Every once in a while, when I go to post, I know exactly what I want to cover, and even know in my mind what I have covered, and yet have no idea exactly how to start it.
This isn't the way this usually works. I.e., I normally form a concept, but I can see and imagine the words I'll write. This, however is the full concept with no words, which makes it difficult to start writing.
Maybe that's because, as they say, in some ways, this is "the whole enchilada". Of course, by now, as I rarely type these out in one single day, that sense has dulled, but I post none the less.
So, where to start.
And what got this started?**
I think what did was being out of the office for a day, just a day, for my daughter's surgery, and knowing that I had to go back the following morning in spite of all that was on my mind at the time. I.e., as a professional occupying one of the country's "good jobs", I had just one day in which to try to be some help. And, not to my surprise I'm afraid, a surgery that was supposed to be in and out, with rapid recovery, isn't going as well as hoped for in regard to a quick return to normality. [1]. Things will ultimately be fine, and I was really skeptical of the "back up on your feet quickly" stuff I'd been told, but I'm disappointed, worried, and stressed anyhow.
And maybe it was the news that Else Stefanik, House Minority Leader, powerful woman, and 36 years old, is pregnant. There's something mind bending about the youthful Stefanik who, while I shouldn't say I will anyhow, is cute, being not only a charming looking power broker, but a central figure in a struggle inside the Republican Party whose central questions is whether or not the GOP is going to continue to endorse Donald Trump's lies about the January 6 assault on the capitol or not. Stefanik is, of course, backing the fable.
Or maybe it was this post:
This is the second time that "Kay (momma of two)" has shown up in comments here, or rather on Lex Anteinternet. The first time I'd actually replied to a tweet she'd posted. That tweet ached with her open desire to be home with her children, rather than working. I set it out again here:
The tweet above relates to this topic really. And so does powerful Elise Stefanik's being with child, while in Congress. And so does my heading off to work on the morning I started posting this, the day after my daughter's surgery. [2].
Or maybe it was all of the above combined.
All of which relates to agrarianism, truly.
And the fact that the modern industrial world (don't give me that "post industrial crap", this is the modern world, computerization is just one more facet of the Industrial Revolution bucko), fails miserably in existential ways.
Put another way, we're at war with nature and the nature we're at war with is our own nature, at least partially (and probably only partially).
While if you look around and listen to people it's not obvious, this isn't how we evolved to live. Politicians argue about jobs, good jobs, getting jobs for everyone, and how to achieve it all the time. Educators, in various fields, counsel their students that various endeavors and activities will help them get a "good job". [3].
And they should.
The economy is, in fact, and obviously, incredibly important. And finding employment, and good employment at that, is not a matter to be taken lightly. Worrying about your kids finding employment that will support them, and a potential future family, is a central concern of parents from children's mid teenage years up until they find it, if they do, and forever, if they don't.
Money won't buy happiness, to be sure, but poverty is its own misery, and there really aren't very many carefree, sane, unemployed.
Be that as it may, at no time whatsoever does a person's DNA really fully suit them for most modern jobs, at least to their full extent and nature. Oh, there are exceptions to be sure in some lines of work, although decreasingly so, but for the most part this is true. And many people's DNA does suit them at least partially, or even mostly, for their occupations. Nonetheless, some people widely admired for their success in the world or for being standard-bearers for modern life are living lives deeply disordered in regard to their natural inclinations. Those smiling faces likely have genes active in their brains that scream at them at night, if not in the day. Some have compressed their personalities into molds in order to suit their roles as well, leaving them something akin to wounded people.
Or maybe its just me. Maybe I'm just a lot more feral than a lot of other people. Or more introspective.
At this point I'm never going to get over that as part of my nature either. I'm not going to end up being one of those people who are really enamored with the concept that success means moving into a super large house in a hot zone after a career of making loads of money. It ain't going to happen. Indeed, in being honest with myself, while I'm outwardly successful by conventional measures, I'm not by my own measure, and I'm never going to be. Not even close, and not in any way whatsoever that I use as a yardstick. Not personally, professionally, or morally. [4].
There never was a time in the world, at least since the fall, in which it was perfect. It's vitally important to remember this. People who look back into the past and state "I wish I'd lived back in . . . and everything would be perfect" are fooling themselves in varying measures. And that can be a dangerous way to think. You are born into the world, and its conditions, that you are born into. Lamenting that fact won't change it.
