violation of life by an oversimplifying, feelingless utilitarianism; they feared the destruction of the living integrity of creatures, places, communities, cultures, and human souls; they feared the loss of the old prescriptive definition of humankind, according to which we are neither gods nor beasts, though partaking of the nature of both. What they mourned was the progressive death of the earth.”
Berry notes that “despite [Wilson’s] pretensions to iconoclasm, Mr. Wilson speaks for a popular scientific orthodoxy. His book reads as though it was written to confirm the popular belief that science is entirely good, that it leads to unlimited progress, and that it has (or will have) all the answers.”
Berry ably demonstrates the incoherence of Wilson’s materialist and empiricist presuppositions, showing that once you determine that free will is an illusion it becomes nonsensical to even attempt an argument to persuade others to your viewpoint. These are not original observations, but they bear repeating nonetheless.
More interesting are his thoughts about how the Arts cannot simply be subsumed into the Sciences as Wilson seems to imagine. Berry brings CP Snow’s The Two Cultures into the discussion, arguing that each of these camps are evaluating different yet complementary truths.
Berry also reminds the reader of the unanticipated yet inevitable drawbacks to the relentless march of technological “progress.”
Highly recommended.
Quotes:
“You cannot translate a poem into an explanation, any more than you can translate a poem into a painting or a painting into a piece of music or a piece of music into a walking stick. A work of art says what it says in the only way it can be said. Beauty, for example, cannot be interpreted. It is not an empirically verifiable fact; it is not a quantity. Artists and critics and teachers and students certainly ought to notice that some things are beautiful and some are not; they ought to ask, and learn if they can, the difference between beauty and ugliness; they should learn how beautiful things are made and how things are made beautiful; but they might as well not ask what are the equivalents of beauty in ideas or pulse rates or dollars or ‘ordinary language.’ 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.”
“Mr. Wilson's spokesman ‘the empiricist’ hauls out, as if he had thought of it himself,the most popular ‘environmental’ cliché about Christianity: ‘With a second life waiting, suffering can be endured—especially in other people. The natural environment can be used up.’ This little platitude has passed from mouth to mouth for years, chewable but not swallowable. It is untrue. Nobody who has actually read the Gospels could believe it. It ignores the very point of the Incarnation. It ignores Christ's unfailing compassion for sufferers, whom He healed, one by one, as they came or were carried to Him. And there is nowhere in the Bible a single line that gives or implies a permission to ‘use up’ the ‘natural environment.’”
“The ‘cutting edge’ is not critical or radical or intellectually adventurous. The cutting edge of science is now fundamentally the same as the cutting edge of product development. The university emphasis upon productivity and innovation is inherently conventional and self-protective. It is part and parcel of the status quo. The goal is innovation but not difference. The system exists to prevent ‘academic freedom’ from causing unhappy surprises to corporations, governments, or university administrators.”
“What were they afraid of? What were their ‘deep-set repugnances’? What did they mourn? Without exception, I think, what they feared, what they found repugnant, was the violation of life by an oversimplifying, feelingless utilitarianism; they feared the destruction of the living integrity of creatures, places, communities, cultures, and human souls; they feared the loss of the old prescriptive definition of humankind, according to which we are neither gods nor beasts, though partaking of the nature of both. What they mourned was the progressive death of the earth.”
February 16, 2018
One of the best book of essays from Wendell Berry that I've read. Intriguing and compelling at every point, he hits his biggest home run (for me) when he considers the different kinds of knowledge and then the distinctions between art and science, and the necessity for both to work together from a common ground.
For those of you who have heard his speech on Wallace Stegner's idea of the "boomers" and "stickers," he elaborates on that more in this book as well.
For those of you who have heard his speech on Wallace Stegner's idea of the "boomers" and "stickers," he elaborates on that more in this book as well.
November 28, 2008
Berry continues to astonish me. This is not a fast and easy read; you have to work and pay attention. But Berry writes as a prophet of our times and has put his finger on a core - maybe the root - cause of dis-ease in our century.
He writes a critique of rationalism and scientific thought that we need to pay attention to.
A few memorable passages:
"For a while I proposed to myself that the only things really explainable are explanations. That is not quite true, but it is near enough to the truth that I am unwilling to forget it.
"What can be explained? Experiments, ideas, patterns, cause-effect relationships and connections within defined limits, anything that can be calculated, graphed or diagrammed. And yet the explanation changes whatever is explained into something explainable. Explanation is reductive, not comprehensive; most of the time, when you have explained something, you discover leftovers. An explanation is a bucket, not a well.
"What can't be explained? I don't think creatures can be explained. I don't think lives can be explained. What we know about creatures and lives must be pictured or told or sung or danced. And I don't think pictures or stories or songs or dances can be explained. The arts are indispensable precisely because they are so nearly antithetical to explanation." (p113)
"The time is past, if ever there was such a time, when you can just discover knowledge and turn it loose in the wold and assume that you have done good.
"This, to me, is a sign of the incompleteness of science in itself - which is the sign of the need for a strenuous conversation among all the branches of learning."
