Book Review: What Are People For? by Wendell Berry. North Point Press, Berkeley, CA. 1990. 210 pp. $9.95.
All of us can point to a handful of books which have forever altered our perceptions and changed our lives. Wendell Berrys The Unsettling of America, Culture and Agriculture was such a book for me. I first read it in the late seventies and itlike most of these life-changing booksat once articulated what I intuited, confirmed what I suspected and pointed to answers for what Id questioned. Many of the essays in this new collection continue to explore the themes of that seminal work.
Wendell Berry is a farmer, poet, novelist and essayist. He works the land which his father and grandfather before him worked in Henry County in northern Kentucky, and it is when he is speaking of the things closest to him, what he calls his country, that his writing is a sheer joy to read. With a poets eye and a lovers heart he dwells on the details of his home place like a man who has long delighted in his beloved and cherishes the details of her being.
It is this combination of poetry and love and lived rural experience which so radically sets apart his writings from others who explore the themes of rural culture and economy and its systematic erosion in the twentieth century. His is a quintessentially American voice, but one with a respect for community which corrects the ever present American dangers of exaggerated individualism and self-centered profit motive.
The book is divided into three sections. The first is two long poems, the second literary essays, and the third social comment (though that is too weak a phrase for this luminous prose). I would suggest that those new to Wendell Berrys work skip to the third section, as some familiarity with his cultural critique will illumine both his poetry and his other literary writings.
His critique of contemporary American society is rooted in love of family, region and land and a hearty respect for what Buddhists call right livelihood. To my knowledge he never makes reference to papal social teachings and, I am not certain he, as a Protestant Christian, is familiar with them, but a Catholic will feel at home here. His criticisms of unbridled capitalism and consumerism, his respect for small land ownership and his embracing of the principle of subsidiarity (though he does not use the word) all echo the great Catholic tradition of social thought. He has even, in The Unsettling of America, criticized the contraceptive and abortive mentality, while in What are People For? he offers some harsh comment on the currently dominant yuppie feminism. And though, again, he never uses the word, his economics are profoundly distributist.
That said, it is remarkable that his audience appears to be largely of the Green/Left/New Age end of the spectrum. His work has appeared recently in The Utne Reader and The Whole Earth Review, journals which hardly seem friendly to the western and biblical tradition in which Wendell Berry is rooted. This is a sign of great hope to me, an indication that folks who often seem bent on the destruction of the things a Christian holds dear may, in fact, be rejecting only distortions of those things and may be willing to listen to a Christian voice which is deeper and more prophetic than that of the obnoxious TV evangelist or bland church bureaucrat. To paraphrase Chesterton, perhaps Christianity has not been heard and rejected, but has not been heard.
Thankfully, there are voices like Wendell Berrys, writings rich with wholeness and humanness, with love of family, simplicity and region and all things held dear throughout the ages preceding our own destructive time. A note of warning, though: the effect of these essays can be profoundly disturbing, stimulating dissatisfaction with the shallowness of ones own life, like the effect of a good Lenten sermon. But it is a sermon that inspires more than it scolds, stirring in one the desire to, in Wendell Berry's words, again have a world fit and pleasant for little children and to safeguard God's pleasure in His work.
DN
