Home » Wendell Berry

Tag: Wendell Berry

Technological Fundamentalism

Berry’s essay ‘Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer’ expresses his preference for a computer-free life without denouncing computers. Not only is such a machine expensive, he explains, but it also means losing the close working relationship that he and his wife cherish. When that essay was published in Harper’s, it attracted a firestorm of controversy and outrage. Berry was caught off guard by the intense reaction and concluded that it reflected ‘technological fundamentalism’; the readers of Harper’s, he observed, wouldn’t abide the questioning of technology use.

-Arthur Boers, Living Into Focus, p. 197

I think I’ll hang on to the phrase ‘technological fundamentalism.’

Enabling the Student (C.S. Lewis)

Alister McGrath comments on C.S. Lewis’s teaching style:

Lewis did not see it as his responsibility to impart information to his students. He resented and resisted what some then called the ‘gramophone’ model of tuition, in which the tutor simply imparted the knowledge that the student had so signally failed to discover for himself.

Lewis saw himself as enabling the student to develop the skills necessary to uncover and evaluate such knowledge for himself.

–C.S. Lewis – A Life, p. 164

This type of teaching philosophy is something I contend for, and something I’ve had to debate and defend for the past couple of years in my studies in Instructional Technology. I always go back to a Wendell Berry quote I came across a while back:

‘Information,’ which once meant that which forms or fashions from within, now means merely ‘data.’ However organized this data may be, it is not shapely or formal or in the true sense in-forming. It is not present where it is needed; if you have to ‘access’ it, you don’t have it. Whereas knowledge moves and forms acts, information is inert. You cannot imagine a debater or a quarterback or a musician performing by ‘accessing information.’ A computer chock full of such information is no more admirable than a head or a book chock full of it (Another Turn of the Crank, p. 96).

My contention is that the true teacher, that is the good teacher, is not someone who sees his or her task as merely imparting information; rather, he or she is the one who sees his or her task as the work of in-forming – that is, actually working to inwardly form the student. Another way of saying that is this: the teacher’s job is not simply to teach the students what to think, but to teach them how to think. In practice, this takes a thousand different forms. For the Literature professor, for example, it means that you don’t simply make your students learn facts about Shakespeare and his plays and sonnets; rather, you teach them to read Shakespeare profitably for themselves. You want them to be able to pick up Hamlet for themselves, even if it’s a year from now, and actually be able to read it and enjoy it. I am having almost daily discussions with a young friend of mine who is taking a summer Lit course at the moment. His daily quizzes involve the remembering of names and places primarily. This is precisely what McGrath says Lewis was against. Teach them to engage the story, not to remember facts about the work. Stop niggling over the data and teach them to engage the actual narrative.

Another example: For the Bible teacher, this means that you aren’t content to teach content; instead you want to impart your students with tools that will enable them to engage the Bible when you are not around. I teach a Sunday School class on a semi-regular basis. I am not the least concerned whether my students can recite all 66 books of the Bible. If they can, that’s great. I’ve never asked them to. I’m more worried about their grasp of the narrative of the Scriptures and their engagement with the Law and the Gospel. If they get those points down, they will essentially be able to engage any passage they come across in their own reading.

I’m tempted to give more examples of how this can play out, but Literature and Bible are my own areas of interest. I’ll leave it to others to make applications in those areas for the time being.

The world around us is in-forming us. Movies are catechisms for our imaginations and impulses. Technology is shaping the way we learn and look at the world. If teachers, especially Christian teachers (and preachers), are content to see themselves as so many shovelers of data, then we are really only digging a hole. If we actually are shoveling something, it probably doesn’t smell too good in terms of pedagogical aroma. Don’t be content to inform. in-FORM.

A Different Kind of Medicine: Bringing the World of Love to the World of Machinery

Wendell Berry offers an interesting insight about the ‘atmosphere’ of hospitals:

In the hospital what I will call the world of love meets the world of efficiency – the world, that is, of specialization, machinery, and abstract procedure. Or, rather, I would say that these two worlds come together in the hospital but do not meet. During those weeks when John was in the hospital, it seemed to me that he had come from the world of love and that the family members, neighbors, and friends who at various time were there with him came there to represent that world and to preserve his connection with it. It seemed to me that the hospital was another kind of world altogether.