"In our present economic predicament, ethics, ecology, environmental law, etc. won't as specialties have much corrective force. They will be used to rationalize what is wrong." (p145)
He writes a critique of rationalism and scientific thought that we need to pay attention to.
A few memorable passages:
"For a while I proposed to myself that the only things really explainable are explanations. That is not quite true, but it is near enough to the truth that I am unwilling to forget it.
"What can be explained? Experiments, ideas, patterns, cause-effect relationships and connections within defined limits, anything that can be calculated, graphed or diagrammed. And yet the explanation changes whatever is explained into something explainable. Explanation is reductive, not comprehensive; most of the time, when you have explained something, you discover leftovers. An explanation is a bucket, not a well.
"What can't be explained? I don't think creatures can be explained. I don't think lives can be explained. What we know about creatures and lives must be pictured or told or sung or danced. And I don't think pictures or stories or songs or dances can be explained. The arts are indispensable precisely because they are so nearly antithetical to explanation." (p113)
"The time is past, if ever there was such a time, when you can just discover knowledge and turn it loose in the wold and assume that you have done good.
"This, to me, is a sign of the incompleteness of science in itself - which is the sign of the need for a strenuous conversation among all the branches of learning."
"In our present economic predicament, ethics, ecology, environmental law, etc. won't as specialties have much corrective force. They will be used to rationalize what is wrong." (p145)
September 23, 2019
Wendell Berry: my constant antidote to graduate school.
Berry dislikes scientific reductionism, argues for the uniqueness of art and religion as ways of knowing, being, doing, etc, and adds some important objections to the "scientific" enterprise as it is carried out today: it is essentially colonial, imperialist, and in bed with a number of environmentally destructive forces.
He also comes down pretty harshly on the way academic disciplines are organized and the way universities are run. This makes a lot of sense to me, but leaves me with some questions about how to proceed with my own chosen field. I am so surrounded by people who do research and scholarly publishing as their livelihood that I forget it's something I've never wanted.
Berry writes in another book, Standing by Words:
"If one wishes to promote the life of language, one must promote the life of the community—a discipline many times more trying, difficult, and long than that of linguistics, but having at least the virtue of hopefulness. It escapes the despair always implicit in specializations: the cultivation of discrete parts without respect or responsibility for the whole."
I'm knee-deep in theory about language and social worlds, yet too much of it, in the end, for me feels like a spinning out into nothing. It is not too late, perhaps, for me to imagine getting much more involved with language and literacy teaching at local, grassroots levels. For all our talk about the Local, currently fashionable ideas in applied linguistics seem rarely to be produced by scholars who are genuinely committed to living and working in a place, rather than an archipelago of universities.
Obviously, this book has provoked thinking beyond its subject. Which I suppose is another thing it has going for it.
Berry dislikes scientific reductionism, argues for the uniqueness of art and religion as ways of knowing, being, doing, etc, and adds some important objections to the "scientific" enterprise as it is carried out today: it is essentially colonial, imperialist, and in bed with a number of environmentally destructive forces.
He also comes down pretty harshly on the way academic disciplines are organized and the way universities are run. This makes a lot of sense to me, but leaves me with some questions about how to proceed with my own chosen field. I am so surrounded by people who do research and scholarly publishing as their livelihood that I forget it's something I've never wanted.
Berry writes in another book, Standing by Words:
"If one wishes to promote the life of language, one must promote the life of the community—a discipline many times more trying, difficult, and long than that of linguistics, but having at least the virtue of hopefulness. It escapes the despair always implicit in specializations: the cultivation of discrete parts without respect or responsibility for the whole."
I'm knee-deep in theory about language and social worlds, yet too much of it, in the end, for me feels like a spinning out into nothing. It is not too late, perhaps, for me to imagine getting much more involved with language and literacy teaching at local, grassroots levels. For all our talk about the Local, currently fashionable ideas in applied linguistics seem rarely to be produced by scholars who are genuinely committed to living and working in a place, rather than an archipelago of universities.
Obviously, this book has provoked thinking beyond its subject. Which I suppose is another thing it has going for it.
May 18, 2020
It's been a while since I've read a Wendell Berry book. I think he is a deep, but narrow thinker (as evidenced by this essay being in response to a single book). He verges on a #tradlife ethic that makes me very uncomfortable, and I don't know how important he is to read in a world with Robin Wall Kimmerer. She has all the same questions, except more, and better answers.
May 16, 2020
Life is a miracle. It cannot be explained away; it is intrinsically miraculous. Why we desire to belong cannot be reduced to sociological explanation. Why strawberries are so sweet cannot be reduced to neurological explanation. Why we long for our tears to be wiped away cannot be reduced to psychological explanation.
Wendell Berry confronts the modern religion that is Science. This is not an attack on science per se, but on the particular application of science that seeks after complete knowledge. Complete knowledge is a dangerous aim because it exist outside the bounds of science, outside the bounds of finite minds. Science is the study of the “physical and natural world.” Thus when science is used to explain away that which belongs to a different realm (i.e. that which concerns beauty, right and wrong, life after death, etc), it enters waters it’s not meant to tread.
