Moral Obligation Under Conditions of Alienation: Berry again, and others

 

I want start by  thinking about a little essay by Wendell Berry "Why I am not going to buy a computer" and the reaction to it, and his subsequent defense against some of these criticisms, "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine." I am less interested in the particular issue of the computer, interesting as that is, and more in the general idea of a moral obligation to eliminate or reduce one's dependence on practices and technologies that are destroying or corrupting that which is worth loving, preserving, caring for (the Good, for short). The computer is really an example. The deeper question is whether a practice, technology, or economic system is damaging things that are intrinsically good – land, community, family, meaningful work, truthfulness, beauty, the health of creatures and places, relationship to God for many – and if so, whether we have an obligation to reduce our participation in it? 

   In "Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer," Berry's argument is often caricatured as technophobia. But his argument is not that computers are evil. Rather, he says he wishes to limit his dependence on technologies and industries whose effects he judges harmful, and that he ought to begin with his own conduct. He asks a question that is pure common sense: before buying a "solution," should I not first ask whether I actually have a problem? And if a technology contributes to harms I oppose, why should I deepen my dependence on it?

     The reaction was fascinating because many readers interpreted his refusal as an attack on them. Berry himself was surprised by the intensity of the response and suggested that he had scratched the surface of a "technological fundamentalism." His critics often argued that computers were merely tools and that his refusal was irrational or reactionary. Others focused on his description of his wife typing and editing his manuscripts, seeing it as evidence of patriarchal assumptions.

     Now, the issue that almost all these reactions missed was that Berry’s argument was not that technology per se is bad. It is more like a claim that love creates obligations. If I claim to love a forest, a farm, a community, a marriage, a tradition, or the world, then I cannot treat my participation in its destruction as morally irrelevant merely because my contribution is small. This reminds me of Hans Jones (previous entry). If our actions contribute to the possible destruction of future human life, do we not have an obligation to refrain? Berry asks a parallel question at a smaller scale: if our ordinary consumption contributes to the destruction of places, communities, and forms of life that we profess to love, do we not have an obligation to limit that participation? Both reject the excuse that "my individual action makes no difference." The obligation arises before the calculation of effectiveness.

    I understand Berry as trying to show that moral life begins in attention and affection. We learn to love particular places, people, and practices. Once we love them, certain actions become unthinkable. The point is not maximizing utility or achieving political success. The point is fidelity to what is good. In other words, we are obligated, as far as reasonably possible, not to live by means that destroy the ends we affirm. That is the moral intuition beneath his refusal to buy the computer.

 

        The strongest objection, however, is also obvious. Modern life implicates us in countless harmful systems. Berry himself admitted this. He depended on fossil fuels, markets, and industrial goods. His critics asked: where do you stop? Why reject the computer but not the truck? Why reject one form of complicity while accepting another?

Berry's answer is important. He does not claim purity. He explicitly rejects the ideal of purity. Instead, he claims that because complete innocence is impossible, one ought nevertheless to reduce one's participation in harm where one can. The impossibility of doing everything is not an excuse for doing nothing.  Thus I think the deepest philosophical question raised by these essays is not technological at all. It is about love, whether it is ‘just a feeling’ or whether it imposes practical disciplines and limits on how we live.

     I would bring in Gaita (and Plato) here. If we become like what we love (previous entry), then reducing our dependence on destructive systems is not only about saving forests or communities. It is also about preserving the soul's capacity to love rightly. The danger is not only that the beloved object is damaged, though of course that matters greatly. The deeper danger is that we become the kind of people who no longer notice the damage, or no longer care. Which is what by and large we have become. That, I think, is the deepest concern running beneath both Berry essays. It is less about machines than about moral formation. Machines are simply one arena in which the question appears. 

. . . 

Often is seems like this. A metaphor. Humanity and all the things worthy of love and care are in a large swimming pool filling up, about to be submerged. We all fill the pool by adding drops at a time. My drop makes no practical difference whatsoever to the rising water level. Do I nevertheless have an obligation to refrain from adding my drop, or to halve my drop. Berry (and I assume Gaita) would say yes. Why? 

