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May Wendell Berry Trouble Your Thoughts Today

May Wendell Berry Trouble Your Thoughts Today

Last updated on: September 1, 2026 at 1:04 pm by Billy Kangas

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May Wendell Berry Trouble Your Thoughts Today 2026-09-01T13:04:41-04:00 Billy Kangas

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This weekend I decided to pick up a book that has been troubling my imagination for the past few years: Why I Will Not Buy a Computer, by Wendell Berry. The title essay first appeared in Harper’s Magazine in 1987. It’s been troubling me because I find that I think about it almost every day.

For those who don’t know him: I could say much about all the ways Berry has helped to shape and inspire me with his stories, poetry and essays, as well in his example of how to work with principle and wisdom as a farmer. I count him as one of the thinkers who has challenged me most in my approach to the modern world we live in

So I return to the question of why I picked up this book. It is perhaps the one volume of essential reading I would recommend to anyone wrestling with the frenetic pace of technological advancement in our own lives, and in particular, as we grapple with the question of artificial intelligence and the new kind of revolution it seeks to bring.

The book begins with the short essay that gives the volume its title, where Berry plainly explains why he intends to keep writing his manuscripts by hand rather than investing in a new computer, which has been promised to increase the quantity of what he produces. Berry instead chose to write by hand, which he argued kept a kind of fundamental physicality in his work He lays out nine rules a new tool would have to meet before he’d let it replace an old one:

Cheaper: the new tool must cost less than what it replaces
Smaller: it should be equal to or smaller in scale
Better: it must perform work that is visibly and demonstrably superior
Energy-efficient: it should use less energy than the old tool
Human-powered: it should ideally use bodily or solar energy
Repairable: an ordinary person should be able to fix it with basic tools
Locally procured: it should be bought and serviced near your home
Of independent origin: it should come from a small, private, local shop
Non-disruptive: it must protect existing family and community bonds

The essay drew a wave of criticism when it first ran, much of it aimed at Berry’s admission that his wife retypes his handwritten drafts, and he answered his critics directly in a follow-up essay, “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine.”

But the real meat and potatoes, what’s stuck with me since I was first introduced to it, is his theology of work and technology. He lays out some fundamental, decisive ideas that I’ve reflected on ever since: the centrality of the family household, in which the means and the ends of work are intrinsically connected; the idea that work should be transformative of oneself rather than extractive of the worker; and finally, the instinct to think about technology ecologically. By that I mean evaluating a technology’s impact not just on the product it seeks to ease the production of, but on everything around it. The introduction of that lever, in many ways, rests on a fulcrum that moves the whole world around it, in ways that are unexamined and, in some cases, catastrophic.

In the end, Berry makes a concession: although he has many principles he lives by, he does occasionally condescend to adopt technology. He gives the example of a chainsaw, which he uses to cut wood on his farm. He mentions that he knew a man who chose instead to chop his wood by hand. “I shall let his memory trouble my thoughts,” Berry writes.

In the age of AI, where the tool cuts so deeply into the embodied human dimension of our work and thought, I find that more and more, it is Berry’s own memory that troubles my thoughts.

As I’ve been thinking over all these things, the news of his death yesterday struck me like a bolt of lightning. He is a prophet for our time, and I feel his absence acutely.

Well then, Wendell Berry, a man of faith, a man of work, and an artist, I shall let your memory trouble my thoughts too.

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