And it is not possible in any sense for a Utopia to be created. Indeed, the amount of human misery caused by Utopian movements, whether they be 20th Century Communism or 21st Century woke progressivism, is epic. We're not going to be able to recreate the world in a perfect image, ever. Indeed, movement progressivism is ironically so locked into the spirt of its own times that it always looks to some degree foolish retrospectively.
But we can acknowledge something that's critical. We can't recreate the world to suit our personal natures, nor can we really recreate our natures. What we can do, however, is acknowledge that our natures are meant to be in a certain natural world, and that's where we are most happy. We know this for a fact.
We are a large brained, very smart, mammal that's capable of more intellectual diversity than any other creature. Culture and invention are natural to us, so that's part of our nature. We have to keep that in mind as well. Given that, we can't say that we'd all be better if we living in the year (Fill In Blank Here). At any one time there are always different cultures and inventiveness.
At the same time, however, it's also the case that at our root, we're an aboriginal agrarian people. We're meant to live in nature, and we're evolved to it. We aren't happy if we aren't in it.
Our departure from that is part of our messed up state to start with. Most humans for most of our existence lived in some sort of association with nature, whether as hunter gatherers or farmers. When we began to rise beyond that is when our lack of equality in things really started. Misguided Reddit Catholic romantics, for example, who imagine things being prefect in the Middle Ages fail to realize that already by that time, in most places, the rise of and concentration of wealth had deprived the average person from his true ancestral connection with the land. Once you couldn't hunt unless you were a poacher or had license from a liege, and once you started farming somebody else's land, you were well into the modern world and an unnatural situation.
Indeed, it's worth noting that even for those who didn't make their living from the land, a close association with the land, or nature, was the norm for a long time. John Adams, who was as farmer, was also a lawyer, and wrote on the joys of riding the circuit, which literally involved riding a circuit on horseback. Urban policemen walked outdoors all day long, unless they rode a horse outdoors all day long. Deliverymen drove wagons pulled by teams. Much of this occurred until very, very recently.
Now it doesn't.
As this evolution occurred, people were severed first from their ownership of the land, or their right to use it, and then later from their families and the natural world. This didn't happen in clean steps, or all at once, or even everywhere at once. Indeed, in some instances people instinctively sought to reverse the trend and were successful for awhile in doing that.
The severance of ownership of the land from the person working it has already been mentioned, and was a major step in this progression.
[5]. The Industrial Revolution was a giant leap in it.
The Industrial Revolution, which we're still in, in spite of the concept of it being complete, at first operated to take men out of their homes, where they had primarily worked with and in the presence of their families, and place them in a separate place of work. Relatively early on it began to do that to poorer women as well. By the mid 19th Century it was so successful in this transition that in Europe most men worked outside of their family homes for somebody else, and even those independent of third party employment worked "in town".
This was so successful that it enculturated the concept of men's work being outside the home, and work that was outside the home as being men's work. In reality other factors governed that, including the traditional role of men in the family necessitating it and the fact that a lot of early outside the home work consisted of backbreaking labor. Additionally, as we've dealt with in numerous other threads, the division of labor necessitated that women's work be primarily domestic before the advent of domestic machinery lessened that need.
Of course, the liberation turned into a requirement over time. The reality of it is that men and women are captive of the industrial economic system, irrespective of what other value their occupations have, and there are numerous other values. The majority of women now work outside the home, which is supposed to be a sign of social advancement, but at the same time we now know that most families can't get by on one income. Hence the reality of:
The female worker has no choice. Neither does the male. They have to work, and that work will be invariably outside the home, and indoors, for most. People talk about choosing careers, and they do (or hopefully they do, but the choice to have a career is one that is necessitated by the need for everyone to serve the economy. Individuals of course have to live in the economy that exists.
We're so acclimated to this that we don't even begin to grasp how profoundly unnatural it is. In any but an industrial society (and again, we are one, no matter what "post" thesis a person might wish to insert into this), the family and work would not be separated. Farmers worked, and still do, making them a rare exception, around their families. People who worked trades typically worked them from their home. When we read, for example, of St. Joseph being a carpenter, and Jesus learning the trade, that work and that education was done at home. Even many professionals worked from their homes, or if not at least not far from them.[6].
