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.

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

edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirsig's_Metaphysics_of_Qualit...

lol

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!

berry is in the same lineage as somebody like muir, and it really pains me to say, but i really wonder how relevant those individualist back to nature (and i dont say this necessarily dismissively, just dont know how to put it) imperatives really are. the world is technological, the necessities of life are commoditized, production and markets are global. how can there be any turning away from it, apart from it being a fetishistic practice, or just eccentric affectation. just think, portable nuclear reactors next to every data center soon. the march goes on.

i had similar feeling with kaczinsky, who had similar views on sanctity of nature and impact of modernity, in a way the diagnosis is incredibly correct, but the regimen ~ a return to a more anarchic, hyperlocal, individualistic relation with it ~ completely misplaced.

the terroir, does it even exist, has it ever even existed in america?

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.”

> To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.

> To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,

> and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,

> and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

Berry was one of the few celebrities I hoped to one day meet in person.

-- Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture.

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

RIP.

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.

I’m compelled by the romantic nostalgia, but I know I personally couldn’t cut the mustard

Food literally grows on trees.

That's why we like it. The people in chairs in Wall-e don't.

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.

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. . . .'

(Your quote reminded me of Thomas Hobbes)

Ah, so a troll and a liar. Got it.

Reported? Who are you reporting me to? You made a false statement, none of your comments in this discussion were made in earnest.

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.

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.

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?

Why is that? In his essay (that's linked above) him writing with his wife is one of the reasons he explicitly names as to why he didn't use a computer. As he says, it would have not just replaced something, but someone. He valued working his wife, and she in all likelihood did too.

There's no hypocrisy, dependence on other people was why he shunned technology. It's very telling that we now have a generation of people grown up on machines who think having to rely on another person, in other words community, is some offense to what he argued for.

“He lived exactly what he preached” is an empirical claim, not an interpretation. Can you substantiate “exactly”?

This is my biggest gripe with HN. You'll see a headline like "Norville Grub has died" and you look him up and he wrote a Unix timestamp parser in the 80's or something. This is pretty much the only time I wish we had moderators; it isn't that difficult to write "Norville Grub, original Unix timestamp parser author, has died". I pretty much skip every obit unless I recognize the name.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

2. I have enough attention thieves in my life to have to "work" to determine if I should read it.

That’s why your comment is not particularly well-received. I’ve had the exact opposite experience as you, I’ve seen overwhelming sadness and misery and depression spawned from a tech-filled life. I hardly can count the few crazy deep into tech who seem at peace simultaneously. So many people leave tech for something more meaningful is almost a meme at this point. The only defense I ever hear is “well if people would just…” but people DON’T just. They never just. They never have just, and they never will just.

In nature, this works out just fine, because there are many natural guardrails. Don’t piss off the tiger. Guardrail: it eats you. Don’t gorge on your fish pond. Guardrail: you deplete and starve.

In society, there are no guardrails because individuals can have massively outsized impacts. One man can start a construction project that depletes his pond, then deplete 40 other ponds refilling his own.

Because we're on a news discussion site about technology, run by a technology incubator, frequented by those who work with and use technology? More substantively, you don't have to care about technology, but if you're arguing that technological society makes people miserable, that's an empirical claim.

> As someone who grew up in a city, with a family that ran a business building mainframes back in the early computer days, there is nothing to romanticize.

I agree! Human labor should not be romanticized.

> So many people leave tech for something more meaningful is almost a meme at this point.

Anecdotes are not data. Can you actually show this?

> In society, there are no guardrails because individuals can have massively outsized impacts. One man can start a construction project that depletes his pond, then deplete 40 other ponds refilling his own.

Society has guardrails: laws, property rights, regulation, liability, prices, taxes, permits, and collective institutions. You seem to be taking an example of an externality and then twisting it into an argument that these don't guardrails don't exist, when they plainly do.

And I'm not sure “deplete your food supply and starve” is a very compelling example of nature's superior guardrails. We have built those social guardrails precisely because we'd prefer to prevent the damage rather than have starvation enforce the constraint afterward.

And us being able to create guardrails which sometimes work if you’re caught is not the same as a force of nature. There are no good or bad outcomes in nature, there are only consequences. This is absolutely not true in civilization.

We have nearly zero guardrails to prevent the damage. Did… you see Nepal? You realize this is a direct result of us either not having, or easily ignoring those guardrails?

As it turns out, starving because you chose to overeat is not going to have the same intensity as a law requiring you to please choose to throw back a fish which is too small (ignore the story about third world countries doing bomb fishing).

I can spell out every point I was making just as specifically as this one if the only thing you were able to pick up was an “appeal to emotion” (note: that’s not what I’m doing, of course, I’m simply showing that the guardrails are effectively useless… how you brought up that point and yet still somehow completely missed it is beyond me), but I’m holding out hope that you’re just being hyperbolic, and it wasn’t actually out of your grasp.

Edit: and stop with the stupid misuse of phrases, or I’ll pull out equally stupid ones. You think I’m appealing to emotion, and yet you’re Gish Galloping! You have no argument then!!! (See how dumb this looks?)

I wouldn't call it LARPing if someone just figures out the life he wants to live and then does it for 90 some-odd years.

PS Its distilleries that are along the river and the land there is far too hilly to grow row crops.