Life is a Miracle is a book for those who know that life cannot be reduced to words found in a textbook. Science, seeking knowledge, studying the natural world are all good things, but they must remember their limits.
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways.”
Wendell Berry confronts the modern religion that is Science. This is not an attack on science per se, but on the particular application of science that seeks after complete knowledge. Complete knowledge is a dangerous aim because it exist outside the bounds of science, outside the bounds of finite minds. Science is the study of the “physical and natural world.” Thus when science is used to explain away that which belongs to a different realm (i.e. that which concerns beauty, right and wrong, life after death, etc), it enters waters it’s not meant to tread.
Life is a Miracle is a book for those who know that life cannot be reduced to words found in a textbook. Science, seeking knowledge, studying the natural world are all good things, but they must remember their limits.
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways.”
June 25, 2021
Amazing to see a takedown of science-as-religion that responds to real people and real ideas. Berry critiques "progress" not in the sense that society can improve (he wholeheartedly agrees that it should) but in so far as "progress" means finding newer and easier ways to turn people and places into money.
May 6, 2018
Simply superb.
May 10, 2020
I think the substance of this book can drag a little as it's mostly a polemic in response to a book titled Consilience by E.O. Wilson. But Life is a Miracle's main argument is a good one: we cannot be fully human and "know"--in the fullest sense of the term--what it means to live life by simply looking to scientific processes. "Science," Berry argues and as practiced currently, is an unholy union between industrialism and market capitalism that tends to obscure true knowledge by erasing and destroying life as truly lived in local communities and culture.
I'm not sure I fully agree with this argument. Berry, it seems to me, is pretty strongly on one side of the spectrum--a Neo-Luddite of sorts. But I find a lot to commend in this book and in his analysis of what does a "good life" or "knowledge" really mean. He says that universities, science, and even the arts tend to try to reduce "life" to its constituent parts and to therefore reduce life to something less than the sum of its parts (I think his chapter on human beings and how our analogies that "he is like a machine!" tend to devalue human life and activity is a particularly good one). He contends that human beings are more than the sum of their activities and that we can only really know who we are when we see ourselves anchored in communal life and in context to a lived place and culture. More importantly, we need to have humility and patience to understand that we cannot really know anything, and that life is lived not by trying to exhaust all the what he calls a "surplus of considerations," but by making well-grounded decisions in light of our ignorance, dependent on tradition and people that have come before us. I think it's an interesting and necessary corrective for our current atomistic, individualized, "you do you" zeitgeist.
Here is one of my favorite parts of the book:
"A little harder to compass is the danger that we can give up on life also by presuming to 'understand' it--that is by reducing it to the terms of our understanding and by treating it as predictable or mechanical. The most radical influence of reductive science has been the virtually universal adoption of the idea that the world, its creatures, and all the parts of its creatures are machines--that is, that there is no difference between creature and artifice, birth and manufacture, thought and computation. Our language, wherever it is used, is now almost invariably conditioned by the assumption that fleshly bodies are machines full of mechanisms, fully compatible with the mechanisms of medicine, industry, and commerce; and that minds are computers fully compatible with electronic technology. . . .
For quite a while it has been possible for a free and thoughtful person to see that to treat life as mechanical or predictable or understandable is to reduce it. Now, almost suddenly, it is becoming clear that to reduce life to the scope of our understanding (whatever 'model' we use) is inevitably to enslave it, make property of it, and put it up for sale. This is to give up on life, to carry it beyond change and redemption, and to increase the proximity of despair. . . .
At this point I can only declare myself. I think that the poet and scholar Kathleen Raine was correct in reminding us that life, like holiness, can be known only by being experienced. To experience it is not to 'figure it out' or even to understand it, but to suffer it and rejoice in it as it is. In suffering it and rejoicing in it as it is, we know that we do not and cannot understand it completely. We know moreover, that we do not wish to have it appropriated by somebody's claim to have understood it. Though we have life, it is beyond us. We do not know how we have it, or why. We do not know what is going to happen to it, or to us. It is not predictable; though we can destroy it, we cannot make it. It cannot, except by reduction and the grave risk of damage, be controlled. It is, as Blake said, holy. To think otherwise is to enslave life, and to make, not humanity, but a few humans its predictably inept masters."
I'm not sure I fully agree with this argument. Berry, it seems to me, is pretty strongly on one side of the spectrum--a Neo-Luddite of sorts. But I find a lot to commend in this book and in his analysis of what does a "good life" or "knowledge" really mean. He says that universities, science, and even the arts tend to try to reduce "life" to its constituent parts and to therefore reduce life to something less than the sum of its parts (I think his chapter on human beings and how our analogies that "he is like a machine!" tend to devalue human life and activity is a particularly good one). He contends that human beings are more than the sum of their activities and that we can only really know who we are when we see ourselves anchored in communal life and in context to a lived place and culture. More importantly, we need to have humility and patience to understand that we cannot really know anything, and that life is lived not by trying to exhaust all the what he calls a "surplus of considerations," but by making well-grounded decisions in light of our ignorance, dependent on tradition and people that have come before us. I think it's an interesting and necessary corrective for our current atomistic, individualized, "you do you" zeitgeist.
