waking up - freeing ourselves from work

And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice's den. (Isaiah 11:8)

Milk is the symbol of the first aspect of love, that of care and affirmation. Honey symbolizes the sweetness of life, the love for it and the happiness in being alive. Most mothers are capable of giving “milk,” but only a minority of giving “honey” too. In order to be able to give honey, a mother must not only be a “good mother,” but a happy person – and this aim is not achieved by many. (Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving, p. 45)

By the thirteenth century [in Europe], the condemnations of dancing had grown in volume and intensity. The Lateran Council of 1215 instituted a new means of social control – the requirement of an annual confession of one’s sins to a priest – and one of the sins was dancing…In Utrecht in the summer of 1278, two hundred people started dancing on the bridge over the Mosel and would not stop until it collapsed, at which point all the dancers drowned. A hundred years later, in the wake of the Black Death, a much larger outbreak of dance mania again struck Germany and spilled out into Belgium: “Peasants left their plows, mechanics their workshops, house-wives their domestic duties, to join the wild revels.”…The Church calendar featured dozens of holy days…on which all work was forbidden…In fifteenth-century France, for example, one out of every four days of the year was an official holiday of some sort…So, despite the reputation of what are commonly called “the Middle Ages” as a time of misery and fear, the period from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century can be seen…as one long outdoor party, punctuated by bouts of hard labor. (Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets, p. 81, 85, 91-2)

*** “…the social chaos which followed the drastic economic reorganization converted impoverished children into the ‘pieces’ that the African slaves were, later, to become…”

It will be remembered that Adam Smith expected the land-divorced laborer to lose all intellectual interest. And M’Farlane expected “that the knowledge of writing and accounts will every day become less frequent among the common people” (1782). A generation later Owen put down laborers’ degradation to “neglect in infancy” and “overwork,” thus rendering them “incompetent from ignorance to make a good use of high wages when they can procure them.” He himself paid them low wages and raised their status by creating for them artificially an entirely new cultural environment. The vices developed by the mass of the people were on the whole the same as characterized colored populations debased by disintegrating culture contact: dissipation, prostitution, thievishness, lack of thrift and providence, slovenliness, low productivity of labor, lack of self-respect and stamina. The spreading of market economy was destroying the traditional fabric of the rural society, the village community, the family, the old form of land tenure, the customs and standards that supported life within a cultural framework…By the 1830’s the social catastrophe of the common people was as complete as that of the Kaffir is today. One and alone, an eminent Negro sociologist, Charles S. Johnson, reversed the analogy between racial debasement and class degradation, applying it this time to the latter: “In England, where, incidentally, the Industrial Revolution was more advanced than in the rest of Europe, the social chaos which followed the drastic economic reorganization converted impoverished children into the ‘pieces’ that the African slaves were, later, to become…The apologies for the child serf system were almost identical with those of the slave trade.” (Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 293-4)

We were still some distance from the beach, and under slow headway, when we sailed right into the midst of these swimming nymphs, and they boarded us at every quarter; many seizing hold of the chain-plates and springing into the chains; others, at the peril of being run over by the vessel in her course, catching at the bob-stays, and wreathing their slender forms about the ropes, hung suspended in the air. All of them at length succeeded in getting up the ship’s side, where they clung dripping with the brine and glowing from the bath, their jet-black tresses streaming over their shoulders, and half enveloping their otherwise naked forms. There they hung, sparkling with savage vivacity, laughing gaily at one another, and chattering away with infinite glee. Nor were they idle the while, for each one performed the simple offices of the toilette for the other. Their luxuriant locks, wound up and twisted into the smallest possible compass, were freed from the briny element; the whole person carefully dried, and from a little round shell that passed from hand to hand, anointed with a fragrant oil: their adornments were completed by passing a few loose folds of white tappa, in a modest cincture, around the waist. Thus arrayed they no longer hesitated, but flung themselves lightly over the bulwarks, and were quickly frolicking about the decks. Many of them went forward, perching upon the head-rails or running out upon the bowsprit, while others seated themselves upon the taffrail, or reclined at full length upon the boats. What a sight for us bachelor sailors! How avoid so dire a temptation?…Not the feeblest barrier was interposed between the unholy passions of the crew and their unlimited gratification. The grossest licentiousness and the most shameful inebriety prevailed, with occasional and but short-lived interruptions, through the whole period of her stay. Alas for the poor savages when exposed to the influence of these polluting examples! Unsophisticated and confiding, they are easily led into every vice, and humanity weeps over the ruin thus remorselessly inflicted upon them by their European civilizers. Thrice happy are they who, inhabiting some yet undiscovered island in the midst of the ocean, have never been brought into contaminating contact with the white man. (Herman Melville, Typee, chap. 2)

