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.
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.
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!
> “If you could do it, I suppose, it would be a good idea to live your life in a straight line - starting, say, in the Dark Wood of Error, and proceeding by logical steps through Hell and Purgatory and into Heaven. Or you could take the King's Highway past the appropriately named dangers, toils, and snares, and finally cross the River of Death and enter the Celestial City. But that is not the way I have done it, so far. I am a pilgrim, but my pilgrimage has been wandering and unmarked. Often what has looked like a straight line to me has been a circling or a doubling back. I have been in the Dark Wood of Error any number of times. I have known something of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, but not always in that order. The names of many snares and dangers have been made known to me, but I have seen them only in looking back. Often I have not known where I was going until I was already there. I have had my share of desires and goals, but my life has come to me or I have gone to it mainly by way of mistakes and surprises. Often I have received better than I deserved. Often my fairest hopes have rested on bad mistakes. I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led - make of that what you will.”
I learned of Berry just this last year. His book 'The Unsettling of America' really had an impact on me. He was a leader who lived what he preached. RIP.
This is really sad to see. I didn't agree with him on much but his viewpoints and arguments definitely made me consider my assumptions about technology. It helped me reconsider whether it was always good for us as humans to make things easier and more convenient via technology. He helped me realize that sometimes to be human is to go through the process to see the fruit of your labor.
I have only read a handful of Berry's books, mostly novels and short story collections, but several of them are among of my all-time favorites: thoughtful, moving, humane, and surprisingly funny. They're especially enjoyable when read aloud.
Berry was one of the few celebrities I hoped to one day meet in person.
Why would I care about some anti-tech person? As someone who grew up in a rural area, with family that ran a hobby farm, descended from sharecroppers, there's nothing to romanticize.
Edit: but really, I can't see any possible reason to read this person's writing over, say, something about Norman Borlaug. Never heard of this person before now, HN never contextualizes obits, didn't come here just to fight.
Yes, like every homesteader, Berry is a bit of a LARPer. Even his sparse lifestyle relies on a lot of products and services developed in technological society. He's still a good read though.
I'm actually with you. Having read some of Wendell Berry's work, he comes across to me as an impractical dreamer. Not only do his ideals not scale to support humanity, but he refuses to acknowledge the external impact of his decisions.
Henry David Thoreau's writings about self-reliance are harder to tolerate once you learn that he was supported by family. Yes he lived in the woods, but his mother literally brought him food. In the same vein, Wendell Berry's writings about technology are harder to tolerate once you learn that he made his wife type up his manuscripts for him to be sent on to publishers.
It's worth having deep conversations about the impact and value of technology in modern society. It's also hard to take a sermon seriously when it's being preached by a hypocritical curmudgeon.
> It's worth having deep conversations about the impact and value of technology in modern society. It's also hard to take a sermon seriously when it's being preached by a hypocritical curmudgeon.
Yes! Making informed decisions about technology is vital, but when his writings appear to boil down to "technology bad, old things good", well, why bother to even engage when there are better thinkers out there?
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.
I think he romanticized the old ways of farming, but I think the overall point was to question what was good about the past and question the line we are fed that all technology is for the general good of all people.
I think it is possible to say that subsistence farming leading to disease and starvation is bad, and a gigantic corporate oligopoly run monoculture farm is also bad. One of his biggest points is really that life should be human scale and speed with human relationships as a priority, the idealized farm was just a way to show what that life looked like in the past.
This is a misrepresentation of Berry's thought. Like many traditional Amish or Mennonite communities, he wasn't at all adverse to mechanized agriculture, he simply believed that technology be used considerately, and that people seeing agriculture up close made for a rooting in local community that he believed beneficial. Even Berry's critics (and he had his share, me included) did not dismiss his ideas so readily as your post.
I grew up in rural Texas, descended from sharecroppers. He's romanticizing a kind of farming that hasn't existed in the US in 70+ years, one that would make it impossible to feed the country.
Not only that, but I know from my parents generation that small hold farm work is brutal an naturally leads to certain dynamics that contemporary Americans would find quite objectionable. When a bad harvest could starve your family directions are never polite requests and norms are very strictly enforced.
Surely there is an agreeable third option between life-and-death subsistence farming and spiritually/ecologically/gustatorily desolate conglomerate monocrop agriculture.
My grandfather nearly starved to death on his parent's farm a couple of times during the Dustbowl and he contracted a disease while in an immunocompromised state due to malnutrition that left its mark throughout his bones. Later, he helped his mother buy a combination general store and house to support herself.
>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.
That's why we like it. The people in chairs in Wall-e don't.
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. . . .'
Perhaps Tir by Carwyn Graves would engage the interest of the Monbiot generation and lead them into a slightly different framing (and introduce some Welsh)?
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.
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.
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!
"So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute"
RIP.
Do yourself a favor and read Jayber Crow -- One of my all time favorite books and really the book that got me back into fiction after a long time away
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1582431604?lv=shuf&channelId=500&p...