     First, neither would begin by asking whether my drop makes a measurable difference. They would begin by asking what kind of act it is. Capitalist culture predisposes us to think that an action is morally significant only if it changes the outcome. If the pool will fill regardless, my drop seems morally negligible. Thus it doesn’t matter what I do. That is how I myself sadly act. Berry's would begin with membership and fidelity. We belong to a world of creatures, places, and communities that sustain us. The question is not merely, "Will my drop change the final water level?" but "What is my relation to what I claim to love?" If I knowingly add water to the pool, I am participating in the drowning of what I profess to cherish. To refrain is an act of loyalty. It expresses the truth of my love, even if it does not alter the outcome. It is not about maintaining a purity which I never had and cannot aspire to. It is about loving or trying to love what I profess to love.  This is why Berry writes about practices rather than results. A farmer (I always think of my great grandparents, who were farmers heart and soul) who cares for the soil may not save agriculture. A neighbor who remains faithful to a community may not stop its decline. But these acts are still intrinsically meaningful because they embody a proper relation to the good. 

    Gaita, I think, would say that morality is not fundamentally about producing states of affairs. It is about seeing reality truthfully.  Suppose someone says, "This person is going to die anyway, so what difference does it make whether I betray him?" Gaita would say that the very question misunderstands the nature of the moral reality before us. The wrongness of betrayal does not depend upon the consequences. It depends upon what betrayal is. Analogously, adding one's drop is not made innocent because the pool is already nearly full. The moral significance lies partly in what the act says about one's understanding of the good. To refuse the drop is to acknowledge the worth of what is being threatened. Thus Plato’s thought that we become what we love. Every act forms the soul's attitude. It is about what happens to my soul as well as what happens to the pool. About the connection. If I repeatedly tell myself that my contribution is insignificant, I begin to train myself into a certain stance toward reality. I learn to separate my actions from my loves. I learn to live comfortably with contradiction. Eventually, I may cease to love the threatened good at all.

     Berry would agree. For him, industrial society is dangerous not only because it destroys forests or farms but because it habituates people to living at a distance from the consequences of their actions. It weakens the connection between affection and conduct. The obligation arises from the value of what is at stake, not from confidence that one's action will succeed. I am reminded of Plato's Republic, in which justice is not merely a strategy for producing a better world but a condition of the soul. One should not commit injustice even if one could gain the whole world by it. Why? Because becoming unjust is itself a corruption. (Gaita’s lecture on Plato is great, it is on YouTube.) Even if my drop will not determine the fate of the pool, adding it may still be an act of disloyalty to the good, while refraining may be an act of fidelity to it. 

. . . 

    Another angle. I love food. I love the pleasure of eating good food. It connects me with my past and people I love who are no longer here. unfortunately much of my diet is based on cruelty to animals - I cannot always afford organic meat, which my boys depend on as well. I think that industrial meat is a de-secration / de-creation, a kind of blasphemy even, and yet I am implicated in it by my choice. And of course the effects of eating meat on global warming are terrible. I could find similar practices, including my use of the Internet and AI. I somehow cannot translate an obligation I recognize with my intellect into my will.

    I am not describing indifference, I think, but a kind of grief I suffer from. The person Berry worries about is not so much the person who cannot live up to every moral insight. It is the person who ceases to notice the contradiction at all. The industrial system works best when we no longer see the animal, the field, the worker, the forest, the river, the future child. I do see them. Doesn’t that make me worse?

     Berry says that affection is the beginning of moral understanding. Before principles come loves. Before duties come attachments. My love food is not merely as fuel but as a communion with place, memory, family, and the dead. That is actually a Berryan starting point. The problem is not that I love food. The problem is that the industrial system has attached that good to practices that violate the very loves from which it originally arose.

Berry might want me to ask about what small acts of fidelity are possible within my actual circumstances. Not how I can become pure, because I can’t. (I think of Jesus “Judge not, lest you yourself be judged.) Berry, contra critics, is not interested in purity. He was a farmer who used tractors, bought supplies, paid taxes, drove on roads, and participated in markets. He knew there was no innocent place to stand. The question is always one of better and worse forms of participation. 

   What would Gaita say? First, he does not think morality begins with conclusions from logical arguments. He thinks it begins with seeing the world and the people and things in it in the right light, the light of love / affection. Like Berry I think. A person who truly sees the full reality of a concentration camp victim, a dying child, a beloved spouse, or a suffering animal does not first infer a duty and then become moved. Rather, the duty is already contained within the seeing. That is why examples matter so much in his philosophy. Saints, parents, lovers, rescuers, and faithful friends reveal what is there to be seen.

