What Are People For?

Wendell Berry's interrogation of the industrial economy's implicit answer to the question of human purpose: that people are for production, that their value is measured by output, that their dignity is contingent on usefulness. When usefulness declines—when machines can do what they do—the culture retrains, redeploys, or discards. Berry, being what one essayist called "a sane man," said no. Not as political rebellion but as empirical observation: people are not for production. People are for care. Not care as abstraction but as practice—the specific, embodied, daily practice of tending something (land, child, community, craft, marriage, codebase) with the patience and attention that only a present, committed person can provide. Care is a competence: the farmer's knowledge of what this field needs, the carpenter's judgment that this joint must be hand-fitted, the developer's understanding that this system requires careful refactoring even though it is functioning. The competence accumulates only through sustained, attentive, local engagement with a specific domain—the competence Segal's engineer lost when Claude took over implementation depositing layers of understanding. AI does