It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the fundamental choice between living authentically as natural beings or conforming to the mechanical and artificial aspects of modern life.
Wendell Berry's quote suggests a looming divide in society between those who embrace their humanity and natural existence versus those who accept machine-like existence, possibly referring to technology's impact on our lives. This contrast highlights an essential philosophical discussion about our identity, the nature of life, and the implications of technology on human experience.
In practice
In a discussion about the impact of technology on society, this quote can highlight the importance of valuing our human nature.
We weren't allowing our hopes to become expectations. Expectations are tempting, pleasant, maybe necessary. They are scary too, once you have had some experience. They are not necessarily and not always a bucket of smoke, but they can be and are even likely to be.
The uplands of my home country in north central Kentucky are sloping and easily eroded, dependent for safekeeping upon year-round cover of perennial plants.
A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
WE ARE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY - I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.
Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.
We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.
No matter how much knowledge and wisdom you acquire during your life, not one jot will be passed on to your children by genetic means. Each new generation starts from scratch.
The woman's perspective is like the dark side of the moon: it always exists, but it is never exposed, at least not in my culture.
Life is full of troubles and vexations, that one must either rise above it by means of corrected thoughts, or leave it.
The Tao belongs neither to knowing nor not knowing. Knowing is false understanding; not knowing is blind ignorance. If you really understand the Tao beyond doubt, it's like the empty sky. Why drag in right and wrong?
Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul.
No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.
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