What are People For? by Wendell Berry
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Although I don’t always agree with Wendell Berry, his essays are written with such grace that they are a pleasure to read no matter what his opinions are. Berry sees his writing as a craft, a calling, and it is obvious that he writes with great care.

This craftsmanship is shown in Berry’s writing process. Berry writes out his essays by hand, then reads them aloud so that he can experience them with the ear, not just the mind. As he goes through this process, he keeps revising and rewriting. The result is precise and elegant prose that makes his essays worthwhile to read regardless of what he is writing about.

The book What Are People For? is a collection of twenty essays and two poems. In them, Berry touches on a lot of subjects: the economy, food, technology, literature, the environment, and farming. In each of the essays, Wendell Berry shows that he has a strong sense of history and of the direction our country is headed. The essays show us what our society used to be, what it is now, where it’s going, and where Berry thinks it should be going.

But the truth is that Berry's solutions won't work. They just won't. The world is too entrenched in its so-called progress, and there is no turning back to the way things once were. But I love the fact that Berry makes a valiant attempt. It is an attempt worth making because human beings are worth it.

As I read the essays in this book, I was struck by the depth of what we have lost in the last century as our society has stopped valuing human beings and has instead gone through the dehumanizing processes of industrialization, globalization, and mechanization. Years ago, many Americans generally recognized that human beings were created in the image of God, and that therefore they were creatures created to work with dignity, purpose, and meaning. But today, America has no sense of value for human beings. If a company today can replace a human being with a machine, it almost certainly will.

Berry shows us that as our society continues heading this direction, we are losing something. Years ago, Americans were close to their families, to their local communities, and to the land itself. They found fulfillment as they worked meaningful jobs that had direct benefits to their communities, and they passed on their values to their children. And because their work directly impacted the local community, people worked with a sense of purpose and pride. Also, people stayed in their local communities their entire lives, so they had a high stake in caring for their families, their neighbors, and their communities.

But times have changed. In our global industrial economy today, most people see no connection between their work and their local community. They see their families more as a financial burden than anything else. And because people no longer have the opportunity to work at home, families don’t spend much time together. And unlike Americans years ago, most Americans today don’t care about their next-door neighbors. The highest value now is "personal peace and affluence." In other words, leave me alone.

Berry shows that what we have lost as a result of these changes is affection. Drawing from his personal experience, Berry shows us that people once had affection for the land because they had a multi-generational connection to it, and they ate the food they had grown on it. They also had more affection for their families, because the older generation knew that their own children would farm the land one day, or take the shop. Families worked together, enjoying the work but also the fellowship. (Berry has great stories from his own experience to tell on this subject.) Berry also shows us that as parents spent time working with and teaching the children, life was enriched for both children and adults. Today this is almost unheard of.

And obviously, people years ago also had much more of a sense of connection to their local community. People generally lived in the same area for their whole lives, so they cared about the community. Neighbors worshipped together, worked together, and visited each other on porches or at the fences in the evenings because they cared for each other. And because Amazon, UPS, and Walmart didn’t exist, people bought everything locally, so they took much more pride in their work as they labored in local shops and fields.

This sense of community was prominent even in schools and colleges, which were focused on training young people not to leave the community, but to become responsible citizens who could stay in the community, pass on its values, and keep it strong. The thought of leaving and “making it big” in the city was seen as disloyal.

But sadly, in the first half of the twentieth century, modernism and greed took over, and personal relationships and community became subordinate to the almighty dollar. American economic policies emphasized quantitative values—consolidation, efficiency, and the bottom line—and the dignity of human beings and human work had little value to corporate executives, who saw people as "resources" to be discarded when more profit demanded it. In short, quantitative values became more important to businesses, schools, and government institutions than the qualitative values of community, family, faith, and meaningful work, which cannot be measured scientifically or financially.

As a result of changes in federal economic policies, small farms were seen as inefficient and undesirable. This caused most small farms, where families once had meaningful work that supported the local community, to fail and eventually disappear. In their place appeared massive farms that were run like factories. People who once found meaningful work were replaced by machines, so they took their families and moved to cities, losing their connections to places and local communities that they had known for generations.

American educational institutions also changed. No longer was the goal to foster responsible citizens who would keep the local community strong. Now the mission of schools and universities was to build corporate workers. The new educational concept of success was for a young person to leave the local community, make lots of money, and move up the corporate ladder. Instead of training young people to become responsible, mature members of the community who would pass on its values to the next generation of families, schools began to focus on math, science, and technological skills, while at the same time failing to present any sort of moral framework for them.

These changes are still impacting us today. Now the goal in our educational institutions is to give people “job skills.” Schools don’t consider what people are for, and considering the direction of our society is seen as a waste of time. They are too busy improving test scores.

And there are further results of these changes. Americans today no longer find meaning in their workweek. The products they make are not for their local community, but for people who live thousands of miles away, whom they have no connection to whatsoever. Because of this loss of community and the consequential loss of joy in work and at home, Americans today live their lives waiting for the evening, or for the weekend, or for retirement, or for death.

The worst casualty of this change in society is the family. Children were once a treasure, a blessing from God, and an asset to the home. Now they are a hindrance and a nuisance, and parents are happy when they send the kids to daycare or to school for the day.

In short, as we have moved toward industrialization, globalization, and mechanization--all at the expense of loving our fellow human beings as ourselves--we have lost our affection for our families, our land, and our local communities.

What are people for? It is a question worth asking.



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