Crossing the Rubicon

"Berry was undeterred. Then as now, when branded a Luddite, Berry rises to the
group's defense. 'These were people who dared to assert that there were needs
and values that justly took precedence over industrialization,' he writes; 'they
were people who rejected the determinism of technological innovation and
economic exploitation.'"

Even now, after centuries of reductionist
propaganda, the world is still intricate and vast, as dark as it is light, a
place of mystery, where we cannot do one thing without doing many things, or put
two things together without putting many things together. Water quality, for
example, cannot be improved without improving farming and forestry, but farming
and forestry cannot be improved without improving the education of consumers —
and so on.

I had a terrible day today for reasons not worth going into, but during it I was reading Wendell Berry who is quoted above. One of my most intense fears in life is that I will be overwhelmed and lose hope...that the future will stop being an adventure to be pursued and will become instead a prison of time to be endured. I disagree with several of his theorems on the economy, progress, technology and his definition of community, but reading him today let me feel where hope resides when the actual day offered nothing but overwhelming disappointment. I will go to sleep still believing in Machu Picchu.

Freedom, in Berry's view, is not about unconstrained individual autonomy,
but rather about choosing which constraints we will abide by and which
communities we will be responsible to.