Necessity and communal work

Who knew, when our culture became modern, what would be lost? And of course, part of being modern means only looking ahead so this question is not something most of us often think about, but several people I have read lately have got me thinking about communal work.

It is often easier to do things yourself. Parents will be quick to recognize that truth. And there are all sorts of efficiencies to be gained with assembly lines. Certainly Henry Ford and his followers figured some of those out. And so I’m not trying to discard valuable ways of doing work at various times and places. But modernity has in fact often discarded traditional ways of doing work.

One woman, through her granddaughter’s blog, described wheat harvest and her small but important role pulling a wagon with coffee and cookies for the workers threshing the wheat.  The granddaughter then recounted a day working together with friends to butcher chickens. She writes, “I had been apprehensive about the day before it began, due to the unpleasant nature of the task at hand. But by evening I marveled at how much I had enjoyed it. And how exhausted I was.” http://www.goshencommons.org/category/blogs/hoof-and-wing/

Then I came upon some thoughts in an essay called ‘Economy and Pleasure’ by Wendell Berry about work.

Berry talks about the tobacco harvest: “Many of my dearest memories come from these times of hardest work … The tobacco cutting is the most protracted social occasion of our year … The tobacco cutting is a ritual of remembrance. Old stories are retold; the dead and the absent are remembered. Some of the best talk I have ever listened to I have heard during these times...”

O yes, he almost forgets to mention that the tobacco got cut.

He finishes the essay with a sweet story about hauling a load of dirt for the barn with his five-year old granddaughter.

“We completed our trip to the barn, unloaded our load of dirt, smoothed it over the barn floor, and wetted it down. By the time we started back up the creek the sun had gone over the hill and the air had turned bitter. Katie sat close to me in the wagon, and we did not say anything for a long time. I did not say anything because I was afraid that Katie was not saying anything because she was cold and tired and miserable and perhaps homesick; it was impossible to hurry much, and I was unsure how I would comfort her.

But then, after a while, she said, “Wendell, isn’t it fun?”

Perhaps not many people are aware of how much deep pleasure we have deprived ourselves in our in our embrace of modern conveniences and ways of doing things, but here’s snippet from my life. When I was much younger, I remember the kitchen was often filled - mostly with women who were cleaning up after Sunday dinner. And wasn’t it fun? What did the automatic dishwasher really give us? What did it take away?

I’m not going to try to take your dishwasher or any other modern tool away from you. But we should recognize that sometimes, as Robert Frost pointed out with perhaps glancing relevance to what I am talking about, “two roads diverged in a yellow wood… “

I believe that relationships and community are built in significant part upon our physically needing each other, our being genuinely useful to each other - even if it’s pulling a wagon with coffee and cookies.

It’s simpler if I have my own ladder or wheelbarrow, if I do my own work and you do yours. But what happens if there is almost never a time when we really need each other’s efforts or the presence of our family members or neighbors in our activities? Where does the bond for the times when we need emotional support come from?

We tend to dismiss with our words the realization that we have become an individualistic culture, but rarely do we understand how deeply that cuts. And rarely do we do much to change things.

The small church I occasionally attend has a couple of work days a year. I enjoy that participation more than sitting in the chairs on Sunday morning. But we’ve nearly forgotten how to do communal work. Each of us tends to find a task and does it. The coffee and cookies are inside and most of us trickle in on our own. Our attitudes and ways of doing things are mostly modern.

There’s a knack to almost everything. To get the full benefits of communal work, people need to establish a rhythm of working and pausing - talking and laughing and trimming the forsythia. It’s even in the prayer sometimes used after the offering: “work and worship are one.”

We like to think that such things as community should happen naturally, and of course, you shouldn’t force friendship. But when traditional cultures worked well, it was in part because people genuinely needed each other in all sorts of practical ways and because people, over generations, had learned how to literally work together.

We won’t learn to knit communities back together overnight. And if we don’t recognize what we’ve lost, we won’t even look for what we’ve lost at all.

Sometimes it helps to try to orchestrate things. My parents were likely mostly following tradition when they had me wash, my brother rinse, and my sister dry the dishes, or some other combination. It was a real task that needed to be done, and it was set up to be done together.

