Showing posts with label Mehr Mensch sein. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mehr Mensch sein. Show all posts

Lex Anteinternet: i nolunt

Lex Anteinternet: i nolunt

i nolunt

Radical refusal to consent.

More specifically, radical refusal to consent to the spirit of the times.  It's part of what I admire in them, but it didn't strike me until recently.

John Pondoro Taylor, in his memoirs, recalled having seen Maasai walking through Nairobi as if it simply wasn't there, as they had always done, dressed in their traditional fashion, and carrying spears.  On their way from one place to another, refusing to consent that the development of the city meant anything in real terms.

I was recently waiting in the Church for the confession line to form.  One of the Mantilla Girls walked in.  I've seen this one once or twice before, but not at this Church.  She not only wears the mantilla, and is very pretty, but she carries herself with pride.

They don't all do that.  Some of the younger women who wear chapel veils do so very naturally.  Some sort of timidly, or uncomfortably.  With at least one, and I could be massively off the mark, it's almost sort of an affectation.  But here, you see something quite different.

Or so it seems.

I don't know her.  I could be wrong.  But it's clear she isn't timid and it's not an affectation.  

It is, it seems to me, a radical rejection of the modern secular world in favor of existential nature.

For those who believe in the modern world, in modernism, or the spirit of the times, or who are hostile to religion, that may seem like a shocking statement.  But the essence of our modern lives (or post-modern, if you insist) is a radical rejection of nature, most particularly our own natures.  Wearing a chapel veil indicates that the person deeply believes in a set of beliefs that are enormously grounded in nature.  The wearer is a woman, in radical alignment with biology in every sense, and accepting everything that means, including what the modern world, left and right, detest.  I nolunt.  She's accepting of the derision, and ironically, or in actuality not ironically, probably vastly happier than those who have accommodated modernity.

Moreover, those who think they're reaching out for a radical inclusion of the natural, who don't take the same approach, never can quite reach authenticity.  There can always be a slight feeling that something isn't authentic, and there isn't.  Reserving an element of modernity defeats it.

Related Thread:

We like everything to be all natural. . . . except for us.

"We keep you alive to serve this ship", Part 1 of societal institutions and work.


"We keep you alive to serve this ship"

Ben Hur

Just observing things, It's really struck me over time how certain social programs, of the left and the right, basically amount to nothing other than serving the needs of businesses, particularly large business entities, no matter how they are styled. This is so much the case that certain huge proponents of some programs who would regard themselves as real fire breathing leftists are actually heavy-duty capitalists, and don't know it.

This shows in their justification for the programs.

Let's, once again, make reference to our evolved place in a state of nature, and where we are actually at.

In a state of nature we'd not do what most of us do daily, which is to leave our abode and clock in time somewhere else, to come back to our home.  In our natural state, while we would leave our families, the family would be the focus all the time.  In our industrial societies, our work is.  Most people spend most of their lives with people they are brought in contact with solely because they serve an economic interest, and nothing else.

Men got there first, long before women. But starting in the early part of the 20th Century, if not slightly before, that changed for women and now women are basically expected to work away from their homes and families.

Everyone is.

When looked at this way, we see why left wing emphasis on child care, and paradoxically abortion, are part and parcel of serving industry.  If women can be prevented from having children, they can, ie., they'll have to, go to work. That's what they should be doing, working.  If they must have children for some weird biological and psychological reason, well then government sponsored child warehousing, i.e., daycare, will force them back into work in another fashion.

Either way, they'll be freed, i.e., forced, to serve work.

Almost all the post 1945 liberalization of domestic law and structure works this way.  Easy no-fault divorce makes it easy to dump families, sending everyone unhindered and untethered into work. Where that results in women falling below the poverty line due to their children, as they foolishly chose to have children, government funded daycare will address it.  Abortion must be kept legal, we are told, as it means women can go to work.

What if things didn't work this way?

Well, men would still be men, and women be women, but they'd have to fund their families themselves, and at least attempt to choose more wisely.  That would have a lot of collateral impacts, but chief among them would be, frankly, less of a focus on work and more of a focus on the domestic.

