What did he say to those kind of criticisms?

Well, that's quite true.

And that's a result of the things he's been writing about for 70 years.

So if you create an agricultural system which systematically favours big business and corporate agriculture and superstores and systematically militates against small stores and local communities, then you end up with a situation in which cheap food is produced extremely badly.

And if you want actual good food produced with what we now call organic methods, but were just normal methods for the 10,000 years before the 1950s, you have to pay a premium for it.

And it's only middle class people who can do it.

So Berry's response to that, I suppose, would be, absolutely, that's the way the system has been developed.

I mean, how did that work, given that you're in the UK, he's in the US and he doesn't use computers and writes by pencil?

At a practical level, what do you mean by these four P's and these four S's?

Well, this goes back to your question at the beginning about roots and what we mean when we talk about roots.

We could mean multiple things, but what I've tried to do here with this little formula is think to myself, what is it that most traditional human societies have had that unite them, even though they've been quite different in many ways? um and this this formulation of the four p's is my is my sort of slightly crude but hopefully useful way of of pinning that down so we can look at four aspects of culture that have usually been in existence pretty much everywhere up till now so you've got you've got people which is your sense of who you are what culture and community you're part of then you've got place which is the place you're in it's your relationship to the natural world it's your relationship to the place that you live which may or may not be the place you come from It's prayer, which is maybe for us Christians, especially that's the most important part of the formula.

This is our connection to God.

And then it's the past, which is our sense of where we come from and what we're doing here and what sort of story brought us to this place.

And I think you can look at almost any culture from the smallest tribe to the biggest civilization, even something like the Romans.

And you can see they have a sense of what those four Ps are.

And so for their benefit, I wanted to ask you a very practical question, which is, what do you think a genuinely rooted church would look like in today's world? What needs to change in terms of the way we live and learn? and worship and serve if we took those four Ps seriously?

Another writer who was inspired by Berry and who wrote the introduction to his essay, The World Ending Fire, was Paul Kingsnorth.

Wendell was a farmer, as you say, probably first and foremost, but he was also a writer and he managed... almost uniquely to combine those two things.

In the 1960s, as a young man, he went to New York City from his native Kentucky because he wanted to be a writer.

But he discovered quite quickly that New York City wasn't the place for him, that he had no stories to tell there.

And he felt a pull back home.

He went back home to Kentucky, to Henry County, where his family had come from.

He bought some land there and he decided that the story he wanted to tell was the story of the place that he'd come from and the story of what it meant to farm the land and the story of what it meant to have roots in the land.

How would you assess what his legacy is in today's world, Paul?

So I don't know, maybe there's, logs for the fire.

I think people have spent 2,000 years trying to work out how to inhabit the Christian story.

It's very hard.

There's a good story I like about Saint Sophrony of Essex, who's an Orthodox saint.

He's a Russian, and he actually came to England in the 1950s, and he helped to set up England first.

Actually, I think maybe so far only Orthodox monastery, which is in Essex.

He was canonized by the church a few years ago.

It's

So what would you say to these people that are saying, "Hey, wait a sec, the West has been a really positive thing overall"?

So I start off the book in many ways with an inquiry about the culture war, asking why people are fighting about the West, and there's a lot of people attempting to destroy it and demolish it and there's a lot of other people trying to defend it, so the question I had at the beginning of the book, "Well, what is, well, what is it? What are we talking about here?" A lot of people throw this phrase around, "the West." What is it? Well, the, the, the reality is when you look at it, the West is the thing that evolved from what used to be Christendom.

It used to be the, the domain of the, the, the Roman Catholic Church as a Christian civilization, for better or for worse.

The thing that we call the West has, has pretty much replaced that, and what I'm talking about when I talk about the West is a very particular way of seeing which is very rationalistic, very scientistic, very mechanistic, which has actually given rise to this machine.

So it was the West that created in that, i- i- in that sense.

Now this...

I wouldn't say that the West was a Christian culture anymore.

Y- you say that you were looking for a truth that you could s- surrender to, and I'm kinda curious if you think that y- um, Eastern Orthodox theology shapes your approach to these kinds of questions.

Tomorrow, a thoughtful conversation between World's Les Sillars and novelist and poet Paul Kingsnorth on his new book, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity.

Humanity.We have been trying to build a world in which we are in control, um, often for understandable reasons, um, in which we can manage and control every aspect of life.

And we've got to the point now where our technologies are so advanced that we're able to, or we hope or think that we're able to, do things like creating super intelligences, creating artificial minds, potentially not just extending our life but ending death, at least this is the dream.

So the story that it tells is really the attempt to replace nature with technology.

Another way of looking at that, if you wanted to look at it say through a religious lens, specifically through a Christian lens, is that it's the same story that played out in the first book of Genesis, um, where we decide that we're going to, uh, eat the apple of the, eat the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil and, and become as gods.

We're trying to be gods.

And, and we've got to the point now where many of the people creating these technologies openly speak in those terms.

And maybe tracking with that conversion, I feel like you've, you still have the strong emphasis on the environment and ecology, but maybe there's more emphasis on what happens to the human mind and the human soul under technological conditions.

Yeah, I think that's probably true.

I mean, as y- as you say, I've been on a kind of long and very winding spiritual search (laughs) for about 15 years, which ultimately ended up in me becoming an Orthodox Christian, which is something I wouldn't have predicted a decade ago.

Um, but since arriving there, the pattern of everything makes a lot more sense.

I think my concern for the, kind of the destruction of the natural world, which was very profound for a long time, very intense, I think you're right.

I think it has, it hasn't disappeared, but somehow it's subsided a little since I became a Christian.

I think partly that's because if you become a Christian, it isn't possible to be a catastrophist in quite the same way because if you're a Christian, you don't believe everything ultimately is in the hands of humanity.

...to all of human nature?

I want you to explain how you see it and also how the sort of death of religion and the turn away from God is core to a- sort of allowing the flourishing of, of what you call the machine.

Well, there were a lot of different Enlightenments.

I mean, America's an Enlightenment society, right? This country comes from the Enlightenment, so it's generally quite popular.

Um, I'm not trying to make a case that the Enlightenment is a bad thing and it shouldn't have happened, but what you get in the 18th century is a lot of different trends that kind of converge and explode in this particular way of seeing.

So from that comes, say, political liberalism and a desire to prevent tyrannical government, which generally is good.

I would think we would probably agree, um, in the broadest sense.

It comes...

(laughs)