Word Project- Wendell Berry Document
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Total Points..........100
Do We Need Computers?
by Wendell Berry
... [W]hat is the purpose of this technological progress? What higher
aim do we think it is serving? Surely the aim cannot be the integrity or happiness
of our families, which we have made subordinate to the education system, the
television industry, and the consumer economy. Surely it cannot be the integrity
or health of our communities, which we esteem even less than we esteem our families.
Surely it cannot be love of our country, for we are far more concerned about
the desecration of the flag than we are about the desecration of our land. Surely
it cannot be the love of God, which counts for at least as little in the daily
order of business as the love of family, community, and country.
The higher aims of "technological progress" are money and ease. And
this exalted greed for money and ease is disguised and justified by an obscure,
cultish faith in "the future." We do as we do, we say, "for the
sake of the future" or "to make a better future for our children."
How we can hope to make a good future by doing badly in the present, we do not
say. We cannot think about the future, of course, for the future does not exist:
the existence of the future is an article of faith. We can be assured only that,
if there is to be a future, the good of it is already implicit in the good things
of the present. We do not need to plan or devise a "world of the future";
if we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full
justice from us. A good future is implicit in the soils, forests, grasslands,
marshes, deserts, mountains, rivers, lakes, and oceans that we have now, and
in the good things of human culture that we have now; the only valid "futurology"
available to us is to take care of those things. We have no need to contrive
and dabble at "the future of the human race"; we have the same pressing
need that we have always had-to love, care for, and teach our children.1
And so the question of the desirability of adopting any technological innovation
is a question with two possible answers-not one, as has been commonly assumed.
If one's motives are money, ease, and haste to arrive in a technologically determined
future, then the answer is foregone, and there is, in fact, no question, and
no thought. If one's motive is the love of family, community, country, and God,
then one will have to think, and one may have to decide that the proposed innovation
is undesirable.
The question of how to end or reduce dependence on some of the technological
innovations already adopted is a baffling one. At least, it baffles me. I have
not been able to see, for example, how people living in the country, where there
is no public transportation, can give up their automobiles without becoming
less useful to each other. And this is because, owing largely to the influence
of the automobile, we live too far from each other, and from the things we need,
to be able to get about by any other means. Of course, you could do without
an automobile, but to do so you would have to disconnect yourself from many
obligations. Nothing I have so far been able to think about this problem has
satisfied me.
But if we have paid attention to the influence of the automobile on country
communities, we know that the desirability of technological innovation is an
issue that requires thinking about, and we should have acquired some ability
to think about it. Thus if I am partly a writer, and I am offered an ecspensive
machine to help me write, I ought to ask whether or not such a machine is desirable.
I should ask, in the first place, whether or not I wish to purchase a solution
to a problem that I do not have. I aknowledge that, as a writer, I need a lot
of help. And I have received an abundance of the best of help from my wife,
from other members of my family, from friends, from teachers, from editors,
and sometimes from readers. These people have helped me out of love or friendship,
and perhaps in exchange for some help that I have given them. I suppose I should
leave open the possibility that I need more help than I am getting, but I would
certainly be ungrateful and greedy to think so.
But a computer, I am told, offers a kind of help that you can't get from other
humans; a computer will help you to write faster, easier, and more. For a while,
it seemed to me that every university professor I met told me this. Do I, then,
want to write faster, easier, and more? No. My standards are not speed, ease,
and quantity. I have already left behind too much evidence that, writing with
a pencil, I have written too fast, too easily, and too much. I would like to
be a better writer, and for that I need help from other humans, not a machine.
The professors who recommended speed, ease, and quantity to me were, of course,
quoting the standards of their universities. The chief concern of the industrial
system, which is to say the present university system, is to cheapen work by
increasing volume.2 But implicit in the professors' recommendation was the idea
that one needs to be up with the times. The pace-setting academic intellectuals
have lately had a great hankering to be up with the times. They don't worry
about keeping up with the Joneses: as intellectuals, they know that they are
supposed to be Nonconformists and Independent Thinkers living at the Cutting
Edge of Human Thought. And so they are all a-dither to keep up with the times-which
means adopting the latest technological innovations as soon as the Joneses do.
Do I wish to keep up with the times? No.
My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and our
leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means that
we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order,
ultimately, to replace ourselves.
