Product Description

One of America's most respected and celebrated writers provides a thought-provoking analysis of, and a concise rebuttal of, E. O. Wilson's Consilience

"[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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #29499 in Books
• Published on: 2001-05
• Released on: 2001-05-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781582431413
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Amazon.com Review
As a poet, novelist, and farmer, Wendell Berry has worked and written in favor of tried and tested ways, rejecting the notion that the modern is always to be preferred over the old. Technology may have its uses, he has insisted in books like The Gift of Good Land, but what matters more is the crafting of sound human communities and of self-reliant living. Religious faith lies at the heart of Berry's unapologetically old-fashioned program. Faith, which supposes that life is full of unpredictable mysteries, stands against much of modern science, an opposition that Berry explores in Life Is a Miracle. Taking particular issue with entomologist E.O. Wilson's recent book, Consilience, which maintains the supremacy of scientific explanation over religious conjecture and supposes that science will one day be able to answer every question about the hows and whys of life, Berry revisits C.P. Snow's "two cultures" thesis to observe that science and religion address different kinds of necessary questions. "Science cannot replace art or religion," he writes, "for the same reason that you cannot loosen a nut with a saw or cut a board in two with a wrench." Against science's "false specification and pretentious exactitude," Berry notes quietly that the more he observes his own little corner of the planet, a small Kentucky farm, the less patient he is with reductionist, materialist explanations of the way things work--for here, and everywhere, "life ... is unique, given to the world minute by minute, only once, never to be repeated."

Berry's slender essay offers a thoughtful repudiation of an increasingly technological--and, some would say, soulless--culture. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly
Living for almost 40 years on a family farm in Kentucky has led Berry to place a high value on local knowledge born of a long and affectionate engagement of the intellect and imagination with a particular place. To readers of his poems, novels (Memory of Old Jack, etc.) and essays (The Unsettling of America, etc.), it will be no surprise that in his latest essay collection, he argues cogently and passionately against the proposition E.O. Wilson puts forth in Consilience, that our best hope for preserving the biosphere lies in linking facts and fact-based theory across disciplines under the hegemony of the natural sciences. Though a conservationist, like Wilson, Berry strongly believes that the materialist prescription for what ails usAecologically, culturally and spirituallyAwill simply bind us more tightly to the often destructive, profit-driven triad of science, technology and industry. It will also move us further away, avers Berry, from what he sees as the sense of propriety that calls on us to base our thoughts and actions on our inescapable interdependency with the planet's other life forms. Berry also opposes the belief underlying Consilience, that scientific analysis can ultimately explain everything: "to reduce the mystery and miracle of life to something that can be figured out is inevitably to enslave it, make property of it and put it up for sale." In opposition to this view, Berry proposes evaluating our behavior and work on how they affect "the health and durability of human and natural communities." To do that, he contends, we must go beyond Wilson's empirical knowledge to imaginative knowledgeAto knowing things "intimately, particularly, precisely, gratefully, reverently, and with affection." Agent, the Spieler Agency.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From The Washington Post
"[A] scathing assessment... Berry is one of the most perceptive critics of American society writing today."

Customer Reviews

Very moving, very salient
At a time when we seem to have forgotten that there is more to life than what can be proven, measured, quantified and sold, Wendel Berry asks us to realize that determinism cannot "learn" the most valuable lessons about life.

He saliently attacks biotechnology, enviro-engineering and many of the modern technological fields that attempt at a reductive view of nature and our relationship to it.

I will treasure this book long after the software I have written is turned to dust.

The only complaint I have is that Berry is constantly apologizing for his "lack of expertise" in the sciences he criticises. Mr. Berry, if you are reading this, you need not worry about your expertise. Indeed, it is the mark of a true scientist that she be more interested in what a person has to say than whether or not they have the "credentials" to say it. You keep talking, I wan't to listen! "Thy life is a miracle. Speak yet again"

A miracle with a message.
We are living in times of despair, Wendell Berry observes, when "most work is now poorly done; great cultural and natural resources are neglected, wasted, or abused; the land and its creatures are destroyed; and the citizenry is poorly taught, poorly governed, and poorly served" (p. 57). We are withdrawing our trust from politicians, professions, corporations, the educational system, religious institutions, and medicine (p. 94). In this compelling, 153-page essay, Berry offers his critical response to Edward O. Wilson's 1998 "scientific credo" (p. 25), CONSILIENCE (which I have not read). Wilson's book spins the popular superstition "that science is entirely good, that it leads to unlimited progress, and it has (or will have) all the answers" (p. 24).

The title of Berry's essay is taken from KING LEAR: "Thy life's a miracle. Speak yet again" (IV, vi, 55). Whether in his poetry, fiction, or essays, miracles happen when Berry puts his pen to paper, and this book is no exception. He argues that Wilson's attempt to integrate science with religion and art is nothing more than an attempt to subjugate those disciplines to the materialistic objectives of science. "It is bad for scientists to be working without a sense of cultural tradition," he writes. "It is bad for artists and scholars in the humanities to be working without a sense of obligation to the world beyond the artifacts of culture" (p. 93). Moreover, to experience life is not "to figure it out" or to understand it, "but to suffer it and rejoice in it as it is" (p. 9). "To reduce life to the scope of our understanding (whatever 'model' we use)," Berry writes, "is inevitably to enslave it, make property of it, and put it up for sale" (p. 7).

In Berry's view, the priorities of science have become synonymous with the goals of industry and commerce, and he advocates emancipating ourselves from corporations, "whose appetites for 'growth' [seem] now ungovernable" (p. 15). He writes: "It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines" (p. 55). He encourages us to "shift the priority from production to local adaption, from innovation to familiarity, from power to elegance, from costliness to thrift" (p. 12).

The thread of wisdom that runs through these times of despair is that "life is a miracle, absolutely worth having, absolutely worth saving" (p. 45).

G. Merritt

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.