The task of winning a softball game, for example, has less real need behind it, but it’s not a useless exercise.

We are people of mind and body. Talking over dinner is a fine thing, but you’ll notice that even that doesn’t even ‘happen’ as often as it used to. The people who sometimes work together become different than people who always work alone.

The foundation of so many important things in life is not simply our ‘wants’ but our ‘needs.’

When we need each other’s real assistance to accomplish a necessary task, whether we want to work with this or that person or do this particular task or not, more than the work sometimes gets accomplished.

Wendell Berry writes of “poor country people” as having everything within their community but money. Now we have nearly everything that money can buy except strong communal bonds.

Maybe getting almost everything we think we want – which sometime includes the ability to not need anyone else - doesn’t lead to happiness. But people in traditional societies truly needed each other. How could people in wealthy cultures choose to be less self-reliant? Still, I have come to believe that necessity is the mother of a lot more than invention. We can’t just talk about wanting to build community. I think, perhaps, we will need to build more barns together.

Working together might also turn out to be more fun than we imagined.

How do we stop playing dumb games?

This goes back to some of the ideas that Jonathan Haidt sparked http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind.html

I’ve been thinking more about the notion of changing the game or at least changing the rules of the game. If we continue with a black versus white sort of game - and in our current cultural context we seem to be stuck with the liberals versus the conservatives - every initiative to try to solve a problem ends up in a stalemate. It’s a dumb game.

Whether or not Haidt’s categories are definitive, I wonder, if we used them to try to place ourselves in a different context for a change, perhaps we could begin to see some of the issues from a different perspective – and find more creative solutions. Instead of playing regular checkers, let’s try Chinese checkers. I still have many doubts that enough people can actually learn a new game but simply continuing with the old game appears to me to be futile.

When I took Haidt's morals quiz http://www.yourmorals.org/ (whatever its flaws), I scored with the declared conservatives on harm, slightly above the declared liberals on fairness, close to the liberals on loyalty, close to the conservatives on authority, and in the middle on purity. I don’t think the categories are entirely arbitrary, but I think this exercise highlights my point almost as well either way.

Whose team am I playing for?

I appear, if I’m setting up the questions this way, to share values and real interests with people who label themselves conservative. The game we are currently playing in our society doesn't recognize that. Our polarized system resists letting me acknowledge that life and people are a lot more complicated than the ways in which we are expected to register our preferences.

Furthermore, the media and politicians seem to have us locked into this ‘it’s either us or them’ kind of game. For some of them, it makes it easier to manipulate people so that they can push the results in a direction that favors the interests of a few. For others, it just makes it easier to explain things and for them to hold onto their audience or their supporters. (Spectator sports appeal to many people for similar reasons.) And for many of the rest of us, we simply lack the imagination or the courage to do more than just try to go along (always complaining, of course).

Huge numbers of us are really not paying close attention or haven’t managed for various reasons to understand the nuances of the real questions at stake. But we are determined to hold onto what we think we believe (and often to what others are telling us that we believe). And so, almost in desperation we settle for at least choosing to identify ourselves with one team or the other. With the current structure of political reality, that’s about all that many of us are capable of, although we sometimes imagine that our yelling is somehow ‘informed’ and that it ‘matters.’

I would really like to be able to go beyond this game metaphor and make this discussion more connected to our social reality but explanations often tend to bog things down. Metaphors are how we think much of the time.

So, this attempt is offered mostly to illustrate. I can hardly imagine actually getting to this kind of practical result in a hundred years given the current environment (which is, after all, what I think needs to be changed somehow).

But let’s try this. I would personally be willing to consider that women should have a total, unrestricted choice to abort a fetus up to four months into a pregnancy. After that, there would be a variety of restrictions increasing over the span of a pregnancy and depending on an array of circumstances, AND these restrictions would be linked with full pre-natal care, with paid time away from work in various contexts, as well as paid child-care, AND other social structures would be provided so that mothers-to-be and mothers and children wouldn’t be overly burdened with responsibility. The father should be on some of the hook as well as the society that says it wants this baby. Many other well-considered provisions for the woman’s well being and a potentially unwanted child’s well-being should also be guaranteed. 

