All my life I have lived next to several square acres of pasture and a big dilapidated barn. They have been a feature in my life for so long I have often taken them for granted; hardly even seen them at times. They aren’t mine but I’ve quite enjoyed long walks around them. I’ve been privileged to see the cattle grazing on them in winter and the hay maturing in them every summer, even before I knew it was a privilege. My family and I have often had a little garden at the back of our small house, but I had always thought of it as more of a novelty than a legitimate way of life. Like most American families today, we’ve never had land of our own to care for in any acknowledgeable amount. Yet, my mind looks back and reflects on those many and varied memories in this place that I’ve called home, and I see it in a very different light than I have ever before. This is largely due to one man and to this man’s sobering voice of sensibility and understanding. Wendell Berry is an author and a poet, philosopher and farmer that is driven by his heritage and beliefs to call a broken world back to its roots; it’s land and place. The influence of one individual on another is inestimable and ultimately mysterious.
In today’s society, especially at its highest levels, we suffer from what Berry often refers to as “hubris.” And the philosophical landscape appears to be no different. We, as humans, have always had an often harsh and sometimes deadly obsession for knowledge. In fact if there is any one thing that the greatest minds have desperately strived for it is just this. As it is often stated, “Knowledge is power,” and so it undoubtedly is. We have become very powerful as a collective group of creatures. We possess the means to assess and analyze a situation or idea to its seeming limit of understandability; at least in terms of the material that composes us and our world. And it is this material knowledge, in Wendell Berry’s view, that is at least in part, the source of our hubris today. Because we have found a method of proof for material knowledge that appears to answer so many questions, we tend to assume that this is the only knowledge that is capable of being known by us, and ultimately that it is the only sphere of reality that truly exists. Resulting in ideas such as Materialism and Utilitarianism. Of course, for Berry, this is simply untrue in light of our ecological history in terms of agriculture and the environment.
In many ways he simply puts words to thoughts of my own that I had not yet been able to express. And as I am witness to Berry’s investigation of agriculture and the culture that is formed from it, I see the validity of Berry’s metaphysical ideas. Ultimately humanity is incapable of being completely objective in any investigation because it is always wrong about the variable of humanity in the investigation. Because we can only know this moment and no other with certainty a calculation of the wholeness of existence is impossible and finally mysterious to us. To admit ignorance of these ultimate things is an act of humility that serves as a correcting force against hubris. Yet, without this correcting force we have assumed that the patterns that we see only look brighter and brighter in the ever more distant future. We seem to think that someday soon both natural selection and technological advancements will save us from both responsibility to community and to good work. But the arguments of mathematical efficiency have destroyed any chance of earthly continuity. As Wendell Berry so eloquently espouses, this is perhaps most evident in the way we produce our food of which science has played an ever more important role.
The effect that science has had on our culture, and agriculture specifically, is certainly almost incalculable. And, as Berry asserts, it also has submitted to, and often been the source of, the influence of utilitarianism and reductionism on social and political thought. Berry has stated that, while science has been misused and abused, it is his aim to “put science in its place,” not in a malicious way, but simply to make it an equal with the other various branches of human study and cognition. Only then will health, membership, stewardship, and wholeness receive the value that it lacks in agriculture and culture alike. Modern science has tended to surmise that understanding of a creature or phenomena can be attained through a simple understanding of what composes it, and inevitably we will, sometime in the future, learn what composes all life, thus reducing life to something we can ultimately understand. This idea is false, according to Berry, and is at the root of our environmental and cultural crisis today.
This reality, in its particularity, has had a lasting impact on me in several ways. I am forced to come to terms with my own ignorance about the ultimate character of life. “The way of ignorance,” as Wendell Berry puts it, is to some degree what keeps us from destroying it. Meaning, as a fact of technological history, once we believe we have understood something, we only do so by means of oversimplification. Ultimately we deny the nature of that thing its final complexity and, in the end, its harmony which destroys it. This is best understood and exemplified by Berry in the common metaphor for creature as machine and brain as computer. To some extent these metaphors are helpful, but ultimately don’t do justice to the life being described.
Spiritually, the implications of this fact are numerous both for Berry and myself. If all life is ultimately and truly mysterious and that we are truly destroying this life, the only way to understand life, if one wishes to preserve it, is as a gift. This is so because life will be oversimplified and reduced to a determinism that will finally destroy it. Stewardship will be lost in the swirling current of cause-and-effect logic. And to the extent stewardship is the way we must understand the relationship we share with our world, creation is the only word available to us that expresses this immutable relationship. For stewardship cannot be simply understood as the place of the most dominant competitor in a dog-eat-dog world. This simply transforms the word’s definition until it serves little significance that cannot be easily cast away. Consequently, any denial of the relevance or reality of morality can to this extent be rejected. In our time we have finally begun to hear Nature cry out against the wrongs that have been done to her, and that it is our behavior as humanity that has absolutely brought about this calamity. The question we have to ask ourselves now is whether or not we can continue to preach from both the religious and secular pulpits that how we act economically and how we act morally is of no consequence? If our society determines our choices, to that extent we are assured of future annihilation as a simple projection of historical trends since our beginning.
In all of this, Wendell Berry has been vicariously a mentor and guide. He has revealed a way of seeing the world through very old eyes, both in maturity and wisdom. I look out onto the fields in which I live and I sense my connection with them. Those memories of the gardening of past years now seems to me a gateway or rite of passage to a very different world. One that you do not have to see to believe, but one you must truly believe in to see at all.