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Elizabeth's avatar

Thank you for this. I agree completely. You have helped me put it all together and see more clearly why I find Peter Thiel and his followers so viscerally threatening and repugnant.

When I was a teenager I wrote a short story about machines fooling us into letting them take over the earth. Unaware this was one of the oldest tropes in science fiction, i thought I had come up with the idea all by myself, because I was sincerely writing from personal fears. All these many years later, as I ironically write this on my iPhone, it seems to me even more obvious that we often give up far more than we gain in our relationships with our clever inventions.

I will be reading this again, but I just wanted to let you know my thoughts. Thanks again.

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Helge Hartung's avatar

Kenny,

I usually like your reflections. And just like you, I am a devoted Wendell reader: I learn from him every day. Just a couple of hours ago I shared his 2015 Yes magazine essay with my local environmental group, with the goal of highlighting that we need bottom-up and not top-down actions...

But here, you lost me! I have longed given up on Naomi Klein and on Marsha Gessen as they represent what is so deeply wrong with the modern left - and Wendell has written about this, Kenny.

Would Wendell be appalled by Peter Thiel and by MAGA and by Trumpism? Absolutely! You are right about that.

But Wendell is Kentucky by choice. He is rooted - and rootedness is a critical aspect of his writings and his world view. Now, we can debate the details of "ordo amoris" -but no, Kenny, Wendell does not believe in a "universalist" Christianity or a top-down, globalist approach to tackling climate change. In contrast, Wendell argues explicitly against such approaches - here is a link to his great 2015 piece

https://www.yesmagazine.org/issue/together-earth/2015/03/24/wendell-berry-climate-change-future-present

Not sure if you are familiar with Ivan Krastev. Ivan is a Bulgarian political scientist, a passionate philosophically liberal (not American liberal - many are deeply illiberal!) and a terrific writer and thinker. And he argues convincingly that it is our Western democratic elites -journalists, politicians, professors et cetera- who have abandoned the project of liberal democracy. Long before we got the awful Trump and MAGA. And Naomi Klein and the Guardian were two (among many) culprits for this center-left and left slide into illiberalism and antisemitism...

All of this is to say: I think you got Wendell quite wrong here.

Respectfully, Helge

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