“[A] scathing assessment . . . Berry shows that Wilson's much–celebrated, controversial pleas in Consilience to unify all branches of knowledge is nothing more than a fatuous subordination of religion, art, and everything else that is good to science . . . Berry is one of the most perceptive critics of American society writing today.” — The Washington Post “I am tempted to say he understands [ Consilience ] better than Wilson himself . . . A new emancipation proclamation in which he speaks again and again about how to defy the tyranny of scientific materialism.”— The Christian Science Monitor In Life Is a Miracle , the devotion of science to the quantitative and reductionist world is measured against the mysterious, qualitative suggestions of religion and art. Berry sees life as the collision of these separate forces, but without all three in the mix we are left at sea in the world. "A new emancipation proclamation in which he speaks again and again about how to defy the tyranny of scientific materialism." -- Colin C. Campbell, Christian Science Monitor Wendell Berry is the author of fifty books of poetry, fiction, and essays. He was recently awarded the Cleanth Brooks Medal for Lifetime Achievement by the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the Louis Bromfield Society Award. For over forty years he has lived and farmed with his wife, Tanya, in Kentucky. "[A] scathing assessment... Berry is one of the most perceptive critics of American society writing today." Life is a Miracle An Essay Against Modern Superstition By Wendell Berry Counterpoint Press Copyright © 2001 Wendell Berry All right reserved. ISBN: 9781582431413 Chapter One Ignorance The expressed dissatisfaction of some scientists with the dangerousoversimplifications of commercialized science has encouragedme to hope that this dissatisfaction will run its full course.These scientists, I hope, will not stop with some attempt at a merelytheoretical or technical "correction," but will press on toward anew, or a renewed, propriety in the study and the use of the livingworld.     No such change is foreseeable in the terms of the presently dominantmechanical explanations of things. Such a change is imaginableonly if we are willing to risk an unfashionable recourse to ourcultural tradition. Human hope may always have resided in ourability, in time of need, to return to our cultural landmarks andreorient ourselves.     One of the principle landmarks of the course of my own life isShakespeare's tragedy of King Lear . Over the last forty-five years Ihave returned to King Lear many times. Among the effects of thatplay?on me, and I think on anybody who reads it closely?is therecognition that in all our attempts to renew or correct ourselves,to shake off despair and have hope, our starting place is always andonly our experience. We can begin (and we must always be beginning)only where our history has so far brought us, with what wehave done.     Lately my thoughts about the inevitably commercial geneticmanipulations already in effect or contemplated have sent me backto King Lear again. The whole play is about kindness, both in theusual sense, and in the sense of truth-to-kind, naturalness, or knowingthe limits of our specifically human nature. But this issue isdealt with most explicitly in an episode of the subplot, in which theEarl of Gloucester is recalled from despair so that he may die in hisfull humanity.     The old earl has been blinded in retribution for his loyalty tothe king, and in this fate he sees a kind of justice for, as he says, "Istumbled when I saw" ( King Lear , The Pelican Shakespeare, IV, i,19). He, like Lear, is guilty of hubris or presumption, of treating lifeas knowable, predictable, and within his control. He has falselyaccused and driven away his loyal son, Edgar. Exiled and undersentence of death, Edgar has disguised himself as a madman andbeggar. He becomes, in that role, the guide of his blinded father,who asks to be led to Dover where he intends to kill himself byleaping off a cliff. Edgar's task is to save his father from despair, andhe succeeds, for Gloucester dies at last "'Twixt two extremes ofpassion, joy and grief ..." (V, iii, 199). He dies, that is, within theproper bounds of the human estate. Edgar does not want his fatherto give up on life. To give up on life is to pass beyond the possibilityof change or redemption. And so he does not lead his fatherto the cliff's verge, but only tells him he has done so. Gloucesterrenounces the world, blesses Edgar, his supposedly absent son,and, according to the stage direction, "Falls forward and swoons"(IV, vi, 41).     When he returns to consciousness, Edgar now speaks to him inthe guise of a passer-by at the bottom of the cliff, from which hepretends to have seen Gloucester fall. Here he assumes explicitlythe role of spiritual guide to his father.     Gloucester, dismayed to find himself still alive, attempts to refusehelp: "Away, and