A man with a machine and inadequate culture is a pestilence.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that technology without a strong ethical or cultural foundation can lead to harmful consequences.
Wendell Berry warns that a person who wields technology without the guidance of a rich cultural and ethical framework poses a danger to society. He implies that mere possession of machine or technology does not guarantee progress or positive outcomes; rather, it is the interplay between technology and the values of the human experience that determines its impact.
In practice
In a discussion about responsible innovation, one could use this quote to emphasize the importance of ethical considerations.
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.
If thy brother wrongs thee, remember not so much his wrong-doing, but more than ever that he is thy brother.
Everything that has form, everything that is the result of combination, is evolved out of this Akasha.
And he could not tell why the struggle was worthwhile, why he had determined to use the utmost himself and his heritage from the personalities he had passed... He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky. I know myself," he cried, "But that is all.
We are, all of us, exploring a world none of us understands...searching for a more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating mode of living...for the integrity, the courage to be whole, living in relation to one another in the full poetry of existence. The struggle for an integrated life existing in an atmosphere of communal trust and respect is one with desperately important political and social consequences...Fear is always with us, but we just don't have time for it.
We hear much of Bolshevism, much of labor unrest; at times, we hear the word 'revolution.' But these are but contagious diseases in the body of civilization, and I believe that the antitoxins of good cheer, mutual confidence, fairness and justice will ultimately cure these ills and make the world healthy and strong again.
Murderers are not monsters, they're men. And that's the most frightening thing about them.
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