Here is one of my favorite parts of the book:
"A little harder to compass is the danger that we can give up on life also by presuming to 'understand' it--that is by reducing it to the terms of our understanding and by treating it as predictable or mechanical. The most radical influence of reductive science has been the virtually universal adoption of the idea that the world, its creatures, and all the parts of its creatures are machines--that is, that there is no difference between creature and artifice, birth and manufacture, thought and computation. Our language, wherever it is used, is now almost invariably conditioned by the assumption that fleshly bodies are machines full of mechanisms, fully compatible with the mechanisms of medicine, industry, and commerce; and that minds are computers fully compatible with electronic technology. . . .
For quite a while it has been possible for a free and thoughtful person to see that to treat life as mechanical or predictable or understandable is to reduce it. Now, almost suddenly, it is becoming clear that to reduce life to the scope of our understanding (whatever 'model' we use) is inevitably to enslave it, make property of it, and put it up for sale. This is to give up on life, to carry it beyond change and redemption, and to increase the proximity of despair. . . .
At this point I can only declare myself. I think that the poet and scholar Kathleen Raine was correct in reminding us that life, like holiness, can be known only by being experienced. To experience it is not to 'figure it out' or even to understand it, but to suffer it and rejoice in it as it is. In suffering it and rejoicing in it as it is, we know that we do not and cannot understand it completely. We know moreover, that we do not wish to have it appropriated by somebody's claim to have understood it. Though we have life, it is beyond us. We do not know how we have it, or why. We do not know what is going to happen to it, or to us. It is not predictable; though we can destroy it, we cannot make it. It cannot, except by reduction and the grave risk of damage, be controlled. It is, as Blake said, holy. To think otherwise is to enslave life, and to make, not humanity, but a few humans its predictably inept masters."
May 28, 2021
This book is consistent with other Berry essays I have read. Mr. Berry is a challenge for me. I mostly agree with him, and am somewhat sympathetic to his emphasis on locality. However, I believe his arguments are poor, and he mainly comes across as a cranky old man (as I often fall into that trap personally, I recognize it when I see it).
This book is an extended rant against modern science, modern corporations, agribusiness, and specialization in universities (consistent with many of his essays). In particular, he spends extended space railing against Edward O. Wilson's book "Consilience: the Unity of Knowledge." Mr. Berry has a lot of complaints, but almost no solutions (on page 135 of 153 pages there are a few generic suggestions).
Mr. Berry uses a lot of strawman arguments and some ad hominem attacks. He is not charitable to the views of his opponents. In particular, in this book Dr. Wilson is actually trying to bridge the gap between science and the arts, which Mr. Berry clearly supports. I agree Dr. Wilson is one sided in his solution (as I understand the Wikipedia explanation of his book), but at least he is trying. I think he should get some credit for that.
Mr. Berry is never explicit, but it seems he would prefer everyone live on a small farm, use late 1800s technology, and pass that life onto their descendants in perpetuity. This has some romantic appeal to me, but it is a bit much to assume everyone in the world wants this. Mr. Berry rails against modern science and technology, without acknowledging his late 1800s farm uses a certain level of science and technology. So how much science and technology is OK, and how/why do you draw the line there?
In railing against corporations, he does not address the consumers who support those corporations. I believe corporations should behave better, but their customers pay for ease and comfort and mostly don't care that the corporations behave badly. I.e. I believe the customers are at least equally culpable for all the problems Mr. Berry notes, but he does not mention them at all.
I like Mr. Berry's writing. I enjoy his fictional tales of Port William. I support many of his assertions. I just wish he did a better job supporting them.
This book is an extended rant against modern science, modern corporations, agribusiness, and specialization in universities (consistent with many of his essays). In particular, he spends extended space railing against Edward O. Wilson's book "Consilience: the Unity of Knowledge." Mr. Berry has a lot of complaints, but almost no solutions (on page 135 of 153 pages there are a few generic suggestions).
Mr. Berry uses a lot of strawman arguments and some ad hominem attacks. He is not charitable to the views of his opponents. In particular, in this book Dr. Wilson is actually trying to bridge the gap between science and the arts, which Mr. Berry clearly supports. I agree Dr. Wilson is one sided in his solution (as I understand the Wikipedia explanation of his book), but at least he is trying. I think he should get some credit for that.
Mr. Berry is never explicit, but it seems he would prefer everyone live on a small farm, use late 1800s technology, and pass that life onto their descendants in perpetuity. This has some romantic appeal to me, but it is a bit much to assume everyone in the world wants this. Mr. Berry rails against modern science and technology, without acknowledging his late 1800s farm uses a certain level of science and technology. So how much science and technology is OK, and how/why do you draw the line there?
In railing against corporations, he does not address the consumers who support those corporations. I believe corporations should behave better, but their customers pay for ease and comfort and mostly don't care that the corporations behave badly. I.e. I believe the customers are at least equally culpable for all the problems Mr. Berry notes, but he does not mention them at all.
