A World Beyond Words

Wendell Berry on the machine metaphor, reduction, and abstraction.

My guest on this week’s episode of The Habit Podcast is Warren Kinghorn, psychiatrist and author of Wayfaring: A Christian Approach to Mental Health Care. One of Dr. Kinghorn’s central themes is the prevalence of the “machine metaphor,” by which all aspects of the created order—including human beings—are understood in mechanistic terms. Dr. Kinghorn’s book sent me back to Wendell Berry’s 2001 book, Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition. I commend both books to you; listen to the podcast episode to hear Dr. Kinghorn give a better account of Wayfaring than I could. But here I thought I would give a precis of Wendell Berry’s argument in hopes of a) nudging you to read Life Is a Miracle and b) provide a little more background for Wayfaring.

At the beginning of Life Is a Miracle, Berry writes,

Our language, wherever it is used, is now almost invariably conditioned by the assumption that fleshly bodies are machines full of mechanisms, fully compatible with the mechanisms of medicine, industry, and commerce; and that minds are computers fully compatible with electronic technology.

I don’t think there can be any question that the machine metaphor has been helpful in important ways. By simplifying complex processes and reducing them to manageable chunks that are more amenable to the scientific method, the machine metaphor has made possible scientific and medical breakthroughs for which I am exceedingly grateful. But that kind of simplification and reduction can easily be mistaken for understanding. As Berry puts it, what began as a metaphor became an equation and ultimately an identity. Certain human processes can be compared to the workings of machines becomes Human beings are like machines, which becomes Human beings are just machines made of meat and the human brain is just a meat computer.

“And this usage,” writes Berry, “institutionalizes the human wish, or the sin of wishing, that life might be, or might be made to be, predictable.” That’s strong language, calling the very understandable desire for predictability a “sin.” You can take that up with Wendell Berry. But you know from experience that the world is unpredictable, unfathomable, and that you have to live well without understanding fully. Berry writes,

To experience [life] is not to “figure it out” or even to understand it, but to suffer it and rejoice in it as it is. In suffering it and rejoicing in it as it is, we know that we do not and cannot understand it completely... Though we have life, it is beyond us. We do not know how we have it, or why. We do not know what is going to happen to it, or to us. It is not predictable; though we can destroy it, we cannot make it.

I don’t think the problem is the desire to understand. “It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honor of kings is to search out a matter” (Proverbs 25:2). The problem is when we reduce and schematize things to something that can be manipulated by the left side of the brain and then call that understanding.

As Berry argues, reductionism is useful and necessary,

But reductionism also has one inherent limitation that is paramount, and this is abstraction: its tendency to allow the particular to be absorbed or obscured by the general. It is a curious paradox of science that its empirical knowledge of the material world gives rise to abstractions such as statistical averages whch have not materiality and exist only as ideas. There is, empirically speaking, no average and no type. Between the species and the specimen the creature itself, the individual creature, is lost. Having been classified, dissected, and explained, the creature has disappeared into its class, anatomy, and explanation.

I couldn’t put my finger on it when I was in school, but this explains why biology was my least favorite class in school. I loved animals and the rest of the living world. The approach we took to living things in my biology class didn’t give me any reason to love them more. It was almost certainly a failure of imagination on my part, but I could never care about taxonomy or the parts of a cell or the difference between mitosis and meiosis; that sort of thing made me feel less connected from reality, not more. Oddly, I liked math and even physics, where abstraction and schematization seemed altogether appropriate.

You could say that the universe is impossibly complex. But you might also say that the universe abounds with an abundance that overspills our capacities. Our theories and diagrams and schematics are a way of dealing with that abundance…as long as we don’t mistake the oversimplification for the reality. And while we’re at it, let’s not forget that no language is sufficient to give a full account of reality. Berry again: “We have more than we know. We know more than say... Finally we live beyond words, as also we live beyond computation and theory.”

So good luck, writers. Your work is to put into words a life that goes beyond words.

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• This afternoon: The Habit Book Club—Frank Ewert’s Embrace Your Writer’s Block

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• This week in The Habit Portfolio: “How We Became Uncitified,” an essay by Dana Ryan

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Warren Kinghorn Doesn’t Think You’re a Machine.

Dr. Warren Kinghorn is a psychiatrist and theologian at Duke University, where he holds joint appointments at Duke Divinity School and the Duke University Medical Center. Warren’s work focuses on the intersection of theology, mental health, and human flourishing—and he brings an integrated, humane perspective to questions that too often get reduced to biology or technique.

His new book is Wayfaring: A Christian Approach to Mental Health Care. In this episode, Warren Kinghorn and I discuss the ways that the metaphor of the human being as a machine has shaped mental health care—and what is gained by reclaiming the older metaphor of the human as wayfarer; we talk about the ways that Thomas Aquinas’s teleological vision of human behavior opens up a richer account of freedom, agency, and virtue; and we talk about the possibility that the meaning of life is an active participation in blessing.

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