What Are People For By Wendell Berry Analysis
Wendell Berry is the author of the nonfiction books What Are People For?; Standing on Earth; Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community; Another Turn of the Crank; Life Is a Miracle; Citizenship Papers; and most recently, The Way of Ignorance. Not only is he an American novelist, but he is also a poet, environmental activist, cultural critic, and a farmer. He believes that he good life includes sustainable agriculture, appropriate technologies, healthy rural communities, connection to place, the pleasures of good food, husbandry, good work, local economics, and the interconnectedness of life. The threats Berry finds to this good simple life include: industrial farming and the industrialization of life, ignorance, hubris, greed, violence against others
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He appeals to ethics (ethos) explaining how he spoke at a meeting and two veterinarians asked him how they could practice veterinary medicine without serious economic damage to the farmers who were their clients. He tells them that they had no choice, since the market for medicinal drugs was entirely controlled by the drug companies, whereas most farmers had no control at all over the market for agricultural products. The powerful are limitlessly “free” to trade, to the disadvantage, and ultimately the ruin, of the powerless. By saying this, he establishes his credibility because he understands the problem and how it affects the disadvantaged. He appeals to emotion (pathos) by saying that he knows the idea of limitations will horrify some people, maybe most people, because we all, including him, have long encouraged ourselves to feel at home on the “cutting edge” of knowledge and power or on some “frontier” of human experience. He is able to empathize with his reader; he puts himself in his reader’s shoes and understands their viewpoint. He appeals to logic (logos) by describing how it is the artists, not the scientists, who have dealt unremittingly with the problem of limits. However, within these limits, artists achieve elaborations of pattern, of sustaining relationships of parts without one another and with the whole, that may be astonishingly complex. He further argues his claim by relating this to the economy and environment. A natural ecosystem survives by the same sort of formal intricacy. If we want to make our economic landscapes sustainably and abundantly productive, we must do so by maintaining in them a living formal complexity like that of natural ecosystems. He says we can do this only by raising to the highest level our mastery of the arts of agriculture, animal husbandry, forestry, and, ultimately, the art of
He appeals to ethics (ethos) explaining how he spoke at a meeting and two veterinarians asked him how they could practice veterinary medicine without serious economic damage to the farmers who were their clients. He tells them that they had no choice, since the market for medicinal drugs was entirely controlled by the drug companies, whereas most farmers had no control at all over the market for agricultural products. The powerful are limitlessly “free” to trade, to the disadvantage, and ultimately the ruin, of the powerless. By saying this, he establishes his credibility because he understands the problem and how it affects the disadvantaged. He appeals to emotion (pathos) by saying that he knows the idea of limitations will horrify some people, maybe most people, because we all, including him, have long encouraged ourselves to feel at home on the “cutting edge” of knowledge and power or on some “frontier” of human experience. He is able to empathize with his reader; he puts himself in his reader’s shoes and understands their viewpoint. He appeals to logic (logos) by describing how it is the artists, not the scientists, who have dealt unremittingly with the problem of limits. However, within these limits, artists achieve elaborations of pattern, of sustaining relationships of parts without one another and with the whole, that may be astonishingly complex. He further argues his claim by relating this to the economy and environment. A natural ecosystem survives by the same sort of formal intricacy. If we want to make our economic landscapes sustainably and abundantly productive, we must do so by maintaining in them a living formal complexity like that of natural ecosystems. He says we can do this only by raising to the highest level our mastery of the arts of agriculture, animal husbandry, forestry, and, ultimately, the art of