Wendell Berry: The Most Brilliant Heist In History

For Monday/Wisdom, it’s fitting to hear from Wendell Berry, a man known for pointing out how all that is currently wrong with our world can be traced directly to our own character. I’ll let this video, in which Wendell reads from one of his own essays, speak for itself:

A week ago, we began our Sunday meditation with the Rail Disaster in Ohio, and the question of whether our silence — if we say or do nothing — is actually consent for evil to continue. Watching the land fouled and a town ruined has jarred a lot of us to thinking: we have to do something, and we have to do it now. But will we actually make the changes — painful at first — necessary to make a difference.

This week, Sunday was about how machines are replacing people and what that means about what we value and who we value. As Wendell says, the industrial system is reaching it’s culmination: making humans useless. It seems fine if that happens elsewhere, and to people less important than us. But now, it’s not just the cheap laborer or the cashier — it’s come for all of us.

It’s fitting the Wendell wraps these all together into one: our replacement by machines because we do not value each other and the damage we are doing to the land and ourselves, again because we lack the character to truly value. He points out that the solution for places is to recognize their uniqueness and their fragility. I think the same could be said of humans. What in each of us touches heaven in glory, and the earth in vulnerability? That is what makes us different from the machine.

First, share your thoughts in the comments below. Then share what this inspires you to do. But don’t share this second idea on the computer or in the comments. Close down your machine and go share what you’re going to do with another human face-to-face.