Our story, crystallizing with each conquest until it is nearly diamond-hard, goes that our world is the chance product of ever-tinier bits of code. This is not the story modernity has told us. Implicit in his work was the idea that matter itself has meaning, that the world itself supersedes our attempts to bottle it up and sell it. The world was not to be flattened to text, it was not a spa or resort for the wealthy, farms were not just one cog in the supply chain, nature had meaning beyond its potential for Instagram backdrops. But he also wrote: “The world does not exist merely to be written about, any more than it exists merely to be studied.” In his book Berry noted a key way the great flattening advanced was through its monopoly of stories, and he advocated a return to figures such as Dante and Shakespeare.
In the pursuit of economic gain, community life had been demolished, and agricultural life shifted to a synthetic model which externalized horrific costs for short-term private gain. This flattening of meaning was, in the eyes of Berry and those he spoke for, laying waste to all that made life worth living. The living whole had vanished like a ghost. The elevation of in vitro over in vivo had led to a mindset which saw all of existence as mere molecules to be interchanged at will in the laboratory. Life Is A Miracle was a wise and wistful reminder that man does not know by petri dishes alone. Wilson’s Consilience, a notable articulation of the reductionist worldview which had come to dominate every significant institution in American life. His name was Wendell Berry, and in the year 2000 from his Kentucky home he issued a book entitled Life Is A Miracle. All that was needed was to change “anno Domini” to “Common Era” and Utopia could march forward a thousand years.Įven before the jet planes incinerated the Twin Towers to usher in two decades of war, broken hopes, mad dreams, and a permanent surveillance state, one man was looking out from his farm and thought the wind boded ill indeed.
#FULFILLMENT OF THE BOOK OF SOPHIA FREE#
The world was poised to be brought together under the banner of free trade, religious dogma was ever-more-rapidly succumbing to the miracles of scientific triumph, and millions were being saved from the dreariness of “one dollar a day” subsistence economies to city living. Year Zero has held a perennial charm for certain minds, and the dawn of the millennium was as happy a time for the neoliberal materialist consensus as the Edwardian summer was to European jingoism. Paul, and the epistemological battle stretches into the mistiest reaches of myth, including the Garden. The beast slouching towards Bethlehem was spoken of in hushed tones as far back as St. This crisis did not begin in 2020, nor in 2000, nor in 1945, nor in the 14th century. As 20 years have passed since the millennial change-over, the profundity of the ongoing revolutions in societal relations and ways of knowing have gone from dim background awareness to an unavoidable spiritual crisis. The 2020s have presented to the public more evidence of a deep psychic split in the Modern World.
0 kommentar(er)
