Still Asking Berry’s Question

Wendell Berry asked a question that modernity hates because it cannot be monetized: What are people for? The industrial age answered without blushing: people are for the economy. They are for the factory, for the spreadsheet, for the gross domestic product, for the “growth curve.” And because modernity is very sure of itself, it named this clear and quantifiable purpose “progress.” Berry, being a sane man, said no. People are not raw material. The farm is not a mine. The town is not a labor pool. The land is not “natural resources.” The creature is not a “human resource.” People are for love, for neighborliness, for covenant, for the stewardship of place, for the worship of God. The economy is for people, not the other way around.

Now we have entered a new chapter in the same old story. The factory was thick steel and soot; the algorithm is clean glass and the promise of frictionless living. But the question has not changed. What are people for? If you listen to the evangelists of ubiquitous AI, you can hear the old answer updated for a sleeker age: people are for optimizing the system. People are for feeding the model. People are for “upskilling” to stay relevant. People are for consumption while machines produce. We are for being managed, curated, nudged, entertained, medicated, subsidized, and finally rendered unnecessary…except perhaps as data points.

We should not pretend this is a neutral development. A tool is never just a tool. Every tool is a moral proposal. The plow proposes a certain kind of farming. The automobile proposes a certain kind of city. The smartphone proposes a certain kind of attention span. And AI proposes a certain kind of humanity. Powerful tools do not merely serve us; they slowly train us to serve them. And if the only virtues we value are efficiency and expediency, we will bow to any machine that offers more of both.

The ideologues of automation speak with a kind of missionary zeal. AI will free us from drudgery. AI will remove human error. AI will multiply economic output. AI will personalize education, healthcare, entertainment, companionship. AI will be the “next electricity,” they say, and so it must be everywhere, in everything, all at once. And then the pious conclusion: anyone raising a hand in caution is anti-progress, anti-science, afraid of the future.

But there is another word for the future they are selling: displacement. The question is not whether AI can do certain tasks as well as humans. Of course it can, and increasingly it will. The question is whether a society that systematically replaces human labor with machine labor is still a society ordered to human good. The promise of liberation from drudgery quickly becomes liberation from purpose. And purpose is not an optional accessory. It is a necessity of being human. A man without meaningful work is not a man who has been freed; he is a man who has been cut loose.

“Work” here does not mean mere wage-earning. It means the human vocation to make and keep, to cultivate and guard, to build what is worth inheriting. Work is the way love takes shape in the world. A father works to provide. A mother works to nurture. A neighbor works to repair what is broken. A farmer works to husband the soil. A teacher works to pass on wisdom. A carpenter works to make shelter. A church member works to bear burdens. These are not interchangeable economic units. They are acts of embodied responsibility. Berry’s complaint against abstraction is precisely this: once people become “labor” in the system, their particular loves and particular places no longer matter.

Ubiquitous AI accelerates abstraction like gasoline on a brushfire. The more that work is done by disembodied systems, the less work is tied to place. And the less work is tied to place, the weaker the ties of membership become. The logic is brutal and simple: if a machine can do it cheaper, humans shouldn’t. If a town is inefficient, the market will bypass it. If a craft is slow, an algorithm will swallow it. If a family is fragile, a platform will replace it with services. We are invited to live in a world of permanent outsourcing, where the friction of being human is treated as a bug to be fixed.

And the social consequences are not hard to predict because many of them are already here. First comes automation. Then comes permanent unemployability for a wide class of people; not because they’re lazy, but because the ladder has been kicked away. “Learn to code” was the pep talk of the last decade; now AI codes. “Go into design” was the assurance of the creative economy; now AI designs. “Do knowledge work” was the shelter from industrial replacement; now AI writes, summarizes, drafts, advises. The goalposts will keep moving because the goal is not human flourishing. The goal is maximal efficiency.

What happens to a people whose sense of worth is tethered to usefulness, when usefulness is mechanized away? We should be honest enough to answer: despair. Aimlessness. Addiction. Political hysteria. A general lowering of the national mood. In some cases, yes, rebellion. In other cases, a dull flotation in entertainment and substances. You cannot turn the human being into a dependent and expect him to remain a citizen. You cannot treat him as superfluous and expect him to remain sane.

