Steve’s blog brings together three people with, among other things in common, keen interest in their surroundings. Each of us might agree that keen interest is warranted and required by our home places if they are to be even partially understood.
Toward this understanding we bring our three perspectives: We have in Steve an experienced and accomplished writer, and a capable amateur scientist; in Reid an accomplished scientist and capable writer; and in Matt an aspiring writer and scientist of the least possible credential (B.A., Sociology).
I believe each of us belongs to other, separate groups of friends and colleagues with whom we speculate and argue on the Nature of Things. To date, we three have done little of that here, and maybe that’s a good thing.
But never one to resist spoiling a good thing, I’d like to ask Reid and Steve to comment, as they are able and so moved, on the following passage from Wendell Berry’s book-length essay, Life is A Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000).
I’ve just finished this book, and to do it a terrible injustice, can sum it up as an argument against a scientific march toward universal reductionism to the exclusion of universal mystery. At last, it proposes a possible model whereby science and art might become allies, even essential partners. And at that point I began thinking of us.
On page 113, within a section entitled “Reduction and Art,” Berry asks:
“What can be explained? Experiments, ideas, patterns, cause-effect relationships and connections within defined limits, anything that can be calculated, graphed, diagrammed. And yet explanation changes whatever is explained into something explainable. Explanation is reductive, not comprehensive; most of the time, when
you have explained something, you discover leftovers. An explanation is a bucket, not a well.What can’t be explained? I don’t think creatures can be explained. I don’t think lives can be explained. What we know about creatures and lives must be pictured or told or sung or danced. And I don’t think pictures or stories or songs or dances can be explained. The arts are indispensable precisely because they are so nearly antithetical to explanation.”
Boys? At your leisure…
This to me is falconry (and parrot training). There is a science of psychology that makes sense of how to train, communicate, interact with wild animals to desired effect. However no scientist will ever be able to tell me what my peregrine is thinking…not exactly or explain his every decision. People on the other hand, just tell you what they’re thinking, even if you don’t want to know. But the birds will never explain their thoughts. I prefer the mystery. It’s the mystery that makes falconry an art.
Matt,
I couldn’t agree more – I was more focused on the consumption angle than the implications of the anethesia-approach to making hunting more palatable to the masses.
I will have to get that Berry book asap – sounds like good reading.
One question: can modern humans combine science and art (as Berry says – to describe a creature through song or dance rather than reductive description) and not romanticize too much? Brings to mind silly white kids with dreadlocks drumming around a prayer circle rather than just going out and killing something! Can most people embrace death as natural – like some of the Maasai we know, who do not go all apoplectic when they kill a cow to eat – in fact, they usually joke and laugh because they understand the cow was there to be used, even though they love their livestock in a way we cannot really relate to.
Wendell Berry is wonderful — I love him dearly and all his writing: essays, poetry, and fiction. However, he is prone to blind spots. The one that has caused the most consternation so far was his offhand remark that he didn’t need a computer because he had a wife, who not only typed everything but also edited. And the price was right. And no, he would not get HER a computer.
In this case, I would say he is vulnerable from the point of view that Christianity is easily viewed as a supersition. I haven’t read this book, but I expect he gives the Xians a free or cut-rate pass.
Nevertheless, the subject is a worthy one.
Proclus has some mildly related commentary.