Clearly people on one pole or the other could never, ever accept something like this. And this is still only a first, very generally defined beginning. But I do think a large middle could likely be able to come to accept some social arrangement like this that they could live with. And of course 'money where the mouth is’ would have to be paid. 

But no one is playing this middle game. You either get to vote with the ‘Life begins at conception - women have no rights’ team, OR with ‘the woman has every right - the fetus and society has no say’ team. There is little talk of either sexual responsibility or social responsibility, except in polarizing terms. 

Again, I have over-simplified to make my point, and these ideas remain far away from touching the real world.

But what most of us want is a reasonable resolution to questions of unwanted pregnancies and children and the real needs of women who are pregnant and the children who might come into the world. The players who might address those possibilities are not even on the field. I can’t escape my metaphor. We don’t have a game – we have a stalemate. People who want to play, not just fight, can’t get into the game as structured. Most of the loudest people are preoccupied with pointing out that the other side is breaking the rules or improperly defining them or simply packed in around their own goal – anything but actually engaging each other over the question of making real people’s lives better. Each team only wants to strengthen itself so that it can win all the marbles. And the losers will, of course, never accept defeat.

So with all this said, I don’t know how you ultimately break up the current game. I am only saying that I am convinced that restructuring our system and the frameworks in which we as a society think about conflicting ideas and values would give us a better chance at different outcomes. To recognize that declared conservatives and I share some specific real value might be a start. At this point, I think even using words like ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative,’ which have become mostly fighting words or shorthand words - but ones that no one even agrees what the words really represent any more – well, even using the words themselves virtually guarantees stalemate.

And the fact that I can only begin to properly explain myself in a thousand-plus words is part of the problem. Frustration with the mess has built to such a level that many people tend to simply want to retreat into the simplicities of ‘the system is broken’ and ‘there’s no point in talking about this’ - essentially giving up. And the truth is that the only answers that will make useful differences for people are indeed complicated. People really do have different values. Whether the question is abortion or climate change or taxes, resolution is not about tweaks to the system or making the right substitutions with the players. Changing the minds of enough people is a nearly impossible task. But a little bit at a time, positive changes sometimes do happen. Look at history.

In my mind, breaking up the old ‘liberal versus conservative game’ is one place to start. What happens if instead of bi-polar values, we tried to think in terms of five fundamental values? If nothing else I think it beats banging my head against the same brick wall.

I favor local markets, progressive taxes, the First Amendment, more tax-payer supported educational alternatives to public schools and more money and accountability in public schools. But the people trying to do the work of educating kids shouldn’t be jerked around. And I favor and oppose possibly a thousand other potential initiatives that should belong to we, the people, (if I took the trouble to spell them out). It should be made clear that I don’t really know what I’m talking about for at least half of them. And I’m pretty comfortable holding inconsistent positions depending on specific contexts. But most of all, we ought to begin to work to structure a system where people are able to win or lose whatever their particular position - if it comes to that - with more grace than we do.  Just give me a good game (one that’s fair and we don’t want to beat each other up all the time). You have a political party for me to join? Call me a Fairness Loyalist for now. 

Like I said at the top of this essay, right now we’re playing a very dumb game in this country. I am open to anyone with reasonable ideas about how to break up the bi-polar game we’re in. I have yet to hear politicians really articulate how fruitless this Liberal/Conservative, Democrat/Republican stalemate is. But then how could they? That’s the only game they know how to play.

I think the choice this country is facing is between continued stalemate or rather some near-impossible solution. But looking at the more fundamental option of changing how we think and how things are done, the people who should know better and who are actually in the position to make useful changes can only seem to think of how to try to make their own side stronger.

So the rest of us can continue to muddle along, or we can hope that some people will somehow be able to imagine a better game – and convince enough people that answers lie not simply in throwing one set of bums out for another but changing some of the structures of the game itself. I would have to bet on more muddle. But there’s still time on the clock. Maybe the game will get interesting – that is, maybe someone will succeed in proposing a better way to play.

