Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition

Berry's slender essay offers a thoughtful repudiation of an increasingly technological--and, some would say, soulless--culture. --Gregory McNamee

Product Description
One of America's most respected and celebrated writers provides a thought-provoking analysis of, and a concise rebuttal of, E. O. Wilson's Consilience

"[A] scathing assessment...Berry shows that Wilson's much-celebrated, controversial pleas in Consilience to unify all branches of knowledge is nothing more than a fatuous subordination of religion, art, and everything else that is good to science...Berry is one of the most perceptive critics of American society writing today."-Lauren F. Winner, Washington Post Book World

"I am tempted to say he understands [Consilience] better than Wilson himself...A new emancipation proclamation in which he speaks again and again about how to defy the tyranny of scientific materialism."-Colin C. Campbell, Christian Science Monitor

"Berry takes a wrecking ball to E. O. Wilson's Consilience, reducing its smug assumptions regarding the fusion of science, art, and religion to so much rubble."-Kirkus Reviews

In Life Is a Miracle, the devotion of science to the quantitative and reductionist world is measured against the mysterious, qualitative suggestions of religion and art. Berry sees life as the collision of these separate forces, but without all three in the mix we are left at sea in the world.

He saliently attacks biotechnology, enviro-engineering and many of the modern technological fields that attempt at a reductive view of nature and our relationship to it.

I will treasure this book long after the software I have written is turned to dust.

The only complaint I have is that Berry is constantly apologizing for his "lack of expertise" in the sciences he criticises. Mr. Berry, if you are reading this, you need not worry about your expertise. Indeed, it is the mark of a true scientist that she be more interested in what a person has to say than whether or not they have the "credentials" to say it. You keep talking, I wan't to listen! "Thy life is a miracle. Speak yet again"


A miracle with a message.   June 13, 2001
G. Merritt (Boulder, CO)
33 out of 40 found this review helpful

We are living in times of despair, Wendell Berry observes, when "most work is now poorly done; great cultural and natural resources are neglected, wasted, or abused; the land and its creatures are destroyed; and the citizenry is poorly taught, poorly governed, and poorly served" (p. 57). We are withdrawing our trust from politicians, professions, corporations, the educational system, religious institutions, and medicine (p. 94). In this compelling, 153-page essay, Berry offers his critical response to Edward O. Wilson's 1998 "scientific credo" (p. 25), CONSILIENCE (which I have not read). Wilson's book spins the popular superstition "that science is entirely good, that it leads to unlimited progress, and it has (or will have) all the answers" (p. 24).

The title of Berry's essay is taken from KING LEAR: "Thy life's a miracle. Speak yet again" (IV, vi, 55). Whether in his poetry, fiction, or essays, miracles happen when Berry puts his pen to paper, and this book is no exception. He argues that Wilson's attempt to integrate science with religion and art is nothing more than an attempt to subjugate those disciplines to the materialistic objectives of science. "It is bad for scientists to be working without a sense of cultural tradition," he writes. "It is bad for artists and scholars in the humanities to be working without a sense of obligation to the world beyond the artifacts of culture" (p. 93). Moreover, to experience life is not "to figure it out" or to understand it, "but to suffer it and rejoice in it as it is" (p. 9). "To reduce life to the scope of our understanding (whatever 'model' we use)," Berry writes, "is inevitably to enslave it, make property of it, and put it up for sale" (p. 7).

In Berry's view, the priorities of science have become synonymous with the goals of industry and commerce, and he advocates emancipating ourselves from corporations, "whose appetites for 'growth' [seem] now ungovernable" (p. 15). He writes: "It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines" (p. 55). He encourages us to "shift the priority from production to local adaption, from innovation to familiarity, from power to elegance, from costliness to thrift" (p. 12).

The thread of wisdom that runs through these times of despair is that "life is a miracle, absolutely worth having, absolutely worth saving" (p. 45).

G. Merritt


It's not *science* that's the problem...   March 14, 2002
Sean Hoade (Tuscaloosa, AL United States)
11 out of 13 found this review helpful

... it's the feeling that "science = technology = progress = good" put forth by Wilson that's the problem, according to Berry. He does say what's wrong with this kind of hubris--it leads us to go forward in areas that perhaps we shouldn't go. He's completely right when he says that the study of chemistry and its industrial application has done irreversible damage to the environment, and much "applied science" now goes to try to fix problems caused by earlier applied science. I understand Strickland's points in his review, but I think he's being disingenuous when he says that Berry calls for an end to scientific exploration; he doesn't. What he calls for in this book is an end to scientific exploitation, and he does so eloquently.


Do not enter a debate with Wendell Berry...   March 18, 2001
Darren Bush (Madison, WI United States)
13 out of 17 found this review helpful

Wendell Berry is a gentleman. No, he's a gentle man. And he very gently but thoroughly skewers E.O. Wilson's thesis, that science explains (or more correctly, one day will explain) everything. As a scientist and artist (weird combination but nonetheless, that's me), I find the book fascinating. Wilson says that religion/humanities and science must come together. No argument there. Wilson then states essentially that the way that will happen is for religion to "learn the language of science," that is, Science is not budging. It is my experience that science is a religious tradition as entrenched in its sacred cattle as any religion.

Berry does not dispute the place of science in making lives better, as it sometimes does. He just questions the wisdom of betting our future on the hopes that science will "come up with something" to fix whatever mess we find ourselves in, be it disease (antibiotics), agriculture (petrochemicals), energy (ditto), or what have you.

If you're going to read one of Berry's books, I'd recommend "The Unsettling of America." This book is a close second. Then get "Farming: A Handbook" to see how a brilliant essayist writes poetry.


A poetic argument against scientism   January 4, 2001
Akif Uzman (Houston, TX United States)
12 out of 16 found this review helpful

Wendell Berry's book is the best argument I have read against the "religion" of scientism practiced by our culture in quite some time. The Enlightenment is dead, and unfortunately many in and out of science refuse to acknowledge it. Mathematical rationalism that was thought to be the best access to ALL human knowledge and wisdom during the Enlightenment. Modern science emerged as the standard bearer of the Enlightenment towards this lofty goal, replacing all other epistemologies. By the mid-twentieth century, epistemologies like philosophy, theology, and mythology were seen as either arcane or trivial - certainly unscientific (sic). E.O. Wilson (one of my favorite biologists) in CONSILIENCE writes at the apogee of this thinking and yes, faith. In CONSILIENCE Wilson wishes to either ignore or concretize the divine - I can't quite get which. Much of our culture does pretty much the same. Wendell Berry's argument is that we must look past scientific description and look deeper into the world around us to achieve wisdom and appreciate the "depth of the world." The superstition (actually a religion to my mind) that Berry argues against is the notion that through science we can come to understand it ALL, which is called scientism. Yet, Berry acknowledges and celebrates science's value to our culture from a practical and philosophical perspective but warns us against relying on it for moral judgment. Scientism lacks soul, spirit - it is a cold "religion" that does not acknowledge the deep mystery of the universe, because this mystery is just another problem to be solved by measurement and experiment. Berry's implicit argument is that no moral culture can arise from it. Science is but one way to come to understand our place in the universe, and we are warned in Berry's book that we should not unduly privilege it since science cannot come to an understanding of the divine aspects of existence.