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

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

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