Disrupting this has disrupted us from our natural order and its pretty easy to see it. Children are dropped off in their formative years with people whose values and views their parents may not share. At one time parents dropped their kids off at school and then recovered them at the end of the school day, thinking that separation was long. Now it starts earlier and lasts longer and is regarded as a natural part of life for many, maybe most. Men used to spend eight hours, or longer, every day from their family in a nearly all male environment, which had its own vices, but starting mid 20th Century they started spending many of those hours with women who were not their spouses.[7]. The term "office wife" has arisen to describe platonic relationship that end up having a marriage like behavioral aspect to the, which is alarming enough, but in reality the office affair is massively widespread and nearly any office of any substantial size is going to have one at some point in time. If Kipling's men in barracks didn't grow into "plaster saints", men and women working outside the home for hours upon hours every day aren't going to universally either.
This gets back, I suppose, to Elise Stefanik, age 36, and House minority leader. She's presently pregnant with her first child, which is to be celebrated. But that child is going to be born into the reality of her mother being a Republican power broker in a time of enormous stress. It's certainly not impossible to be a female leader and a mother, Empress Maria Theresa of Austria was, by all accounts, a force to be reckoned with (Frederick the Great called her the "greatest man I ever met), and she had sixteen children. Indeed, she wasn't above using her status as a mother to shame her government into supporting her in time of war, once bringing her large brood into an assembly debating war and demanding to know if it was going to save her and her children. But somehow her role as a mother wasn't inconsistent her status as Empress. Will the young child of the House Minority Leader receive the full attention that a child is really entitled to. Maybe. If the child doesn't, however, that would certainly be the American norm.
Indeed, paternal neglect has long been a feature of modern life. The rebellious teenager is practically a trope, it's so common, but the role of the absent father in that is rarely noted. It's interesting to note, in that context, how often the sons of really famous hard driven men don't do well. There are exceptions to be sure, such as Theodore Roosevelt's for example, but then TR is an example of a many who largely lived without the problems noted here and who did in fact actively live with his family and children, even when President.
At any rate, institutionalizing this further, so that we can squeeze the last ounce of human productivity out of workers, it is a feature of the proposed infrastructure bill, or at least it was. Free child care was a Democratic wish. Conceived of by progressives as aid to working women, what it really amounts to is subsidized aid to industry so that no excuse remains for women with children to stay home. No excuse for men has existed for over a century. It's interesting in that in the same era in which the concept of a Universal Basic Income, and "free" university education has been debated and discussed, and in which some advanced societies are trying to figure out how to encourage women to have more children, the one thing we get pretty far with is a subsidization of industry in this fashion so that more women "can", i.e., "must" go to work.[8]. There's no equivalent subsidy that would allow one member of a family, male or female, to be assisted in not going to work outside their homes.
All of which relates to the fact that people who are receiving COVID 19 benefits aren't gong to back to work in the numbers expected. Why would they? It may not be that they're' receiving more staying home, just that they're staying enough not to have to rush back to work. And by doing that, maybe there just being more human. Ironically, those payments may be the assistance, albeit temporary, that allowed them to do that.
Indeed, many people during COVID 19 who remained employed worked from home. This has now become such a part of work in some areas of employment (it never was for me) that I typically assume if I'm calling a professional that they're probably at home. This is becoming less true now, but only to a slight degree. Indeed, it was already the case that in certain occupations this trend was developing anyhow with it being notable in heavily computerized industries.
Indeed, here it must be noted that even though I barely worked from home during the pandemic, that says more about me than anything else. While I may be noting all of these problems, at this point in my life I can probably legitimately be accused of being a "workaholic" and I never really adjusted to the new work at home world. Like an old lawyer of our firm, dead before I started working there, who used his Dictaphone when it was introduced for one day, I may be incapable of adjusting to a different world.[9].
So, what's the way out of here toward a better balance of things? Well, there is one, but it'll take a long time to get out. At the present time, with the world developed and developing as it is, all we can really do is to create that world for ourselves, if we can, and hold on to the idea, if we can't. And most of us can't, at least not completely. Quite a few can, partially.
Footnotes
*This is one of two posts I wrote, more or less at the same time, in which I was pretty angry about something but which I won't detail here. It's vaguely alluded to in the other post, which was completed before this one, but which will go to press, so to speak, after it.