The danger most immediately to be feared in "technological progress"
is the degradation and obsolescence of the body. Implicit in the technological
revolution from the beginning has been a new version of an old dualism, one
always destructive, and now more destructive than ever. For many centuries there
have been people who looked upon the body, as upon the natural world, as an
encumbrance of the soul, and so have hated the body, as they have hated the
natural world, and longed to be free of it. They have seen the body as intolerably
imperfect by spiritual standards. More recently, since the beginning of the
technological revolution, moreandmore people have looked upon the body, along
with the rest of the natural creation, as intolerably imperfect by mechanical
standards. They see the body as an encumbrance of the mind-the mind, that is,
as reduced to a set of mechanical ideas that can be implemented in machines-and
so they hate it and long to be free of it. The body has limits that the machine
does not have; therefore, remove the body from the machine so that the machine
can continue as an unlimited idea. 3
It is odd that simply because of its "sexual freedom" our time should
be considered extraordinarily physical. In fact, our "sexual revolution"
is mostly an industrial phenomenon, in which the body is used as an idea of
pleasure or a pleasure machine with the aim of "freeing" natural pleasure
from natural consequence. Like any other industrial enterprise, industrial sexuality
seeks to conquer nature by exploiting it and ignoring the consequences, by denying
any connection between nature and spirit or body and soul, and by evading social
responsibility. The spiritual, physical, and economic costs of this "freedom"
are immense, and are characteristically belittled or ignored. The diseases of
sexual irresponsibility are regarded as a technological problem and an affront
to liberty. Industrial sex, characteristically, establishes its freeness and
goodness by an industrial accounting, dutifully toting up numbers of "sexual
partners," orgasms, and so on, with the inevitable industrial implication
that the body is somehow a limit on the idea of sex, which will be a great deal
more abundant as soon as it can be done by robots.
This hatred of the body and of the body's life in the natural world, always
inherent in the tecnological revolution (and sometimes explicitly and vengefully
so), is of concern to an artist because art, like sexual love, is of the body.
Like sexual love, art is of the mind and spirit also, but it is made with the
body and it appeals to the senses. To reduce or shortcut the intimacy of the
body's involvement in the making of a work of art (that is, of any artifice,
anything made by art) inevitably risks reducing the work of art and the art
itself. In addition to the reasons I gave previously, which I still believe
are good reasons, I am not going to use a computer because I don't want to diminish
or distort my bodily involvement in my work. I don't want to deny myself the
pleasure of bodily involvement in my work, for that pleasure seems to me to
be the sign of an indispensable integrity.
At first glance, writing may seem not nearly so much an art of the body as,
say, dancing or gardening or carpentry. And yet language is the most intimatly
physical of all the artistic means. We have it palpably in our mouths; it is
our langue, our tongue. Writing it, we shape it with our hands. Reading aloud
what we have written-as we must do, if we are writing carefully-our language
passes in at the eyes, out at the mouth, in at the ears; the words are immersed
and steeped in the senses of the body before they make sense in the mind. They
cannot make sense in the mind until they have made sense in the body. Does shaping
one's words with one's own hand impart character and quality to them, as does
speaking them with one's own tongue to the satisfaction of one's own ear? There
is no way to prove that it does. On the other hand, there is no way to prove
that it does not, and I believe that it does.
The act of writing language down is not so insistently tangible an act as the
act of building a house or playing the violin. But to the extent that it is
tangible, I love the tangibility of it. The computer apologists, it seems to
me, have greatly underrated the value of the handwritten manuscript as an artifact.
I don't mean that a writer should be a fine calligrapher and write for exhibition,
but rather that handwriting has a valuable influence on the work so written.
I am certainly no calligrapher, but my handwritten pages have a homemade, handmade
look to them that both pleases me in itself and suggests the possibility of
ready correction. It looks hospitable to improvment. As the longhand is transformed
into typescript and then into galley proofs and the printed page, it seems increasingly
to resist improvement. More and more spunk is required to mar the clean, final-looking
lines of type. I have the notion-again not provable-that the longer I keep a
piece of work in longhand, the better it will be.
To me, also, there is a significant difference between ready correction and
easy correction. Much is made of the ease of correction in computer work, owing
to the insubstantiality of the light-image on the screen; one presses a button
and the old version disappears, to be replaced by the new. But because of the
substantiality of paper and the consequent difficulty involved, one does not
handwrite or typewrite a new page every time a correction is made. A handwritten
or typewritten page therefore is usually to some degree a palimpsest; it contains
parts and relics of its own history-erasures, passages crossed out, interlineations-suggesting
that there is something to go back to as well as something to go forward to.
The light-text on the computer screen, by contrast, is an artifact typical of
what can only be called the industrial present, a present absolute. A computer
destroys the sense of historical succession, just as do other forms of mechanization.
The well-crafted table or cabinet embodies the memory of (because it embodies
respect for) the tree it was made of and the forest in which the tree stood.
The work of certain potters embodies the memory that the clay was dug from the
earth. Certain farms contain hospitably the remnants and reminders of the forest
or prairie that preceded them. It is possible even for towns and cities to remember
farms and forests or prairies. All goodhuman work remembers its history. The
best writing, even when printed, is full of intimations that it is the present
version of earlier versions of itself, and that its maker inherited the work
and the ways of earlier makers. It thus keeps, even in print, a suggestion of
the quality of the handwritten page; it is a palimpsest.
Something of this undoubtedly carries over into industrial products. The plastic
Clorox jug has a shape and a loop for the forefinger that recalls the stoneware
jug that went before it. But something vital is missing. It embodies no memory
of its source or sources in the earth or of any human hand involved in its shaping.
Or look at a large factory or a power plant or an airport, and see if you can
imagine-even if you know-what was there before. In such things the materials
of the world have entered a kind of orphanhood.
It would be uncharitable and foolish of me to suggest that nothing good will
ever be written on a computer. Some of my best friends have computers. I have
only said that a computer cannot help you to write better, and I stand by that.
