Hell hath no limits (just like my word count).
There are some names that can only be uttered correctly with a maximum of 50% accuracy. For me, one of those names is Wendell Berry; he sounds to me more like a “Walter”. Of course, that’s because I’m confusing him with the Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann, who writes about prophets with the following excerpt:
“It is the vocation of the prophet to to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one [i.e. the flawed dominant culture].”
Walter Brueggeman, The Prophetic Imagination
Walter B’s words crystallized the reason I keep confusing these names: Under Walter B’s definition, Wendell B is one of America’s foremost prophets. It’s obvious given even a cursory reading of any one of Berry’s prolific essays, poems, or novels, but the essay that contains max prophecy-per-paragraph is “Faustian Economics”, first published in Harper’s in 2008. It’s incredibly vital, essential reading, but due to its print medium, it’s also concise to the extent that unfamiliar readers may feel thrown in the deep end. Therefore, I want to “amplify” Berry’s writing, providing a sort of footnotes to complement his essay, both so that I can more fully process, but also to contextualize these ideas for other readers.
Today’s work is, of course, “Faustian Economics”. Go ahead and read it, sit and think about it for a fortnight, and then come back here for my amplification of Berry’s ideas.
1: Scientific Positivism
“The strategies of delay, so far, have been a sort of willed oblivion … or the familiar unscientific faith that ‘science will find an answer’.”
Wendell Berry, “Faustian Economics”. Harper’s Magazine, May 2008.
Here Berry alludes to the idea of “scientific positivism” — given infinite time, scientists will learn everything there is to know about the universe, which will solve all of the world’s problems. Berry doesn’t agree, which may come as a surprise to some, who may respond that “of course science will eventually know everything — it’s right! It’s the most basic knowledge we can have”. What goes unsaid by Berry, surely due to space constraints, is that scientific positivism is not a research method but a philosophical worldview. This idea is explored much further in Stephen Barr’s Modern Physics and Ancient Faith, a non-technical review of cutting-edge science. A more in-depth read on some lacunae in science can be found in Sir Roger Penrose’s Shadows of the Mind: The Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness. In short, the answer to “can science know everything that matters?” depends not on the scientific paradigm du jour, but rather on the worldview of the scientist themselves. A person enculturated into a Post-enlightenment rational/scientific positivism (for example, literally all of America) would answer “yes”; these are the people subject here to Berry’s critique.
2: A Limitless Economy
“…we have founded our society upon delusional assumptions of limitlessness…”
“All are entitled to pursue without limit whatever they conceive as desirable…”
Ibid.
Berry’s example here of the energy summit in Kentucky is a piercing one, and aptly demonstrates the tautological priorities of American consumerism and capitalism, but I felt myself hoping for another concrete example. The first two examples I thought of are quasi-fictional, but they tell a poetic truth that hits harder than graphs ever could: The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) and The Big Short (2016). Though these were Hollywood films meant to profit by telling easily-digestible fables, they are based off the actions of real humans, and their moral is salient here: In America, greed is not punished; it is rewarded.
I was reminded of this irony again this week when I stumbled upon a book entitled Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas, which illustrates how corporations control society by funding the non-profits, even while they use those donations to compensate for predatory economic practices. (This book was one of my best reads of 2020.)
3: Limitless Humanity
“We are, in short, coming under pressure to understand ourselves as limited creatures in a limited world.”
“Every cultural and religious tradition that I know about, while fully acknowledging our animal nature, defines us specifically as humans — that is, as animals… capable of living, not only within natural limits, but also within cultural limits, self-imposed.”
“We must have limits or we will cease to exist as humans…”
Ibid.
Interestingly, science, often the focus of Berry’s criticism, is perhaps the strongest evidence supporting his point that humans are inherently limited, frail, flawed creatures. There is no better counterpoint to neo-Platonic rational positivism than modern neuroscience, which has discovered that humans “think” with their emotions (Johnathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind), and lose all semblance of rationality when dealing with money (Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational), to the increasingly meaningful influence of the body on the mind (rather than the Platonic elevation of “mind over matter”). Simply put, we are not the machines of economic output that American capitalism wants us to be. The lie of limitlessness is evident from the beginning!
