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June 2000

Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition By Wendell Berry Counterpoint Click on the title to buy the book

My wife was complaining the other night about some dogs a mile or so down our lonely road. They chase her every time she rides by on her bike, she said; they scared her. "Oh bosh," I replied, "I've gone by them a thousand times and nothing's ever happened." Karmic (and at only 6 stitches almost comic) payback came to me on my morning run just eight hours later.

Hubris usually has a longer incubation period---he who the gods would destroy they first give 2,000 points on the NASDAQ---but as our world speeds up, the cycle of arrogance and downfall seems to be accelerating too. Which is why it's hard to imagine that the millennium has seen a more important book than this slim volume from our finest essayist.

Wendell Berry holds that title precisely because he does not spend most of his time essaying. For four decades he has farmed a small patch of Kentucky, restoring a corner of degraded land to health by concentrating on the small, the particular. In his poems and novels, as well as his collections of essays, he has preached the same gospel: We were made to care for our homes and our neighbors; our satisfaction lies in commitment to the same. He's changed many lives, mine included, but of course he has been swimming upstream against the culture, and the dams just grow taller. Those same four decades have seen the near-destruction of rural economies based on small farming. Our emotional lives have grown ever more self-centered and careless---for proof, one need look only at the statistics on the lives of children, or on the size of our cars and houses, or at the feverish way we spend our money. (Careful societies don't have "negative savings rates.")

At the same time, our view of the future grows ever more grandiose and gaudy. Consider the millennial issues of any magazine you want, for they spoke with a common voice: Whatever temporary problems still plague us, science stands on the verge of solving them, with an explosion of knowledge and technology so vast it will make our progress to date seem like a firecracker in the shadow of Nagasaki. Since the first of the year we've finished decoding the human genome---an achievement, more than any other, that should serve to demarcate the new epoch.

And so it is toward science and technology that Berry directs this splendid denunciation---in particular towards E.O. Wilson and his bestselling book, Consilience. It seems an odd choice of targets, for there are few titans of science who at first glance resemble Berry more than the great Harvard biologist. They are both courtly Southerners, passionate about the natural world (Wilson's greatest interest is ants), and devoted conservationists. Wilson is among the relatively small group of academic biologists who have not spent the last two decades turning their labs into start-up companies, choosing instead to work for biodiversity protection, and to promote the notion of "biophilia," that humans have evolved "to draw deep satisfaction" from the creatures and places around them. He is, in short, deservedly regarded as an environmental champion. Still, the sweep of Consilience invites a spirited response, for Wilson offered nothing less than a perfect distillation of the scientific faith: the idea that before too long our understanding of

chemistry and biology---and ultimately physics---will have grown so complete that it will take under its wing the arts, religion, human nature, indeed everything. In such a worldview, the existence of God becomes "a problem in astrophysics," and "people, after all, are just extremely complicated machines." In a recent and revealing interview in Salon, he explained his position as a secular humanist, and his hope that all religions would evolve into some sort of humanist creed.

Berry offers a rich variety of responses, never intimidated by the scientific prowess of his rival. He makes hash of Wilson's claims about the humanities and faith, arguing that an inescapable and magnificent cloud of mystery surrounds our lives. You can learn all you want about genes, and the mind, will remain a combination of "brain and body and world and local dwelling place and community in history." (And history, he continues, in turn is "the whole heritage of culture, language, memory, tools, and skills.") Each will judge the issue for himself, but to my mind Berry more than delivers on his subtitle: He has routed the "modern superstition" of reductionism.

At some earlier moment in time, that might have been the end of it---an intellectual or aesthetic debate. But now, of course, it is a question with the highest practical stakes. Even if we can't ultimately reduce the world to a series of scientific principles, proceeding as if we could, may yield "progress" but it also may get us in deep, perhaps ultimate, trouble. To understand its urgency, Berry's book needs to be read in conjunction with a shorter essay, Bill Joy's "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us," which was published in the April issue of Wired magazine and can still be read on the Wired web site.

Joy resembles Berry in none of the superficial ways that Wilson does. A child of the suburbs, he grew up interested in science fiction, math, and computers. He has spent his career designing software for Sun Microsystems, where he is chief scientist, one of the wealthy kings of abstraction. And yet he has somehow preserved the moral sense necessary to ask important questions about what he and other technologists are busy doing. About whether the future they are building is a future we want.

In particular, Joy offers a stomach-turning warning about the rise of genetic engineering, closely followed by robotics, and by nanotechnology (the manipulation of matter at the atomic level to build molecule-sized "assemblers" that could cure cancer or clean up the environment.) What scares Joy, and should scare all of us, is that these technologies do not require exotic materials---they are "knowledge based"---and that they are self-replicating. That is, once you have set them off, robots are capable of producing new, more sophisticated robots; genetically manipulated plants can cross DNA with wild species; and nanotechnology could produce, say, "tough, omnivorous bacteria that could spread like blowing pollen, replicate swiftly, and reduce the biosphere to dust in a matter of days." (This is apparently known among nanotechnology aficionados as the Œgray goo' problem, since that is what the world might be reduced to.) In short, Joy kicks off a new wave of environmentalism, though he does not use the word.

Nanotechnologists and genetic engineers offer the two lines of defense that always mark these debates: We have safeguards in place, and it's inevitable anyway.

History should have taught us enough by now about the first assurance. Genes are already crossing in the field, despite Monsanto's pledge that they would not. Joy quotes supporters of these new technologies as estimating that they present perhaps a 50 percent chance of our species' extinction. As he writes (with a humility that will appeal to anyone who has had to deal with the buggy software his ilk produce), "my personal experience suggests we tend to overestimate our design abilities." Or, as Berry puts it, in the process that carries knowledge from the lab to the market, "there is not enough fear."

The second question, inevitability, may well turn out to be the crux of the practical argument. It's not that most people demand robotics or nanotechnology---most people don't want genetically engineered corn chips. As Berry writes, it might well have been sound policy to Œstay out of the nuclei' as we contemplated the future of biology. Certainly a good many people would have chosen thus, "but that was a choice they did not have. When a few scientists decided to go in, they decided for everybody Š Adam was the first, but not the last, to choose for the whole human race."

Is it possible to imagine some scheme that could restrain science? Joy, to his immense credit, tries. "The only realistic alternative I see is relinquishment," he writes. "To limit development of the technologies that are too dangerous, by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge." He offers the example of our ability to back down from the nuclear cliff as a hopeful precedent, and indeed it is---though as Joy points out it will be endlessly harder to verify controls on what is essentially commercial technology. This work must be at the forefront of any activist agenda in the next few years.

But if we are ever even to attempt such a relinquishment, we need to heed the deeper message that Berry provides---the idea that we are not machines but people, and that that carries profound meaning. Joy quotes a friend of his, the avant-garde computer scientist Danny Hillis, who explains why the new technologies don't scare him: "I'm as fond of my body as anyone, but if I can be 200 with a body of silicon, I'll take it." Berry's book, indeed his life's work, attempts to show why such a dream, which clearly underlies our willingness to pursue dangerous paths, is pathetic folly:

"No individual life is an end in itself," he writes. "One can live fully only by participating fully in the succession of the generations, in death as well as in life. Š We can live fully only by making ourselves as answerable to the claims of eternity as to those of time."

That idea, once aesthetic and "spiritual," is now the most practical question we face, and it is the reason why Life is a Miracle is an indispensable handbook for the new age into which we now stumble.