I like Mr. Berry's writing. I enjoy his fictional tales of Port William. I support many of his assertions. I just wish he did a better job supporting them.
October 19, 2020
“To give up on life is to pass beyond the possibility of change or redemption” p. 5
“One can live fully only by participating in the succession of the generation, in death as well as in life.” p. 8
“To treat life as less than a miracle is to give up on it.” p.10
“The legitimacy of a metaphor depends on upon our understanding of its limits.” p. 46
“...the worth of freedom depends on how it is used.... One should not increase one’s freedom by refusing someone else’s.” p. 79
“An idea of health that does not generously and gracefully accommodate the fact of death is obviously incomplete.” p. 146 (also a great paragraph to follow this)
“Applying knowledge— scientific or otherwise— is an art. An artist is somebody who knows what to put where, and when to put it. A good artist is one who applies knowledge skillfully and sensitively to the particular creatures and places of the world.” p. 148
“One can live fully only by participating in the succession of the generation, in death as well as in life.” p. 8
“To treat life as less than a miracle is to give up on it.” p.10
“The legitimacy of a metaphor depends on upon our understanding of its limits.” p. 46
“...the worth of freedom depends on how it is used.... One should not increase one’s freedom by refusing someone else’s.” p. 79
“An idea of health that does not generously and gracefully accommodate the fact of death is obviously incomplete.” p. 146 (also a great paragraph to follow this)
“Applying knowledge— scientific or otherwise— is an art. An artist is somebody who knows what to put where, and when to put it. A good artist is one who applies knowledge skillfully and sensitively to the particular creatures and places of the world.” p. 148
June 15, 2008
i can't wait to read this over and over and over again. intelligent, powerful, beautiful, poetic. i could gush on and on. makes me want to abandon computers and hand write more letters. take more photographs and create more art.
December 27, 2016
Short but brilliantly thoughtful. One of the best books of the year.
October 19, 2016
“We are not getting something for nothing. We are getting nothing for everything,” the epigraph with which Berry opens Life is a Miracle, is apt and concise. Modern society appears miraculous, the product of man’s industry and ingenuity. It looks (and is advertised largely as) a kind of perpetual motion machine, powered by little other than human inventiveness. Attentive observers have noticed that appearances are, as usual, deceptive: we are living on fossil fuels, energy created over eons by geological processes, and in a matter of decades, we’ve used up more than half of what’s available. But there are problems even greater than the depletion of our main energy sources, destroying our ability to perpetuate our society and culture without much notice from anyone. We (and many other animals) have been passing our knowledge and ways of life the old fashioned way (and the only way) from parent to child as long as we’ve been on this planet without giving it a thought, but it appears that this simple and irreducible aspect of our species existence can be interrupted. When this happens locally, tribes and cultures die. It’s not clear whether it is possible for this to happen globally, but it seems that this is the direction we are heading. Globalization and the “market economy” have been at work disrupting and destroying local cultures and replacing them with a universal mono-culture known to its practitioners and captives variously as “capitalism,” “market economy,” or “democracy” in the west, “communism” or “socialism” elsewhere. Whatever name it goes by, its effects on the living beings and the environments they inhabit is the same.
Life is a Miracle is about this process, the loss of the ability to perpetuate the culture we’ve built over millenia. Wendell Berry looks to science for a culprit, because science is our culture’s founding myth, governing paradigm, and much more, and he picks E. O. Wilson’s Consilience as the book through which to analyze the subject. The choice is appropriate for a number of reasons: Wilson is a mainstream scientist, and in Consilience, he tackles questions like ethics, religion, art, and culture in general- necessarily, since his stated goal is to bring the different disciplines together into a working whole. He is also a conservationist, as is Berry.
Science approaches all questions as problems to be solved, and all unanswered questions as questions yet to be answered. “(Consilience) reads as though it was written to confirm the popular belief that science is entirely good, that it leads to unlimited progress, and that it has (or will have) all the answers.” (p. 24) This means that mystery, an essential and critical part of human culture, is an impossibility: Wilson attributes it entirely to human ignorance. Without mystery, reverence and propriety are impossible, leading to a society governed by profit and raw power as we’ve arrived at today, whether the power is cloaked in the accoutrements of “democracy,” “socialism,” or more transparent forms. What Wilson calls “consilience” turns out to be an invitation (or an ultimatum, taken more broadly) for religion and the arts to take on the goals and methodology of science, an impossibility if the words mean what we all think they mean. “Like a naïve politician, Mr. Wilson thinks he has found a way to reconcile two sides without realizing that his way is one of the sides… One cannot, in honesty, propose to reconcile Heaven and Earth by denying the existence of Heaven.” (p.99)
The crisis we face can’t be solved with more science or technology, since these are part of the cause. We have to address the way we think and talk about the world and ourselves.
