- When the solution’s a problem.
- Exploiting the valuable, defending the beloved.
- Need prophets know about the electromagnetic spectrum?
- Hillbillies, yokels and perceptions.
- The lab versus the Cross.
- Incommensurable art.
- Boomers and Stickers.
- Perfectly assimilated, perfectly forgotten.
When I read Wendell Berry, it’s as if I’m awakening from thralldom, some amnesiac sorcery, and remembering what I always really knew.
All quotes following are from his Life Is a Miracle.
It is a fact that the solutions invented or discovered by science have tended to lead to problems or become problems themselves. Scientists discovered how to use nuclear energy to solve some problems, but any use of it is enormously dangerous to us all, and scientists have not discovered what to do with the waste. (They have not discovered what to do with old tires.) The availability of antibiotics leads to the overuse of antibiotics. And so on. Our daily lives are a daily mockery of our scientific pretensions.. We are learning to know precisely the location of our genes, but significant numbers of us don’t know the whereabouts of our children.
Page 32.
We know enough of our own history by now to be aware that people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love. To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know. The abstract, “objective,” impersonal, dispassionate language of science can, in fact, help us to know certain things, and to know some things with certainty. It can help us, for instance, to know the value of species and species diversity. But it cannot replace, and it cannot become, the language of familiarity, reverence, and affection by which things of value ultimately are protected.
Page 41.
[H]ere we meet a strange and difficult question that may be uniquely modern: can the past be taught, can it even be known, by people who have no respect for it? If you believe in the absolute superiority of the new, can you learn and teach anything identifiable as old? Here, as before, Mr. Wilson speaks from an entirely conventional point of view. He takes seriously no history before the Enlightenment, which he believes began the era of modern science. Of “prescientific cultures,” he makes short work: “they are wrong, always wrong.” They know nothing about “the real world.” but can only “invent ingenious speculation and myths.” And: “Without the instruments and accumulated knowledge of the natural sciences – physics, chemistry and biology – humans are trapped in a cognitive prison. They are like intelligent fish born in the deep, shadowed pool.” I think (or, anyhow, hope) he does not realize how merciless this is – for he has thus flipped away most human history, most human lives, and most of the human cultural inheritance – or how small and dull a world this leaves him in. To escape the “cognitive prison” of religion and mythology, he has confined himself to the prison of materialist and reductive cognition …
“I mean no disrespect,” Mr. Wilson says, “when I say that prescientific people, regardless of their innate genius, could never guess the nature of physical reality beyond the tiny sphere attainable by unaided common sense. … No shaman’s spell or fast upon the sacred mountain can summon the electromagnetic spectrum. Prophets of the great religions were kept unaware of its existence, not because of a secretive god but because they lacked the hard-won knowledge of physics.” It seems only courteous to inquire at this point if anybody, ever before, as had the originality to propose that prophets needed to know about the electromagnetic spectrum?
Pages 65-66.
We treat people, places and things in accordance with the way we perceive them, and literature influences our perceptions. To leave aside more fashionable examples, who can deny that the history of coal mining and southern Appalachians has being under the influence of writers who have written of the mountaineers as “briars” or “hillbillies”? And who wishes to say that our long exploitation and finally our virtual destruction of our farm population has not been influenced by generation of writers who have represented farmers as “yokels” who live in the “sticks” and do “mind-numbing work”? We can’t deny that writing has an influence unless we also deny that stereotyping and character assassination have an influence.
Page 88.
Job says: “I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: and though … worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God ….” This statement rests upon no evidence, no proof. It is not in any respectable sense a theory. Job calls it knowledge: he “knows” that what he says is true. A great many people who have read these verses have agreed; they too have known that this is so.
“The empiricist” in Mr. Wilson’s chapter on “ethics and religion” would find Job’s knowledge readily explainable as a “beneficent” falsehood, supported by no “objective evidence” or “statistical proofs.” Mr. Wilson himself understands it as a genetically implanted “urge”: “Perhaps … it can all eventually be explained as brain circuitry and deep genetic history.” People follow religion, he says, because it is “easier” than empiricism, the lab evidently being harder to bear than the cross.
Page 96.
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 piece of music into a walking stick. A work of art says what it says in the only way it can be said.
Page 117.
Wallace Stegner knew, both from his personal experience and from his long study of his region, that the two cultures of American West are not those of the sciences and the arts, but rather those of the two human kinds that he calls “boomers” and the “stickers,” the boomers being “those who pillage and run,” and the stickers “those who settled, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.”
…
The sticker theme has so far managed to survive, and to preserve in memory and even in practice the ancient human gifts of reverence, fidelity, neighborliness and stewardship. But unquestionably the dominant theme of modern history has been that of the boomer. It is no surprise that the predominant arts and sciences of the modern era have been boomer arts and boomer sciences.
The collaboration of boomer science with the boomer mentality of the industrial corporations has imposed upon us a state of virtually total economy in which it is the destiny of every creature (humans not excepted) to have a price and to be sold. In a total economy, all materials, creatures, and ideas become commodities, interchangeable and disposable. People become commodities along with everything else. Only such an economy could seek to impose upon the world’s abounding geographic and creaturely diversity the tyranny of technology and genetic monoculture. Only in such an economy could “lifeforms” be patented, or the renewability of nature and culture be destroyed. Monsanto’s aptly named “terminator gene” — which, implanted in seed sold by Monsanto, would cause the next generation of seed to be sterile — is as great an indicator of the totalitarian purpose as a concentration camp.
Pages 131-32.
And perhaps my favorite,
Always informing our practice of artistic form is our sense of the formality of creation. This “sense” is not knowledge of the empirical or scientific sort. It does not tend toward any sort of description. It is the perfectly assimilated, perfectly forgotten knowledge by which all creatures live in their places.
Page 150 (emphasis added)
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 