New essay in The Point

This morning I’ve got an essay in The Point, one of my favorite magazines (to which I subscribe, and to which you should also subscribe). The essay is titled “When Losing Is Likely,” and it is a lengthy response to George Scialabba’s review of Wendell Berry’s collected essays last year in The Baffler. Here’s a taste:

The industrial economy is thus the paradigm, for Berry, of technocracy understood as the generic application of Thinking Big from nowhere to anywhere and everywhere. Such “thinking” is nothing of the kind: it is the abdication of thought, which properly takes shape in particular interactions between actual persons and the concrete objects and environments that make their lives possible—“our only world,” as he calls it. Technocracy is “machine thought.” Some presume the solution to the problems of technocracy must be more of the same, only the good variety rather than the bad. Berry demurs: technocracy as such is the errant mode of thinking and acting for which we need an alternative. It cannot save itself. It is what got us into this mess.

That objection, however, is not the heart of Berry’s view as expressed in “Think Little.” Its heart is this: Justice is not bifurcated between public and private, global and local, them and me; justice, like all the virtues, is a form of life and thus an end in itself. Every attempt to divorce these elements one from another, to address one as though it were not of a piece with the others, to reduce ends to mere means—in sum, to achieve a just society without just people—is both wrong on the merits and doomed to failure.

I touch on religion, pragmatism, Rorty, Chiaromonte, Macdonald, Marxism, ecology, justice, and more. Go check it out.