See, I owe it now. I have been sitting on this post for a while, letting the combination of school and work crowd out any sort of posting I have wanted to do, but I can’t wait. It seems the content of this blog has had everything to do with the influence of a writer by the name of Wendell Berry. He is all over these last several months of posts except I don’t mention his name. I think it’s time to talk about him. I am a bit nervous because the last time I wrote about a real live person they noticed. I don’t think Mr Berry will though. I think I am under the radar enough … but also, he has rejected the use of computers.
Today a friend suggested the whole climate change deal could be a hoax. He said he wouldn’t be surprised if us humans had nothing to do with the changes that we are seeing in the climate while scientists across the globe continue to peddle inflated “facts”, suppressing anyone whose opinion differs from theirs (something like what Ben Stein suggested in the documentary Exposed, just switch climate change and evolution around and wah-la, another republican friendly documentary).
This conversation with my skeptical friend reminded me why I even care about all this sustainable living and buying organic and reusing the crap out of stuff. It had everything to do with what I have learned from Wendell Berry. It has had little to do with saving the world for my kids and making sure polar bears don’t drown – it has little to do with scientists and a lot to do with the way that I live out my Christian beliefs – it’s this:
I can’t help but think that it’s not God’s heart or intent to live as if we can have it all. I just don’t believe that continual advancement is going to always be good for us. I’m thinking some restraint is necessary. It’s looking to me like the constant seeking of more comfort and more efficiency and more technological progress is leading to more selfishness and more pride. At the center of wanting more is just us and whenever I find me at the center it never ends well.
Can I just post a few things by Wendell Berry here to show a little of what makes me feel this way? Here it goes. This is from an article he wrote in 1989 called “Feminism, The Body, and the Machine”. I read about it in this great book.
Some people would like to think that this long sequence of industrial innovations has changed human life and even human nature in fundamental ways. Perhaps it has – but, arguably, almost always for the worse. I know that “technological progress” can be defended, but I observe that the defenses are invariably quantitative – catalogs of statistics on the ownership of automobiles and television sets, for example, or on the increase of life expectancy – and I see that these statistics are always kept carefully apart from the related statistics of soil loss, pollution, social disintegration, and so forth. That is to say, there is never an effort to determine the net result of this progress.
Later in the same article:
To ask a still more obvious question, what is the purpose of this technological progress? What higher aim do we think it is serving? Surly the aim cannot be the integrity or happiness of our families, which we have made subordinate to the education system, the television industry, and the consumer economy. Surely it cannot be the integrity of health of out communities, which we esteem even less than we esteem our families. Surly it cannot be love of our country, for we are far more concerned about the desecration of the flag than we are about the desecration of our land. Surly it cannot be the love of God, which counts for at least as little in the daily order of business as the love of family, community, and country.
The higher aims of “technological progress” are money and ease. And this exalted greed for money and ease is disguised and justified by an obscure, cultish faith in “the future.” We do as we do, we say, “for the sake of the future” or “to make a better future for our children.” How we can hope to make a good future by doing badly in the present, we do not say. We cannot think about the future, of course, for the future does not exist: the existence of the future is an article of faith. We can be assured only that, if there is to be a future, the good of it is already implicit in the good things of the present. We do not need to plan or devise a “world of the future”; of we take care or the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us. A good future is implicit in the soils, forest, grassland, marshes, desert, mountains, rivers, lakes, and oceans that we have now, and in the good things of human culture that we have now; the only valid “futurology” available to us is to take care of those things. We have no need to contrive and dabble at “the future of the human race”; we have the same pressing need that we have always had – to love, care for, and teach our children.
And so the question of the desirability of adopting any technological innovation is a question with two possible answers – not one, as had been commonly assumed. If one’s motives are money, ease, and haste to arrive in a technologically determined future, then the answer is foregone, and there is, in fact, no question, and no thought. If one’s motive is the love of family, community, country, and God, then one will have to think, and one may have to decide that the proposed innovation is undesirable.
Admittedly, that’s a lot. I said from the start to this post we would go beyond the usual scope of this blog so I say let’s be done for now. But I do hope there are more Wendell Berry posts to come. If you want more right this very second then read this article that was published in Harper’s criticizing our “dogged belief that what we call the American Way of Life will prove somehow indestructible” (taken from the intro – it’s that good.)
It’s like eating your vegetables – we don’t always like them, but we know they are good for us. I find that documentaries are the same, in particular, Food Inc. And it is good. It is a life changing film.
