Berry strikes again

I am re-reading Wendell Berry's book, Life is a Miracle: An Essay against Modern Superstition as of late. It got me to thinking a bit about research and reality a bit last night. Much of social research is typically deterministic. That is, many try to make causal conclusions about people and groups as if we were all like a machine that processes inputs and has a necessary and automatic output. There are others out there that subscribe to 'soft determinism' where they either think that by and large people are these 'machines' but they at times do weird things or they think that people are machines that are so complex that there is always some stimulus that is left out of the equation.

I like Wendell Berry because his book is a reminder (or a warning? corrective?) that we ought to not think of life as a massive machine that we are always one step closer to understanding, apprehending, and controlling. For him, "to treat life as less than a miracle is to give up on it" and it is only when we are able to give up viewing our lives as "an understood possession" are we able to "take it back as miracle and mystery." Because we on some level do live in a non-reducible mystery, control ought not be the question of highest importance, but mere living. Living in - reveling in - some level of ignorance is a constant action and not an end or goal.

Much of social science has been done in a guise of detachment. Good research, however, is probably better defined by embracing context. Only from the midst of context can any understanding of concrete experiences be abstracted. Berry scores again, saying, "though they are inescapably in context, they assume or pretend that they think and work without context."

The modern superstition has nothing to do with religion, but has everything to do with false pretenses and assumptions of big and successful science that requires 'giving up on life.'