Two minds

Progressive, The, Nov, 2002 by Wendell Berry

It is tempting now to call this poem "prophetic." But it is so only in the sense that it is insightful; it perceives the implicit contradiction between tall buildings and airplanes. This contradiction was readily apparent also to the terrorists of September 11, but evidently invisible within the mist of technological euphoria that had surrounded the great innovators and decision makers.

In the several dimensions of its horror the destruction of the World Trade Center exceeds imagination, and that tells us something. But as a physical event it is as comprehensible as 1 1, and that tells us something else.

Now that terrorism has established itself among us as an inescapable consideration, even the great decision makers are beginning to see that we are surrounded by the results of great decisions not adequately informed. We have built many nuclear power plants, each one a potential catastrophe, that will have to be protected, not only against their inherent liabilities and dangers, but against terrorist attack. And we have made, in effect, one thing of our food supply system, and that too will have to be protected (if possible) from bioterrorism. These are by no means the only examples of the way we have exposed ourselves to catastrophic harm and great expense by our informed, rational acceptance of the normalcy of bigness and centralization.

After September 11, it can no longer be believed that science, technology, and industry are only good or that they serve only one "side". That never has been more than a progressivist and commercial superstition. Any power that belongs to one side belongs, for worse as well as better, to all sides, as indifferent as the sun that rises "on the evil and on the good." Only in the narrowest view of history can the scientists who worked on the nuclear bomb be said to have worked for democracy and freedom. They worked inescapably also for the enemies of democracy and freedom. If terrorists get possession of a nuclear bomb and use it, then the scientists of the bomb will be seen to have worked also for terrorism. There is (so far as I can now see) nothing at all that the Rational Mind can do, after the fact, to make this truth less true or less frightening. This predicament cries out for a different kind of mind before and after the fact: a mind faithful and compassionate that will not rationalize about the "good use" of destructive power, but will repudiate any use of it. After such power exists, such a repudiation cannot assuredly prevent its use by those who do not repudiate it. Still, it is the right thing to do--and, to the extent that it is done, it reduces humanity's power and will to use destruction for good ends. There is no way to correct a nuclear explosion.

In the midst of the dangers of the Rational Mind's achievement of bigness and centralization, the Sympathetic Mind is as hard-pressed as a pacifist in the midst of a war. There is no greater violence that ends violence, and no greater bigness with which to solve the problems of bigness. All that the Sympathetic Mind can do is maintain its difference, preserve its own integrity, and attempt to see the possibility of something better.