What Are People For? by Wendell Berry

First published: San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Subgenre(s): Critical analysis; essays

Core issue(s): Capitalism; connectedness; freedom and free will; justice; love; nature

Overview

What Are People For? is a collection of essays written between 1975 and 1990 by Wendell Berry—novelist, poet, social critic, and moral philosopher—that touches on the proper way of life for people in Western civilization. The essays include literary criticism and meditations on problematic “improvements” to nature, the decline of farming communities, the dangers of constant technological innovation, the shortcomings of organized religion, and religion’s centrality in a proper moral economy. Taken as a whole, they reveal Berry’s firm conviction that Western civilization has lost its way and has followed industrial and technological innovation into a self-indulgent, immoral, environmentally destructive, dehumanizing, monolithic, and unjust way of life. He warns that this way of life can only end in apocalypse: When the rape of the land for minerals to fuel the artificial, wasteful lifestyle is complete and no natural resources are left to fuel the industrial beasts (and nations), they will turn on and destroy each other in the fight for what little remains.

In “Harry Caudill in the Cumberlands,” for example, Berry praises Caudill, the author of Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area (1963), for his indictment of strip mining for coal because of its destruction of Kentucky’s streams, lakes, roads, forests, and sometimes even people. He notes the destructiveness of the military-industrial state in “A Few Words in Favor of Edward Abbey,” and in “A Poem of Difficult Hope,” he analyzes Hayden Carruth’s “On Being Asked to Write a Poem Against the War in Vietnam.” In this essay, Berry says that today’s world is the most destructive and therefore the most stupid period in human history.

Berry traces that destructiveness back to the Industrial Revolution, noting in “The Work of Local Culture” that William Wordsworth, in his poem “Michael,” first captured the fundamentally destructive changes brought to rural communities by the Industrial Revolution. Industrialization broke the eons-old pattern of young persons leaving rural communities to then return mature and equal to the task of joining and continuing those communities because it took the jobs from the rural areas and forced these young people to leave to seek their life’s work in the ever-growing urban areas. Berry’s essays document the continuing decline and disappearance of small farms and small communities as rural areas become merely natural resources to be exploited and destroyed for the sake of city dwellers’ artificial, consumption-driven pleasure and comfort. To Berry, the only real pleasure, and the only real way to combat the destructiveness of the industrial, technological, energy-consumptive society, is a return to the small farms and interdependent rural communities that proliferated prior to the Industrial Revolution.

In “A Remarkable Man,” Berry extensively praises Nate Shaw, a black farmer in Alabama in the early twentieth century who was “a mule farmin’ man to the last,” despite the advent of the era of tractor farming late in Shaw’s life. Furthermore, in Berry’s view, Shaw’s principled life as a small farmer—which led to him being imprisoned for twelve years because he defended a neighbor’s stock against attachment by local authorities—made him a man of character. Shaw possessed self-respect, love of work, pride in his accomplishments, and high standards for his own work and behavior, all qualities Berry feels are woefully lacking in today’s technological, urban-centered society. Therefore, Shaw is emblematic of Berry’s solution to the misdirection of today’s society.

As described in “The Work of Local Culture,” the only solution is the revival of rural communities with interdependent, local produce production and distribution; with ecologically sound, regenerative farming practices that sustain the natural world rather than destroy it; and with cultural memories and traditions preserved by productive relationships with friends and neighbors. Only then, Berry believes, can humans be spared the eventual destruction implicit in Western civilization’s direction since the Industrial Revolution. Of course, as the author himself realizes, the key question is how to bring about this reversal of direction, as he notes in “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine.” He admits his own dependence on modern technology (automobile, airplane, and chainsaw) and offers no simplistic solution, just his belief that the reversal will have to begin with the revival of rural communities brought about by the residents of those communities themselves, based on the longstanding principles of neighborliness, love of that which is precious, and the desire to be at home.

Christian Themes

Christian themes are of course implicit throughout Berry’s essays; the most important themes are a religiously sound relationship to nature, a moral economic system, and the primacy of love. In “God and Country,” he indicts those pseudo-Christians who have read no more of the Bible than Genesis I:28, concerning subduing the earth, and who use that passage as rationalization for destroying the natural world.