The truth is that we are biologically predetermined to think primarily in this bi-polar manner. Black or white, either or or, yes or no, us or them - this is what is built into our mental structures. What I am talking about proposes that we devise societal structures that help us pull away from these natural tendencies when it just leads to stalemate.  You should recognize that the democratic ways of decision making that now exist began as ways of structuring societies away from our natural tendencies for the stronger groups to simply beat up on the weaker ones and take the spoils. Rule of law has much in its favor as well. But now we need different rules.

The time frame I’m thinking in is admittedly too vast. And yet those are the frames that human culture moves in if at all. I can’t address everything. No single person will put a solution together for what ails us. The question remains, how do individuals talk and write about our various situations so that there is movement towards better ways of thinking and doing things?

I like the ‘play’ of Jonathan Haidt. It’s at least a more interesting approach than the current game. And maybe it’s a push in a better direction. Shaking things up is always a risk, but there’s probably a chance that prolonged stalemate might lead to tyranny. When anything is perceived as better than the mess we’re in, then life can get really scary, really fast.

So how would you propose we begin to break up this dumb game we’re playing?

Only people can care about books.

CreateSpace wants you to believe that they can make you a best-selling author – or at least one that might make some money. That’s their business.

But you can take their bottom dollar, do all the work of writing and setting everything up on your own and then upload it to their computers, and they will print you something that looks like a book, feels like a book and you can take into a coffeeshop and spill something on the pages just like a book - for less money than you paid for that beverage you just spilled. Plus shipping and handling of course.

Many people like to read. And many of those don’t particularly care how they get their words. Amazon doesn’t care. I mean they don’t give a flip one way or another about books or anything else, for that matter. They care about one thing, just like any corporation. They are not persons. Let’s be clear about that. Only people can care. And only some of them do.

So if, for whatever reason, you want your coffee beans roasted fresh, or just this dark and no darker, that probably indicates that you are someone who cares about your coffee. And you can probably find people who care about making it the way you like it so that when you sip your coffee and smile and say ‘that’s good,’ you can hope that the baristas feel a little satisfied with something more than just taking some of your money.

But Starbucks doesn’t know squat about the land of the free and good enterprise. They’re empty phrases to a corporations. It’s not about satisfaction and ‘good work.’  It’s about controlling the market by hook or by crook. Some of the real people who can only find work at Starbucks might care. But they would really rather be working for themselves and for their customers if only the giants and pirates didn’t control the land and the high seas.

And the book lovers - you know who you are. For better or worse, Long Jeff Bezos  on the pirate ship Amazon doesn’t even notice that you exist. So scurry up the side of that behemoth and then quickly drop back down onto your canoe and paddle away with your self-published book.

You will never get your book onto a rack in every airport around the country. But you could afford to leave it behind, next to your empty cup of coffee. A book lover might see it, pick it up and page through it, not with a click, but with a coffee stained thumb. And they might smile and say, ‘that’s pretty good. Maybe I’ll read a little of this, instead of opening my laptop right away.’

Amazon will get a little of your money, of course, but they know nothing of the love of books. Write one. Read one. It’s never been easier to get into print. Certainly it makes a huge difference if your voice is clear - and distinctly yours. It takes some work and an eye to make your book look like the kind of book human beings want to read.

Forget about Amazon. They are only trying to publish money-makers.

To love books you don’t need to care about money or fame or power. You only need to care about well-crafted books. The next book you pick up and hold in your hands might be the one you’ve been looking for all your life.

Or have a small affair with the book I wrote not so long ago. Books are about love, not fidelity.

I once had this thing with a book in the Public Library in Frisco, Colorado. I had no idea it would mean anything to me when I pulled “The Dispossessed” by Ursula LeGuin off the shelf. She was just this science fiction novel with some interesting ideas. I was passing through and didn’t have a library card, so we could only meet near the stacks when the library was open. After a few days, she stayed on the shelf. I left. But we’ll always have Frisco.

Amazon is a whore. Love the words that speak to your soul from the printed page.

Love books.