I note that as writing while angry, like going to the grocery store when hungry, going into a bar while thirsty, or operating heavy machinery while taking narcotics, isn't necessarily a really good idea. Sometimes you say stuff you don't mean, really.
**See footnote above.
1. This post might frankly be also partially inspired by an event which lead me to draft a post on Empathy that will go up the morning of June 14, on Lex Anteinternet. Suffice it to say, at the time that I am writing this I'm completely disgusted, and disillusioned, by the conduct of a certain specific person. So much so that next time I'm in a certain venue where there's an audio association with that individual, I'll have a really hard time not reacting to it.
2. Which might mean that I'm one of those people who can't tear myself away from work under any circumstances, a character defect rather than an indicia of the state of the world.
I'll note, unconnected with the sentence immediately above, I had on the day I returned to work, after one day off, a remote contact with a lawyer in another matter which made me pretty angry, and which is addressed in the top note above. I'm still angry about it.
I don't have an Irish Temper, in spite of being nearly 100% descendant of Irish blood. I tend to think that's misunderstood anyhow. I'm extremely slow to anger. But once I get angry, I remain angry. People who cross a certain threshold of expectation with me, and its a pretty high threshold as I really don't expect much of people, have pretty much broken my tolerance for them permanently. This is a vice on my part, not a virtue.
3. When my son was in high school, an English teacher used to try to recruit students to debate with the claim that it would help you potentially become a lawyer. I now actually know, for the first time, a kid who intends to become a lawyer who is in debate, or "forensics" as it is sometimes bizarrely inaccurately referred to.
I once did a minor survey of lawyers I immediately knew to see if any of them had been in speech and debate, or anything of the kind, the result was a resounding "no". Indeed, the closest I could find is that one lawyer had been a university English major, which he majored in with the express intent of becoming a lawyer. Otherwise, nope, nobody had been in debate.
As noted in my upcoming post on Empathy, I've become very cynical about some things and this spills over to this, but the type of debate and whatnot that is taught in that academic endeavor strikes me as being of little practical value for anyone is a legal pursuit, save for it does get you used to speaking in public, I guess. Having said that, generally people who are attracted to the law because of the claim "I like to argue" should stop and think, as that makes them assholes, and the law has enough assholes as it is.
4. But then, perhaps nobody who is introspective thinks they are. And a lawyer should be introspective.
5. While not to sound like the 1619 Project, slavery was also part and parcel of this. Serfdom and slavery, aspects of the same unnatural deprivation of a person from their own freedom, is critically tied to the advancement of a society based, in some ways, on wealth.
6. As late as the 1970s I accompanied my father to a trip to a lawyer's home for some reason. I don't recall what the reason was, and it wasn't a lawyer that was my father's lawyer. But my father knew him. He was a retired judge, I recall, and I was surprised that his office was in his home, with it having a separate entrance. I also recall my father telling me that this was illegal, but somehow the lawyer was getting away with it.
Along a similar lines, a plumber my father knew had a huge old house on a major downtown road in town that he inherited. I don't think the fellow married until he was in his 50s. Anyhow, his company was on the main floor, he lived in the rest of the house.
7. One of the byproducts of the all male work environment, and maybe a vice depending upon how you look at it, was a sort of tribal society nature to a lot of work. Men who worked together bonded in a way that they don't, usually, now. That was a good thing but it also had a distinct element to it that developed where they outright ignored their family. Men spent all day at work and in some cases even started spending time together before work for breakfast, worked all day, and then hit the bars right after work, not getting home until after several beers, by which time some of them were pretty messed up. My own father never ever did this, but I was aware that it had been the culture in years prior to my growing up and in actuality still was to some degree.
The degree to which this culture existed varied substantially by region and it was really common in blue collar areas. It might still be a bit. I've seen this, interestingly enough, in the instance of somebody I somewhat know who descends from that region who has that tendency to extend the work day on into the post work hours in such a fashion.
8. I'll forego here discussing in depth a welfare system which has evolved, in numerous different ways, that encourages men to abandon their offspring and which in other areas further subsidizes children in ways that are socially questionable, as that's a different topic, but both of those are features of the modern welfare system.
9. The lawyer in question wrote out, by hand, his work product.
I actually did that when I was still a student and working where I now work. But upon become a lawyer, I pretty rapidly gave that up and dictated my product. When computers came in, however, I went back to writing them out myself, which is what I find that most lawyers under 60 years of age now do.
