Two minds

Progressive, The, Nov, 2002 by Wendell Berry

The Rational Mind is the lowest common denominator of the government-corporation-university axis. It is the fiction that makes high intellectual ability the unquestioning servant of bad work and bad law.

Under the reign of the Rational Mind, there is no firewall between contemporary science and contemporary industry or economic development. It is entirely imaginable, for instance, that a young person might go into biology because of love for plants and animals. But such a young person had better be careful, for there is nothing to prevent knowledge gained for love of the creatures from being used to destroy them for the love of money.

Now some biologists, who have striven all their lives to embody perfectly the Rational Mind, have become concerned, even passionately concerned, about the loss of "biological diversity," and they are determined to do something about it. This is usually presented as a merely logical development from ignorance to realization to action. But so far it is only comedy. The Rational Mind, which has been destroying biological diversity by "figuring out" some things, now proposes to save what is left of biological diversity by "figuring out" some more things. It does what it has always done before: It defines the problem as a big problem calling for a big solution; it calls in world-class experts, and invokes large grants of money; it propagandizes and organizes and "gears up for a major effort." The comedy here is in the failure of these rationalists to see that as soon as they have become passionately concerned they have stepped outside the dry, objective, geometrical territory claimed by the Rational Mind, and have entered the still mysterious homeland of the Sympathetic Mind, watered by unpredictable rains and also by real sweat and real tears.

The Sympathetic Mind would not forget that so-called environmental problems have causes that are in part political, and that they therefore have remedies that are in part political. But it would not try to solve these problems merely by large-scale political protections of "the environment." It knows that they must be solved ultimately by correcting the way people use their home places and local landscapes. Politically, but also by local economic improvements, it would stop colonialism in all its forms, domestic and foreign, corporate and governmental. Its first political principle is that landscapes should not be used by people who do not live in them and share their fate. If that principle were strictly applied, we would have far less use for the principle of "environmental protection."

The Rational Mind does not work from any sense of geographical whereabouts or social connection or from any basis in cultural tradition or principle or character. It does not see itself as existing or working within a context. The Rational Mind doesn't think there is a context until it gets there. Its principle is to be "objective"--which is to say, unremembering and disloyal. It works within narrow mental boundaries that it draws for itself, as directed by the requirements of its profession or academic specialty or its ambition or its desire for power or profit. This is what sponsors the "trade-off" and the "externalization" of costs and effects. Even when working outdoors, it is an indoor mind.