bsmall217h ago
> The thing most overlooked by scientists, and by the enviers and emulators of science in the humanities, is the complicity of science in the Industrial Revolution, which science has served not by supplying the “scientific” checks of skepticism, doubt, criticism, and correction, but by developing of marketable products, from refined fuels to nuclear bombs to computers to poisons to pills.
#WendellBerry _TenEssays _
Show threadbsmall21d ago
> “Butz is the perfect example of the agribusiness, commercial-farming, agricultural-educationa1 sttablishment man. When dean of agriculture at Purdue University, he also on the boards of directors of the Ralston-Purina Co., the J. I. Case Co., Iternationa1 Minerals and Chemicals Corp., Stokely-Van Camp Co. and Standard Life Insurance Co. of Indiana.” By such men and such careers the land-grant college system, originally meant to enhance the small-farm possibility, has been captured for the corporations.
#WendellBerry with #LaurenSoth on #EarlButz
Brian Small1d 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
bsmall22d 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
bsmall24d ago
> ... as speed increases, care declines. And so, necessarily, do the skills of responsibility. If this were not so, we would not restrict the speed of traffic in residential areas. We know that there is a limit to the capacity of attention, and that the faster we go the less we see. This law applies with equal force to work; the faster we work the less attention we can pay to its details, and the less skill we can apply to it.
#WendellBerry #OnSpeed in #TheUnsettlingOfAmerica p.97
got me thinking of Vanderbilt's Traffic
bs24d 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 ..

bsmall24d 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.

bsmall25d ago
> ベリー，ウェンデル (ベリー，ウェンデル)　　 Ｂｅｒｒｙ，Ｗｅｎｄｅｌｌ
１９３４年、米国ケンタッキー州の農家生まれ。１９５５年ケンタッキー大学にて英文学の学士号、１９５７年に修士号を取得。１９６５年以降、同州ヘンリー郡で農業を営むかたわら、詩人、小説家、随筆家、評論家、哲学者として精力的に執筆活動を行い、これまでに８０以上に及ぶ多くの作品を発表。Ｔ・Ｓ・エリオット賞ほか多数受賞。現代の米国を代表する人文学者の一人である。また長年、積極的に自然保全運動に関わり、環境活動家としても社会に大きな影響を与えた。それらの功績が認められ、２０１０年、オバマ大統領より国家人文科学勲章を授与された。現在もヘンリー郡にターニャ夫人と居住、農園経営に勤しみつつ健筆を振るい、またその環境保全をめぐる発言は常に注目を集め続けている
https://www.e-hon.ne.jp/bec/SA/Detail?refShinCode=0100000000000034581371&Action_id=121&Sza_id=C0
https://www.kinokuniya.co.jp/f/dsg-01-9784812207581
#ベリウェンデル #WendellBerryJa #WendellBerry
bsmall26d ago
> 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 threadbsmall26d ago
🧵
The photo of an astronaut and and Lewis Mumford's commentary in _Myth of The Machine_ came to mind while reading Wendell Berry's _The Unsettling_..
> The future is the time when science will have solved all our problems, gratified all our desires; when we will all live in perfect ease in an air-conditioned, fully automated womb; when all the work will be done by machines so sophisticated that they will not only clothe, house, and feed us, but think for us, play our games, paint our pictures, write our poems.
#WendellBerry #BoyWomb
@bsmall2