Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition

This book certainly creates controversy as the disparate ratings from one to five stars illustrates. If nothing else, that says something very good about it as a book. Indeed the ratings seem to be more along the lines of agreeing or disagreeing with Berry's ideas, rather than the usual standard I apply: how much of my short allotment of time and restricted stack of cash should be spent on a book. I think of most of my reviews along those lines, instead of engaging in a dialect with the author. Now, that being said, I really need to say I am deviating from that practice because although I think this is a five star should read (agree with Berry's updated C.P. Snow Two Cultures or not, spiritualism vs techno-engineeering or not) as a discussion centre, I think there are some writerly considerations: Berry is a poet, a much greater poet than many realize. Like other definers of an age - unacknowledged legislators true but subsequently recognized - his audience does not always realize the way his mind works words around. In his poetry a sort of slow dawning comes on the reader who does not force things along. Brisk walks in his woods will not do, instead the multiple shades of green, the distinct notes of each birdsong, the subtle shifts of a breeze on the face constitute an experience, a miracle of life. That goes on in this prose arguement as well. Reading him for a concise debate just will not work. I guess what I am saying is that the underlying premise is the undeniable point that for all of sciencethere is no such substance as life. But it's still there and that's the miracle and that's the poetry and the rational, logical, orderly prose of an essay does not manifest the miracle that is poetry. But I am thankful there is a Wendell Berry writing such books to make me think. Spend a few bucks, do some pondering, but in the end go to his poems.

I am writing in response to the reviews listed here on Life is a miracle. My objection to those who would dismiss Berry as a spiritualist, is that they didn't read his work carefully enough. Berry knows how to prove a point logically and with sufficient evidence. In Berry's case he achieves both the practical, intellectual language of a critical essay and the eye opening prose of cherished thought in literature. It is not a personal book on dreaming about how life should be but a rather original look at the reality and possible extent of collaboration and conversation between science and art. He never attacked science, he proposed limits on it, not for data, not for obtaining knowledge, but limits on how it can solve our human problems. He suggests we be responsible with our knowledge, not simply by eating up more knowledge to be merely original and meeting some professional standard, but by implementing our knowledge in a useful way, that helps in our communities. Why it would be hard to understand Berry's position seems impossibly self-centered given the fact we all now bear the cost of our industry.

I just returned from The Prairie Festival at the Land Institute in Salina,
Kansas where I heard Wendell Berry speak. At least two speakers at the
Festival said they had changed the course of their lives after reading words
written by Wendell Berry.

In this book, I found such life changing words in sections 6 - 8. I got
bogged down however in the first sections discussing E.O. Wilson's work
"Consilience". I slowly made my way through sections 1-4 and found much
to think about but decided to skip section 5. I was then delighted to find
the style of writing Berry has used in many of his other books (and in his
talk).

"We should give up the frontier and its boomer "ethics" of greed, cunning,
and violence, and, so near too late, accept settlement as our goal. Wes
Jackson says that our schools now have only one major,upward mobility,
and that we need to offer a major in homecoming. I agree, and would only
add that a part of the sense of 'homecoming' must be homeMAKING, for we
now must begin sometimes with remnants, sometimes with ruins."

"The time is past, if ever there was such a time, when you can just
discover knowledge and turn it loose into the world and assume that
you have done good.
This, to me, is a sign of the incompleteness of science in itself-which
is a sign of the need for a strenuous conversation among all the branches
of learning. This is a conversation that the universities have failed
to produce, and in fact have obstructed."

The use of the word "superstition" in the title is a mistake, and one that captures the problem with the whole argument. The book is meant as a rebuttal to E.O. Wilson's book Consilience, which argues for an expansion of the use of the scientific method into the realm of the Humanities.

A superstition is a belief that one holds without any supporting evidence or in spite of evidence to the contrary. Some examples would include believing that bad things are more likely to happen on Friday the 13th, that the Earth is 6000 years old, or that water can be located with a bent twig. The human mind is so susceptible to superstition that people had to devise a method of constantly checking their beliefs against observations. That's science -- the thing that rescues you from superstition.

I have to believe that anyone who thought seriously about the scientific method would be OK with it. After all it's just away of keeping oneself honest. In this book Wendell Berry seems particularly angry about something called "scientism," a silly word meant to criticize those who place undue faith in the scientific method. Berry's argument is that there are aspects of human existence that are outside the realm of science, and to think otherwise is to engage in superstition. But he's wrong. Science is a tool for figuring out how things work, and people use it because it has time and again proven successful in solving mysteries that seemed impenetrable, even deeply spiritual. In other words people use science to solve problems because centuries of evidence have shown it to be the best way to solve problems. One might as well use the word "carpentism" to describe the belief that patios can be made out of wood and nails.

Beyond carping about what can be studied, Berry really wants to limit the things that should be studied. I have to say I find this kind of creepy. He talks a lot about his sense of wonder at the beauty of his Kentucky farm, but what about people who derive a sense of wonder from the mathematical structure of music or the brain circuitry that gives rise to religious experience? I can think of no objective reason why farms are more beautiful than equations, or poetry more beautiful than synapses. And suppose our knowledge of synapses could improve people's lives. Suppose we could use a rigorous understanding of the biological basis of thoughts and emotions to treat schizophrenia (one of the world's leading causes of human misery). I know of no other way to investigate the way the brain works, and no reason why such suffering is not worth alleviating.

The book also complains a great deal about the abuses of science by politicians and corporations. As several other reviewers have pointed out, his legitimate beef here is with the government, not science. Governments were abusing their subjects long before there was any such thing as science, and they will continue to do so as long as their corruption is unchecked. The U.S. is (for the moment) a democracy that is responsive to the will of the people, and the laws regulating industry can be changed far more easily than the laws of physics.

Life is a Miracle is one beautiful essay on the folly and pretensions of scientism. If this is your kind of book, you'll get a good laugh reading the venomous review (number 17) by a Dr. Strickland. He calls himself "davexray", so we know how clever he is, but apparently this defender of the scientific method isn't any kind of scientist at all, but merely the practitioner of an interpretive skill, namely, radiology. I hope that you'll see in this review, too, confirmation of Berry's point that such inept thinkers dressed in lab coats are a real threat to our freedom.

You may note that this spokesman for science is a little light on his logic. In the third paragraph, Dr. Strickland, confounding contradiction with contrariety, suggests that for Berry to argue that the Industrial Revolution initiated rampant destruction of the environment and communities, Berry would have to argue that there was no exploitation, suffering, or early death--absolutely none, in fact--in earlier times.

Berry wishes to point out that many of the assertions made in the name of science are not scientific at all, but metaphysical propositions stemming from philosophical materialism and that, furthermore, scientism asserts its right to decide all truth not, as Dr. Strickland would have it, based upon evidence, but as a matter of faith. I would highly recommend reading also "Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing," to get a feel for just how vicious people like Dr. Strickland and other intellectual pygmies get when their pretentious nonsense is exposed to critical examination by great thinkers.