The Social Vision of the Alternative Food Movement - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 527

One of the deities or mythological prototypes . . . of modern science . . . is the pio-
neering navigator or land discoverer: Christopher Columbus or Daniel Boone. Mr.
Wilson's book returns to this image again and again. He says that “Original discovery
is everything.” And he speaks of “new terrain,” “the frontier,” “the mother lode,” and
“virgin soil,” “the growing edge” and “the cutting edge.” . . .
This figure of the heroic discoverer, so prominent in the mind of so eminent a sci-
entist, dominates as well the languages of scientific journalism and propaganda. It
defines, one guesses, the ambition or secret hope of most scientists, industrial tech-
nologists, and product developers: to go where nobody has previously gone, to do
what nobody has ever done.
(Berry 2001, 53)
This frontier spirit of science, this ambition to go beyond present-day limits of knowl-
edge to make new discoveries and innovations, troubles Berry very deeply and con-
tributes to his intense antagonism toward science. What is worse, says Berry, this sort
of ambitious frontier spirit has spilled over from science to other fields, to the point of
becoming pervasive in our society. This, according to Berry, has led to an unfortunate
disregard for traditional social, cultural, geographical, and technological limits, and to a
dangerous quest to continually keep expanding our horizons:
Young people are being told, “You can be anything you want to be.” Every student is
given to understand that he or she is being prepared for “leadership.” All of this is a
lie. Original discovery is not everything. You don't, for instance, have to be an origi-
nal discoverer in order to be a good science teacher. A high professional salary is not
everything. You c an' t be everything you want to be; nobody can. Everybody c an' t be a
leader; not everybody even wants to be.
(Berry 2001, 55)
Berry grew up in the racially segregated South. In he Hidden Wound he explores his
family's legacy of slave owning, and his own experience of living in a segregated society.
He criticizes slavery and racism on many occasions. However there is one outcome of
this system that appeals to Berry:
[The white laborer] worked with the idea that his work would lead to ownership,
or that at least, as a white man, the nigger work he was doing was unworthy of him;
in neither case, because of his sense of racial superiority, did he find it necessary to
come to emotional or philosophical terms with the work he was doing. Only the
black man, the nigger to whom nigger work was appointed, for whom there was no
escape, was able to face it as a present and continuing necessity, and to invent the
means of enduring and living with it—and, if I understand the communal and emo-
tional impetus of the work song, of building a culture, not beside or in spite of that
necessity, but upon it to triumph over it. It seems to me that the black people devel-
oped the emotional resilience and equilibrium and the culture necessary to endure
and even enjoy hard manual labor wholly aside from the dynamics of ambition.
(Berry 1989, 81)