> “If you could do it, I suppose, it would be a good idea to live your life in a straight line - starting, say, in the Dark Wood of Error, and proceeding by logical steps through Hell and Purgatory and into Heaven. Or you could take the King's Highway past the appropriately named dangers, toils, and snares, and finally cross the River of Death and enter the Celestial City. But that is not the way I have done it, so far. I am a pilgrim, but my pilgrimage has been wandering and unmarked. Often what has looked like a straight line to me has been a circling or a doubling back. I have been in the Dark Wood of Error any number of times. I have known something of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, but not always in that order. The names of many snares and dangers have been made known to me, but I have seen them only in looking back. Often I have not known where I was going until I was already there. I have had my share of desires and goals, but my life has come to me or I have gone to it mainly by way of mistakes and surprises. Often I have received better than I deserved. Often my fairest hopes have rested on bad mistakes. I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led - make of that what you will.”
Totally agreed. My copy has been through the ringer.
I learned of Berry just this last year. His book 'The Unsettling of America' really had an impact on me. He was a leader who lived what he preached. RIP.
This is really sad to see. I didn't agree with him on much but his viewpoints and arguments definitely made me consider my assumptions about technology. It helped me reconsider whether it was always good for us as humans to make things easier and more convenient via technology. He helped me realize that sometimes to be human is to go through the process to see the fruit of your labor.
I have only read a handful of Berry's books, mostly novels and short story collections, but several of them are among of my all-time favorites: thoughtful, moving, humane, and surprisingly funny. They're especially enjoyable when read aloud.
Berry was one of the few celebrities I hoped to one day meet in person.
Why would I care about some anti-tech person? As someone who grew up in a rural area, with family that ran a hobby farm, descended from sharecroppers, there's nothing to romanticize.
Edit: but really, I can't see any possible reason to read this person's writing over, say, something about Norman Borlaug. Never heard of this person before now, HN never contextualizes obits, didn't come here just to fight.
Yes, like every homesteader, Berry is a bit of a LARPer. Even his sparse lifestyle relies on a lot of products and services developed in technological society. He's still a good read though.
"Yet you participate in society"
I hate people, but I love gatherings. Ironic, isn't it?
I'm actually with you. Having read some of Wendell Berry's work, he comes across to me as an impractical dreamer. Not only do his ideals not scale to support humanity, but he refuses to acknowledge the external impact of his decisions.
Henry David Thoreau's writings about self-reliance are harder to tolerate once you learn that he was supported by family. Yes he lived in the woods, but his mother literally brought him food. In the same vein, Wendell Berry's writings about technology are harder to tolerate once you learn that he made his wife type up his manuscripts for him to be sent on to publishers.
It's worth having deep conversations about the impact and value of technology in modern society. It's also hard to take a sermon seriously when it's being preached by a hypocritical curmudgeon.
> It's worth having deep conversations about the impact and value of technology in modern society. It's also hard to take a sermon seriously when it's being preached by a hypocritical curmudgeon.
Yes! Making informed decisions about technology is vital, but when his writings appear to boil down to "technology bad, old things good", well, why bother to even engage when there are better thinkers out there?
Over on Substack it feels like the whole platform is in mourning and the tributes are beautiful. RIP.
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.
I think he romanticized the old ways of farming, but I think the overall point was to question what was good about the past and question the line we are fed that all technology is for the general good of all people.
I think it is possible to say that subsistence farming leading to disease and starvation is bad, and a gigantic corporate oligopoly run monoculture farm is also bad. One of his biggest points is really that life should be human scale and speed with human relationships as a priority, the idealized farm was just a way to show what that life looked like in the past.
This is a misrepresentation of Berry's thought. Like many traditional Amish or Mennonite communities, he wasn't at all adverse to mechanized agriculture, he simply believed that technology be used considerately, and that people seeing agriculture up close made for a rooting in local community that he believed beneficial. Even Berry's critics (and he had his share, me included) did not dismiss his ideas so readily as your post.
I grew up in rural Texas, descended from sharecroppers. He's romanticizing a kind of farming that hasn't existed in the US in 70+ years, one that would make it impossible to feed the country.
Not only that, but I know from my parents generation that small hold farm work is brutal an naturally leads to certain dynamics that contemporary Americans would find quite objectionable. When a bad harvest could starve your family directions are never polite requests and norms are very strictly enforced.
Surely there is an agreeable third option between life-and-death subsistence farming and spiritually/ecologically/gustatorily desolate conglomerate monocrop agriculture.
Food literally grows on trees.
Reading McCullough bio of Truman and Caro bio of LBJ lead me to the same conclusion. It was brutal, and most who saw any means of escape seized it
I’m compelled by the romantic nostalgia, but I know I personally couldn’t cut the mustard
My grandfather nearly starved to death on his parent's farm a couple of times during the Dustbowl and he contracted a disease while in an immunocompromised state due to malnutrition that left its mark throughout his bones. Later, he helped his mother buy a combination general store and house to support herself.
>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.
That's why we like it. The people in chairs in Wall-e don't.
https://jonnegroni.com/2015/04/15/the-humans-of-wall-e-were-...
I was shocked to notice the date in the URL. I think I understand where the LLMs are getting it from now
Easy to say when you never had to live that life.
https://archive.today/rAr8f
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendell_Berry
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. . . .'
Perhaps Tir by Carwyn Graves would engage the interest of the Monbiot generation and lead them into a slightly different framing (and introduce some Welsh)?
(Your quote reminded me of Thomas Hobbes)
this one hit me hard! why do i work in technology
Quiet desperation?