(In fact, I know a publisher who says that under the influence of computers-or
of the immaculate copy that computers produce-many writers are now writing worse.)
But I do say that in using computers writers are flirting with a radical separation
of mind and body, the elimination of the work of the body from the work of the
mind. The text on the computer screen, and the computer printout too, has a
sterile, untouched, factorymade look, like that of a plastic whistle or a new
car. The body does not do work like that. The body characterizes everything
it touches. What it makes it traces over with the marks of its pulses and breathings,
its excitements, hesitations, flaws, and mistakes. On its good work, it leaves
the marks of skill, care, and love persisting through hesitations, flaws, and
mistakes. And to those of us who love and honor the life of the body in this
world, these marks are precious things, necessities of life.
But writing is of the body in yet another way. It is preeminently a walker's
art. It can be done on foot and at large. The beauty of its traditional equipment
is simplicity. And cheapness. Going off to the woods, I take a pencil and some
paper (any paper-a small notebook, an old envelope, a piece of a feed sack),
and I am as well equipped for my work as the president of IBM. I am also free,
for the time being at least, of everything that IBM is hooked to. My thoughts
will not be coming to me from the power structure or the power grid, but from
another direction and way entirely. My mind is free to go with my feet.
I know that there are some people, perhaps many, to whom you cannot appeal on
behalf of the body. To them, disembodiment is a goal, and they long for the
realm of pure mind-or pure machine; the difference is negligible. Their departure
from their bodies, obviously, is much to be desired, but the rest of us had
better be warned: they are going to cause a lot of dangerous commotion on their
way out.
Some of my critics were happy to say that my refusal to use a computer would
not do any good. I have argued, and am convinced, that it will at least do me
some good, and that it may involve me in the preservation of some cultural goods.
But what they meant was real, practical, public good. They meant that the materials
and energy I save by not buying a computer will not be "significant."
They meant that no individual's restraint in the use of technology or energy
will be "significant." That is true.
But each one of us, by "insignificant" individual abuse of the world,
contributes to a general abuse that is devastating. And if I were one of thousands
or millions of people who could afford a piece of equipment, even one for which
they had a conceivable "need," and yet did not buy it, that would
be "significant." Why, then, should I hesitate for even a moment to
be one, even the first one, of that "significant" number? Thoreau
gave the definitive reply to the folly of "significant numbers" a
long time ago: Why should anybody wait to do what is right until everybody does
it? It is not "significant" to love your own children or to eat your
own dinner, either. But normal humans will not wait to love or eat until it
is mandated by an act of Congress.
One of my correspondents asked where one is to draw the line. That question
returns me to the bewilderment I mentioned earlier: I am unsure where the line
ought to be drawn, or how to draw it. But it is an intelligent question, worth
losing some sleep over.
I know how to draw the line only where it is easy to draw. It is easy-it is
even a luxury-to deny oneself the use of a television set, and I zealously practice
that form of self-denial. Every time I see television (at other people's houses),
I am more inclined to congratulate myself on my deprivation. I have no doubt,
as I have said, that I am better off without a computer. I joyfully deny myself
a motorboat, a camping van, an off-road vehicle, and every other kind of recreational
machinery. I have, and want, no "second home." I suffer very comfortably
the lack of colas, TV dinners, and other counterfeit foods and beverages.
I am, however, still in bondage to the automobile industry and the energy companies,
which have nothing to recommend them except our dependence on them. I still
fly on airplanes, which have nothing to recommend them but speed; they are inconvenient,
uncomfortable, undependable, ugly, stinky, and scary. I still cut my wood with
a chainsaw, which has nothing to recommend it but speed, and has all the faults
of an airplane, except it does not fly.
It is plain to me that the line ought to be drawn without fail wherever it can
be drawn easily. And it ought to be easy (though many do not find it so) to
refuse to buy what one does not need. If you are already solving your problem
with the equipment you have-a pencil, say-why solve it with something more expensive
and more damaging? If you don't have a problem, why pay for a solution? If you
love the freedom and elegance of simple tools, why encumber yourself with something
complicated?
And yet, if we are ever again to have a world fit and pleasant for littlechildren,
we are surely going to have to draw the line where it is not easily drawn. We
are going to have to learn to give up things that we have learned (in only a
few years, after all) to "need." I am not an optimist; I am afraid
that I won't live long enough to escape my bondage to the machines. Nevertheless,
on every day left to me I will search my mind and circumstances for the means
of escape. And I am not without hope. I knew a man who, in the age of chainsaws,
went right on cutting his wood with a handsaw and an axe. He was a healthier
and a saner man than I am. I shall let his memory trouble my thoughts.4
NOTES
1 Do you think these are the only needs humans have?
2 Just what do you think Berry means by "cheapening work"?
3 Do you agree with Berry's analysis of this split between the mind and the
body?
4 This piece is an excerpt from the longer essay, "Feminism, the Body,
and the Machine", printed in Modern American Prose: Fifteen Writers +15,
Third Edition, John Clifford and Robert DiYanni, eds. McGraw-Hill, Inc., New
York, 1993.