Quote: Buying products to replace ourselves (Berry)
March 1st, 2006 | Published in Culture, Life, Quotes, Technology
My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves.
The danger most immediately to be feared in “technological progress” is the degradation and obsolesce of the body…. More recently, since the beginning of the technological revolution, more and more people have looked upon the body, along with the rest of he natural creation, as intolerably imperfect by mechanical standards. They see the body as an encumbrance of the mind – the mind, that is, as reduced to a set of mechanical ideas that can be implemented in machines – and so they hate it and long to be free of it. The body has limits that the machine does not have; therefore, remove the body from the machine so that the machine can continue as an unlimited idea.
—Wendell Berry, “Feminism, The Body, and the Machine” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (2002), p. 75