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Book Notes

Wendell Berry's, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition
Book review by Peter Bakken

In his many essays, poems, and novels, Wendell Berry has used his gift for language, his appreciation for the wisdom of the past, and his experience as a farmer to critique modern American society - its restless rootlessness, its competitive individualism, its naive but destructive faith that "bigger is better." He is a passionate defender of the land and its creatures, of rural communities and the dignity of those who live there, of the virtues of good work and decency and compassion. His focus is relentlessly on the local, the particular, on the stuff of common, ordinary life. He is suspicious of abstractions and hostile to grandiose schemes for "improvement" of any sort. To many people he is perhaps the preeminent sage and prophet of our time.

The "modern superstition" that Berry criticizes in this book is the belief that science can know everything on its own reductionistic and materialistic terms. Further, it is the belief that the quest for such all-encompassing knowledge is necessary for human progress, and for "saving the environment." He finds a typical expression of this attitude in sociobiologist E.O. Wilson's book Concilience. Wilson claims that all areas of life - art and religion included - can be unified through the methods of study and forms of explanation used by science.

As others have before him, Berry argues that scientific understanding, though valid and valuable, has its limits; that art and religion are other valid ways of knowing; that worldviews such as Wilson's are impoverished and truncated; that "life is a miracle" which can never be fully explained. Along the way he deals with the commercialization of scientific research, the temptation to political tyranny inherent in promises of complete and certain knowledge, the effects of placing a premium on innovation, and the fragmentation of specialties within universities.

He notes the irony that Wilson, a staunch advocate of preserving biodiversity, undercuts his own cause of conservation by promoting a view of organisms as machines. Berry asserts that "It is impossible to prefigure the salvation of the world in the same language by which the world has been dismembered and defaced." (8) What sort of language is needed? For Berry, it is not the "scientific" language of classification, abstraction, and reduction.

Nor is it enough to inject language of "values" into the mix. What is essential is language that specifies the particular, the unique, the individual. "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." Scientific language can help us to know the value of biodiversity. "But it cannot replace, and it cannot become, the language of familiarity, reverence, and affection by which things of value ultimately are protected." (41)

Such "particularizing" language is the language of poetry, memory, and local knowledge -- and of the Bible: "People who blame the Bible for the modern destruction of nature have failed to see its delight in the variety and individuality of creatures and its insistence upon their holiness. But that delight - in, say, the final chapters of Job or the 104th Psalm - is far more useful to the cause of conservation than the undifferentiating abstractions of science." (102)

It would be a mistake to read this as "anti-science." The reader must remember that Berry is countering a worldview that regards the competence of science as unlimited -- what is often called "scientism"-- so he stresses that science cannot do and know everything, that it can be corrupted by arrogance and greed. He is not calling for the dismissal of science, but for its reorientation toward the well-being of creation. "I am not of course proposing an end to science and other intellectual disciplines, but rather a change of standards and goals. . . . . We must shift the priority from production to local adaptation, from innovation to familiarity, from power to elegance, from costliness to thrift." (p. 12) "Suppose that the ultimate standard of our work were to be, not professionalism and profitability, but the health and durability of human and natural communities. . . . What then? Well, we certainly would have a healthier, prettier, more diverse and interesting world, a world less toxic and explosive, than we have now." (134)

Berry has no prescriptions for how this is to be done. It is certainly a tall order. But surely this is the task of Au Sable - both as an institute and as a wider community of students, alumni, faculty, and friends. As scientists and practitioners, citizens and church members, we are committed to "bring[ing] healing to the biosphere and the whole of Creation" and "the integration of knowledge of the Creation with biblical principles" (Official Bulletin 2001, pp. 1, 3) Who else is in a better position to witness, in science, faith, and practice, that "life is a miracle"?

Wendell Berry. Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition. Counterpoint Press, 2000. $21.00 ISBN: 1582430586

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