This syncs up really nicely with Brueggemann, who says in The Prophetic Imagination, “the task of the prophetic imagination is to cut through the numbness, to penetrate the self-deception”. By using Hellish imagery in his discussion, Berry dramatizes the pitfalls of wishing for human limitlessness, cutting through the numbness of our typical social-media scroll.
4: Science without Wisdom
“…scientists and technicians have justified themselves by the proposition that they are the vanguard of progress, enlarging human knowledge and power. Thus have they romanticized both themselves and the predatory enterprises that they have served.”
Ibid.
What I think of the most here is the failure of Italian Futurism. This school of painters and sculptors worked in the decade leading up to World War I, and were characterized by their scientific positivism — they were living in the belle epoque, when railroads united Europe, every home could suddenly afford electricity and plumbing, and humanity was united in pursuing technical marvels like the Eiffel Tower and World’s Fairs. The Futurists thought they were living in a Utopia brought on by the wonders of modern technology, and it showed in their art: the outlines of their works are blurred and dynamic, the relentless pace of modern society frozen into an instant:
Of course, in 1914, Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated, setting the world ablaze. Newly invented Lewis machine guns and lever-action rifles enabled unparalleled killing speeds. Impossibly huge Minenwurfer-Gerat 42-ton guns pulverized armies from miles away. Airplanes, a civilian invention by the Wright brothers, were weaponized to rain death from above. And above all, scientists weaponized cyanide gas to indiscriminately blind combatants, killing them by filling their lungs with fluid. (If these images aren’t vivid enough, try Wilfred Owen’s immortal poem Dulce et Decorum Est — “If you could hear, with every jolt, the blood / come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs / obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues…”) The Italian Futurists had a bit of a rude awakening to the power of the modern technology they had hailed so gladly; there’s a reason the art style ends in 1914.
We would do well to learn from the Futurists’ failures. Science may have moved past howitzers and mustard gas, but humanity has not. We split the atom… to incinerate cities in an instant. Our chemistry knowledge grew… and we developed Agent Orange and napalm. Even now, technologies like robotics, genetics, and machine learning are racing ahead of humanity’s capacity to be moral animals. As Berry says, science has indeed failed to secure a safe and just world for humans and their fellow-creatures. We must turn to other resources.
5: Prophetic Imagination
“I am well aware what I risk in bringing this language of religion into what is normally a scientific discussion … I do so because I doubt that we can define our present problems adequately, let alone solve them, without some recourse to our cultural heritage. We are, after all, trying now to deal with the failure of scientists, technicians, and politicians to ‘think up’ a version of human continuance that is economically probable and ecologically responsible…”
“…our earthly and human limits, properly understood, are not confinements, but rather are inducements to formal elaboration and elegance, to fullness of relationship and meaning.”
“It is the artists, not the scientists, who have dealt unremittingly with the problem of limits.”
Ibid.
The resources Berry turns to, considering the (very real) failures of science, are arts, culture, and community. This calls to mind several deeply impactful works in my own life:
Community and Growth by Jean Vanier discusses the structure and intricacies of intentional community living, and the unexpected Life to be found within. The currency of this little-e economy is dailiness, not limitlessness, but it gives Life all the more for it.
Sabbath as Resistance by Walter Brueggemann resists the lure of endless acquisitive capitalism by the ritual of rest.
And most of all, I think of the most profound works of art I have enountered: Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia, a reminder of everyday beauty. TOOL’s Fear Inoculum, a clarion call to remember our limits and live well, within them. NK Jemisin’s How Long ‘Til Black Future Month?, which depicts compelling prophetic alternatives to a racially-divided future. The Shire in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien’s ode to an ecology cared for properly.
This is what it means to be prophetic: to recognize the flaws of the royal consciousness that mire us in predation and hopelessness, to offer imaginations of alternative realities that should exist, and to inspire the hope to live out those alternatives. That is the task of prophecy outlined by Walter Brueggemann, and that is the work done by Wendell Berry.