The Way of Ignorance: And Other Essays

192 Pages·2005·1.038 MB·English

by  Wendell Berry

Also by Wendell Berry
Fiction
Fidelity Sayings and Doings
Hannah Coulter The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry
(1998)
Jayber Crow
A Timbered Choir
The Memory of Old Jack
The Wheel
Nathan Coulter
A Place on Earth
Essays
Remembering
That Distant Land Another Turn of the Crank
Watch with Me The Art of the Commonplace
The Wild Birds Citizenship Papers
A World Lost A Continuous Harmony
The Gift of Good Land
Poetry
Harlan Hubbard: Life and Work
The Broken Ground The Hidden Wound
Clearing Home Economics
Collected Poems: 1957–1982 Life Is a Miracle
The Country of Marriage The Long-Legged House
Entries Recollected Essays: 1965–1980
Farming: A Hand Book Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Com-
munity
Findings
Standing by Words
Given
The Unforeseen Wilderness
Openings
The Unsettling of America
A Part
What Are People For?
Sabbaths

The Way
Ö
Ignorance
and other essays by
Wendell Berry
With Contributions by
Daniel Kemmis and Courtney White
Shoemaker & Hoard
Copyright © 2005 Wendell Berry
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without written permission from the Publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in
critical articles and reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Berry, Wendell, 1934–
The way of ignorance / Wendell Berry.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN (10) 1-59376-077-9 (alk. paper)
ISBN (13) 978-1-59376-077-9
I. Title.
PS3552.E75W36 2005
814’.54—dc22
2005012294
Jacket and text design by Gopa & Ted2, Inc. • Calligraphy by Christine Colasurdo
Printed in the United States of America
Shoemaker& Hoard • An Imprint of Avalon Publishing Group, Inc.
Distributed by Publishers Group West
The author wishes to thank Terry Cummins, Ernie Gaines, and Bob Weiden for permission to quote
from their work.
Some of the essays in The Way of Ignorancewere previously published. We thank the editors and
publishers of these periodicals and books for their good work:
“Agriculture from the Roots Up”—Farming
“The Burden of the Gospels”—The Christian Century
“Charlie Fisher”—Originally published as “Trees for my Son and Grandson to Harvest”in Draft
Horse Journal
“Compromise Hell!”—Originally published as “People can’t survive if the land is dead” in Lexington
Herald-Leaderand then, with its present title, in Orion
“Contempt for Small Places”—Farming
“Imagination in Place”—Place in American Fiction: Excursions and Explorations—ed. H. L. Weatherby
and George Core. University of Missouri Press.
“Local Knowledge in the Age of Information”—The Hudson Review
“The Purpose of a Coherent Community”—Forum Journal (National Trust for Historic Preservation
“Quantity vs. Form”—Southern Arts Journal
“Renewing Husbandy”—Crop Science: A Journal Serving the International Community of Crop Scientists.
Reprinted in Orion.
“Rugged Individualism”—Playboy
“Some Notes for the Kerry Campaign, If Wanted”—OrionOnline
“The Way of Ignorance”—New Letters
“We Have Begun”—Slow
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
“The good, as he came to understand it, is what is uniquely and incomparably appro-
priate to a given setting. It observes a certain scale, displays a certain proportion. It
fits, and the senses can recognize this fit . . . Values, on the other hand, are a uni-
versal coin without a proper place or an inherent limit . . . Values undermine the
sense of due proportion and substitute an economic calculus. What is good is what
is always good; a value prevails only when it outranks a competing value.”
from David Cayley’s Introduction to
The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich
“Leadership passes into empire; empire begets insolence; insolence brings ruin.”
William Carlos Williams,Paterson I

Contents
))0)64^))0)
Preface xi
Part I
Secrecy vs. Rights 3
Contempt for Small Places 7
Rugged Individualism 9
We Have Begun 13
Some Notes for the Kerry Campaign, If Wanted 17
Compromise, Hell! 21
Charlie Fisher 29
Part II
Imagination in Place 39
The Way of Ignorance 53
The Purpose of a Coherent Community 69
Quantity vs. Form 81
Renewing Husbandry 91
Agriculture from the Roots Up 105
Local Knowledge in the Age of Information 113
The Burden of the Gospels 127
Part II
Letter to Daniel Kemmis 141
Daniel Kemmis Replies 151
The Working Wilderness: A Call for
a Land Health Movement, by Courtney White 159
Preface
))0)64^))0)
I thinkThe Way of Ignoranceis the right title for this book, but I recognize
that it also is risky. Some readers, I am afraid, will conclude from the title
that I intend to recommend ignorance or praise it. I intend to do neither.
Some scientists and their gullible followers think that human ignorance
is merely an agenda for research. Eventually, they think, we humans will
have in hand “the secret of life” or “the secret of the universe,” and then all
our problems will be solved and all our troubles and sorrows ended.
There are kinds and degrees of ignorance that are remediable, of course,
and we have no excuse for not learning all we can. Within limits, we can
learn and think; we can read, hear, and see; we can remember. We don’t
have to live in a world defined by professional and political gibberish.
But the essays and speeches in this book have been written with the
understanding, hardly a novelty, that our ignorance ultimately is irreme-
diable, that some problems are unsolvable and some questions unanswer-
able—that, do what we will, we are never going to be free of mortality,
partiality, fallibility, and error. The extent of our knowledge will always be,
at the same time, the measure of the extent of our ignorance.
Because ignorance is thus a part of our creaturely definition, we need an
appropriate way: a way of ignorance, which is the way of neighborly love,
kindness, caution, care, appropriate scale, thrift, good work, right liveli-
hood. Creatures who have armed themselves with the power of limitless
destruction should not be following any way laid out by their limited
knowledge and their unseemly pride in it.
The way of ignorance, therefore, is to be careful, to know the limits and
x preface
the efficacy of our knowledge. It is to be humble and to work on an appro-
priate scale.
64^
Some people who have written about my essays have honored me by sup-
posing that I am a philosopher or a scholar. I am neither. I have no talent
for the abstract thought of philosophers and not much interest in it. My
reading in philosophy is scant and unskilled. And though I have been a con-
stant reader for most of my life, I have never read systematically. I own a fair
number of useful books, but I don’t live near a good library, and I am in no
sense a researcher. For many years, in writing my essays, my “research” has
consisted in large part of articles that people have sent to me in the mail. I
have tried to be both consistent and honest, aims that sometimes are con-
tradictory, but I have never attempted to contrive a “system” of thought.
And so I hope my readers will recognize what an ad hoc affair my essay
writing has been. As a writer on agriculture I have of course been under
the influence of other writers, but what I have written has also been
influenced immeasurably by the instruction, conversation, and example
of farmers I have known, and by my daily work on my own small farm. I
am a small writer as I am a small farmer. My work is no more professional
than it is official. In my essays I have meant to speak for myself and nobody
else. The work that I feel best about I have done as an amateur: for love. But
in my essays especially I have been motivated also by fear of our violence
to one another and to the world, and by hope that we might do better. If I
had not been so reasonably afraid, my essays at least would have been much
different and many fewer.
64^
One mind alone, like one life alone, is perfectly worthless, not even
imaginable.
For many years I have used my brother’s thinking as a test of my own,
and so I am always indebted to him, even when I have not shown him my
drafts or carried them to his house to read them to him. I would not dare