Two minds

Progressive, The, Nov, 2002 by Wendell Berry

Exactly the same feat of displacement is characteristic of the air transportation industry, which exists to free travel from all considerations of place. Air travel reduces place to space in order to traverse it in the shortest possible time. And like gigantic buildings, gigantic airports must destroy their places and become no-places in order to exist.

People of the modern world, who have accepted the dominance and the value system of the Rational Mind, do not object, it seems, to this displacement, or the consequent disconnection of themselves from neighborhoods and from the landscapes that support them, or to their own anonymity within crowds of strangers.

These things, according to cliche, free one from the suffocating intimacies of rural or small town life. And yet we now are obliged to notice that placelessness, centralization, gigantic scale, crowdedness, and anonymity are conditions virtually made to order for terrorists.

It is wrong to say, as some always do, that catastrophes are "acts of God" or divine punishments. But it is not wrong to ask if they may not be the result of our misreading of reality or our own nature, and if some correction may not be needed. My own belief is that the Rational Mind has been performing impressively within the narrowly drawn boundaries of what it provably knows, but it has been doing badly in dealing with the things of which it is ignorant: the future, the mysterious wholeness and multiplicity of the natural world, the needs of human souls, and even the real bases of the human economy in nature, skill, kindness, and trust. Increasingly, it seeks to justify itself with intellectual superstitions, public falsehoods, secrecy, and mistaken hopes, responding to its failures and bad surprises with (as the terrorists intend) terror and with even grosser applications of power.

But the Rational Mind is caught, nevertheless, in cross purposes that are becoming harder to ignore. It is altogether probable that there is an executive of an air-polluting industry who has a beloved child who suffers from asthma caused by air pollution. In such a situation the Sympathetic Mind cries, "Stop! Change your life! Quit your job! At least try to discover the cause of the harm and do something about it!" And here the Rational Mind must either give way to the Sympathetic Mind, or it must recite the conventional excuse that is a confession of its failure: "There is nothing to be done. This is the way things are. It is inevitable."

The same sort of contradiction now exists between national security and the global economy. Our government, having long ago abandoned any thought of economic self-sufficiency, having ceded a significant measure of national sovereignty to the World Trade Organization, and now terrified by terrorism, is obliged to police the global economy against the transportation of contraband weapons, which can be detected if the meshes of the surveillance network are fine enough, and also against the transportation of diseases, which cannot be detected. This too will be excused, at least for a while, by the plea of inevitability, never mind that it is the result of a conflict of policies and of "informed decisions." Meanwhile, there is probably no landscape in the world that is not threatened with abuse or destruction as a result of somebody's notion of trade or somebody's notion of security.