To argue for a balance between people and their tools, between life and machinery, between biological and machine-produced energy, is to argue for restraint upon the use of machines. The arguments that rise out of the machine metaphor – arguments for cheapness, efficiency, labor-saving, economic growth, etc. – all point to infinite industrial growth and infinite energy consumption. The moral argument points to restraint; it is a conclusion that may be in some sense tragic, but there is no escaping it. Much as we long for infinities of power and duration, we have no evidence that these lie within our reach, much less within our responsibility. It is more likely that we will have either to live within our limits, within the human definition, or not live at all. And certainly the knowledge of these limits and of how to live within them is the most comely and graceful knowledge that we have, the most healing and the most whole.
Wendell Berry, “The Use of Energy” in The Unsettling of America
Tag: Wendell Berry
don’t be significant or effective
Some of my critics were happy to say that my refusal to use a computer would not do any good. I have argued, and am convinced, that it will at least do me some good, and that it may involve me in the preservation of some cultural goods. But what they meant was real, practical, public good. They meant that the materials and energy I save by not buying a computer will not be “significant.” They meant that no individual’s restraint in the use of technology or energy will be “significant.” That is true
But each one of us, by “insignificant” individual abuse of the world, contributes to a general abuse that is devastating. And if I were one of thousands or millions of people who could afford a piece of equipment, even one for which they had a conceivable “need,” and yet did not buy it, that would be “significant.” Why, then, should I hesitate for even one moment to be one, even the first one, of that “significant” number? Thoreau gave the definitive reply to the folly of “significant numbers” a long time ago: Why should anybody wait to do what is right until everybody does it? It is not “significant” to love your own children or to eat your own dinner, either. But normal humans will not wait to love or eat until it is mandated by an act of Congress.
Wendell Berry, “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine” in What Are People For?
One of my favorite lines of thought within good Christian theology is a critique of the desire for efficiency and significance in modern culture. I based the entire first series of my essay project at The Radical Ordinary on this critique. For Wendell Berry, it is an on-going critique as well, and he states it so well in this essay. The world conforms itself to the demands of economics, of numbers and dollars and cents: everything must be efficient, streamlines, frictionless.
But, as Berry reminds us here, love is not efficient. Love is not significant, at least not in the way the world would view significance. It does not contort itself meet the needs the invisible hand of the market, but instead, moves things out of its reach. As Christians, and as the Church, questions of efficiency must always be pretty far down the list of priorities in making decisions about the use of our time, resources, and love. Other things must come first.
In the newest issue of Plough Quarterly, there is a story about the Palazzo Migliori, a mansion just off Saint Peter’s Square in the Vatican, that Pope Francis had turned into a home for people with no where else to go. The story contemplates the divine wastefulness of turning such a beautiful and historic building into a shelter for just a few people. In this section of the piece, I am reminded of these conversations I keep having here about effectiveness, and the words of Stanley Hauerwas and Wendell Berry:
This place gives Anna a story that bends toward peace and rests there. Something about its over-the-top-ness: the carefully painted crests on the ceiling, the terrace overlooking Saint Peter’s Square, the unnecessarily good food. The visitors who know your name and your favorites and your good and bad habits, who know you need to put that cream on your foot and will banter with you until you do it. Above all it is knowing: that this place could have been a posh hotel; that some might call its current incarnation a waste; that you are not being given the bare minimum.
When we love someone, we are not thinking of how to do so efficiently; we are thinking how to do it well. Think of new parents preparing a beautiful nursery: they may buy things the child never uses, and perhaps some of that money and effort might be better used elsewhere. But we are not surprised when loving parents put more thought and work into preparing a place than is strictly necessary.
There are certain things that we know make a good place for anyone – shelter from the cold, a quiet place to sleep, a warm stew, a clean place to wash up, art, song, softness – and we can prepare these things even before we meet the recipients. Once we meet, there begins the work of making it a good place for them in particular – for Astriche, who loves chamomile; for Lioso, who is so much more tired than hungry and just wants to sleep; for Ajim and his appetite; for Anna the teller of tales.
https://www.plough.com/en/topics/justice/social-justice/princess-of-the-vatican
The mindless drive for efficiency and significance is a depersonalizing drive. Love is not depersonalized. It requires intimacy, connection, and a knowing of the other we are called to love. You can build a generic homeless shelter, sure. But you can’t build a home, or a relationship that way. And only those relationships of love are what save lives and make the world a better place. And remember, you don’t need permission to act this way, or to develop a strategic 12-point plan to figure out how. Just ask, how can I show love today, or in this situation, or in this specific encounter, and then do those things. Don’t worry if it is the most effective use of your time. Don’t worry about whether it will undermine some bigger Plan. Don’t run a cost-benefit analysis. Just love, and be loved, as God wants us to be.
An ode to soil
Who knew a description of soil could be so beautiful and inspiring?
The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of it all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.
It is alive itself. It is a grave, too, of course. Or a healthy soil is. It is full of dead animals and plants, bodies that have passed through other bodies. For except for some humans – with their sealed coffins and vaults, their pathological fear of the earth – the only way into the soil is through other bodies. But no matter how finely the dead are broken down, or how many times they are eaten, they yet give into other life. If a healthy soil is full of death it is also full of life: worms, fungi, microorganisms of all kinds, for which, as for us humans, the dead bodies of the once living are a feast. Eventually this dead matter becomes soluble, available as food for plants, and life begins to rise up again, out of the soil into the light. Given only the health of the soil, nothing that dies is dead for very long. Within this powerful economy, it seems that death occurs only for the good of life. And having followed the cycle around, we see that we have not only a description of the fundamental biological process, but also a metaphor of great beauty and power. It is impossible to contemplate the life of the soil for very long without seeing it as analogous to the life of the spirit. No less than the faithful of religion is the good farmer mindful of the persistence of life through death, the passage of energy through changing forms.
Wendell Berry, “The Use of Energy” in The Unsettling of America
Justin DaMetz 