But that would also mean that a society based on consumption, and which reduced its members to consumers, would be focused on families instead.

And then who is going to make and buy all that crap?

So the next time you here Bernie Sanders spouting off about something like universal child care, remember, what he's really saying, whether he means it or not, is:

"We keep you alive to serve this ship"

Lex Anteinternet: Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist Part XXVI. Pets and Pope Francis, the man who can't get a break. Pangur Bán. Warped Hollywood. Ghislane? The return of Boston marriages. Khardasian Attention Disorder

Lex Anteinternet: Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist Part XXVI. Pets and P...

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist Part XXVI. Pets and Pope Francis, the man who can't get a break. Pangur Bán. Warped Hollywood. Ghislane? The return of Boston marriages. Khardasian Attention Disorder

There's no such thing as "fur babies"


Pope Francis commented on childless couples and pets.

Before I go into that, I'm going to note that one of the things about Pope Francis is that he tends to be incredibly hard to pigeonhole, even though his fans and critics love to go around doing just that.  And here we have just such an example.  Only weeks away from making it pretty clear that the Latin Tridentine Mass needs to be a thing of the past, as far as he's concerned, and while he's the Bishop of Rome, he says something that's radically. . . traditional.

Here's what he said, in so far as I tell, as I can't find a full transcript of his remarks.

Today ... we see a form of selfishness. We see that some people do not want to have a child.

Sometimes they have one, and that's it, but they have dogs and cats that take the place of children.

This may make people laugh, but it is a reality.

[This] "is a denial of fatherhood and motherhood and diminishes us, takes away our humanity", he added.

Oh you know where this is going to go. . . 

Right away I saw predictable "I'm not selfish, it's my deep abiding love of the environment. . . "

Yeah, whatever.

Apparently there were a fair number of comments of that type, as a subsequent article on this topic found that, nope, most childless couples are childless as they don't want children, not because of their deep abiding concern about the environment.

Indeed, tropes like that are just that, tropes.  People tend to excuse or justify conduct that they engage in that they are uncomfortable excusing for self-centered or materialistic reasons for more ennobled ones, or even for ones that just aren't attributed to something greater, in some sense.  

Not everyone, mind you, you will find plenty of people who don't have children and justify that on that basis alone.  Indeed, in the 70s through the mid 90s, I think that was basically what the justification was, to the extent that people felt they needed one.  More recently that seems to have changed, although there are plenty of people who will simply state they don't want children as they're focused on what the personally want, rather than some other goal.  Others, however, have to attribute it, for some reason to a cause du jour.  In the 80s it was the fear of nuclear war, I recall.  Now it's the environment, although it was somewhat then as well.  I suppose for a tiny minority of people, that's actually true, but only a minority.

Whatever it is, the reaction to the Pope's statement will cause and is causing a minor firestorm.  Oh, but it'll get better.

The same Pope has already made some Catholic conservatives mad by his comments equating destroying the environment with sin.   And there's a certain section of the Trad and Rad Trad Catholic community that's unwilling to credit Pope Francis with anything, even though he says some extremely traditional things, particularly in this area.

A comment like this one, if it had been made by Pope Benedict, would have sparked commentary on the Catholic internet and podcasts for at least a time.  There's no way that Patrick Coffin or Dr. Taylor Marshall wouldn't have commented on it, and run with it in that event.

Will they now?

Well, they ought to.

Am I going to? 

No, not really.

I could be proven wrong, but I doubt I will be.

The Pope's point will be difficult for the childless to really grasp.  I don't think I became fully adult until we had children, really.  People who don't have children don't really know what its like to, I think.  And I think that probably includes even those who grew up in large families.

At any rate, I have a bit of a different point, that being my ongoing one about the industrialization of female labor.  In no small part, in my view, childless couples in general have come about as our modern industrialized society emphasizes that everyone's principal loyalty should be to their workplace or a career, without question.  As put by Col. Saito in the epic The Bridge On The River Kwai, people are to be "happy in their work".