The language we use to speak of the world and its creatures, including ourselves, has gained a certain analytical power (along with a lot of expertish pomp) but has lost much of its power to designate what is being analyzed or to convey any respect or care or affection or devotion toward it. As a result, we have a lot of genuinely concerned people calling upon us to “save” a world which their language simultaneously reduces to an assemblage of perfectly featureless and dispirited “ecosystems,” “organisms,” “environments,” “mechanisms,” and the like. It is impossible to prefigure the salvation of the world in the same language by which the world has been dismembered and defaced. (italics in original) (p. 8)
Berry’s solution to this crisis, if there is to be any solution to it, is for scientists, artists, and religious people, whether they can work together in the end or not, to root their work in local considerations and return to such considerations at their works’ end, as well as, ideally, throughout the process.
Directly opposed to this reduction or abstraction of things is the idea of the preciousness of individual lives and places. This does not come from science, but from our cultural and religious traditions. It is not derived, and it is not derivable, from any notion of egalitarianism. If all are equal, none can be precious. (And perhaps it is necessary to stop here to say that this ancient delight in the individuality of creatures is not the same thing as what we now mean by “individualism.” It is the opposite. Individualism, in present practice, refers to the supposed “right” of an individual to act alone, in disregard of other individuals. (p.42)
Any new invention or idea or practice should, in the end, be weighed on the merits of its impact on our communities. “Suppose we learn to ask of any proposed innovation the question so far only the Amish have been wise enough to ask: What will this do to out community?” (p.134) Obviously, most people don’t have the benefit of living in anything resembling a community, so we would have to break up the corporate capitalist society into local communities first.
Life is a Miracle elicits some hysterical reviews on Amazon, as one would expect with books that challenge our most basic assumptions about ourselves and the world. I expect that if it were more widely read, the greater part of our country would be foaming at the mouth over this book. God I wish it were. This is likely one of the most important books of the decade, or century, or however long we plan on living miserable lives governed by anti-human precepts.
Life is a Miracle is about this process, the loss of the ability to perpetuate the culture we’ve built over millenia. Wendell Berry looks to science for a culprit, because science is our culture’s founding myth, governing paradigm, and much more, and he picks E. O. Wilson’s Consilience as the book through which to analyze the subject. The choice is appropriate for a number of reasons: Wilson is a mainstream scientist, and in Consilience, he tackles questions like ethics, religion, art, and culture in general- necessarily, since his stated goal is to bring the different disciplines together into a working whole. He is also a conservationist, as is Berry.
Science approaches all questions as problems to be solved, and all unanswered questions as questions yet to be answered. “(Consilience) reads as though it was written to confirm the popular belief that science is entirely good, that it leads to unlimited progress, and that it has (or will have) all the answers.” (p. 24) This means that mystery, an essential and critical part of human culture, is an impossibility: Wilson attributes it entirely to human ignorance. Without mystery, reverence and propriety are impossible, leading to a society governed by profit and raw power as we’ve arrived at today, whether the power is cloaked in the accoutrements of “democracy,” “socialism,” or more transparent forms. What Wilson calls “consilience” turns out to be an invitation (or an ultimatum, taken more broadly) for religion and the arts to take on the goals and methodology of science, an impossibility if the words mean what we all think they mean. “Like a naïve politician, Mr. Wilson thinks he has found a way to reconcile two sides without realizing that his way is one of the sides… One cannot, in honesty, propose to reconcile Heaven and Earth by denying the existence of Heaven.” (p.99)
The crisis we face can’t be solved with more science or technology, since these are part of the cause. We have to address the way we think and talk about the world and ourselves.
The language we use to speak of the world and its creatures, including ourselves, has gained a certain analytical power (along with a lot of expertish pomp) but has lost much of its power to designate what is being analyzed or to convey any respect or care or affection or devotion toward it. As a result, we have a lot of genuinely concerned people calling upon us to “save” a world which their language simultaneously reduces to an assemblage of perfectly featureless and dispirited “ecosystems,” “organisms,” “environments,” “mechanisms,” and the like. It is impossible to prefigure the salvation of the world in the same language by which the world has been dismembered and defaced. (italics in original) (p. 8)
Berry’s solution to this crisis, if there is to be any solution to it, is for scientists, artists, and religious people, whether they can work together in the end or not, to root their work in local considerations and return to such considerations at their works’ end, as well as, ideally, throughout the process.
Directly opposed to this reduction or abstraction of things is the idea of the preciousness of individual lives and places. This does not come from science, but from our cultural and religious traditions. It is not derived, and it is not derivable, from any notion of egalitarianism. If all are equal, none can be precious. (And perhaps it is necessary to stop here to say that this ancient delight in the individuality of creatures is not the same thing as what we now mean by “individualism.” It is the opposite. Individualism, in present practice, refers to the supposed “right” of an individual to act alone, in disregard of other individuals. (p.42)
Any new invention or idea or practice should, in the end, be weighed on the merits of its impact on our communities. “Suppose we learn to ask of any proposed innovation the question so far only the Amish have been wise enough to ask: What will this do to out community?” (p.134) Obviously, most people don’t have the benefit of living in anything resembling a community, so we would have to break up the corporate capitalist society into local communities first.