    Now in my description I spoke of  desecration, de-creation, blasphemy. Emotionally charged language. But my loves are in tension. I love animals, my children, the traditions embodied in food, economic security, the earth. And these loves pull in different directions. That is a tragedy rather than merely a failure, though it is that, too. I experience several goods simultaneously, and they are entangled within systems that make it impossible to honor all of them perfectly. Like being caught in a spider’s web. But I am no less responsible for that.

     I think Berry would be suspicious of any moral vision that leaves a person feeling only guilt and no gratitude. The fact that a meal contains traces of injustice does not erase the fact that it is also a gift, a communion, a memory of those who loved us. Gaita might say that the recognition of moral failure is itself evidence of a relation to the good. A completely corrupted person would not experience this conflict at all. The conflict hurts precisely because the good still exerts a claim upon me. The tension might be a form of hope in that it shows that my loves have not yet been reduced to mere preferences or calculations. Indeed, I must do better. That is the thought I take from this.

    The moral life is not about achieving innocence. It is about remaining faithful to the good in a world where innocence is no longer available. 

. . . 

   Concerning the loss of purity or innocence, I cannot help but think of the myth of the Fall of Man – the loss of innocence, unavoidable complicity in structures of harm, the impossibility of finding a completely pure place to stand. In this context the biblical story of the Fall makes sense. The Fall is not really about breaking a rule, I think. It is about a rupture in the relation between humanity, God, nature, other persons, and oneself. After the Fall, every good becomes mixed with domination, anxiety, exploitation, pride, and necessity. We still encounters genuine goods, but never in pristine form. I think that is consistent with the interpretation of St. Thomas Aquinas.

    I come back to my love of food. The meal remains a gift, a source of communion, memory, gratitude, and life. Yet it is now entangled with suffering, ecological damage, economic exploitation, and mortality – corporations that do to food what the porn industry does to sexuality. The goodness remains real, but it is no longer innocent.

    I recall Josef Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) in his Einführung in das Christentum. He argues that sin is not merely an individual act but a condition into which we are born. We enter a world already marked by what he sometimes calls a "network" or "web" of distorted relationships. Thus nobody begins from a morally neutral position. We are beneficiaries and victims of injustices we did not create and participants in systems we did not design. He does not conclude that therefore nothing matters. Grace enables us to live truthfully within this fallen condition. The Christian task is not to achieve innocence but to live faithfully within a history that has already lost innocence. Berry and Gaita show us how to do this.

    Hans Urs von Balthasar is another theologian important to me, though I know only a small fragment of his work. He emphasizes the dramatic character of existence. Human life unfolds within a cosmic drama between grace and sin. One of the great temptations is the desire to escape the drama altogether, that is, to seek a pure position outside history. But Christ does not remain outside history. He enters fully into a compromised world. The Incarnation therefore sanctifies involvement rather than withdrawal. Thus the answer to complicity is not flight from the world but faithful participation in it.

    Another important theologian for me is Bernard Häring. He criticized legalistic moral theology that focused exclusively on isolated acts, emphasizing rather conscience, responsibility, and fidelity. He often portrays moral life less as avoiding contamination and more as responding lovingly to God's call within concrete situations. I can hear an affinity with Berry here. The question becomes ‘What is the most loving and responsible response available to me here and now?’ rather than ‘How do I keep my hands completely clean?’

    The Orthodox view, as I understand it from Kallistos Ware, is that the Fall introduced corruption into the whole creation. Creation remains good, but wounded. The earth still manifests divine glory, yet it also groans under mortality and disorder. The fundamental human vocation is to receive the world as gift and offer it back to God in thanksgiving. The Fall is fundamentally a failure of eucharistic vision, which is to say a failure to receive creation gratefully. One consequence is that we begin to consume rather than commune. This is the idea behind my wanting to describe the corporate-capitalist food industry as a desecration, a de-sacralizing of Creation. The problem is that creation ceases to be received as sacred gift and becomes raw material.