– Wendell Berry, Another Turn of the Crank, p. 101

Why should you visit people in the hospital? Because it is an act of love, which reminds them that their existence is not one of cold steel and machinery alone. It is counter-cultural. It is a different kind of medicine. It is humane because it reminds the sick that they are human despite the chords and wires.

Not Quasi-Physical

Put your arm around somebody. Give someone a hug:

The New York Review of Books of February 3, 1994, for example, carried a review of the correspondence of William and Henry James along with a photograph of the two brothers standing together with William’s arm around Henry’s shoulders. Apropos of this picture, the reviewer, John Bayley, wrote that ‘their closeness of affection was undoubted and even took on occasion a quasi-physical form.’ It is Mr. Bayley’s qualifier, ‘quasi-physical,’ that sticks in one’s mind. What can he have meant by it? Is this prurience masquerading as squeamishness, or vice versa? Does Mr. Bayley feel a need to assure his psychologically sophisticated readers that even though these brothers touched one another familiarly, they were not homosexual lovers?

The phrase involves at least some version of the old dualism of spirit and body or mind and body that has caused so much suffering and trouble and that raises such troubling questions for anybody who is interested in health. If you love your brother and if you and your brother are living creatures, how could your love for him not be physical? Not spiritual or mental only, not ‘quasi-physical,’ but physical. How could you not take a simple pleasure in putting your arm around him?

– Wendell Berry, Another Turn of the Crank, p. 92

Experience…is Not Predictable

Mike Tyson once said, ‘everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.’ Wendell Berry says something quite similar, or not, regarding hospitals and medicine – and by logical extension, science in general. This is also a good quote regarding tacit knowledge:

For in the hospital even the professionals are involved in experience; experimentation has been left far behind. Experience, as all amateurs know, is not predictable, and in experience there are no replications or ‘controls’; there is nothing with which to compare the result. Once one decision has been made, we have destroyed the opportunity to know what would have happened if another decision had been made. That is to say that medicine is an exact science until applied; application involves intuition, a sense of probability, ‘gut feeling,’ guesswork, and error.

– Wendell Berry, Another Turn of the Crank, p. 106

Information: Data vs In-Forming

Wendell Berry gives us a little gem about the meaning of the word ‘information’:

‘Information,’ which once meant that which forms or fashions from within, now means merely ‘data.’ However organized this data may be, it is not shapely or formal or in the true sense in-forming. It is not present where it is needed; if you have to ‘access’ it, you don’t have it. Whereas knowledge moves and forms acts, information is inert. You cannot imagine a debater or a quarterback or a musician performing by ‘accessing information.’ A computer chock full of such information is no more admirable than a head or a book chock full of it.

– Another Turn of the Crank, p. 96

Getting knowledge, storing and accessing data, simply won’t do it. There is information in the form of data, and there is information that truly forms a person inwardly. Which are you primarily seeking after?

What we often do not realize is that the entertainment culture around us is often what is truly informing us. Movies are catechisms, stories are catechisms, they are forming our impulses, shaping the way that we look at the world.

While this is the case, in school we often find ourselves simply storing and regurgitating data. This might be a good thing when it comes to bad schools, but it’s not a good thing in general. The ability to regurgitate data does not equate to true knowledge.

The Bible, and the book of Proverbs, in particular, calls us to seek both knowledge and wisdom. Both belong to God: “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!” (Rom. 11:33). God is rich in knowledge. He has all the data. He knows all the facts. He is omniscient. But he is also rich in wisdom. He is able to take those facts and form them into a coherent whole. He can make sense of the facts in the most practical details.

Being truly informed is to have knowledge and wisdom come together in such a way that they shape you from the inside. And since Christ is the Word (the Logos), the Reason, the Logic of God and the Wisdom of God, the One who makes it all make sense in the nuts and bolts of existence, you will never be informed until He dwells in you. You might be a data collector, and even a data regurgitator. You might take on the shape of your favorite pop star or fictional series, but you will never know the glory of being truly formed from within toward God – Christ in you, the hope of glory.

  • Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me (John 15:4).