re:generation quarterly, 6.4 (Winter 2000-2001)
When True Simplicity
is Gained
David Wright
Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition,
Wendell Berry (Counterpoint, 2000),
153 pp., $21.00.
To read Wendell Berry's work is to join a conversation with the land, in particular with the Kentucky landscape that has been both backdrop and foreground to his career as a poet, essayist, and novelist. Over the span of forty years, Berry has learned what it might mean for human beings to live in relationship with the particular chunks of creation we inhabit. As he put it in an interview thirty years ago: "I could construct an airtight argument for not settling in my own community. The fact is that I'm spending my life constructing an argument for being here."
Berry's Life is a Miracle extends this lifelong argument into territory both familiar and new to his readers. The collection is an extended response to biologist Edward O. Wilson's Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (Random House, 1999). Though tied to Wilson's book, Berry's writing rings with his familiar polemical and aphoristic style as he demonstrates his distrust of abstraction in all its forms.
Nothing matters more to Berry than places underfoot and the specific communities of people charged with caring for the ground. Whether his subject is science, religion, art, or agribusiness, Berry has always offered up the standard he reiterates here, that any innovation or practice "should be applied locally by local people on a local scale, using the health of the locality as the standard of application and judgment." Thus, for Berry, the use of science (or anything else) "by or upon people who do not understand it is always potentially tyrannical, and it is always dangerous."
In defense of the local and sustainable, he presents a jeremiad against the reductive "superstitions" of progress and globalism‹superstitions Berry spots lurking everywhere in Wilson's book. Berry takes on Wilson point by point to demonstrate how science has become a modern religion, and why that is a damned dangerous thing. "Legitimate faith in scientific methodology," Berry writes, "seems to veer off into a kind of religious faith in the power of science to know all things and solve all problems, whereupon the scientist may become an evangelist and go forth to save the world."
The contemporary sciences, in Berry's view, regularly reduce creation to the "terms of our understanding," especially to a mechanistic understanding that linguistically simplifies the world, as he puts it, "to an assemblage of perfectly featureless 'ecosystems,' 'organisms,' 'environments,' 'mechanisms' and the like."
For Berry, to sustain a morally complex view of the world, human beings need to embrace our particularity and our limitations, cultivating a deeper recognition of our ignorance about ourselves and the natural world. History shows us just how dangerous is the temptation to "act on the assumption that sure knowledge is complete knowledge‹or on the assumption that our knowledge will increase fast enough to outrace the bad consequences of the arrogant use of incomplete knowledge." This is not only bad science, says Berry, "It is bad religion."
As an example of this bad religion, Berry makes the likely and obvious choice of Wilson's Consilience. Over a long career, Wilson has contributed groundbreaking work as an entomologist, as a sociobiologist, and as an environmental activist‹studying the particular to see what it tells us about the general. It is that sort of generalization that's behind Wilson's ambitious aim to achieve a "unification of knowledge." Such an endeavor will accomplish no less, writes Wilson, than to "save the spirit, not by surrender but by liberation of the human mind.... When we have unified enough certain knowledge, we will understand who we are and why we are here."
The dangers and misapplications of Wilson's unifying impulse are clearest in his proposals for "unifying" science with the arts and religion. The unification he proposes is a victor's peace, with religion becoming the poetic servant of science.
Rather than grand theory, Berry believes in humility and context and points to the basic flaw in Wilson's reductionism‹"its tendency to allow the particular to be absorbed or obscured by the general." In Berry's judgment, people will never defend and sacrifice for what they know generally and abstractly. I will not spend time cultivating "land," but I will dig and dig in my own particular garden.
Berry sees particularity not merely as an antidote to postmodern placelessness and scientific arrogance but as a way of enacting a biblical faith that is "explicitly against reductionism." He rejects the usual simplistic environmentalist criticism of Christianity, the one that says Christians are too heavenly minded and see the earth as dispensable. Such a critique, in Berry's words, "ignores the very point of the Incarnation. It ignores Christ's unfailing compassion for sufferers, whom He healed one by one."
Berry's advocacy of the particular often gets him in trouble, and for good reason. His distrust of overarching stories and abstractions ("Abstraction is the enemy everywhere," he has written) at times teeters towards generalization itself.
Both Wilson and Berry are elder statesmen in their professions, making clear and accessible arguments for the Big Ideas that charm them, whether or not the ideas necessarily or even logically follow from the realities of science, or society. As true as this might be, the difference, I think, is that Berry, by remaining in a single place, has made his polemic his grounds for living (in ways that Wilson fails to). He is not a poet, nor an essayist, nor an activist, nor a farmer only. The daily acts of "reverence, fidelity, neighborliness, and stewardship" he calls for and practices over and over simply do not have a place in Wilson's conjectural ideas. But in Berry's smaller universe, they are truly at home.
David Wright is the author of the poetry collection Lines from the Provinces. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in RQ, Teaching English in the Two-Year College, and The Penwood Review.
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