Posts in: Wendell Berry

I won’t pretend that I have a sophisticated understanding of AI or a nuanced idea of where and how it can be safely used. I do, however, have some principles that will guide my own personal approach to the technology. And, unsurprisingly, they can be found in a passage from Wendell Berry (from Life is a Miracle):

And so I would like to be as plain as possible. What I am against–and without a minute’s hesitation or apology–is our slovenly willingness to allow machines and the idea of the machine to prescribe the terms and conditions of the lives of creatures, which we have allowed increasingly for the last two centuries, and are still allowing, at an incalculable cost to other creatures and to ourselves. If we state the problem that way, then we can see that the way to correct our error, and so deliver ourselves from our own destructiveness, is to quit using our technological capability as the reference point and standard of our economic life. We will instead have to measure our economy by the health of the ecosystems and human communities where we do our work.

It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.

Creatures before machines. That’s the crux of it for me. Machines are useful tools, but the health of creatures is far, far more important. We are in the age of unconstrained machines and we creatures are suffering for it.

And in this age of unconstrained machines, the old boundary markers are unimportant. What matters now is not whether you are liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, Christian or Muslim or Buddhist or atheist or pagan. What matters now is this: are you on the side of life or are you a servant of machines? As a leftist pagan, I find more in common with some traditionalist conservatives than I do with mainstream liberals–despite having more agreement with them on the traditional political topics. Many mainstream liberals seem perfectly content to serve the machines and nod sedately along with whatever the “realist” technocrats say is necessary.

Creatures before machines.

Creatures before machines.

Creatures before machines.

I was glad to read this bit from Bill McKibben in his tribute to Wendell Berry:

I’m lucky that I was reading Ed Abbey at the same charged moment, because that helped me love the wild as fully as the pastoral, and the irreverent as fully as the good.

I’ve often considered the same contrast, but with Berry and Robinson Jeffers. Berry a poet of the domestic; marriage and community are some of his most common themes. Jeffers is a poet of the wild; hawks and granite and the roar of the Pacific are everywhere in his work.

Having read quite a bit of both of them, I cannot imagine them anywhere other than where they are. Wendell Berry writing and working his farm, considering the soil along the Kentucky River. Jeffers looking out over the Pacific as it washes over the granite cliffs. They are the two most “placed” writers I’ve ever encountered. Some day when I have more time, I’d like to write more about this, with specific examples from their work.

Prayer after Eating
Wendell Berry

I have taken in the light
that quickened eye and leaf.
May my brain be bright with praise
of what I eat, in the brief blaze
of motion and of thought.
May I be worthy of my meat.

[published in The Country of Marriage]

At the moment, my plan is to continue reading Wendell Berry’s fiction until I’ve read it all. Using Tom Murphy’s site as my source (and excluding some hard-to-find small press titles), here’s how it stands:

  • ✔ Nathan Coulter
  • A Place on Earth
  • ✔ The Memory of Old Jack
  • The Wild Birds
  • ✔ Remembering
  • Fidelity
  • Watch With Me
  • A World Lost
  • ✔ Jayber Crow
  • ✔ Hannah Coulter
  • That Distant Land
  • Andy Catlett: Early Travels
  • Whitefoot: A Story from the Center of the World
  • A Place in Time
  • The Art of Loading Brush
  • How It Went

Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter (p158):

Sometimes, a haunted old woman, I wander about in this house that Nathan and I renewed, that is now aged and worn by our life in it. How many steps, wearing the thresholds? I look at it all again. Sometimes it fills to the brim with sorrow, which signifies the joy that has been here, and the love. It is entirely a gift.

I’ve heard it said that grief is the price of love, and that seems true to me. Love is a great risk; only the indifferent are safe. But what good is such safety?

Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter:

The living can’t quit living because the world has turned terrible and people they love and need are killed. They can’t because they don’t. The light that shines in darkness and never goes out calls them on into life. It calls them back again into the great room [of love]. It calls them into their bodies and into the world, into whatever the world will require. It calls them into work and pleasure, goodness and beauty, and the company of other loved ones.

… No big happiness came to me yet, but little happinesses did come, and they came from ordinary pleasures in ordinary things: the baby, sunlight, breezes, animals and birds, daily work, rest when I was tired, food, strands of fog in the hollows early in the morning, butterflies, flowers. The flowers didn’t have to be dahlias and roses either, but just the weeds blooming in the fields, the daisies and the yarrow. I began to trust the world again, not to give me what I wanted, for I saw that it could not be trusted to do that, but to give unforeseen goods and pleasures that I had not thought to want.

Finished reading Nathan Coulter by Wendell Berry. 📚 This was his first novel but my edition is the revised 1985 paperback. He edited it so that it would fit in what would become the overarching history of the Port William membership. I think I’ll read Hannah Coulter next.