My apologies for the run of boringly predictable anti-government tripe. It must be all the Wendell Berry that I’ve been (re-)reading. While we’re on the subject, though, let me point to Exhibit Q in my case for Why the Organic is Always Better than (Human) Intelligent Design:
That’s a “new quarter-ounce microbot that can jump over four and a half feet in the air”. How does it do it, you ask? Why the same way that locusts do, of course, which is to say not the way you’d likely have come up with if you tried to create a leaping microbot from scratch. Hence the – significant, I think – similarity between Darwinism and conservatism: not because anyone ought to think that the success of natural selection shows that we ought to do nothing (someone has to build the microbots, after all), but because it reveals the superiority of “patient observation” to closed-door thinking in trying to figure out what we should do. An overabundance of the latter, of course, is exactly what’s brought the current Right – religious and otherwise – to its presently sorry state.
Filed under: conservatism, science/tech
Into the fields, indeed. I thought you would get a kick out of this:
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D90Q70M80&show_article=1
“It’s the way of the future.” Glorious!
Thanks Adam, that is awesome. I would love to post something about it but I’m trying to restrain myself (unsuccessfully, as you can see). But I was just reading – what else? – a Wendell Berry essay that quotes a former Assistant Secretary of (I think) Agriculture saying that “Agripower [sic] is, unquestionably, an even greater force than petropower in man’s survival in the future. Man can and has survived without petroleum, but he cannot live without food.” Berry goes on to remark, of course, that our current “agripower” is overwhelmingly dependent on oil. But God bless the Raymonds for showing us that small farms, at least, are still adaptable.
(Our CSA farm, by the way, uses biodiesel – i.e., recycled vegetable oil – to fuel their tractors. I wonder if there is anything – well, anything aside from the force of habit and the fuel industry’s vice grip on the American economy – keeping this from becoming a more widespread practice.)