"What are People For?", Wendell Berry Book Review

Wendell Berry graduated from the University of Kentucky with both a BA and MA and then joined the Stanford creative writing program under Wallace Stegner. He taught creative writing in several universities before retiring to run his farm in Kentucky. He has been a prolific writer of fiction and nonfiction with an emphasis on farming, the environment and culture. His writing has a Christian tint and is preoccupied with work, the family farm and industrialization. He has become a proponent of "subsistence farming," a notion that declares practical limits on acreage production and opposes "industrial farming" as short term productive but long term destructive. Farming becomes an interesting parallel to life as it demands hard work, planning, commitment, community and an underlying interstitial framework--a belief--to base it all on.

It is difficult to review him without reducing his work to aphorism as short, compact summaries are, to a degree, the way he thinks and writes. "What Are People For?" is a collection of essays that contain a good introduction to his thinking.

Edward Abbey has written about he United States, "The country is being destroyed not by bad politics but by a bad way of life." Berry thinks this problem is magnified because of our conviction that "we cannot change because we are dependent on what is wrong." These frightening and challenging concepts run through Berry's writing, from farms, to culture, to work, to marriage. Man must have a continuity in his life, an infrastructure that forms the underpinning of all our world. We are a moral people; there is--or should be--a moral basis to the economy as well. Restraint--the art of the barber (in another work)--should stay our hand. Competition can be destructive, indeed tries to be. In a community which strives for stability, competition is against its very nature. The rat lives by supply and demand; humans must show restraint and live by justice and mercy. Production must not be an isolated goal.

Productive work is an inherent good but must be done as the logical extension of solid, general beliefs. It can not be isolated. "Any man with a machine and an inadequate culture is a pestilence." Often our eagerness to produce blinds us to self-destructive risk: "You provide the risk to the community or the environment, I will provide the fool or the drunk to make the small mistake." Worse, work is being devalued; the culture now sees achievement of decreased work as a national ambition. Marriage, a shared economic unit, has become a "negotiation for separate responsibilities."

He has an interesting--if grim--view of art: "Art now stands by itself. It can be taught but it cannot teach." The student learns only "about," never "from" art. As he says elsewhere "'Objectivity' is teaching without regard for the truth." Consequently, the humanities education becomes a technical evaluation of creative events, not an evaluation of to how to live.

This collection also contains an elegant essay on why "Huck Finn" fails as a novel. It fails because Huck's community fails. There is pain and horror for Huck but no escape, no redemption. The community is only another source of oppression. When Tom Sawyer, the flim-flam man, arrives, the die is cast. Grownup concerns recede, children come to the fore. Real escapes become bogus ones. A man without an adult community context, fails.

So do farms. So do cultures.