That means that they don't have time for children, they believe, and moreover the children are societal obstacles to the concept that the only thing that matters is career.  It's the one place that ardent capitalist and ardent socialist come together.  And, as its often noted, particularly by both working mothers and folks like Bernie Sanders, it's difficult to be both a mother and worker, with it being my guess that the more education that goes into a woman's career, the more this is the case.  Society, and by that we mean every industrialized society, has no solutions to this, and there probably aren't any.  About the only one that Sanders and his ilk can come up with is warehousing children sort of like chickens at the Tyson farms.

It's also a lie, of course.  Careers, by and large, don't make people fulfilled or happy, for the most part, although there are certainly individual exceptions.  Statistical data more than demonstrates that.

The Pope, by the way, is not against pets.

Messe ocus Pangur Bán,
cechtar nathar fria saindán;
bíth a menma-sam fri seilgg,
mu menma céin im saincheirdd

Caraim-se fos, ferr cach clú,
oc mu lebrán léir ingnu;
ní foirmtech frimm Pangur bán,
caraid cesin a maccdán.

Ó ru·biam — scél cen scís —
innar tegdais ar n-óendís,
táithiunn — díchríchide clius —
ní fris tarddam ar n-áthius.

Gnáth-húaraib ar gressaib gal
glenaid luch inna lín-sam;
os mé, du·fuit im lín chéin
dliged n-doraid cu n-dronchéill.

Fúachid-sem fri frega fál
a rosc anglése comlán;
fúachimm chéin fri fégi fis
mu rosc réil, cesu imdis,

Fáelid-sem cu n-déne dul
hi·n-glen luch inna gérchrub;
hi·tucu cheist n-doraid n-dil,
os mé chene am fáelid.

Cía beimmi amin nach ré,
ní·derban cách ar chéle.
Maith la cechtar nár a dán,
subaigthius a óenurán.

Hé fesin as choimsid dáu
in muid du·n-gní cach óenláu;
du thabairt doraid du glé
for mu mud céin am messe.

I and Pangur Bán, each of us two at his special art:
his mind at hunting (mice), my own mind is in my special craft.
I love to rest—better than any fame—at my booklet with diligent science:
not envious of me is Pangur Bán: he himself loves his childish art.
When we are—tale without tedium—in our house, we two alone,
we have—unlimited (is) feat-sport—something to which to apply our acuteness.
It is customary at times by feat of valour, that a mouse sticks in his net,
and for me there falls into my net a difficult dictum with hard meaning.
His eye, this glancing full one, he points against the wall-fence:
I myself against the keenness of science point my clear eye, though it is very feeble.
He is joyous with speedy going where a mouse sticks in his sharp-claw:
I too am joyous, where I understand a difficult dear question.
Though we are thus always, neither hinders the other:
each of us two likes his art, amuses himself alone.
He himself is the master of the work which he does every day:
while I am at my own work, (which is) to bring difficulty to clearness.

Pangur Bán, a poem by an unknown Medieval Irish monk.

The Seamus Heany translation, which I like better.  It really gets at the nature of the poem:

I and Pangur Bán my cat,
‘Tis a like task we are at:
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night.

Better far than praise of men
‘Tis to sit with book and pen;
Pangur bears me no ill-will,
He too plies his simple skill.

‘Tis a merry task to see
At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind.

Oftentimes a mouse will stray
In the hero Pangur’s way;
Oftentimes my keen thought set
Takes a meaning in its net.

‘Gainst the wall he sets his eye
Full and fierce and sharp and sly;
‘Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try.

When a mouse darts from its den,
O how glad is Pangur then!
O what gladness do I prove
When I solve the doubts I love!

So in peace our task we ply,
Pangur Bán, my cat, and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine and he has his.

Practice every day has made
Pangur perfect in his trade;
I get wisdom day and night
Turning darkness into light.

The Values candidates

Jeanette Rankin of Montana, who was a pacifist, and voted against delcaring war in 1917 and in 1941. She's a hero, as she stuck to her declared values.

