WE'VE GOT EXPERTS FOR EVERYTHING AND LEARNING NOTHING

From the afterward of Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America. He’s talking about experts in the world of farming. Trouble is we find “experts” everywhere. From politics and religion and none of them want to or care to listen to what we have to say.

 

If the world and all its creatures are machines, then the world and all its creatures are entirely comprehensible, manipulable and controllable by humans.

 The humans who have this power are experts.

 Experts are made by education.

 Education only happens in schools.

 Experts are smarter than other people.

 Thinking is best done by experts in offices of laboratories.

 People who do the work cannot be trusted to think about it.

 People who do work would prefer not to.

 Human workers are inefficient machines, encumbered by extraneous needs and desires, and they should be replaced by more efficient machines or chemicals.

 In general the human machine is better at consumption than production.

 A farm is or ought to be a factory in which plant and animal machines serve the economic machine in the most efficient way.

 Efficiency has nothing to do with human biological needs or desires.

 Conventional agricultural science (like all conventional science) is disinterested and objective and serves no interest others than the advancement of human knowledge.

 

Just one another piece of the puzzle. Contrast the attitude of universe as a collection of machines with the beliefs of the Henge of Keltria. See earlier blog entry.