What Are People For?
Berry, Wendell
S ome years ago Wendell Berry quit his teaching job at the University of Kentucky to take up farming in Port Royal, about midway between Louisville and Cincinnati. There he has written...
...of the evil that is done by centralization...
...I have heard from one of his students that this was the sum of Berry's message in creative writing classes: You just tell the truth about what you know...
...218 pages / 1990 / cloth $29.95 / paper $11.95 The Brookings Institution P. 0. Box 270 Washington DC 20055 (202) 797-6258 (202) 797-6004 FAX Write or call for a catalog...
...Appearances to the contrary, though, Berry is not a spokesman for anything so limited in its aims as the environmental movement...
...Berry emerges as an eloquent spokesman for rural and agrarian concerns...
...one of its most tiresomely self-congratulatory Et G Myers...
...he tries only to make them persuasive...
...all available means may be used in pursuit of this goal...
...Universal agreement...
...His title suggests that people exist only for the sake of nature...
...For example, in every competition, Berry believes somewhat tautologically, there is a winner and a loser...
...There he has written energetically, publishing many volumes of fiction, poetry, and essays...
...Berry is unlikely to find this description entirely to his liking...
...Finally, in the longest section, Berry begins to write polemically, in twelve essays that determine the book's claim on our attention...
...We know the answer of many environmentalists: Earth-First...
...WHAT ARE PEOPLE FOR...
...Much could be said about this conclusion, but there is perhaps something to observe about the habit of the mind that reaches it...
...Who could possibly quarrel with such a modest demand...
...He sees something similar in the late Edward Abbey, who "speaks insistently as himself" and refuses "to act as a spokesman or a property of any group or movement, however righteous...
...The movement on behalf of which Berry speaks is larger than environmentalism, and bids fair to swallow it whole...
...He returns again and again to the same themes: "the rape of the earth," the need to "protect it from those who would dishonor it," "the gravity, the great danger, of the predicament we are now in," and the saving grace—the great promise—of "local culture, local responsibility...
...Although he has been compared to Thoreau, Berry belongs more among Ignatius Donnelly, Mary Elizabeth Lease, and W. H. "Coin" Harvey—the pamphleteers of late nineteenth-century Populism—and, in polite literature, with the panegyrists of rural midwestern life, Booth Tarkington and Ruth Suckow...
...V et the uncomfortable truth is 1 that Berry writes very much as the spokesman for a movement...
...In his essays Berry does not reflect upon the basis of his opinions...
...Although "democratic" is a word of praise for Berry, he is not to be trusted on the subject, because he is more concerned with seeking an outcome than with the civil measures necessary to attain it...
...He never offers an argument for "the fowls of the air and the lilies of the field...
...and the bracing reassurance that this time around things are really going to be smashed...
...slogans...
...but the simple verb "use" enables him to imply that any use is an exploitation...
...What then...
...Wendell Berry/North Point Press/192 pp...
...At every occasion that presents itself, Berry seizes upon these ideas and feels compelled to express them...
...With the international collapse of Marxism, this new form of radical populism, emphasizing no-growth restrictions and local autonomy, is a good bet to fill the void...
...In his essay on the oral biography of the black Alabama farmer Nate Shaw, he describes how he would prefer to be known: as a solitary man of principle, useless to propagandists, who writes out of experience and is never far from judgment...
...an anti-educational and anti-intellectual bias ("public falsehoods, betrayals of trust, aggressions, injustices, and imminent catastrophes are now almost exclusively the work of the college-bred...
...9.95 paper D. G. Myers THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1990 51 much talk of preserving and handing on a common tradition and birthright...
...promises for the "empowerment" of work in a new economy...
...an icon-smashing book on school reform...
...Berry's characteristic procedure is to start from what seems to him to be a given and then to adduce varieties of experience around it...
...19.95...
...But consider its specific character...
...disdain for "nuclear security...
...For conservatives, there is61174gArr* The Best of Brookings Books for holiday giving,for year round reading Politics, Markets, and America's Schools BY JOHN E. CHUBB AND TERRY M. MOE "The education book of the year...
...He attacks environmentalists' search for "planetary" solutions, and demands local dedication to local problems...
...They may wish to obtain a copy of the book in any event, if only as a guide to the slogans they are almost certain to hear over and over for the next few years...
...it also conceals the obvious truth that these "wild places," identified as such, set aside, and protected as a result of human decision, are "used" by man, though in another way...
...Majority rule...
...of limits...
...assistant professor of English at Texas A&M, has written for the American Scholar and Commentary...
...His is the performance of a spokesman...
...What is Berry's answer...
...But it is clearly how Berry would like to see himself...
...Some urban people are becoming disturbed about the contamination of air, water, and food," he writes in his most recent book, "and that is promising, but there are not enough of them yet to make a difference...