     Though not really a theologian, Simone Weil also comes to mind. For Weil, the fallen condition means that every human action participates in necessity, force, and limitation.

Absolute purity is impossible but loving attention remains possible. Compassion remains and truthfulness remain possible. One of her deepest insights is that acknowledging one's implication in evil without either despairing or lying to oneself is itself a spiritual achievement.

    A connection to Berry. I sometimes think Berry's theology of farming is essentially a doctrine of the Fall. Not in a narrow doctrinal sense, but existentially. His essays assume

the world is good, that humans belong within it, that our relation to it has become disordered, perfect innocence is unavailable, and that gratitude and fidelity remain possible. That is  the Christian understanding of life east and west. How do I love faithfully in a world where innocence has already been lost? – that is the question. That, I think, is why Berry's difficult hope feels so religious even when he is not writing theology. It echoes the biblical conviction that creation remains worthy of love despite the Fall, and that fidelity is meaningful even when redemption is incomplete. 

. . . 

   Without finding his historical materialism very deep, I also think of the Marxian analysis of alienation, a secular version of the Fall, broadened to include other people, nature, work, community (I would add God but Marx wouldn't). The phenomenon I am trying to  describe – being implicated in systems that violate goods I affirm – is a form of alienation.

   Marx's original account in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, which made a deep impression on me as a student – distinguishes several forms of alienation. The worker becomes alienated from the product of labor, the activity of labor itself, other human beings, and his own "species-being" (Gattungswesen), his properly human nature. The last category is quite broad. Marx believed that human beings are naturally productive, social, world-forming creatures. Under capitalism, they increasingly experience themselves as powerless objects within processes they do not control.

    Now back to my food example. I eat food that you know emerges from practices you regard as cruel. I also use technologies – the computer, for example – that contribute to patterns you find destructive. I participate in an economy whose effects often contradict your deepest values. That sounds like alienation: from nature (e.g., the animal becomes an industrial object), from labor (e.g., producers are strangers from far away), from community (production and consumption are separated and human relations are transactional), from my own moral convictions (my actions fail fully to embody what I believe).

    Where I go beyond Marx is in the nature of what is being alienated. For Marx, the deepest loss is the loss of our human powers and our communal nature. For Berry, the loss is alienation from the land, from creatures, from inherited traditions, from family memory, from local communities, from the practices of stewardship – more comprehensive losses. And for Gaita or Weil, for Berry too though less explicitly perhaps, the loss becomes metaphysical, i.e. we becomes alienated from reality itself.

    That may sound strange, but Gaita often implies that morality begins in a truthful seeing of what is before us. Industrial systems permit us to consume without seeing. The animal disappears behind packaging. The worker disappears behind prices. The future child disappears behind quarterly reports. Alienation therefore becomes a failure of attention.

   For Marx, alienation is largely a social and economic phenomenon. For Weil, it is spiritual. For Berry, it is cultural and ecological. For Gaita, it is moral and existential. Yet they are all describing a world in which we become separated from realities to which we properly belong. Theologically, one could even reinterpret the Fall in these terms. The Fall is the primordial alienation from God, from nature, from one another, from oneself. I guess the difference is that Marx thinks the alienation originates historically in social and economic oppression, whereas Christianity thinks those forms of oppression are themselves expressions of a deeper disorder in the human heart. I think it is a chicken-and-egg problem. The heart becomes disordered where love fails, and forms of oppression disorder the heart.

 

 Works Cited

Wendell Berry

What Are People For?. North Point Press, 1990.

(Contains "Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer" and "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine.")

 

Karl Marx

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Translated by Martin Milligan, Dover Publications, 2007.

 

Kostas Axelos

Alienation, Praxis, and Techne in the Thought of Karl Marx. Translated by Ronald Bruzina, University of Texas Press, 1976.

 

Joseph Ratzinger

Introduction to Christianity. Translated by J. R. Foster and Michael J. Miller, 2nd ed., Ignatius Press, 2004.

 

Simone Weil

Gravity and Grace. Translated by Emma Craufurd, Routledge, 2002.

Waiting for God. Translated by Emma Craufurd, Harper Perennial, 2001.

The Need for Roots. Translated by Arthur Wills, Routledge, 2002.

 

Kallistos Ware

The Orthodox Way. Rev. ed., St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1995.