While I’m at it, I'm developing a deep suspicion of conservative candidates and figures that express certain highly conservative social positions but don't quite seem to adhere to them in their own lives.  This coming from somebody who is obviously highly socially conservative themselves.

This comes to mind in the context of "family values", "protecting the family" and the like.  I see and read stuff like that from conservatives all the time.  So if you are saying that you strongly value the family, and protecting the family, etc., why don't you have one?

Now, some people are no doubt deeply shocked by that question, but it's a legitimate one, and I'm not the first person to raise it.  If a person might ask if I seriously expect people to answer the question, well I do.

Now, in complete fairness, all sorts of people don't have children for medical reasons.  But more often than that, if a couple don't have them, they don't want them. That's what's up with that.  And you really can't campaign on your deep love of the family if you are foreclosing that part of the family in your own lives, absent some really good reason.  More often than not, the reason is money and career.

Recently I saw, for example, a statement that a person is deeply committed to family and loves spending time with their nieces.  Well, everyone likes spending time, for the most part, with nieces and nephews.  That's not even remotely similar to having children, however.  Not at all.

I'll go one further on this and note this as I do.

The person who is trustworthy in very small matters is also trustworthy in great ones; and the person who is dishonest in very small matters is also dishonest in great ones.

Luke, 16:10.

I note this as some of the conservative value candidates, if you look into their backgrounds, have question marks that should give pause for the reason noted above. If a person doesn't keep to their principals in small things, or basic things, why would they keep them on anything else?

One conservative candidate that I'm aware of, when you look up that person's background, was born of an ethnicity that's overwhelmingly Catholic and went to Catholic schools growing up.  That person was undoubtedly a Catholic. That didn't preclude, however, the candidate from getting divorced and remarried to another person who was divorced.

Now, that's quite common in our society, but it's completely contrary to the Catholic faith without some explanation.  Maybe there is one.  I don't know, but it's a fair question, just as it would be if a Jewish candidate grew up in an Orthodox household but operates a delicatessen featuring ham.  That may seem odd, but if you are willing to compromise on small things, you'll get around to the big ones, if the small ones also express a deep principle.

If you won't compromise on small things, or things that are represented as elemental to your declared world view, you are dependable in a crisis. On the other hand, if you participated in a faith, and were educated by it, and okay with its elements, and it formed part of your worldview . . right up until you had to do something difficult and chose the easier path. . . well, there's no real reason to believe that haven gotten there once, you won't do it again.

The candidate, I'd note, has been stone-cold silent on the insurrection.  From that, you can tell the candidate knows it was an insurrection, but is unwilling to say diddly.

The Primordal Connection

St. Jerome with lion.  St. Jerome is supposesd to have taken a thorn out of a lion's paw, and the lion thereafter stayed with him. While some might doubt some aspects of this, St. Jerome's lion is also recounted as having caused fear in the monestary in which he lived, and having adopted the monestary's donkey as a friend.

Back to pets for a second, one added thing I think about them is that for a lot of people, they're the last sole remaining contact with nature they have.

There are lots of animal species that live in close contact with each other and depend on each other.  We're one.  We cooperated with wolves, and they became dogs as they helped us hunt. Cats took us in (not the other way around) as we're dirty, and we attract mice.  We domesticated horses, camels and reindeer for transportation.  And so on.

We miss them.

One more way that technology and modern industrialization has ruined things.  Cats and dogs remind us of what we once were.

And could be, again.

Warped legacies

An awful lot of what the Pope is tapping into has to deal with the combined factors of moderns forgetting what, well, sex is for, and what its implications are, and that root morality and human nature remain unchanged.  There are probably more generations between modern house cats and Pangur Bán than there are between your ancestors who were waking up each morning in the Piacenzian and you.

Which takes us to men, behaving badly, and everyone turning a blind eye.

And, of course, Sex and the City.

She is fiercely protective of Carrie Bradshaw and livid that she and everyone else at the show has been put into this position, It is not about the money, but rather her legacy. Carrie was all about helping women and now, under her watch, women are saying that they have been hurt.

