allisonburtch.com

If regression really is a possibility, then should we not watch for the signs of it? And should we not attempt to subtract regression from progression to get at least an approximate notion of net gain or net loss? Mr. Wilson concedes that people forget and die, but he says that “knowledge continues to expand globally while passing from one generation to the next” (p. 236). But in fact as knowledge expands globally it is being lost locally. This is the paramount truth of the modern history of rural places everywhere in the world. And it is the gravest problem of land use: Modern humans typically are using places whose nature they have never known and whose history they have forgotten; thus ignorant, they almost necessarily abuse what they use. If science has sponsored both an immensity of knowledge and an immensity of violence, what is the gain? if we “grasp the true strangeness of the universe” but forget how to farm, what is the gain?

–  Wendell Berry, in Life is a Miracle, p. 91.

The ultimate manifestation of this incoherence is loss of trust – loss, moreover, of the entire cultural pattern by which we understand what it means to give and receive trust. The general assumption now is that everybody is working in his or her own interest and will continue to do so until checked by somebody whose self-interest is more powerful. That nobody now trusts the politicians or their governments is probably the noisiest of present facts. More quietly, people are withdrawing their trust from the professions, the corporations, the education system, the religious institutions, the medical industry. Perhaps no expert has yet assigned a quantitative value to trust; it is nonetheless certain that when we have finished subtracting trust from all we think we have gained, not much will be left.

- p. 94