“When the road of excess has reached the palace of wisdom, it is a healed wound, a long scar.”
—Wendell Berry

For the past half-century, the United States has built its domestic economy on the assumption that cheap oil was as inexhaustible as the oceans. It is now clear to all but the most blindered industrialist that this was always a fool’s wager. Even before Dwight Eisenhower unveiled his plan for a system of “Interstate and Defense Highways,” M. King Hubbert mathematically predicted global peak oil production by century’s end, to be followed by irreversible resource decline. Plentiful, cheap oil remains a beautiful delusion, and we, as a people, seem in no hurry to recover our senses or live within our means. If Barbara Tuchman were alive, she’d be writing another chapter for The March of Folly.

In an essay, “Faustian Economics: Hell hath no Limits,” published this past May in Harper’s, Wendell Berry places the current national unease over peak oil in helpful context. “The problem with us,” he writes, “is not only prodigal extravagance but also an assumed limitlessness.” The problem with that, he continues, lies in a confusion of “godly traits” with human ones, since humans, unlike God, are, by definition, limited creatures.

Such explicitly religious language usually sends editors of national monthlies straight to the delete button, so it’s reassuring that someone of Berry’s stature can still get past the censors. Berry has long criticized insitutional Christianity for its easy complicity in planetary degradation, but he has always made explicit his biblical commitments and the life-giving habits they demand. After critiquing delusions of limitlessness by citing Marlowe’s Tragical History of Doctor Faustus and Milton’s Paradise Lost, he interjects:

“I am well aware of what I risk in bringing this language of religion into what is normally a scientific discussion. I do so because I doubt that we can define our present problems adequately, let alone solve them, without some recourse to our cultural heritage. We are, after all, trying now to deal with the failure of scientists, technicians, and politicians to “think up” a version of human continuance that is economically probable and ecologically responsible, or perhaps even imaginable. If we go back into our tradition, we are going to find a concern with religion, which at a minimum shatters the selfish context of the individual life, and thus forces a consideration of what human beings are and ought to be.”

It’s in that “selfish context of the individul life” that we, confident heirs of the Enlightenment, confuse human freedom with lack of restraint, and limits with confinement. But such imprecisions arise from an impoverished contemporary social vocabulary, and need not be accepted uncritically. “On the contrary,” Berry says, “our human and earthly limits, properly understood, are not confinements but rather inducements to formal elaboration and elegance, to fullness of relationship and meaning.”

Berry takes yet another unconventional turn as he nears his essay’s conclusion: in order to live “with limited intelligence in a limited world,” our science and technology-besotted culture would do well to reconsider the arts. “An art,” he offers, “does not propose to enlarge itself by limitless extension but rather to enrich itself within bounds that are accepted prior to the work…. It is the artists, not the scientists, who have dealt unremittingly with the problem of limits.”

Berry may be too generous here. Art, in itself, is no sure protection against illusions of limitlessness. History has, after all, raised up more than enough Byrons and Wagners: artists who, for all their brilliance, lacked the twin virtues of humility and genuine humor, virtues now overshadowed by those trendy imposters, public self-humiliation and dismissive irony. Chuckling over one’s creatureliness while wrestling a work of art into shape is a discipline most often learned through apprenticeship, real or metaphorical, to acknowledged masters. Wisdom can be written down in books or painted on canvas, but it comes one’s way—in my experience, at least—only through sustained acts of submission.

It may seem the language of human limits best suits the tragic vision, but tragedy is, for some, a way through rather than an end. Shakespeare’s last works were romances: an innovative blend of tragedy, comedy and pastoral, and Dante’s poetic exploration of how human desire, through grace and effort, conforms to divine will, wanders through the pit of hell, but is, in title and spirit, a comedy.

For me, W. H. Auden (who learned in midlife to take himself less seriously) captures in a late poem (written ostensibly to the Roman god of limits) what Berry is getting at, how the long scar of human excess may yet arrive at the palace of wisdom:

You alone, Terminus the Mentor,
can teach us how to alter our gestures.

God of walls, doors and reticence, nemesis
overtakes the sacrilegious technocrat,
but blessed is the City that thanks you
for giving us games and grammar and metres….

In this world our colossal immodesty
has plundered and poisoned, it is possible
You still might save us, who
by now have learned this: that scientists, to be truthful

must remind us to take all they say as a
tall story, that abhorred in the Heav’ns are all
self-proclaimed poets who, to wow an
audience, utter some resonant lie.