Sarah Jessica Parker on the scandal involving James Noth.

M'eh.

A note from Wikipedia regarding the series:

When the series premiered, the character was praised by critics as a positive example of an independent woman in the vein of Mary Richards. However, retrospective analysis tends to place more emphasis on the character's repeated and often unrepentant infidelities, with many critics instead viewing her as narcissistic.

Carrie was about helping women?  Well, excuse me if that was deluded.

Scary legacies

This news item came out the same day, I'd note, that Ghislane Maxwell was convicted of sex trafficking.  And by that we mean procuring underage girls for Jeffrey Epstein.

Eew, ick.

Connection? Well, none directly.

Or maybe.  More narcissism and obsession with unrestrained desire, or lust.  

It sort of seems that you can't unleash this without it oozing out as filth sooner or later.

On Maxwell, because I tend to get my news by reading, I'm left perplexed by how a person says her first name, Ghislaine.  I have no idea. I heard it on the nightly news the other day, but the spelling is so odd, I immediately forgot how to pronounce it.

Boston Marriages

Some recent headlines from the ill historically informed press department:

What is a Platonic life partnership? These couples are breaking societal relationship norms

And:

Platonic Partnerships Are On The Rise, So I Spoke To These Friends Who Have Chosen To Live The Rest Of Their Lives Together
"I don't think our love and commitment together should pale in comparison to romantic love."


Oh my gosh! This means that people don't always default to acting like their characters in Sex In The City or Sex Lives of College Girls!

Could this be a new trend?!?  Oh my oh my, what would it mean.

Well, maybe people are just defaulting back to normal, but we're unable to grasp that as we've been steeped in seventy years of Hugh Hefner pornification of absolutely everything. [1]  This isn't new.  Indeed, we've dealt with this here before in our  Lex Anteinternet: The Overly Long Thread. Gender Trends of the Past...
 post. Let's take a look:

But there is more to look at here.

Another extremely orthodox cleric but one of an extremely intellectual bent, and who is therefore sometimes not very predictable, is Father Hugh Barbour, O. Pream.  I note that as his comment on same gender attraction in women was mentioned earlier here and came out in a direction that most would not suspect in the context of a "Boston Marriage".  Father Barbour did not license illicit sexual contact, i.e., sex outside of marriage, in any context either, but he did have a very nuanced view of attraction between women that's almost wholly unique in some ways.  Like the discussion above, but in a more nuanced form, it gets into the idea that modern society is so bizarrely sexually focused that its converted the concept of attraction to absolute need, failing to grasp the nature of nearly everything, and sexualized conduct that need not be.  Barbour issued an interesting opinion related to this back in 2013, at which time there had just been a huge demonstration in France regarding the redefinition of the nature of marriage. 

Katherine Coman and Katherine Lee Bates who lived together as female housemates for over twenty years in a "Wellesley Marriage", something basically akin to what's called a Boston Marriage today.  Named for Wellesley College, due to its association with it, Wellesley Marriages were arrangements of such type between academic women, where as Boston Marriages more commonly features such arrangements between women of means.  Barbour noted these types of arrangements in a basically approving fashion, noting that its only in modern society when these arrangements are seemingly nearly required to take on a sexual aspect, which of course he did not approve of.

Hmmm. . . . 

Men and women who don't marry have always been unusual, but the sexualization of everything in the post Hefner world has made their situation considerably more difficult, really.  Society has gone from an expectation that the young and single would abstain from sex until married to the position that there must be something wrong with them if they are not.  This has gone so far as to almost require same gender roommates, past their college years, to engage in homosexual sex.  I.e, two women or two men living together in their college years is no big deal, but if they're doing it by their 30s, they're assumed to be gay and pretty much pressured to act accordingly.

Truth be known, not everyone always matches the median on everything, as we will know.  For some reason, this has been unacceptable in this are as society became more and more focused on sex.

