BY
Wendell Berry has a massively ambitious plan to save the earth with humility and simple living. Photo: Guy Mendes.
I’m pretty sure that in his now-famous press briefing of Feb.
12, 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wasn’t trying to write poetry in
the vein of William Carlos Williams. Yet, how beautifully he
captured the conundrum at the center of all human attempts to make sense of
reality, helpfully set to verse by Slate:
The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.
Surely, in the history of literature, never have words more
filled with humble awe at the limits of human knowing issued from the lips of
an admitted torturer. It’s a great irony, if you think about it in a certain
way.
Tortured
logic
So that’s why I like to imagine that, two years later, another
poet of humility, who is also an avid student of irony, might have been
inspired by the words of the Great Waterboarder.
“Except to the arrogantly ignorant, ignorance is not a simple
subject,” agrarian activist Wendell Berry wrote in a 2004 essay called “The Way
of Ignorance” (available in a 2006 collection, The Way
of Ignorance: And Other Essays).
If Rumsfeld is a man who tormented people and words alike, Berry
is a man who would set them both free.
The Way of Ignorance by Wendell Berry, Counterpoint, 2006, 192 pp, paperback, $15.95.
Berry, who brings a crafted prose style to essays on farming,
religion, politics and the environment, has a way of making simple subjects
fascinating and complex subjects understandable. In this essay, for example, he
takes on no less a target than the practice of science, whose prestige and
influence over industrial society are indisputable.
With peak oil threatening to take down the global economy and
climate change threatening the future of the human species, Berry’s remarks are
more relevant today than ever before. Science helped cause these problems in
the first place. Now, science helps us to understand each problem, yet, sound science is under constant political attack.
If we can only cut through the politics and get back to the science, can it
give us the solutions, if any exist?
Blinded
me with science
It turns out that science has its own problems.
Berry is all for more science as long as he can frame it with
intuition and traditional wisdom that he believes to be greater than science.
Otherwise, science becomes just another form of “willful ignorance that refuses
to honor as knowledge anything not subject to empirical proof…materialist
ignorance.”
“This ignorance rejects
useful knowledge such as traditions of imagination and religion, and so it
comes across as narrow-mindedness. We have the materialist culture that
afflicts us now because a world exclusively material is the kind of world most
readily used and abused by the kind of mind the materialists think they have.
To this kind of mind, there is not longer a legitimate wonder. Wonder has been
replaced by a research agenda, which is still a world away from demonstrating
the impropriety of wonder.”
To this empirical ignorance, Berry joins moral ignorance, “the
invariable excuse of which is objectivity,” that refuses to make value
judgments, as well as the ignorance of false confidence, which seems to be the
attitude that has created a society of fools who rush in where angels fear to
tread, whether with wars of choice or careless use of fossil fuels, both so beloved
by Rumsfeld and his ilk.
Skeptical of large-scale solutions (Berry quotes a sarcastic Yeats: “Hurrah for revolution and more cannon
shot! / A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot”), Berry’s approach is
not just the opposite of Rumsfeld’s imperial overreach. Berry’s is also not the
angle you’d want to make a bundle saving the world by selling a billion
electric cars or putting up a million wind turbines to power them in a clean
energy revolution.
“There is, as maybe we
all have noticed, a conspicuous shortage of large-scale corrections for
problems that have large-scale causes. Our damages to watersheds and ecosystems
will have to be corrected one farm, one acre at a time. The aftermath of a
bombing has to be dealt with one corpse, one wound at a time…Arrogance cannot
be cured by greater arrogance, or ignorance by greater ignorance.”
As he rejects heroic industrial interventions as arrogance,
Berry finds that we are left only with “a proper humility” that he admits even
he finds to be “laughable.” How could small, local actions ever be big enough
or fast enough to make a difference against the world’s biggest problems?
Seeking big solutions to big problems, the eco-conscious search
for “robust” and “scalable” solutions to climate change and peak oil employing
our highest of high tech: nuclear fusion, algae fuel, thin-film solar panels,
even geoengineering to
remake the climate that we’re now destroying. Fighting fire with fire.
Ignorance
is bliss
It may be in human nature to try to help, especially if there’s
money to be made, Berry thinks. “To help, or to try to help, requires only
knowledge; one needs to know promising remedies and how to apply them. But to
do no harm involves a whole culture, and a culture very different from
industrialism. It involves, at the minimum, compassion and humility and
caution.”
That may sound like too-little-too-late to those of us who’d
like to see industrial society mobilized on a “war footing” to get off of
fossil fuels, as green activists and peak oilers have called for in recent
years. I’ve said this myself in countless conversations.
But now I’m starting to wonder if perhaps Berry has a point.
Maybe we citizens of industrial nations should give up trying to help our world
so much and instead learn to be satisfied with ceasing to cause so much harm.
Maybe it’s less about Apollo Projects, cool new
clean energy sources, hot new systems to increase efficiency or brave new ways
to use nanotechnology than about living with less stuff and enjoying life more.
If we decide to follow the path of acting locally and in harmony
with the natural and cultural ecosystem where each of us find ourselves, then
we will be following what Berry calls, after TS Eliot,
“the way of ignorance.”
Zen teachers call it “beginner’s mind,” but really it’s just the
path recommended by all great spiritual teachers, a way of faith with an active
humility. Berry thinks it could be just what we need to set us free from
bondage to the arrogance of the corporate mind that would process all nature
into products or waste products and reduce all people to mere workers or
consumers.
In that case, humility and living locally would become weapons
of mass destruction — weapons to destroy mass thinking — that would be sure to
evade Rummy’s best efforts to hunt them down.
— Erik Curren, Transition Voice
Please go here for the original article: http://transitionvoice.com/2011/09/wendell-berrys-weapons-of-mass-destruction/