...What he offers in lieu of argument is voluble elaboration of established positions...
...A consensus of environmental spokesmen...
...You will object that a businessman may not murder his competitor, but that it is small consolation if he may murder nature...
...What this strange amalgam points to, however, is a realignment of political ideologies in this country, and perhaps around the world...
...Berry says as much: the emerging division, he warns, "is of far more portent for the future of the world than any of the presently recognized national or political or economic divisions...
...After two loose gatherings of aphorisms labeled "Damage" and "Healing" ("To lose the scar of knowledge is to renew the wound," "The possible, fulfilled, is timely in the world, eternal in the mind"), Berry turns his hand to literary subjects: six essays in praise of men and books, then two general statements of the writer's relationship to the community and of his responsibility...
...I wish to speak a word for Nature," begins an essay by Thoreau, a writer to whom Berry is often compared...
...Berry's reworked populism is a beguiling array of appeals to left and right...
...What if a democratically elected local government chooses after deliberation to ignore Berry and, instead of leaving a place wild, votes to approve a suburban housing development...
...Berry's own concerns are larger and more radical...
...You do not read Berry to listen to an independent mind discovering what it has to say on an unfamiliar theme, but to decipher the exact nature of the movement that he speaks for...
...This seems an odd claim to make on behalf of Abbey, the very title of whose novel The Monkey Wrench Gang has given Earth First...
...and the conviction that the profit motive is behind everything ("corporate interests . . . are destroying the rural home and the rural life," "an incalculable birthright sold for money...
...By "use" Berry seems to mean "exploit the resources of for untold profits...
...And the convergence of these two impulses explains much about Berry's group or movement...
...The Washington Post 317 pages / 1990 / cloth $29.95 / paper $11.95 After the Wall: American Policy toward Germany ELIZABETH POND The former Christian Science Monitor correspondent traces the events leading to the transformation of Germany, beginning with the one-night—November 9, 1989—when the wall fell and the postwar world of Europe vanished forever...
...He invokes resentment toward modernity on the one hand and nostalgia for community on the other...
...The only question is the strength of this new populism's attachment to democracy...
...The Wall Street Journal 336 pages / 1990 / cloth $28.95 / paper $/0.95 Setting National Priorities Policy for the Nineties EDITED BY HENRY J. AARON "If the subject of influence in Washington interests you, this series of books deserves your respectful attention...
...Every [commercial] transaction is meant to involve a winner and a loser," Berry says...
...Skeptical readers may ask, however, whether the concern for nature isn't a disguise for totalitarian populism...
...A Priority Press Publication of the Twentieth Century Fund 100 pages / 1990 / paper $8.95 An American Trade Strategy Options for the 1990s ROBERT Z. LAWRENCE AND CHARLES L. SCHULTZE, EDITORS Is the postwar strategy of reliance on multilateral free trade agreements still the best course for the United States...
...of natural harmonies ("The goal is a harmony between the human economy and nature that will preserve both nature and humanity...
...At one point he calls for "places that by common agreement we [humans] do not use at all, but leave wild...
...Everything he has written has been from a rural and agrarian point of view, although he has not sought such a limited audience...
...It follows, then, that an economy founded on the principle of competition is, well, not a nice thing...
...The interest in reading him is not that of reading the best essayists...
...From athletics to business, the goal is to destroy one's competitor, to remove him from the scene, to leave him with nothing...
...But Berry speaks no such word...
...The need to defend nature is self-evident to him...
...a dualistic conception of political conflict ("The world is now divided between those who adhere to this ancient purpose and those who by intention do not...
...234 pages / 1990 / cloth $28.95 / paper $10.95 Deterrence and the Revolution in Soviet Military Doctrine RAYMOND L. GARTHOFF Garthoff makes use of unique, newly available material—including a complete file of the confidential Soviet general staff journal—to illuminate the development of Soviet military thinking...
...For ex-Marxists whom the counterrevolution in Eastern Europe has left with nothing to believe in, there are pleas for cooperation, not competition...
...What Are People For?, Berry's seventh collection of essays, is a good introduction to his way of thinking...
...And what civil prescription is implied in the phrase "by common agreement...
...a view of existing social arrangements as the effort of a cabal ("The present practice of handing down from on high policies and technologies . . . 'invented' by self-styled smart people in the offices and laboratories of a centralized economy...
...52 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1990...
...Its roots, upon closer examination, turn out to be the articles of a resurgent populism: there is a vision of a golden age, now lost ("such local cultures and economies as we once had have been stunted or destroyed...
...It sounds so simple and beautiful...
...And in some competitions, such as war, even this prohibition is lifted...
...And for this reason the human economy is pitted without limit against nature...
...and of slow, small adjustments...
Vol. 23 • December 1990 • No. 12
