[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.
Living for almost 40 years on a family farm in Kentucky has led Berry to place a high value on local knowledge born of a long and affectionate engagement of the intellect and imagination with a particular place. To readers of his poems, novels (Memory of Old Jack, etc.) and essays (The Unsettling of America, etc.), it will be no surprise that in his latest essay collection, he argues cogently and passionately against the proposition E.O. Wilson puts forth in Consilience, that our best hope for preserving the biosphere lies in linking facts and fact-based theory across disciplines under the hegemony of the natural sciences. Though a conservationist, like Wilson, Berry strongly believes that the materialist prescription for what ails us--ecologically, culturally and spiritually--will simply bind us more tightly to the often destructive, profit-driven triad of science, technology and industry. It will also move us further away, avers Berry, from what he sees as the sense of propriety that calls on us to base our thoughts and actions on our inescapable interdependency with the planet's other life forms. Berry also opposes the belief underlying Consilience, that scientific analysis can ultimately explain everything: "to reduce the mystery and miracle of life to something that can be figured out is inevitably to enslave it, make property of it and put it up for sale." In opposition to this view, Berry proposes evaluating our behavior and work on how they affect "the health and durability of human and natural communities." To do that, he contends, we must go beyond Wilson's empirical knowledge to imaginative knowledge--to knowing things "intimately, particularly, precisely, gratefully, reverently, and with affection." Agent, the Spieler Agency. (June) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Actually consisting of a set of wide-ranging, sentimental essays in which farmer, poet, and writer Wendell Berry argues for greater dialogue between the arts and sciences, attempts to show that E.O. Wilson's is no more than the subjugation of religion and art by science, and advocates a new "emancipation proclamation" to free people from enslavement by corporations. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
The same themes that inform Jayber Crow are articulated in Berry's other new book, Life Is a Miracle, which is a response to E.O. Wilson's Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge . Wilson's book, published in 1998, argued for a unity of the academic disciplines, as he proposed a consilience, or, as he defined it, "the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanations."
Berry argues, however, that religious, artistic and family experiences cannot be understood as discrete parts of a fact-based theory. Such experiences suggest complex relationships that are perhaps unmeasurable by scientific methods. He illustrates with Mark Twain's "Notice" in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn : "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." (A version of this warning is posted in Jayber Crow , too.) "Mark Twain's point," Berry writes, "is not that his book had no motive or moral or plot, but rather that its motive, its moral, and its plot were peculiar to itself as a whole, and could be conveyed only by itself as a whole." Berry gets to the heart of the matter when he says that Wilson's "consilience requires the acceptance of empiricism as a ruling dogma or orthodoxy."
But how does a conservationist writer of faith argue against the secular religion of empiricism in the face of such spectacular successes in medicine, space exploration and technology? Being a prophet in a profitable time can't be easy. Although Berry's essay is a model of rhetorical skill and critical insight, it is probably unpersuasive in the great marketplace of ideas that has so wholeheartedly swallowed Wilson's premise that science, corporate research funds and university scientists are the answers to all our worries. I suspect that the most persuasive way to illustrate Berry's point--and to refute Wilson's doctrine--may be through the mysterious experience of literature.
Berry likely would agree because, for thirty years, he has been producing humorous, deeply moving stories about Port William that record the meaningful social life that was known to our ancestors' generations while indicting the rage for progress endemic to our own. He has been steadfast in his message that each individual has a responsibility to do something to relieve the pressure that this economic system has put on nature and society. No one can wait until "they" find a solution. The solutions, rather, require fidelity to a personal commitment to conserve what is good in one's place, which is not what most people want to hear. But, then, a prophet's words are rarely welcome.
Going further than other critics, Berry develops a nuanced and thought-provoking critique and its rationality-rules worldview. WQ Magazine
Life is a Miracle is an indispensable handbook for the new age into which we now stumble.The Washington Monthly
A strong polemic, in which Berry (Another Turn of the Crank, 1995, etc.) 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. Berry does not see life as mechanical or predictable or understandable, and he does not believe it possible to reduce it to the scope of our understanding. This would be to "give up on life, to carry it beyond change and redemption, and to increase the proximity of despair." For Berry, "life is a miracle" (as Edgar said to King Lear), and it is not containable in Wilson's empiricism or his reductionism or his subordination of art to science—particularly as Berry sees science currently under the sway of corporate interests. Berry advocates intellectual standards that "shift the priority from production to local adaptation, from power to elegance, from costliness to thrift. We must learn to think about propriety in scale and design." Despite Wilson's "pretensions to iconoclasm," Berry sees orthodoxy and the hand of politics: "for the putative ability to explain everything along with the denial of religion (or the appropriation of its appearances) is a property of political tyranny." The obtuse nature of the scientific attitude is crudely suggested in Berry's caricature of Wilson responding to the prophet Isaiah in the following dialogue: "The voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as a flower of the field." To which Wilson replies, "But, sir! Are you aware of the existence of the electromagnetic spectrum?"Somewhatlame, to be sure, but it illustrates Berry's point: "I have been trying to learn a language particular enough to speak of this place as it is and of my being here as I am. . . . And then is when I see that this life is a miracle, absolutely worth having, absolutely worth saving." Berry has earned these lofty sentiments about life's abiding mystery and beauty. He has lived close to the earth, pressed his ear to the ground, and been rewarded with doubt and discernment.
