The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry

by Wendell Berry

In the hurry of technological progress, we have replaced some tools and methods that worked with some that do not work. But we also need culture-borne instructions about who or what humans are and how and on what assumptions they should act. The Chain of Being, for instance – which gave humans a place between animals and angels in the order of Creation – is an old idea that has not been replaced by any adequate new one. It was simply rejected, and the lack of it leaves us without a definition. Lacking that ancient definition, or any such definition, we do not know at what point to restrain or deny ourselves. We do not know how ambitious to be, what or how much we may safely desire, when or where to stop. I knew a barber once who refused to give a discount to a bald client, explaining that his artistry consisted, not in the cutting off, but in the knowing when to stop. He spoke, I think, as a true artist and a true human. The lack of such knowledge is extremely dangerous in and to an individual. But ignorance of when to stop is a modern epidemic; it is the basis of ‘industrial progress’ and ‘economic growth.’ The most obvious practical result of this ignorance is a critical disproportion of scale between the scale of human enterprises and their sources in nature.