2021/06/18

Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition: Berry, Wendell: 9781582431413: Amazon.com: Books

Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition: Berry, Wendell: 9781582431413: Amazon.com: Books

Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition Paperback – May 1, 2001
by Wendell Berry  (Author)
4.4 out of 5 stars    76 ratings
176 pages
“[A] scathing assessment . . . Berry shows that Wilson's much–celebrated, controversial pleas in Consilience to unify all branches of knowledge is nothing more than a fatuous subordination of religion, art, and everything else that is good to science . . . Berry is one of the most perceptive critics of American society writing today.” —The Washington Post



“I am tempted to say he understands [Consilience] better than Wilson himself . . . A new emancipation proclamation in which he speaks again and again about how to defy the tyranny of scientific materialism.”—The Christian Science Monitor





In Life Is a Miracle, the devotion of science to the quantitative and reductionist world is measured against the mysterious, qualitative suggestions of religion and art. Berry sees life as the collision of these separate forces, but without all three in the mix we are left at sea in the world.


Editorial Reviews
Review
"A new emancipation proclamation in which he speaks again and again about how to defy the tyranny of scientific materialism." -- Colin C. Campbell, Christian Science Monitor
About the Author
Wendell Berry is the author of fifty books of poetry, fiction, and essays. He was recently awarded the Cleanth Brooks Medal for Lifetime Achievement by the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the Louis Bromfield Society Award. For over forty years he has lived and farmed with his wife, Tanya, in Kentucky.
From The Washington Post
"[A] scathing assessment... Berry is one of the most perceptive critics of American society writing today."

Customer Reviews: 4.4 out of 5 stars    76 ratings

Wendell Berry
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Biography
Wendell E. Berry (born August 5, 1934) is an American novelist, poet, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer. A prolific author, he has written many novels, short stories, poems, and essays. He is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, a recipient of The National Humanities Medal, and the Jefferson Lecturer for 2012. He is also a 2013 Fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Berry was named the recipient of the 2013 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award. On January 28, 2015, he became the first living writer to be ushered into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Guy Mendes (Guy Mendes) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

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4.4 out of 5 stars

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S. Nachalo
5.0 out of 5 stars society ended and no one noticed
Reviewed in the United States on July 7, 2016
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“We are not getting something for nothing. We are getting nothing for everything,” the epigraph with which Berry opens Life is a Miracle, is apt and concise. Modern society appears miraculous, the product of man's industry and ingenuity. It looks (and is advertised largely as) a kind of perpetual motion machine, powered by little other than human inventiveness. Attentive observers have noticed that appearances are, as usual, deceptive: we are living on fossil fuels, energy created over eons by geological processes, and in a matter of decades, we've used up more than half of what's available. But there are problems even greater than the depletion of our main energy sources, destroying our ability to perpetuate our society and culture without much notice from anyone. We (and many other animals) have been passing our knowledge and ways of life the old fashioned way (and the only way) from parent to child as long as we've been on this planet without giving it a thought, but it appears that this simple and irreducible aspect of our species existence can be interrupted. When this happens locally, tribes and cultures die. It's not clear whether it is possible for this to happen globally, but it seems that this is the direction we are heading. Globalization and the “market economy” have been at work disrupting and destroying local cultures and replacing them with a universal mono-culture known to its practitioners and captives variously as “capitalism," "market economy," or “democracy” in the west, “communism” or “socialism” elsewhere. Whatever name it goes by, its effects on the living beings and the environments they inhabit is the same.

Life is a Miracle is about this process, the loss of the ability to perpetuate the culture we've built over millenia. Wendell Berry looks to science for a culprit, because science is our culture's founding myth, governing paradigm, and much more, and he picks E. O. Wilson's Consilience as the book through which to analyze the subject. The choice is appropriate for a number of reasons: Wilson is a mainstream scientist, and in Consilience, he tackles questions like ethics, religion, art, and culture in general- necessarily, since his stated goal is to bring the different disciplines together into a working whole. He is also a conservationist, as is Berry.

