Wendell Berry's Life is a Miracle: Review, part 1

After a slow and interrupted start, I gobbled up Wendell Berry’s Life is a Miracle and found in it much of relevance to those who have chosen a life within (or at least within earshot) of the university. I originally picked the book up out of interest in how Berry—an acclaimed poet who is also an essayist, a fifth-generation farmer, a conservationist, and a Christian (I believe)—would approached the issue of ‘scientism’ in contemporary culture. I did not expect to be so directly addressed as a prospective member of the profession of English within university culture.

As a poet-farmer with an MA in English, Berry has participated at times in university culture but for the large part remains outside of it, ‘in but not of’ its world. It is precisely the framework of that world and its capitulation to the ideals of science-technology-industry that draws a lot of fire from Berry, often causing me to wince and mutter an appreciative and somewhat chastened ‘ouch!’ at thundering denunciations such as this:

“The cult of progress and the new, along with the pressure to originate, innovate, publish, and attract students, has made the English department as nervously susceptible to fashion as a flock of teenagers. The academic ‘profession’ of literature seems now to be merely tumbling from one critical or ideological fad to another, constantly ‘revolutionizing’ itself in pathetic imitation of the ‘revolutionary’ sciences, issuing all the while a series of passionless, jargonizing, ‘publishable’ but hardly readable articles and books, in which a pretentious obscurity and dullness masquerade as profundity” (69).

Lest you be tempted to dismiss Berry as an injured poet uninitiated in higher criticism, it is well worth noting that renowned literary critic and theorist, Peter Brooks, has also recently militated against the dominance of ‘ideological criticism’ and argued for the profession to return to poetics (although emphatically not to the liberal humanist assumptions that once drove the study of poetics).

To my mind, Berry’s most crucial insights are the way he links respect for mystery to the quest for knowledge and his insistence on the distinction between creatures and machines which in turn impacts not only economics, but ideas of community, ecosystems, and what and how it is that humans study in the university. I will treat these two in two separate posts.

Ignorance and Mystery
Berry in many ways regards ignorance as a fundamental part of the human condition, and not necessarily a negative part. Ignorance is not the mere absence of knowledge for Berry, but can also signal the human encounter with mystery. Some mysteries—and certainly the most important ones—cannot simply be reduced into problems to be solved as scientism demands. In contrast to scientism’s faith in the future solution of all problems and the limitlessness of human knowledge, Berry postulates that “The mystery surrounding our life probably is not significantly reducible” (11). As a result, the question of most importance is not a technological or educational question that pushes forward into new frontiers of knowledge, but “the question of how to act in ignorance” (11).

As someone writing up a PhD and worried about what I’ve left out, “how to act in ignorance” describes a daily dilemma. When faced with what I do not know, do I run to the library and spend days and days to try to gain exhaustive knowledge that, while very informative, probably will be left on the cutting room floor at the end of the writing process? How much time should I spend increasing my knowledge of _insert ancient or modern foreign language here_? How can I possibly publish my own opinions or claim a place in intellectual culture when what my PhD reveals to me is how little I know? Berry’s comments on knowledge and ignorance are worth repeating to myself on a daily basis:

“If there is an economy of the life of the mind—as I assume there has to be, for the life of the mind involves the distribution of limited amounts of time, energy, and attention—then that economy, like any other, subsists upon the making of critical choices. You can’t think, read, research, study, learn or teach everything. To choose one thing is to choose against many things. To know some things well is to know other things not so well, or not at all. Knowledge is always surrounded by ignorance” (59-60).

This statement may at first appear dismaying, but should not be. Ignorance is natural to us, and it signals not just our limitations, but also our interdependence and the grace of our encounter with mysteries both human and divine. To regard a limit to our natures solely as something bad is to not only to envy what we have not been given but also to desire to grasp at the place of a god, unlimited in knowledge and agency. To regard an encounter with mystery as a disappointment instead of a grace also shows the temptation of Adam and Eve to see ‘as God’ to be quite familiar to their sons and daughters. The question of writing up my PhD and preparing to be in some ways ‘an intellectual’ is not a question of knowing everything or even of knowing the ‘right’ things in order to pass muster, but is fundamentally a question of how to live in the state of ignorance, a question of ethics: “How does one act well—sensitively, compassionately, without irreparable damage—on the basis of partial knowledge” (149). And the crucial insight of Berry is that the answers we find to such questions are not limited to the concerns of the minutiae of our studies, but must address a context, a community, and a common purpose outside of those concerns. For me, then, how to write my PhD on the basis of partial knowledge is a question that includes but also goes beyond the details of late-medieval England, beyond the professionalism required of bona fide medievalists to include concerns larger than obscure understandings of literate history or my career.

“The question for art, then, is exactly the same as the question for science: Can it properly subordinate itself to concerns that are larger than its own?....It is bad for artists and scholars in the humanities to be working without a sense of obligation to the world beyond the artifacts of culture....to be operating strictly according to ‘professional standards’, without local affection or community responsibility, much less any vision of an eternal order to which we are all subordinate and under obligation” (88, 93).

Ignorance and the University
You may have already noticed the connection here between ignorance and the university. The partial nature of human knowledge is in many ways the founding condition for the university as a sort of ‘convocation’ in Berry’s terms, a coming together of those called to different specialties. A specialist chooses myopia, chooses to be ignorant of many things in order to see distinctly a few things up close. A convocation of the near-sighted needs to have a conversation which takes on the far-sightedness gained by questions from outsiders as well as by a sense of being subordinate to something larger than one’s own narrow concerns. To do so is not to eliminate ignorance; we don’t have a conversation to become specialists in more things. To do so is an appropriate act in response to the isolation and hubris that partial knowledge outside of community can occasion. To do so is to recognize our higher obligations outside of the concerns of our specialties, even beyond the range of our knowledge, and to work together to meet those obligations as best we can. As Berry puts it:

“[To become a conversation] the convocation would have to have a common purpose, a common standard, and a common language. It would have to understand itself as a part, for better or worse, of the surrounding community. For reasons both selfish and altruistic, it would have to make the good health of its community the primary purpose of all its work” (60).

Cross-/interdisciplinarity is clearly not enough, because its goals tend to be too narrowly focused on the narrow agenda of enhancing or spicing up one’s own work. Interdisciplinarity may stitch together various bits of knowledge into new forms and uses, but such translocations are not the main point of conversation within a university and tend to be done rather poorly. What is needed to inspire this conversation and determine part of its agenda is a larger vision of what academic work is for, and thinking hard about that larger vision in the context of a local community. The work of the academy has its own places after all, and there are not the virtual places in the pages of refereed journals or briefly popping into existence for a day conference, but real, solid, embodied places, each of which has a unique nature and provides a home to living creatures of all sorts. These are places and creatures to which we owe our stewardship as well as our loyalty as we make our home with them; in other words, we owe our love to them.