I’m quoting a fairly lengthy portion of our own Peter Lawler’s essay on technology because it does a tantalizing job of raising some fair but serious questions about the limits of Wendell Berry’s — or anyone else’s — dedication to nature as the site of whole persons and whole communities. (And, presumably, whole polities — although maybe Berry’s thought isn’t political enough to really successfully get him there.) To be blunt, Berry on occasion seems to point tellingly toward a vision of the world in which the Land, not the Lord, shall provide. And there is little doubt, as college students sometimes grasp studying Locke, that the Land is a finite and randomly or uncharitably distributed resource. Yet the ‘natural reproduction’ of fruitful human multiplication works directly against that uncharitable finitude — at least until we really do get Lost in the Cosmos. Somehow, for the time being, we need to square the limits of the land with our desire, as bounded earthly beings, for bounded earthly places, and the captivating way in which that desire seems to betoken our very desire for life unbounded.
I could go on, but I’m mostly interested in hearing reflections and reactions around here concerning the below . . . .
A contemporary critic of technology, Wendell Berry, explains that our dogma or “conventional prejudice” today is the uncritical acceptance of the goodness of technological liberation. Our intellectuals and educators mean to prejudice us “against old people, history, parental authority, religious faith, sexual discipline, manual work, rural people and rural life, anything that is local or small or inexpensive.” We are prejudiced against all that is required to acquire moral virtue, to what we must have to subordinate technical means to human ends. We are prejudiced against “settled communities,” against anything that has not been uprooted by the impersonal universalism of technological thinking. But it is only in the routinized and moralized context of such communities that any technology might be viewed as good, as not merely displacing or disorienting human beings for no particular purpose.
Berry agrees with Heidegger that in a technological age those who are best at manipulating others as objects will rule without restraint. Technological democracy tends to bring into existence a new sort of tyrannical ruling class composed of clever and liberated or communally irresponsible merito-crats who employ technology to impose a humanly destructive uniformity on those they rule. These meritocrats—believing maybe more than any prior ruling class that they deserve to rule—are full of contempt for those they control. And they themselves don’t realize the extent to which they are controlled by technological thinking, by a way of thinking that has devalued all standards except wealth and power.
Heidegger and Berry, not without evidence, tend to view America as a sort of technological tyranny in which the unlimited pursuit of money and power that is the result of technological thinking has led the few to lay waste to the communal and moral world inhabited by the many. Technological progress tends to make true or communal democracy almost impossible, as even Tocqueville showed. Berry explains that we Americans characteristically “behave violently” toward the land and particular places because from the beginning we “belonged to no place.” We have regarded the land or nature as an alien or hostile force to be conquered, not as our home. For Berry, what we modern Americans regard as the natural human propensities for wandering and violence are not really so natural at all. Our anxious dissatisfaction can at least be checked by our natural tendency to be bound by habit and familiarity. As even Heidegger says, the existential view that the truth is that we human beings alone have no natural place in particular is not shared by people who have the experience of belonging “deeply and intricately” to some place.
That human beings have to be some place to live and that technology erodes all particular human attachments is true. Beings with bodies have to be somewhere, and all human experience of the universal truth comes through reflection that occurs in the context of particular communities. But it is unclear to what extent that place has to literally be a piece of land; American Indian communities, for example, were often really bands of wanderers. And to some extent or other so too is any Christian community, any community composed of human beings who believe that they are really pilgrims or wayfarers in this world. According to one of the very first modern thinkers, Blaise Pascal, the truth is that human beings exist nowhere in particular. They are miserably contingent and displaced accidents. The truth, in fact, makes us so miserable that we spend most of our lives diverting ourselves from it. The only real remedy for our natural misery, according to Pascal, is believing in a God hidden from natural view. From this perspective, the disorientation we experience in this high-tech world is actually closer to the truth about what we are by nature than is the experience of the Old World peasant.
For Berry, Pascal is simply wrong. Berry seems to believe that we can live well according to nature by becoming deeply rooted in a particular place; we are not wanderers by nature. There is much human experience that supports such a view. But Berry is not simply right; we are different from the birds because most of us self-conscious beings do not accept our deaths serenely. It seems natural for us to fight and to hope to overcome our natural, mortal limits. It seems even noble for us to do so. Our longing for a personal God, winning our liberty by dying courageously, and resisting via technology the nature that is out to kill us all seem to be natural or authentic responses. The truth, surely, is somewhere between Berry and Pascal.