Science approaches all questions as problems to be solved, and all unanswered questions as questions yet to be answered. “(Consilience) reads as though it was written to confirm the popular belief that science is entirely good, that it leads to unlimited progress, and that it has (or will have) all the answers.” (p. 24) This means that mystery, an essential and critical part of human culture, is an impossibility: Wilson attributes it entirely to human ignorance. Without mystery, reverence and propriety are impossible, leading to a society governed by profit and raw power as we've arrived at today, whether the power is cloaked in the accoutrements of “democracy,” “socialism,” or more transparent forms. What Wilson calls “consilience” turns out to be an invitation (or an ultimatum, taken more broadly) for religion and the arts to take on the goals and methodology of science, an impossibility if the words mean what we all think they mean. “Like a naïve politician, Mr. Wilson thinks he has found a way to reconcile two sides without realizing that his way is one of the sides... One cannot, in honesty, propose to reconcile Heaven and Earth by denying the existence of Heaven.” (p.99)

The crisis we face can't be solved with more science or technology, since these are part of the cause. We have to address the way we think and talk about the world and ourselves.

The language we use to speak of the world and its creatures, including ourselves, has gained a certain analytical power (along with a lot of expertish pomp) but has lost much of its power to designate what is being analyzed or to convey any respect or care or affection or devotion toward it. As a result, we have a lot of genuinely concerned people calling upon us to “save” a world which their language simultaneously reduces to an assemblage of perfectly featureless and dispirited “ecosystems,” “organisms,” “environments,” “mechanisms,” and the like. It is impossible to prefigure the salvation of the world in the same language by which the world has been dismembered and defaced. (italics in original) (p. 8)

Berry's solution to this crisis, if there is to be any solution to it, is for scientists, artists, and religious people, whether they can work together in the end or not, to root their work in local considerations and return to such considerations at their works' end, as well as, ideally, throughout the process.

Directly opposed to this reduction or abstraction of things is the idea of the preciousness of individual lives and places. This does not come from science, but from our cultural and religious traditions. It is not derived, and it is not derivable, from any notion of egalitarianism. If all are equal, none can be precious. (And perhaps it is necessary to stop here to say that this ancient delight in the individuality of creatures is not the same thing as what we now mean by “individualism.” It is the opposite. Individualism, in present practice, refers to the supposed “right” of an individual to act alone, in disregard of other individuals. (p.42)

Any new invention or idea or practice should, in the end, be weighed on the merits of its impact on our communities. “Suppose we learn to ask of any proposed innovation the question so far only the Amish have been wise enough to ask: What will this do to out community?” (p.134) Obviously, most people don't have the benefit of living in anything resembling a community, so we would have to break up the corporate capitalist society into local communities first.

Life is a Miracle elicits some hysterical reviews on Amazon, as one would expect with books that challenge our most basic assumptions about ourselves and the world. I expect that if it were more widely read, the greater part of our country would be foaming at the mouth over this book. God I wish it were. This is likely one of the most important books of the decade, or century, or however long we plan on living miserable lives governed by anti-human precepts.
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Joy S. Frady
4.0 out of 5 stars A Helpful Corrective for Our Times
Reviewed in the United States on July 9, 2016
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This book is a response to E.O. Wilson's "Consilience", a book which purports to bring all academic disciplines under the rubric of scientism. Berry strongly objects, pointing out the slippery slopes abounding in academia and culture when scientific pursuits are given preeminence. Berry is at his best in this book when he critiques the university system, particularly its penchant for specialization and the funding streams within which mitigate against the good of the community. This book was written at the turn of the 21st century and it is apparent to this reader that in the intervening years the problems Berry addresses have gotten worse. Berry's theme of community may be the most important and most needed theme for our world today, as we live in an isolated, divided culture where ideologies are at war.
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Anders Martinson
5.0 out of 5 stars A challenging, thought-provoking, and valuable piece of writing
Reviewed in the United States on July 12, 2009
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Having read many of Wendell Berry's work I can say that this is probably not to use as your introduction to his writing. Better to start with a collection of his agrarian essays. This is one of his most difficult essays to come to terms with, and a review that attempts to analyze it would almost work in opposition to the (anti-reductionist) points Berry tries to convey.

In a way I think Berry made an error in choosing his subtitle. The use of the word superstition is unnecessarily inflammatory, and the word against distracts the reader from the fact that Berry's work in general and this essay in particular focus largely on things that he is for.

A casual approach to this book could leave the reader unfamiliar with his other work feeling that Berry is a Luddite polemicist. A more careful reading of the, somewhat uncharacteristically, dense prose here will reveal Berry's thoughtful passion for what it means to be human. One needn't agree with every point Berry attempts to make in order to use this book as a way to simply stop and think.

