The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry

by Wendell Berry

I am aware that all this is exactly the sort of thinking that the technological determinists will dismiss as nostalgic or wishful. I mean it, however, not as a recommendation that we ‘return to the past,’ but as a criticism of the past; and my criticism is based on the assumption that we had in the past, and that we have now, a choice about how we should use technology and what we should use it for. As I understand it, this choice depends absolutely on our willingness to limit our desires as well as the scale and kind of technology we use to satisfy them. Without that willingness, there is no choice; we must simply abandon ourselves to whatever the technologists may discover to be possible. The technological determinists, of course, do not accept that such a choice exists – undoubtedly because they resent the moral limits on their work that such a choice implies. They speak romantically of ‘man’s destiny’ to go on to bigger and more sophisticated machines. Or they take the opposite course and speak the tooth-and-claw language of Darwinism. Ex-secretary of agriculture Earl Butz speaks, for instance, of ‘Butz’s Law of Economics’ which is ‘Adapt or Die.’ I am, I think, as enthusiastic about the principle of adaptation as Mr. Butz. We differ only on the question of what should be adapted. He believes that we should adapt to the machines, that humans should be forced to conform to technological conditions or standards. I believe that the machines should be adapted to us – to se...