At one time, the phenomenon of the lifelong bachelor or "spinster" wasn't that uncommon, and frankly it didn't bear the stigma that people now like to believe.  It was harder for women than for men, however, without a doubt.  People felt sorry for women that weren't married by their early 30s and often looked for ways to arrange a marriage for them, a fair number of such women ultimately agreeing to that status, with probably the majority of such societally arranged marriages working out. Some never did, however.

For men, it was probably more common, and it was just assumed that things hadn't worked out.  After their early 30s a certain "lifelong bachelor" cache could attach to it, with the reality of it not tending to match the image, but giving societal approval to it.  In certain societies it was particularly common, such as in the famed Garrison Keillor "Norwegian Bachelor Farmer" instance or in the instance of similar persons in Ireland, where it was very common for economic reasons.  

People didn't tend to assume such people were homosexual, and they largely were not.  Indeed, again contrary to what people now assume, except for deeply closeted people or people who had taken up certain occupations in order to hide it, people tended to know who actually was homosexual.

I can recall all of this being the case when I was a kid.  My grandmother's neighbor was a bachelor his entire life who worked as an electrician.  After he came home from a Japanese Prisoner of War camp following World War Two, he just wanted to keep to himself.  A couple of my mother's aunts were lifelong single women and, at least in one case, one simply didn't want to marry as she didn't want children, and the other had lost a fiancé right after World War One and never went on to anyone else.  Her secretary desk is now in my office.  In none of these instances would anyone have accused these individuals of being homosexual.

Taking this one step further, some people in this category did desire the close daily contact of somebody they were deeply friends with, in love with if you will, but that need not be sexual.  Love between women and love between men can and does exist without it having a sexual component.  Interestingly, it is extremely common and expected when we are young and up into our 20s, but after that society operates against it.  People form deep same gender relationships in schools, on sporting fields, in barracks and in class.  

Some of those people won't marry, and there's no reason that their friendships shouldn't continue on in the post college roommate stage.

Well, society won't have it as everything needs to be about sex, all the time.  Haven't you watched The Big Bang Theory?

Tatting for attention?


Kourtney Kardashian, I think (I can't really tell the various Kardashians from one another and don't really have a sufficient interest to learn who is who), apparently is now all tatted up now that she has a tattooed boyfriend or fiancé or something that is.  And by this, we mean heavily tattooed.

Like, enough already?

Apparently Salena Gomez has a bleeding rose tattoo.  I don't get that either, but I'm sure that piles of ink will be spilled on it.

Footnotes:

It would be worth noting here that early on a female researching on Hefner's early publications noted how much of it was actually in the nature of barely disguised child pornography, with cartoons particularly depicting this.  This lead to an investigation in Europe, and the magazine rapidly stopped it, but it's interesting in that the magazine was so debased that it not only portrayed women as stupid, sterile, top-heavy, and nymphomaniacs, but also underage.

The impact however had been created, and by the 1970s the full on sexual exploitation of child models was on.  As debased as society has become, it's at least retreated from this.

A lamentation. The modern world.*


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:

Kay (momma of two)
@jacelala
People at work are discussing why no one should get married until they’re at least 25 and I’m over here with 2 children at 21 Face with tears of joyFlushed face

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:

Kay (momma of two)
@jacelala
I don’t want to work. I want to be home with my baby and I can’t afford it. I hate that. I hate it so much.

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.  


Looked at that way, the entire "women's liberation" movement of the 1970s wasn't so much a liberation of women as a means of redirecting their employment outside the home now that it was no longer required there as much as it had been previously. That wasn't liberation at all, but the propaganda associated with it made it seem so.  If you accepted that men's careers had unique intrinsic value that was superior to any any domestic role, and that this was defined primarily if not exclusively by cash, then it must be the case that allowing women to enter into that world was liberating them from some captivity that precluded them from doing that.


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:

Kay (momma of two)
@jacelala
I don’t want to work. I want to be home with my baby and I can’t afford it. I hate that. I hate it so much.

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.

The irony.

 Same day, same paper. One ad celebrating agriculture, and one celebrating its destruction.