In the chapter A Conversation Out of School Berry quite plainly asserts that science and art are not inherently at odds with one another. He clearly sees limits in what science can help us know and accomplish, but he doesn't dismiss entirely the pursuit of empirical knowledge. This is a provocative and challenging piece of work, but well worth the effort.

Reasonable people can disagree. Read it with an open mind and see where the discussion takes you. The very fact that it has led to pointed discussions on all sides of the issue just among these reviews shows that it touches on crucial issues for our society and world.
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Greta S. Hyland
5.0 out of 5 stars First Wendell Berry Book
Reviewed in the United States on February 19, 2014
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Wendell Berry has come up often enough over the last couple of years that I finally had to buy one of this books. I have to admit, I was kind of put off by the reverence that his readers showed when talking of him, but once I read his book, I could understand the fanfare. This book is clearly written, thought provoking, and one that made the most compelling argument for the limits of science...and I am a science buff. I have since ordered two more of Berry's books. I know I will return to my highlights in the book over and over again.
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Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition
by Wendell Berry
 4.19  ·   Rating details ·  1,063 ratings  ·  132 reviews
"[A] scathing assessment…Berry shows that Wilson's much-celebrated, controversial pleas in Consilience to unify all branches of knowledge is nothing more than a fatuous subordination of religion, art, and everything else that is good to science…Berry is one of the most perceptive critics of American society writing today." --Lauren F. Winner, Washington Post Book World

"I am tempted to say he understands [Consilience] better than Wilson himself…A new emancipation proclamation in which he speaks again and again about how to defy the tyranny of scientific materialism" ---Colin C. Campbell, Christian Science Monitor

"Berry takes a wrecking ball to E. O. Wilson's Consilience, reducing its smug assumptions regarding the fusion of science, art, and religion to so much rubble. --Kirkus Reviews

In Life Is a Miracle, the devotion of science to the quantitative and reductionist world is measured against the mysterious, qualitative suggestions of religion and art. Berry sees life as the collision of these separate forces, but without all three in the mix we are left at sea in the world. (less)
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Paperback, 176 pages
Published April 19th 2001 by Counterpoint (first published 2000)
Original TitleLife Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition
ISBN1582431418 (ISBN13: 9781582431413)
Edition LanguageEnglish
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Werner
Mar 18, 2008Werner rated it really liked it
Recommends it for: All readers who care about serious questions
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 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... . (less)
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David
Aug 05, 2012David rated it really liked it
As a scientist and a university faculty member, I found some parts of this essay stinging. Nevertheless, I found, on the whole, much of the commentary cogent and useful. At first, this essay seemed like some form of Luddite treatise. But what actually emerged was a well thought out challenge to the primacy of science in the modern world. Although the author issues this challenge directly at the Ecologist E. O. Wilson, in response to Wilson's thesis entitled Consilience, Wendell Berry rarely misses an opportunity to broaden his attack against Science (with a capital S). Nevertheless, I found the points of attack well articulated and rarely gratuitous.

In sum, this text made me (actually, allowed me) to look at science from a fresh perspective. Such opportunities are rare, when one has been in a given field for many years. For this, I am indebted to this author. (less)
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Karson
Feb 04, 2008Karson rated it really liked it
Wow. I didn't think the whole thing totally ruled, but there are certain quotes that are probably going to stick with me forever. He just has a different point of view than i have ever been exposed to. He really values the particular. Particular places, particular people, particular animals, particular things. This is across the spectrum from me. Like most Americans I value big, novel things. I think big trips rule, big mountains, big states, even big animals. I like moose more than birds. Mountains more than streams. Adventurous trips more than everyday life. I want to love particular "mundane" things, and Berry knows a lot more about that then I do. He'd rather stay one place his whole life and fully appreciate its depth and richness, than briefly skim all the world without a deep understanding of any one place. The particular and mundane scare the shit out of me, but this guy revels in it. Holy crap. (less)
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Jon
Dec 19, 2008Jon rated it it was amazing
Gotta give this one 5-stars just for sheer audacity. Berry takes on modern science and its materialistic and mechanistic world view, and he has E.O. Wilson and his book Consilience in his sights. Berry suggests that something is lost when we only focus on the reductionist perspective at the root of modern science. We are, he is suggesting, more than can be explained by modern science, and he suggests the dominance of the modern scientific paradigm represents a threat to those ineffable or irreducible characteristics that make us uniquely human.