“Universal basic income will solve that,” we are told. Money for nothing; a subsidy to float those who have been made redundant. But here again is Berry’s question in another costume. What are people for? If the answer is “for consuming products and staying quiet while machines do the meaningful stuff,” then yes, UBI is a tidy solution. It is also a polite form of social euthanasia. Bread without work is not dignity; it is sedation. The Christian tradition does not say, “If a man does not work, let him receive a check so he can endlessly scroll.” It says, “If a man does not work, neither shall he eat”—not to be cruel, but because work is woven into the fabric of a meaningful life. We were made to bear responsibility. We were made to put our love to work in the service of God and neighbor. A society that tries to offload that need is not merciful; it is vandalizing the soul.

The defenders of ubiquitous AI assume that meaning is something you can invent once the machines handle the necessities. “People will be free to pursue art, leisure, relationships, play.” But leisure is only leisure after labor. Play only means something because there is something serious to play from. Art is not a default state produced by free time; it is the fruit of disciplined attention, usually learned under the patient hand of a community. Relationships fray when no one is needed. If we take away the ordinary callings that knit people to one another, we don’t create a paradise of creativity. We create a petri dish for narcissism.

The deeper issue is theological before it is economic. God made man in His image. That image includes the charge to rule, name, cultivate, and create. We are not gods, but we are makers under God. We were not fashioned to be ornamental. When the machine becomes the primary actor in the world and the human becomes a passive recipient, the image is insulted. The cult of AI is not just a business strategy. It is an anthropology: a doctrine about what humans are. And its doctrine is that humans are error-prone meat devices. The system is wise. Trust the system. Give over agency. Let the optimization proceed.

Berry’s resistance to industrialism was never about nostalgia for hard labor. It was about fidelity to creaturely limits and local loves. The point is not that we should forbid every use of machine intelligence. The point is that we must never enthrone it. Tools are gifts when they remain tools. They are curses when they become masters.

So what does it mean to refuse subservience to the tool?

It means we stop speaking as though inevitability were the same as righteousness. “AI is coming, so we must adapt,” is not an argument. Plagues come too. Pornography comes too. Tyrants come too. The question is not what is coming, but what is good. And goodness is measured by whether human beings become more fully human in their homes, churches, and towns.

It means we choose…deliberately, even stubbornly…to preserve human-centered work where it matters. A community that keeps teachers teaching, craftsmen crafting, nurses nursing, pastors pastoring, and parents parenting is not inefficient; it is sane. It is recognizing that the speed of a machine is not the same thing as the health of a people.

It means we re-localize what AI tries to de-localize. The more our economy is mediated by distant, opaque systems, the less accountable it becomes. AI concentrates power because it concentrates knowledge and production into the hands of those who own the models and compute. If Berry taught us anything, it is that concentrated power is always a threat to the land and the people. The antidote is smallness, transparency, and face-to-face responsibility.

It means we insist that education is for forming persons not “training users.” If AI shortcuts every hard mental hill, it does not make students free; it makes them dependent. Wisdom grows through struggle, through memory, through attention, through the risk of being wrong. A classroom ruled by AI tutoring as the default is a classroom that has quietly replaced the teacher’s moral authority with the machine’s efficiency. That is a bad bargain.

It means we regard the family and church as the primary economies of meaning. A man who is needed at home and in his congregation is not easily replaced by an algorithm. A village that sees its young people as future members rather than future data labor is harder to colonize by tech inevitability. You can’t build that kind of belonging with a push notification.

Some will call this reactionary. Fine. The Hebrews have been “reactionary” against idolatry since Pharaoh, and the Christians followed their example in Rome. We are not against tools. We are against false gods. We give thanks for whatever genuinely helps a mother care for her kids, a doctor diagnose disease, a farmer steward soil, a teacher teach clearly. But we refuse to live in a world where the human is downstream from the machine. We refuse to trade our birthright for convenience.

Berry’s question presses us toward a final clarity. People are not for AI. People are not for the market. People are not for the state. People are not for the machine. People are for God, and therefore for one another, and for the care of the earth that God has placed beneath our feet. Everything else is a tool. And if the tool demands that we become smaller, thinner, more passive, less responsible, and less bound to place and neighbor, then the tool is not helping. It is devouring.

So in this new industrial moment, the old counsel holds: put the living at the center. Keep the machines in the shed. Let them serve actual communities, actual households, actual farms, actual schools, actual churches. And when efficiency asks to be worshiped, laugh at it like Elijah laughed at the prophets of Baal. We were not made to be optimized. We were made to be faithful.

Image Credit: David Lucas, “Weymouth Bay” (1830) via The MET.