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- Hacker News
- Adjacent to the noble savage myth, the good ol' days illusion meets the grass is greener on the other side. Just 4 generations ago, when people worked a low tech, hand-to-mouth agrarian existence without powered equipment, proper nutrition, or antibiotics, they were at constant risk of starvation from a single low yield harvest. It's a very hard life.
- rip, sad day for my homestate, he's a giant here. and for me too, as he's one of those rabbit hole authors, revealing a Truth (capital T).
berry is in the same lineage as somebody like muir, and it really pains me to say, but i really wonder how relevant those individualist back to nature (and i dont say this necessarily dismissively, just dont know how to put it) imperatives really are. the world is technological, the necessities of life are commoditized, production and markets are global. how can there be any turning away from it, apart from it being a fetishistic practice, or just eccentric affectation. just think, portable nuclear reactors next to every data center soon. the march goes on.
i had similar feeling with kaczinsky, who had similar views on sanctity of nature and impact of modernity, in a way the diagnosis is incredibly correct, but the regimen ~ a return to a more anarchic, hyperlocal, individualistic relation with it ~ completely misplaced.
the terroir, does it even exist, has it ever even existed in america?
by trgn - I've been carrying one of his poems around in my pocket recently. I'll leave it here for y'all. Maybe it'll find someone else as it found me when I needed it most:
> To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
> To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
> and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
> and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
by jondlm - Wendell Berry is practically unknown in the UK, and I tried to introduce his work to a book group a couple of years ago. Unfortunately due to the nature of the book group, we had new members who hadn't read it and another who seemed more interested reading George Monbiot than Wendell Berry (a shame since Monbiot is overexposed and has little personal experience of working the land).
Quote from Wendell Berry on big business and big government: 'The corporate mind at work overthrows all the virtues of the personal mind, or it throws them out of account. The corporate mind knows no affection, no desire that is not greedy, no local or personal loyalty, no sympathy or reverence or gratitude, no temperance or thrift or self-restraint. It does not observe the first responsibility of intelligence, which is to know when you don't know or when you are being unintelligent. Try to imagine an official standing up in the high councils of a global corporation or a great public institution to say "We have grown too big," or "We now have more power or money than we can responsibly use," . . . -- and you will see what I mean. . . .'
by nephihaha - I traveled to the Wendell Berry Center numerous times over the last few years - he and his family were a wonderful boon on the local community there.
One of my favorite quotes of his, from What Are People For?
“Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy. It is impossible not to notice how little the proponents of the ideal of competition have to say about honesty, which is the fundamental economic virtue, and how very little they have to say about community, compassion, and mutual help.”
by Guthwine - I was assigned to read some of his work in high school. Among (many) other things, he wrote a fair amount of criticism of technology and computers.
https://classes.matthewjbrown.net/teaching-files/philtech/be...
I was always struck that one of the letters in opposition to Berry's view was written by Nathaniel Borenstein, the co-inventor of MIME.
It was an odd experience for me because it was coming from such a different worldview that I generally felt I couldn't relate to what Berry was saying at all. (I could contrast that with some of Cliff Stoll's writings about his skepticism of computers, which are always coming from a culturally familiar place and are at least readily comprehensible for me.)
I also have a book Berry wrote as a rejoinder to E. O. Wilson's Consilience (called Life is a Miracle). I put the two next to each other on my bookshelf!
by schoen - I read The World-Ending Fire (Wendell Berry), Hackers (Steven Levy), and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert Pirsig) around the same time. I was struck by how similar Berry, Pirsig, and the early MIT hackers thought about Quality work. I gave a talk about it at an images & algorithms class I took in undergrad. It's reassuring to see Wendell Berry was an influential figure to many others in this space. RIP.
- He was a friend of many people in my community. I met him a few times at public lectures. But his way of thinking has had a profound impact on my life.
I rejected his rejection of technology. I think he didn't appreciate the power of information technology to support exactly the dreams he held. If people can understand each other, if they can learn from the whole world how to care for their bit of earth, surely that's a good thing? Because he rejected technology he never learned of free, open source, culture. He didn't appreciate that there is another path to liberation of humans from the machines that dominate us—that we embed them in our communities, bend them to our will, and reject exploitation. There's still hope...
I however am permanently touched by his perspective on the land as our foundation.
I was so inspired that I helped start a farm on the Kentucky River. It's a journey, but we are on our way to implement a little reflection of his vision near where he dreamed us these beautiful dreams of past and future.
by inciampati