Wendell Berry has died

Posted by Curiositry 2 days ago

162 points | 89 commentspage 2

toomuchtodo 2 days ago|

https://archive.today/rAr8f

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendell_Berry

stevenfoster 9 hours ago||

Over on Substack it feels like the whole platform is in mourning and the tributes are beautiful. RIP.

bmmayer1 9 hours ago||

"So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute"

RIP.

kulahan 4 hours ago||

The last dude is scared of nuclear tech despite it fitting neatly into Berry’s rules except for him being anti-big-tech.

senderista 7 hours ago||

A life well lived.

https://classes.matthewjbrown.net/teaching-files/philtech/be...

burnt-resistor 1 day ago||

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.

TFNA 17 hours ago||

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.

ChickeNES 10 hours ago||

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.

ch4s3 10 hours ago||

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.

gmoot 1 hour ago||

> norms are very strictly enforced

And now norms are not enforced at all, and look at who we have in the white house. This is why we can't have nice things.

onefiftymike 9 hours ago|||

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.

aaron695 7 hours ago||

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talon8635 1 day ago|||

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

burnt-resistor 20 hours ago||

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.

randusername 10 hours ago|||

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.

woah 8 hours ago||

Pay 2x for organic vegetables at the fancy grocery store

ch4s3 5 hours ago||

Organic vegetables are still monocrops grown by large companies, which I don’t think is a bad thing. Large scale agriculture has made food plentiful and cheap, that’s a good thing. We’ve eliminated famines in every nation with a stable government and market access outside or war zones.

coldtea 10 hours ago||

>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.

ChickeNES 10 hours ago|||

https://jonnegroni.com/2015/04/15/the-humans-of-wall-e-were-...

phainopepla2 9 hours ago|||

I was shocked to notice the date in the URL. I think I understand where the LLMs are getting it from now

bitwize 7 hours ago||||

I was a bit surprised by WALL-E and its premise; here was a space movie with a large corporation at the center, but it wasn't "evil" in the mold of Weyland-Yutani. BnL's CEO, Shelby Forthright, lived up to his name and generally meant well. The tragedies of the film lay entirely in unintended consequences.

Which is even darker in a sense, because it seems to try to tell us we're going to gum up the Earth even without the usual motives of greed and a lust for power, just a desire for the best life for everyone.

coldtea 6 hours ago|||

Yeah, hard disagree.

matteoraso 10 hours ago|||

Easy to say when you never had to live that life.

nephihaha 1 day ago||

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. . . .'

2b3a51 10 hours ago|

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)

greenie_beans 1 day ago||

this one hit me hard! why do i work in technology

thataccount 10 hours ago|

Quiet desperation?

Preston67 10 hours ago||

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Preston67 10 hours ago|

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