Emphasizing the “replenish the earth” language of Genesis I:28, Berry contends that humans possess the earth only in trust for God. Therefore, humans cannot ethically destroy any of the natural world but must preserve and protect it from waste. Berry also turns to Revelation 4:11 to buttress this view, emphasizing that all of the natural world was created for God’s pleasure and therefore humans must safeguard it. Of course, such safeguarding is the opposite of what the Industrial Revolution and current technological innovation have done with nature. Berry’s deeply held, biblically based beliefs about nature are fundamental to his dissatisfaction with modern, urban, industrial life. Berry also believes, based on Revelations, that humans must be attentive to the natural world and work to strengthen all living things as long as possible.

Further, a moral economic system is central to Berry’s beliefs, and he notes this moral economy in “God and Country.” In “A Practical Harmony,” he argues that a moral economy, one obedient to nature’s laws and based on replenishing of natural resources, was the norm throughout history until the Industrial Revolution, when elaborately rationalized rape and plunder of the natural world became the norm. Fundamental also to a moral economy is diversity rather than specialization, as is the modern norm. In “Nature as Measure,” he explains that one-crop agriculture depletes the soil, but rotation of many types of crops is more consistent with what nature does without human interference.

Another central theme in Berry’s essays is the primacy of love, in an all-inclusive, biblical sense that encompasses love of nature, love of other species, and love of fellow human beings. The importance of love is evident in Berry’s indictment of capitalistic competition, which presupposes losers in the competition but ignores them as an embarrassment. Berry notes in “Economy and Pleasure” that the “losers” in capitalism are also the children of God and deserve more than being told to just go into another line of work. Love is also implicit in Berry’s criticism that proponents of capitalistic competition always have very little to say about honesty, the fundamental economic virtue, or about community, compassion, and mutual help, all of which of course derive from Christian love. Further, in “Word and Flesh,” Berry notes that only love can bring the intelligence necessary to do what must be done to reverse the destructive direction of Western civilization. This includes, as he says in “Nature as Measure,” farmers tending farms they know and love—farms small enough to know and love—using tools they know and love in the company of neighbors they know and love. Finally, Berry ends the collection by stating that rape of nature has continued too long, and now it is time for marriage, based of course on love.

Sources for Further Study

Angyal, Andrew J. Wendell Berry. New York: Twayne, 1995. Best analysis of Berry’s life, ideas, poetry, fiction, and essays to date, with excellent bibliography of writings by and about Berry.

Berry, Wendell. The Long-Legged House. New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1965. His initial collection of essays, critical of strip mining and the Vietnam War, which established the themes of his later essays.

Berry, Wendell. The Way of Ignorance. Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005. Berry’s most recent collection of essays, continuing themes of community and nature and addressing constitutional issues generated by responses to terrorism.

Cornell, Robert. “The Country of Marriage: Wendell Berry’s Personal Political Vision.” Southern Literary Review 16 (Fall, 1983): 59-70.

Ditsky, John. “Wendell Berry: Homage to the Apple Tree.” Modern Poetry Studies 2, no. 1 (1971): 7-15.

Freyfogle, Eric. “The Dilemma of Wendell Berry.” University of Illinois Law Review 1994 (2): 363-385.

Goodrich, Janet. The Unforseen Self in the Works of Wendell Berry. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Goodrich looks at the five personae of Berry—autobiographer, poet, farmer, prophet, and neighbor—as they are expressed in his poems, stories, and essays.

Hass, Robert. “Wendell Berry: Finding the Land.” Modern Poetry Studies 2, no. 1 (1971): 16-38.

Hicks, Jack. “Wendell Berry’s Husband to the World: A Place on Earth.” American Literature 51 (May, 1979): 238-254.

Merchant, Paul, ed. Wendell Berry. Lewiston, Idaho: Confluence Press, 1991.

Morgan, Speer. “Wendell Berry: A Fatal Singing.” Southern Review 10 (October, 1974): 865-877.

Nibbelink, Herman. “Thoreau and Wendell Berry: Bachelor and Husband of Nature.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 84 (Spring, 1985): 127-140.

Pevear, Richard. “On the Prose of Wendell Berry.” Hudson Review 35 (Summer, 1982): 341-347.

Smith, Kimberly K. Wendell Berry and the Agrarian Tradition: A Common Grace. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003.

Smith, Kimberly K. “Wendell Berry’s Feminist Agrarianism.” Women’s Studies 30 (2001): 623-646.

Trachtman, Paul. “Berry Wendell.” Smithsonian 36, no. 8 (November, 2005): 54-56. A profile of Berry, who farms 125 acres in Connecticut with his family. His philosophical outlook is discussed.