“I hate to see subtlety showing through these affairs, Mr. Purbright. Murder is such a beastly business in the first place. It becomes positively crawly when you have to strain a decent intelligence to sort it out. And nowadays, I’m afraid, the better the address the more distasteful the crime turns out to be. Odd, that, isn’t it?” (The sensible Mr. Chubb in Colin Watson’s Hopjoy Was Here)

There was a sick joke once among people of color that in disaster / horror films, dark-skinned characters were always the first to go. *

We were the ones seemingly superfluous to any plot. Expendable. (The appearance of this Western compulsion in the Mamet film The Edge ruined both the story and my opinion of the director at a single blow.)

When a plot device rises to the level of archetype, it represents not only the psychological preoccupations of a society, but how these preoccupations get reflected in propaganda. If a theme, pattern, formula, continually recurs, it’s worthwhile taking a look at why. In a society rooted in the soil of inequity, in which a narrow ‘elite’ tries to control what messages are allowed to exist, it’s a safe bet that the dominant messages are not just lies, but inverted truth – that they tell the truth in reverse. So – we’re told the story, over and over, that the darker-skinned are expendable because, in fact, the opposite is true.

But I have to admit being grateful to Mamet for one thing, the film House of Games – because it offers a wonderful examination of the dynamics of the con, how you suck in the mark by appearing to offer them something of value while you surreptitiously ‘relieve’ them of whatever it is you want from them – in our case, our sense of ourselves as valuable human beings, as inherently ‘good,’ ‘smart,’ creative, powerful, competent, self-sufficient – i.e., our happiness…leaving us with a legacy of doubt, and a question of mammoth millennial proportions: why did they want to steal our happiness?

Despite centuries of Western schooling, this question still lives, still remains a puzzle, because each new generation is biologically gifted with the knowledge that we are inherently a cooperative, fun-loving, joyous, generous species.

Of course gradually, for those who advance in ‘the system,’ those who fully absorb their roles as the functionaries of Mind in its current manifestation, those who assiduously study the Thought which capitalism wraps itself in, those who bow down deeply and long, the question falls into shadow, is disappeared from allowable debate. It hardly bears thinking about, for these, this thing called “civilization.” But the question won’t – can’t – go away. It is our birthright.

…
Pity – the Pard – that left her Asia –
Memories – of Palm –
Cannot be stifled – with Narcotic –
Nor suppressed – with Balm –
(Emily Dickinson)

Let us never cease from thinking – what is this ‘civilization’ in which we find ourselves? What are these ceremonies and why should we take part in them? What are these professions and why should we make money out of them? Where in short is it leading us, the procession of the sons of educated men? (Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, p. 63)

This World is not Conclusion.
A Species stands beyond –
Invisible, as Music –
But positive, as Sound –
It beckons, and it baffles –
Philosophy – don’t know –
And through a Riddle, at the last –
Sagacity, must go – …
(Emily Dickinson)

The received wisdom that capitalism brought us The Good Life, that its’ triumph was the triumph of ‘civilization’ over ‘barbarism,’ and so is the finest flower in the garden of Reason, which delivered up all the blessings of modern technology, blooms capable of solving any problem we can pose to it, and all the problems it creates – these sophisms paralyze many who might otherwise act to end podrunk rule.

If you believe that the atomization of life supports all the modern ‘comforts’ and ‘conveniences’ that make men gods rather than animals, then where is there to go? It’s hard to envision a substantively different future if ‘freedom’ from working manually is your standard for a fully evolved existence.

Perhaps the greatest propagandist for the Triumph of Reason children’s story is the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). I quote him at length here so as not to adulterate his pool, and to allow you a quiet moment to probe its crystalline depths. Enjoy it at your leisure, or ignore it, as you like.