Life is a Miracle elicits some hysterical reviews on Amazon, as one would expect with books that challenge our most basic assumptions about ourselves and the world. I expect that if it were more widely read, the greater part of our country would be foaming at the mouth over this book. God I wish it were. This is likely one of the most important books of the decade, or century, or however long we plan on living miserable lives governed by anti-human precepts.
July 13, 2019
A passionate sermon on science as a modern superstition
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.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “Understanding Evolution and Ourselves”
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.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “Understanding Evolution and Ourselves”
June 6, 2020
This was a tough read for me. My 3 stars is not to denigrate the book, as Berry is clearly a brilliant thinker and writer, but I struggled.
This is a work of philosophy, but it is also an extensive book review and commentary. If one has not read Edward O Wilson's Consiliance, which is, essentially, the text that Berry responds to with this writing, the reading, in my estimation is doubly hard.
Life is a Miracle is an extended review, or rebuke, of Wilson's work. The thesis, that life cannot be reduced, that life is a miracle and we do well to soak that in through art, the humanities, faith and a commitment to one's locality, is a strong one. But as Berry goes back and forth between a critique of Wilson while adding in his own perspective, it became a bit of a slog for me.
This is a work of philosophy, but it is also an extensive book review and commentary. If one has not read Edward O Wilson's Consiliance, which is, essentially, the text that Berry responds to with this writing, the reading, in my estimation is doubly hard.
Life is a Miracle is an extended review, or rebuke, of Wilson's work. The thesis, that life cannot be reduced, that life is a miracle and we do well to soak that in through art, the humanities, faith and a commitment to one's locality, is a strong one. But as Berry goes back and forth between a critique of Wilson while adding in his own perspective, it became a bit of a slog for me.
July 5, 2018
I only gave it 4 stars because I read it so long ago that it’s possible it has a flaw...I just don’t remember any. This is a spectacular defense of the humanities and religion from Scientism’s quest for domination.
May 30, 2022
A bit over my head, but I can get down with the premise that scientism and unquestioning technological advancement are not immune to critique.
March 23, 2019
I will read anything by poet/farmer Wendell Berry including this book - a scathing criticism of one of my all-time favorites books written by Harvard Biology professor E. O. Wilson, PhD - Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998). In Consilience, Wilson seeks to bridge science and humanities through biology; in Life is a Miracle (2000) Berry argues that such a bridge is not only impossible but is contrary and illconcieved. Berry writes,
"One cannot, in all honesty, propose to reconcile Heaven and Earth by denying the existence of Heaven."
Berry's arguments are relevant in describing the dangers of reductionist explanations. Both science and the arts are spawned by different parts of competitive cultures. Scientific knowledge and motives may not assume to explain away the aggregate outputs of the arts and humanities.
Berry continues,
"To begin to think of the possibility of collaboration among the disciplines, we must realize that the 'two cultures' exist as such because both of them belong to the one culture of division and dislocation, opposition and competition, which is to say the culture of colonialism and industrialism. This culture has steadily increased the dependence of individuals, regions, and nations upon larger and larger collective economies at the same time that it has thrown individuals, regions, and nations into a competitiveness with one another that is limitlessly [sic] destructive and demeaning. The state of universal competition understands the world as an anti-pattern in which each thing as opposed to every other thing, and it destroys the self-sufficiency of all places - households, farms, communities, regions, nations - even as it destroys the self-sufficiency of the world.
The collective economy is run for the benefit of a decreasing number of increasingly wealthy corporations. These corporations understand their "global economy" as a producer of money, not of goods. The goods of the world such as topsoil or forests must decline so that the money may increase. To facilitate this process, the corporations patronize the disciplines, chiefly the sciences, but some of the money, as 'philanthropy,' trickles down upon the arts."
Ultimately, as Berry lambasts would-be results of such an attempt to use science to explain and conquer he states,
"If science has sponsored both an immensity of knowledge and an immensity of violence, what is the gain? If we 'grasp the true strangeness of the universe' but forget how to farm, what is the gain?"
Berry seeks to defend against scientific encroachment that raises the banner of machines over humans writing,
"And so I would like to be as plain as possible. What I am against - and without a minute's hesitation or apology - is our slovenly willingness to allow machines and the idea of the machine to prescribe the terms and conditions of the lives of creatures, which we have allowed increasingly for the last two centuries, and are still allowing, at the incalculable cost to other creatures and to ourselves. If we state the problem that way, and we can see that the way to correct our error, and so deliver ourselves from our own destructiveness, is to quit using our technological capability as the reference point and standard of our economic life. We will instead have to measure our economy by the health of the ecosystems and human communities where we do our work."
These 2 books are almost 20 years old but are still relevant to the discussions humans must continue to have today. Each author is brilliant. I'd recommend reading both.
"One cannot, in all honesty, propose to reconcile Heaven and Earth by denying the existence of Heaven."
Berry's arguments are relevant in describing the dangers of reductionist explanations. Both science and the arts are spawned by different parts of competitive cultures. Scientific knowledge and motives may not assume to explain away the aggregate outputs of the arts and humanities.
