The time will come when we will not be able to remember the horrors of September 11 without remembering also the unquestioning technological and economic optimism that ended on that day.
—Wendell Berry, “Thoughts in the Presence of Fear”
1.
Wendell Berry, how I wish you hadn’t
left us at this fraught moment, tragic wars
exploding our hard-fought semblance of world
order, despoiling the land, despoiling
the past, despoiling any facade of honor
we may have maintained through the last century’s
disorder. Twenty-five years ago
you saw clearly, had seen clearly for
what appears to be a lifetime, the cost
of our technological idolatry,
the threat to “all life, including the lives
of the supposedly prosperous.” Now even
the tech bros who have advanced the madness
in labs and in their profane worship
of god-mimicking human intellect
sound the alarm, falling on deaf ears
of a president embodying the worst
of who we have been, who still believes
that survival is a zero sum game, as if
the mind without spirit inside the machine
would recognize any of us as “winners.”
2.
Wendell Berry, you stood for a kind of
mutual flourishing of humans and land,
that also folded the ancestors into
decision-making unto the nth
generation, inscribed that spiritual
community into novels, essays,
and poems in which those who had passed
could stand again with us a little while
in whatever light this strange new day offers.
You would have met the announcement of AI’s
threat with unsurprised realism as you did
year after year, decade after decade
from your oracular nest in Kentucky.
But you were not one to make too much
of yourself, and I should be careful
not to overpraise you so as not to further
burden your spirit. No one will say that you
didn’t serve existence, peaceable warrior
flying no flag but the one with that lone
earthen sphere into which you are now
welcomed back, leaving us, armed with your gifts,
to continue the work to which you gave your life and love.
.
Thomas R. Smith
.