Two minds

Progressive, The, Nov, 2002 by Wendell Berry

The Sympathetic Mind, even when working indoors, is an outdoor mind. It lives within an abounding and unbounded reality, always partly mysterious, in which everything matters, in which we humans are therefore returned to our ancient need for thanksgiving, prayer, and propitiation, in which we meet again and again the question: How does one become worthy to use what must be used?

Whereas the Rational Mind is the mind of analysis, explanation, and manipulation, the Sympathetic Mind is the mind of our creatureliness.

Creatureliness denotes what Wallace Stevens called "the instinctive integrations which are the reason for living." In our creatureliness, we forget the little or much that we know about the optic nerve and the light-sensitive cell, and we see; we forget whatever we know about the physiology of the brain, and we think; we forget what we know of anatomy, the nervous system, the gastrointestinal tract, and we work, eat, and sleep. We forget the theories and therapies of "human relationships," and we merely love the people we love, and even try to love others. If we have any sense, we forget the fashionable determinisms, and we tell our children, "Be good. Be careful. Mind your manners. Be kind."

The Rational Mind is preoccupied with the search for a sure way to avoid risk, loss, and suffering. For the Rational Mind, experience is likely to consist of a sequence of bad surprises and therefore must be booked as a "loss." That is why, to rationalists, the past and the present are so readily expendable or destructible in favor of the future, the era of no loss.

But the Sympathetic Mind accepts loss and suffering as the price, willingly paid, of its sympathy and affection--its wholeness.

To show how these two minds work, let us place them within the dilemma of a familiar story. Here is the parable of the lost sheep from the Gospel of St. Matthew: "If a man have an hundred sheep, and one of them be gone astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and goeth into the mountains, and seeketh that which is gone astray? And if so be that he find it, verily I say unto you, he rejoiceth more of that sheep, than of the ninety and nine which went not astray."

This parable is the product of an eminently sympathetic mind, but for the moment that need not distract us. The dilemma is practical enough, and we can see readily how the two kinds of mind would deal with it.

The rationalist, we may be sure, has a hundred sheep because he has a plan for that many. The one who has gone astray has escaped not only from the flock but also from the plan. That this particular sheep should stray off in this particular place at this particular time, though it is perfectly in keeping with the nature of sheep and the nature of the world, is not at all in keeping with a rational plan. What is to be done? Well, it certainly would not be rational to leave ninety and nine, exposed as they would then be to further whims of nature, in order to search for the one. Wouldn't it be best to consider the lost sheep a "trade-off" for the safety of the ninety-nine? Having thus agreed to his loss, the doctrinaire rationalist would then work his way through a series of reasonable questions. What would be an "acceptable risk"? What would be an "acceptable loss"? Would it not be good to do some experiments to determine how often sheep may be expected to get lost? If one sheep is likely to get lost every so often, then would it not be better to have perhaps 110 sheep? Or should one insure the flock against such expectable losses? The annual insurance premium would equal the market value of how many sheep? What is likely to be the cost of the labor of looking for one lost sheep after quitting time? How much time spent looking would equal the market value of the lost sheep? Should not one think of splicing a few firefly genes into one's sheep so that strayed sheep would glow in the dark? And so on.