The beginning of culture and of the struggle to pass out of the unbroken immediacy of naïve psychical life has always to be made by acquiring knowledge of universal principles…The systematic development of truth in scientific form can alone be the true shape in which truth exists…The force of mind is only as great as its expression; its depth only as deep as its power to expand and lose itself when spending and giving out its substance…When we want to see an oak with all its vigour of trunk, its spreading branches, and mass of foliage, we are not satisfied to be shown an acorn instead. In the same way science, the crowning glory of a spiritual world, is not found complete in its initial stages. The beginning of the new spirit is the outcome of a widespread revolution in manifold forms of spiritual culture; it is the reward which comes after a chequered and devious course of development, and after much struggle and effort…The truth is the whole. The whole, however, is merely the essential nature reaching its completeness through the process of its own development. Of the Absolute it must be said that is it essentially a result, that only at the end is it what it is in very truth; and just in that consists its nature, which is to be actual, subject, or self-becoming, self-development…man is explicitly man only in the form of developed and cultivated reason, which has made itself to be what it is implicitly…But this very unrest is the self…[K]nowledge is only real and can only be set forth fully in the form of science, in the form of system…That the truth is only realized in the form of system, that substance is essentially subject, is expressed in the idea which represents the Absolute as Spirit (Geist) – the grandest conception of all, and one which is due to modern times and its religion. Spirit is alone Reality. It is the inner being of the world, that which essentially is, and is per se…and exists for self…Mind, which, when thus developed, knows itself to be mind, is science. Science is its realization, and the kingdom it sets up for itself in its own native element…The task of conducting the individual mind from its unscientific standpoint to that of science had to be taken in its general sense…The particular individual…has also to go through the stages through which the general mind has passed…as stages of a road which has been worked over and leveled out…The road to science, by the very movement of the notion itself, will compass the entire objective world of conscious life in its rational necessity…The goal…is fixed for knowledge just as necessarily as the succession in the process. The terminus is at that point where knowledge is no longer compelled to go beyond itself, where it finds its own self, and the notion corresponds to the object and the object to the notion. The progress towards this goal consequently is without a halt, and at no earlier stage is satisfaction to be found. That which is confined to a life of nature is unable of itself to go beyond its immediate existence; but by something other than itself it is forced beyond that; and to be thus wrenched out of its setting is its death. (Georg W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, p. 70, 74, 75-6, 81-2, 83, 85-6, 89, 95, 137-8)

