Ken Myers, of Mars Hill Audio, wrote this good and interesting review principally of a Wendell Berry article on economics and limits. Here's part of the into:
"For some time now, I have been growing in my understanding of how many cultural disorders are related to hatred of limits. The aspiration to limitlessness was embedded in the first temptation and the original sin, it informed the earliest docetic and Gnostic heresies, and it inspired the founding intellects of modernity. Many sincere Christians still have some sense that being limited is an effect of sin, rather than a condition of the Creation. Both Genesis accounts of Creation (in chapters 1 and 2) resound with the establishment of boundaries—in time, in space, in ontology, and in vocation. ...
"Almost all human cultures have pursued the task of defining and governing boundaries in human behavior. Philip Rieff argued (in The Triumph of the Therapeutic) that every culture survives "by the power of its institutions to bind and loose men in the conduct of their affairs with reasons which sink so deep into the self that they become commonly and implicitly understood." The story of modern Western culture, however—a culture built around the ideal of the sovereign self—is a story of the abandonment of restrictions and restraints in the name of human freedom. Our institutions have increasingly been defined in terms of encouraging liberation from limits rather than cultivating a conscientious honoring of limits.
"It was in light of this understanding that I read Wendell Berry's essay in the May issue of Harper's with great appreciation. In "Faustian Economics," (subtitled "Hell Hath No Limits"), Berry argues that "we have founded our present society upon delusional assumptions of limitlessness," (the rest of the review)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment