THE LESSONS OF COMPLEXITY : On reading E. O. Wilson & Wendell Berry.

A recent New York Times Magazine article (February 4) told the chilling tale of a couple who are trying to clone their dead child. They are being assisted by a UFO cult, one led by a former racecar driver named Rael, who claims to have learned much from space aliens. The chemist who is directing the cloning project for the Raelians says that a number of young women are willing to serve as surrogate mothers; one is the woman's own daughter. The dead child's parents know, says the chemist, that "this baby will have no memory of the ten months they had been living together. They know the baby will not be exactly the same as the first one. But they are still working to get him back. They think this baby should be alive." (See this, and more strange stuff, in Margaret Talbot's article, "A Desire to Duplicate.")

This struck me as both sad--in the unlikely chance of a successful cloning, they will not get "him" back--and profoundly superstitious. Superstition, after all, is more about control and the illusion of control than it is about magic.

By a wonderful coincidence, a fine book came my way at the same time this article did. It is Wendell Berry's long essay, Life Is a Miracle: An Essay against Modern Superstition (Counterpoint). Berry spends a good deal of the book arguing with Edward O. Wilson's proposed reconciliation of science, religion, and the arts, which Wilson put forward in Consilience (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998). Berry's point is that religion and the arts are, in Wilson's scheme, subsumed under a scientistic, reductionist point of view, one which is finally as much a matter of faith and a priori thinking as any religion ever was. Berry speaks of the Kentucky farm he has worked for thirty-seven years, and shows that its mystery cannot be exhausted by reductive language. "To know that I am 'a white male American human,' that a red bird with black wings is 'a scarlet tanager,' that this is 'a riparian plant community'--all that is helpful to a necessary kind of thought. But when I try to make my language more particular, I see that the life of this place is always emerging beyond expectation or prediction or typicality, that it is unique, given to the world minute by minute, only once, never to be repeated. And then is when I see that this life is a miracle, absolutely worth having, absolutely worth saving....Perhaps we should wish that after the processes of reduction, scientists would return, not to the processes of synthesis and integration, but to the world of our creatureliness and affection, our joy and grief, that precedes and (so far) survives all of our processes."

Berry argues that a real dialogue among science, art, and religion would exhibit "a just complexity," which rules out the narrowness of Wilson's reductionism. Science is necessarily about generalization and exhaustive explanation; Berry asks, "Is knowledge by definition explainable, or is there such a thing as unexplainable knowledge?" Arguing that there is such a thing, Berry provides examples from King Lear, a biography of Robert E. Lee, and the Old Testament. He offers Job's "I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: And though...worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh I shall see God." Wilson would consider this "a 'beneficent' falsehood, supported by no 'objective evidence' or 'statistical proofs.'...People follow religion, he says, because it is 'easier' than empiricism, the lab evidently being harder to bear than the cross....Suppose, granting the hopelessness of empirical proof, that you took Job's statement of faith as seriously as Mr. Wilson wishes you to take empiricism; how, then, could you explain it to Mr. Wilson? It seems to me that you would have to concede--and here empirical evidence is available--that it could not be done."

The arts--and the Incarnation itself--are incapable of the generalization and reductionism that a merely scientific point of view imposes. Berry is not at all against science; it is a necessary but limited and limiting way to examine aspects of the world. What he opposes is the claim that science can satisfactorily explain everything that matters most to us. He demonstrates his points well, sometimes devastatingly.

But this book is finally much more than an argument with Wilson. Berry has wise and powerfully moving things to say about ethics, morality, religion, and the arts. The title might lead people to dismiss Life Is a Miracle as one of those dreadful inspirational books. It is inspirational, like Lear, like Job. Toward the beginning of the book, after making a wonderful use of the dialogue between Gloucester and Edgar in King Lear, Berry writes something that shines through on every page: "To treat life as less than a miracle is to give up on it."