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Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition

Wendell Berry

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Mar 18, 2008 Werner rated it really liked it

Shelves: other-nonfiction

Wendell Berry is a well-known author of prose and poetry; sometimes a college teacher of English (a field in which he has a graduate degree); a Kentucky farmer who tills land that's been in his family for several generations and who advocates for sustainable farming practices and environmental stewardship; and a public intellectual who thinks seriously about important social and philosophical issues. To date, this is the only one of his numerous books that I've read (though I definitely intend t Wendell Berry is a well-known author of prose and poetry; sometimes a college teacher of English (a field in which he has a graduate degree); a Kentucky farmer who tills land that's been in his family for several generations and who advocates for sustainable farming practices and environmental stewardship; and a public intellectual who thinks seriously about important social and philosophical issues. To date, this is the only one of his numerous books that I've read (though I definitely intend to read more!); but I've now read it three times, most recently because I've long really wanted to review it, and felt that because of the depth and complexity of the thought, it deserved a review written with the benefit of the freshest possible engagement. Even so, it will be a challenge to summarize it within the scope of a review.

Berry is a classical Christian believer, whose faith shapes his view of the world and universe around him and undergirds his thought. Moreover, in the present book, he's making the case that human life in the world is essentially miraculous, and that it has an inescapable spiritual dimension. That said, however, he does not base his arguments here on appeal to religious authority as such, nor present them in narrowly "religious" terms. Rather, he's arguing for a basic philosophical position, and a basic way of living in the world on the basis of that position, that can be shared by persons of a wide variety of faiths, and even by persons who have no specific faith as such, but who approach the natural and human world from an existentially humble perspective that recognizes the mystery and complexity of the universe and values individual humans, communities, and natural spaces. For this reason, although I originally shelved the book with "Christian life and thought," I think "Other nonfiction" would be the more accurate classification --not because his thought isn't Christian, but because he's writing from the perspective of philosophy, not theology, and writing to all of his fellow humans who share the common graces of conscience and ability to reason.

While this is a short book (153 pages), addressed to general intelligent readers rather than academic specialists, not burdened with scholarly apparatus and expressed in as clear a style as possible, and although it is a relatively quick read, it's not AS quick as one might initially expect. The content is pithy, and covers a lot of ground at short length, but significant depth. Berry illustrates and supports his points with examples from literature, especially Shakespeare (the first chapter has an extended discussion of King Lear --which I have never read-- and the book's title comes from Edgar's words to his suicidal father, "Thy life's a miracle...."), references to history and current events, and quotes from other serious thinkers. While he's primarily concerned with the concrete and practical side of life, he necessarily addresses some significant abstract ideas that bear on how we approach the concrete and the practical; the writing demands thought and attention. Full engagement with it can be demanding.

Published in 2000, the book is a specific response to the 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by Edward O. Wilson, much-honored Harvard Univ. biologist, secular humanist philosopher (and avowed "environmentalist") and general pillar of the intellectual establishment. In that book (which I admittedly have not read; I believe Berry represents it accurately and that his numerous quotations from it are not out of context, but in any case the viewpoint Berry describes is a common establishment party line that most readers have already encountered frequently) Wilson argues for the equation of "science" with positivist materialism and denial of the existence of anything not empirically material, for the ability of Science thus defined to ultimately explain all of reality, and for the reorganization of all human knowledge and academic disciplines into a supposedly "consilient" whole subordinated under the overarching philosophic guidance of this super-competent Science. Berry begs to differ; but while he develops his own position in response to Wilson's, his book has value, IMO, as a positive statement on its own terms, not simply as a refutation of Wilson (so it can be appreciated on its own terms whether you've read Wilson or not).

To summarize some of Berry's main positions in capsule form, he maintains: that human knowledge is not solely rationally deductive-empirical, but can be intuitive, emotional, and/or the product of wholistic experience over time that's not reducible to mathematical formulas or "data;" that organisms and machines are two distinctly different things, and that the former, and the world and the universe generally, are not properly conceived by trying to reduce them to the latter; that the "scientist" is not a detached observer of the "environment" but a part of it, and that the instant you set up a false dichotomy between the two you're fatally undercutting any genuine commitment to the "environment;" that humans are not mechanically or chemically determined but have genuine free will (not the "illusion" of it), which means that we make choices, and that if we don't, appealing to us to make environmentally-friendly choices makes no sense; and that while the proper goal of all sciences and arts is the healthy flourishing of humans and their communities, the goal of science as practiced in contemporary academia is maximizing the profits of the wealthy corporations that pay for the research, with results generally inimical to human flourishing. He devotes a chapter to the concept of "propriety," which he defines as "the fittingness of our conduct to our place and circumstance" (and which has a wealth of applications to present-day behaviors); and he emphasizes the importance of commitment to the local and particular, rather than grandiose subordination of the local and particular to 'globalized" operations. But there's much more content, and more food for thought, here; I've only scratched the surface rather briefly!

My read of the book this time, and writing of this review, was of course in the shadow of the current pandemic, a situation that heightens and accentuates the urgency of some of Berry's themes. The virus is a "problem" that many people are looking to Science to "solve;" but of course science had a great deal to do with creating the "problem" and the conditions under which it's spread, and deified "Science" isn't going to give us moral and spiritual resources for getting through the "problem," explaining it or making sense of its consequences in anything but a reductionist sense, or helping us decide what sort of social reality we want to build or rebuild in its aftermath. Those are things that don't call so much for technical expertise as for virtue, faith, wisdom, and community. A blog post written 20 years after this book was, and which doesn't mention Berry or this book, may seem an odd thing to link to in closing; but that's what I'm going to do, because I think Billy Coffey's conclusion there puts in simple words much of what Berry is saying here. https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog... . ...more

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