Berry continues,
"To begin to think of the possibility of collaboration among the disciplines, we must realize that the 'two cultures' exist as such because both of them belong to the one culture of division and dislocation, opposition and competition, which is to say the culture of colonialism and industrialism. This culture has steadily increased the dependence of individuals, regions, and nations upon larger and larger collective economies at the same time that it has thrown individuals, regions, and nations into a competitiveness with one another that is limitlessly [sic] destructive and demeaning. The state of universal competition understands the world as an anti-pattern in which each thing as opposed to every other thing, and it destroys the self-sufficiency of all places - households, farms, communities, regions, nations - even as it destroys the self-sufficiency of the world.
The collective economy is run for the benefit of a decreasing number of increasingly wealthy corporations. These corporations understand their "global economy" as a producer of money, not of goods. The goods of the world such as topsoil or forests must decline so that the money may increase. To facilitate this process, the corporations patronize the disciplines, chiefly the sciences, but some of the money, as 'philanthropy,' trickles down upon the arts."
Ultimately, as Berry lambasts would-be results of such an attempt to use science to explain and conquer he states,
"If science has sponsored both an immensity of knowledge and an immensity of violence, what is the gain? If we 'grasp the true strangeness of the universe' but forget how to farm, what is the gain?"
Berry seeks to defend against scientific encroachment that raises the banner of machines over humans writing,
"And so I would like to be as plain as possible. What I am against - and without a minute's hesitation or apology - is our slovenly willingness to allow machines and the idea of the machine to prescribe the terms and conditions of the lives of creatures, which we have allowed increasingly for the last two centuries, and are still allowing, at the incalculable cost to other creatures and to ourselves. If we state the problem that way, and we can see that the way to correct our error, and so deliver ourselves from our own destructiveness, is to quit using our technological capability as the reference point and standard of our economic life. We will instead have to measure our economy by the health of the ecosystems and human communities where we do our work."
These 2 books are almost 20 years old but are still relevant to the discussions humans must continue to have today. Each author is brilliant. I'd recommend reading both.
May 20, 2015
Ohhhh I'm definitely gonna read more Wendell Berry. As a poetic critic of our technological, secular obsessions, he's a bit like Marilynne Robinson. He's the kind of critical thinker that puts to shame most other supposed forms of "critical thinking"... And he does so in a cheerful, elegant way that I find hard to resist. No one is spared here, but Berry's targets are not the standard liberal boogeymen of Republican politicians and CEOS (though those people are implicated by association) but rather the people who abet them: ostensibly leftist college professors (!) and utopian urban intellectuals (!), scientists like E.O Wilson (!) (who gets creamed here)(!), and novelists like Cynthia Ozick (!), all people who champion a kind of "individual freedom" vision as they forget about Berry's principal concern-- community responsibility and stewardship. Berry wrote the book in 2000, and it's even more devastating now, because the trends he identified in supposedly "pure" science and technology fifteen years ago have become even more hostile to the health of our planet (I'm sure he's had plenty to rant about in the oh so wonderful Age of Information (aka the age of Robots Putting Humans Out of Work and All Chance at Meaningful Connection). Please, please read this.
August 1, 2013
A challenging read, but well worth it. Berry takes on one scientist's essay and exposes its fallacies and cliches about history, religion, humanity, agriculture, education, and what science can really do. He's hilarious at times, strikingly angry other times, but always dead on. I found myself dog-earing and underlining parts on every page, and I value so much his call for a satisfied, "ordinary" life where we simply appreciate living and the miracle it truly is. He values a life where one knows a place well, supports a community, passes on information from generation to generation, and lives honestly, without pretending to solve the world's problems or recreate mankind in one foul swoop. He's hopeful but not deluded by big ideas and can see our limitations as humans while still believing that it is those very limitations that can guide us to humility and a deeper understanding of what life really is.
November 26, 2011
This extended essay is a response to E.O. Wilson's Consilience. Berry takes on Wilson's hegemonic ambitions for science over religion, the humanities, and the arts as ways of knowing. Perhaps his most striking observation is that what all of these have in common and the thing that unites them is that all of these at their best help us dwell in this world and not abuse it or one another. He also has little positive to say about the often self-contained discourse in the university world that often has little bearing on the real challenges people living and working in the world are facing.
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December 14, 2016Quite a bit of overlap with other books I've read on the shortcomings of materialism, though there are many Berry-isms about the importance of place, nature, etc. Charming, as usual, but my quick reading of this one likely didn't do it justice (so I'll refrain from rating... though I'm sure Wendell Berry would never get near enough to a computer to know or care.)
August 30, 2007
I figured if anyone could convince me to become religious, it was wendell. But he doesn't quite pull it off; at some level, I just don't believe one can be convinced to have faith. You gotta feel it in your bones, and I don't, at least not in remotely the same way as berry.
March 11, 2008
I read this before reading Consilence by EO Wilson. I found the author’s arguments to be misinformed. I wrote all over the book and in the margins. I understand his problems with science, but I also feel that scientific knowledge does not destroy the beauty of existence.
March 27, 2007
This is so dense and tough to understand, but hey, I tried.
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