We are, he is suggesting, more than machines:

"The most radical influence of reductive science has been the virtually universal adoption of the idea that the world, its creatures, and all the parts of its creatures are machines--that is, that there is no difference between creature and artifice, birth and manufacture, thought and computation" (p. 6).

In response to that model he suggests that, "life, like holiness, can only be known by being experienced" (p. 8), and that "Our daily lives are a daily mockery of our scientific pretensions" (p. 33). And again, "Directly opposed to this reduction or abstraction of things is the idea of the preciousness of individual lives and places" (p. 42).

The book does bog down a bit in the middle, but then there will be a line like this to catch your attention:

"To define knowledge as merely empirical is to limit one's ability to know; it enfeebles one's ability to feel and think" (p. 103).

Or this:
"'Survival value', it seems to me, must deal in minimums, since any species dependent upon maximums would be too vulnerable to survive. The human race has survived because of its ability to survive famine, not because of its ability to survive feasts" (p. 110).

Or this:
A work of art says what it says in the only way it can be said. Beauty, for example, cannot be interpreted. It is not an empirically verifiable fat; it is not a quantity (p. 117). (less)
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M.G. Bianco
Feb 15, 2018M.G. Bianco rated it it was amazing
Shelves: non-fiction
One of the best book of essays from Wendell Berry that I've read. Intriguing and compelling at every point, he hits his biggest home run (for me) when he considers the different kinds of knowledge and then the distinctions between art and science, and the necessity for both to work together from a common ground.

For those of you who have heard his speech on Wallace Stegner's idea of the "boomers" and "stickers," he elaborates on that more in this book as well. (less)
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Evan
Nov 06, 2008Evan rated it it was amazing
Berry continues to astonish me. This is not a fast and easy read; you have to work and pay attention. But Berry writes as a prophet of our times and has put his finger on a core - maybe the root - cause of dis-ease in our century.

He writes a critique of rationalism and scientific thought that we need to pay attention to.

A few memorable passages:

"For a while I proposed to myself that the only things really explainable are explanations. That is not quite true, but it is near enough to the truth that I am unwilling to forget it.

"What can be explained? Experiments, ideas, patterns, cause-effect relationships and connections within defined limits, anything that can be calculated, graphed or diagrammed. And yet the explanation changes whatever is explained into something explainable. Explanation is reductive, not comprehensive; most of the time, when you have explained something, you discover leftovers. An explanation is a bucket, not a well.

"What can't be explained? I don't think creatures can be explained. I don't think lives can be explained. What we know about creatures and lives must be pictured or told or sung or danced. And I don't think pictures or stories or songs or dances can be explained. The arts are indispensable precisely because they are so nearly antithetical to explanation." (p113)

"The time is past, if ever there was such a time, when you can just discover knowledge and turn it loose in the wold and assume that you have done good.

"This, to me, is a sign of the incompleteness of science in itself - which is the sign of the need for a strenuous conversation among all the branches of learning."

"In our present economic predicament, ethics, ecology, environmental law, etc. won't as specialties have much corrective force. They will be used to rationalize what is wrong." (p145)
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Joel
May 18, 2011Joel rated it really liked it
Wendell Berry: my constant antidote to graduate school.

Berry dislikes scientific reductionism, argues for the uniqueness of art and religion as ways of knowing, being, doing, etc, and adds some important objections to the "scientific" enterprise as it is carried out today: it is essentially colonial, imperialist, and in bed with a number of environmentally destructive forces.

He also comes down pretty harshly on the way academic disciplines are organized and the way universities are run. This makes a lot of sense to me, but leaves me with some questions about how to proceed with my own chosen field. I am so surrounded by people who do research and scholarly publishing as their livelihood that I forget it's something I've never wanted.

Berry writes in another book, Standing by Words:

"If one wishes to promote the life of language, one must promote the life of the community—a discipline many times more trying, difficult, and long than that of linguistics, but having at least the virtue of hopefulness. It escapes the despair always implicit in specializations: the cultivation of discrete parts without respect or responsibility for the whole."

I'm knee-deep in theory about language and social worlds, yet too much of it, in the end, for me feels like a spinning out into nothing. It is not too late, perhaps, for me to imagine getting much more involved with language and literacy teaching at local, grassroots levels. For all our talk about the Local, currently fashionable ideas in applied linguistics seem rarely to be produced by scholars who are genuinely committed to living and working in a place, rather than an archipelago of universities.

Obviously, this book has provoked thinking beyond its subject. Which I suppose is another thing it has going for it. (less)
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