Brian Small2d ago
Mr. Esfandiary sees the future as an earthly Heaven in which, by the miracle of technology, humans will usurp the role of God — who, it may be recalled, was once thought to be the only maker of manna...He is berating us, with the fervor of an evangelist because we do not abandon ourselves to machines as people of faith abandon themselves to God. He is berating us, in fact, for not being gods or at least acting as if we were gods.

The crucial concept here is that of“limitless” or “infinite”quantity.

From _The Unsettling of America_: Wendell Berry on a 1975 article where F. M. Esfandiary
nytimes.com/1975/08/09/archive…


#WendellBerry #TheUnsettling #FMEsfandiary more #FuturologyBullshit like for Nukes in the 1950s "too cheap to meter" or "AI" (LLM Salami data-center waste) "generative AI" "agentic AI" probability games will save us from the over-use add the wasting of everything..

Homo Sapiens, the Manna Maker

F M Esfandiary article on threshhold of age of limitless abundance of energy, food and raw materials; describes new sources of energy, new methods of food production and new accessibility of limitless raw materials; cites as 'short-sighted' exhortations to no-growth at time when world needs more growth not within but beyond industrialism; says people around world face scarcity not because of lack of resources but because of billions of dollars squandered on armaments; sketch (M)

The New York Times
bsmall23d ago
"Skill... is the practical understanding of value. Its opposit is not merely unskillfulness, but ignorance of sources, dependences, and relationships.
Skill is the connection between life and tools, or life and machines. Once, skill was defined ultimately in qualitative terms: How well did a person work; how good, durable, and pleasing were his products..."
#WendellBerry in #TheUnsettling pp. 95-96
bs25d ago

> If animals are regarded as machines, they are confined in pens remote from the source of their food, where their excrement becomes, instead of a fertilizer, first a “waste” and then a pollutant. Furthermore, because confinement feeding depends so largely on grains, grass is removed from the rotation of crops and more land is exposed to erosion.

#WendellBerry #TheUnsettling #AnimalsAsMachines #SaveOurBacon ..

bsmall25d ago

"... as speed increases, care declines"

"... the faster we work the less attention we can pay to its details, and the less skill we can apply to it."

"A machine has no life, and for this reason it cannot of itself impose any restraint or any moral limit on behavior"
--- #WendellBerry #TheUnsettling p.97

We need moral limits for our activity,
to slow down, think, and feel with skill.

bsmall2Jun 6
> At some point in history the balance between life and machinery was overthrown. I think this began to happen when people began to desire long-term stores or supplies of energy — that is, when they began to think of energy as volume as well as force — and when machines ceased to enhance or elaborate skill and began to replace it.
#WendellBerry in #TheUnsettling
#LifeMachineBalance
Show threadBrian SmallJun 6
> It is no doubt impossible to live without thought of the future; hope and vision can live nowhere else. But the only possible guarantee of the future is responsible behavior in the present. When supposed future needs are used to justify misbehavior in the present, as is the tendency with us, then we are both perverting the present and diminishing the future. But the most prolific source of justifications for exploitive behavior has been the future. The exploitive mind characteristically puts itself in charge of the future. The future is a time that cannot conceivably be reached except by industrial progress and economic growth. The future, so full of material blessings, is nevertheless threatened with dire shortages of food, energy, and security unless we exploit the earth even more “freely,” with greater speed and less caution.

#WendellBerry #TheUnsettling #ExploitativeMind #ProgressIsAScam #ProgressWithoutPeople
@bsmall2 @bsmall2

Show threadbsmall2Jun 6

🧵
> There is nothing more absurd, to give an example that is only apparently trivial, than the millions who wish to live in luxury and idleness and yet be slender and good-looking. We have millions, too, whose livelihoods, amusements, and comforts are all destructive, who nevertheless wish to live in a healthy environment; they want to run their recreational engines in clean, fresh air.

#WendellBerry #TheUnsettling
@[email protected]

Brian SmallJun 6
Berry's _The Unsettling of America_.. from 1977! So quotable for today'! He writes of what iit felt important to learn from Pollan's _Omnivore's Dilemma_ ... from the documentary _King Corn_... The all-powerful all-evil Butz Secretary of Ag ends up an old-age home talking to recent college graduats making a film...

The "tech-bros" AI-Salami morons were seen coming in books and song.
"Take the only water left. flush it down the hole, in your culture" --- apologies to Leonard Cohen "The Future"

> ... The automobile-of-the-future, the kitchen-of-the-future, the classroom-of-the-future have long figured more actively in our imaginations, plans, and desires than whatever versions of these things we may currently have. We long ago gave up the wish to have things that were adequate or even excellent; we have preferred instead to have things that were up-to-date. But to be up-to-date is an ambition with built-in panic: our possessions cannot be up-to-date more than momentarily unless we can stop time — or somehow get ahead of it. The only possibility of satisfaction is to be driving now in one’s future automobile.
> It is no doubt impossible to live without thought of the future; hope and vision can live nowhere else. But the only possible guarantee of the future is responsible behavior in the present. When supposed future needs are used to justify misbehavior in the present, as is the tendency with us, then we are both perverting the present and diminishing the future. But the most prolific source of justifications for exploitive behavior has been the future. The exploitive mind characteristically puts itself in charge of the future. The future is a time that cannot conceivably be reached except by industrial progress and economic growth. The future, so full of material blessings, is nevertheless threatened with dire shortages of food, energy, and security unless we exploit the earth even more “freely,” with greater speed and less caution.
#WendellBerry #TheUnsettling
Show threadbsmall2Jun 4
🧵
> Young was quite clear that small and middling farmers shouldn’t bother with convertible husbandry; it was best left to the big ones: “how in the name of common sense were such improvements to be wrought by little or even moderate farmers! Can such inclose wastes at a vast expense–cover them with an hundred loads an acre of marle–or six or eight hundred bushels of lime–keep sufficient flocks of sheep for folding[…] No. It is to GREAT FARMERS you owe these. Without GREAT FARMS you never would have seen these improvements.”
#TheUnsettling