Wendell Berry What Are People For Summary

What are people for?

Wendell Berry writes in his book, “What are people for?” a thesis that present-day society is crushing the farming-based culture. He feels that technology is seen and used as the easy way to make food faster and more efficiently. With this modern way of farming comes the idea that we need to “work smarter, not harder” which is not generally true. The goal is comfort and relaxation and Berry feels that this is the reason for the downfall of the agricultural culture. He believes that abstract things like diligent work and pride is more important than materialistic things like goods and money. But even with these faults we have today, this society still appreciates the hard work of farming families compared to the easy way

of living today.
One point of Berry’s argument is that he believes that the land is falling more and more into the hands of city people, who in spite of all the scientific agricultural miracles still have more money than farmers. Big technology and large economics have caused more people to leave the countryside for the city. Many of the great farmers are clearly becoming different because they lack the manpower and money to maintain their farms properly and the number of part time farmers and ex-farmers increase every year due to problems with money and resources. The farm people are becoming less dependent on what they produce and more dependent on what they are buying. A lot of farmers worry more about their money so they overwork themselves. The ideal of hard work has been replaced with the desire to have a good time.
Another argument that Berry proposes is the connection between the “modernization” of agricultural techniques, the disintegration of the culture, the communities of farming, and the consequent disintegration of structures of urban life. What we called “agriculture progress” has involved the displacement of millions of people. An example of modernization can be seen through the idea of “Get big or get out.” It’s a policy that says that you have to become more modern or “big” through change and be competitive in order to keep up with the other competitors. If not, than you must “get out” what you are doing. This can be used through a comparison of communist using military force in order to remove those who refuse to follow their demand for change, and the government using their economic power to force farmers to improve their farming techniques. In a “Free Market” the most successful becomes the richest, that’s just how it works. To those who could not improve their business or compete with those who are successful, they have to “get out” of the business in order to save themselves. If they refuse to leave, they may suffer a huge loss to their economic well-being. For a social or economic goal, size is the most important thing and it is establishing an inevitable tendency toward the one that will be the biggest of all. Many of those who “got big” to stay in business, are now being driven out by those who are even bigger. The aim of big businesses is to make as much money as possible, but at the cost of others.
Berry sums up his point through the example of food as a cultural product that cannot be produced by technology alone.

Those agriculturists that think the problems of food production can be solved through technology fail to see the importance of the hard work it takes to make the food. This hard work reinforces the cultural times among farmers and their families. “A culture is not a collection of relics or ornaments, but a practical necessity, and its corruption invokes calamity. A healthy culture is a communal order of memory, insight, value, and work, conviviality, reverence, and aspiration” (43). It reveals the needs of human as well as their limits; a healthy farm culture can be based only upon familiarity and can grow only among a people soundly established upon the land. It supports and protects a person’s knowledge of the earth. We cannot allow another generation to forget the importance of this culture. If we do, the knowledge that is held will be lost

forever.
It is by the measure of culture, rather than economics or technology that we can begin to understand the cost of people moving to the city and its effects on those who stay behind to farm.

From a cultural point of view, the movement from the farm to the city involves a radical simplification of mind and of character. “[…] there seems to be a rule that we can simplify our minds and our culture only at the cost of an oppressive social and mechanical complexity” (58). We can simplify our society by freeing ourselves from undertaking tasks of great mental and cultural complexity. Farming includes this sort of complexity, both in this character and culture. If you try to simplify either one, you risk destroying them. The best farming requirements are a husband and a nurturer, not a technician or a businessman. Technicians and businessmen are created through training. A good farmer on the other hand, is a cultural product, a sort of training seen through the time he imposes. If a culture is to hope for survival, then the relationships within it must be mainly cooperative rather than competitive. The relationships in the universe are thus not competitive but

interdependent.
I believe that Berry does prove his thesis by showing that modernization has a hand in the destruction that is happening in the farming culture. He stated that as the society’s technology improves their way of life we seem to overlook the significance of the basic information about the land. He looks down on the competition within the culture that is competing with one another. He despises the fact that most of all the small farmers cannot compete with the bigger farms because small farms lack money, resources and manpower to keep up. All of this replaces the destruction of the farming culture today.