The inquiry into the essential destiny of Reason…is identical with the question, what is the ultimate design of the World? And the expression implies that that design is destined to be realized…The destiny of the spiritual World, and – since this is the substantial World, while the physical remains subordinate to it…– the final cause of the World at large, we allege to be the consciousness of its own freedom on the part of Spirit, and ipso facto, the reality of that freedom…Itself is its own object of attainment, and the sole aim of Spirit. This result it is, at which the process of the World’s History has been continually aiming; and to which the sacrifices that have ever and anon been laid on the vast altar of the earth, through the long lapse of ages, have been offered. This is the only aim that sees itself realized and fulfilled…The question of the means by which Freedom develops itself to a World, conducts us to the phenomenon of History itself…The first glance at History convinces us that the actions of men proceed from their needs, their passions, their characters and talents; and impresses us with the belief that such needs, passions and interests are the sole springs of action – the efficient agents in this scene of activity…Passions, private aims, and the satisfaction of selfish desires, are…the most effective springs of action. Their power lies in the fact that they respect none of the limitations which justice and morality would impose on them; and that these natural impulses have a more direct influence over man that the artificial and tedious discipline that tends to order and self-restraint, law and morality. When we look at this display of passions, and the consequences of their violence;…when we see the evil, the vice…we can scarce avoid being filled with sorrow at this universal taint of corruption…We endure in beholding it a mental torture, allowing no defense or escape but the consideration that what has happened could not be otherwise; that it is a fatality which no intervention could alter…But even regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples…have been victimized – the question involuntarily arises – to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered…nothing great in the World has been accomplished without passion…The History of the World is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony – periods when the antithesis is in abeyance…Society and the State are the very conditions in which Freedom is realized…The mutations which history presents have been long characterized…as an advance to something better, more perfect. The changes that take place in Nature…exhibit only a perpetually self-repeating cycle; in Nature there happens “nothing new under the sun,” and the multiform play of its phenomena so far induces a feeling of ennui; only in those changes which take place in the region of Spirit does anything new arise. This peculiarity in the world of mind has indicated in the case of man…a real capacity for change, and that for the better – an impulse of perfectibility…In actual existence Progress appears as an advancing from the imperfect to the more perfect…[A] doubt has been suggested whether in the progress of history and of general culture mankind have become better; whether their morality has been increased…What the absolute aim of Spirit requires and accomplished…transcends the obligations, and the liability to imputation and the ascription of good or bad motives, which attach to individuality in virtue of its social relations. They who on moral grounds, and consequently with noble intention, have resisted that which the advance of the Spiritual Idea makes necessary, stand higher in moral worth than those whose crimes have been turned into the means – under the direction of a superior principle – of realizing the purposes of that principle…The deeds of great men, who are the Individuals of the World’s History, thus appear not only justified in view of that intrinsic result of which they were not conscious, but also from the point of view occupied by the secular moralist. But looked at from this point, moral claims that are irrelevant, must not be brought into collision with world-historical deeds and their accomplishment…what [the History of the World] has to record is the activity of the Spirit of Peoples, so that the individual forms which that spirit has assumed in the sphere of outward reality, might be left to the delineation of special histories…
The peculiarly African character is difficult to comprehend, for the very reason that in reference to it, we must quite give up the principle which naturally accompanies all our ideas – the category of Universality. In Negro life the characteristic point is the fact that consciousness has not yet attained to the realization of any substantial objective existence – as for example, God, or Law – in which the interest of man’s volition is involved and in which he realizes his own being. This distinction between himself as an individual and the universality of his essential being, the African in the uniform, undeveloped oneness of his existence has not yet attained; so that the Knowledge of an absolute Being, an Other and a Higher than his individual self, is entirely wanting. The Negro, as already observed, exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state. We must lay aside all thought of reverence and morality – all that we call feeling – if we would rightly comprehend him; there is nothing harmonious with humanity to be found in this type of character…At this point we leave Africa, not to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit…What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature, and which had to be presented here only as on the threshold of the World’s History. Having eliminated this introductory element, we find ourselves for the first time on the real theatre of History. (Georg W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, p. 16, 19, 20-1, 23, 26-7, 41, 54, 57, 66, 67, 93, 99)

Pronouncements as from God, Hegel gives – and to the West of his day and beyond, what passed through his lips bore no questioning – except by us, ‘the Unhistorical.’

Those of us dismissed from the corporate headquarters of History have always questioned these assumptions of Western Thought; we had no choice – survival obliged us.

The edifice of this Thought was erected on cherished lies: the supposed “changelessness” of Nature; the formula “‘culture’ equals change, opposition, constant conflict, ruthless upheaval; a stern, restless, churning spirit of ‘working-against-itself;’” the sad cloak of “Perfectibility” as a personal and species goal; a theater piece called “History” that must, of necessity, mind, unfold in ascending stages of “Developing Spirit.”

And then, of course, the insertion, as the prime mover of ‘History,’ of a self-actualizing ‘Mind’ that drives the whole thing pitilessly forward, and which must (nothing personal), of necessity, grind you, if you are “the Unhistorical,” underfoot (only after bleeding you dry of course – “no offense…sorry”).

Out of these lies – stories others made up – which he threaded and ‘systematized,’ * Hegel made up a grand ‘theory of the World’ – and congealing capitalism ate it up like candy.

But not capitalism alone – Marxism found Hegel’s philosophy of history equally manly and robust.

We should never forget that our whole economic, political and intellectual development has as its presupposition a state of things in which slavery was as necessary as it was universally recognized. In this sense we are entitled to say: Without the slavery of antiquity, no modern socialism…For it is a fact that man sprang from the beasts, and had consequently to use barbaric and almost bestial means to extricate himself from barbarism. The ancient communes, where they continued to exist, have for thousands of years formed the basis of the most barbarous form of state…It was only where these communities dissolved that the peoples made progress of themselves, and their first economic advance consisted in the increase and development of production by means of slave labor. It is clear that so long as human labor was still so little productive that it provided but a small surplus over and above the necessary means of subsistence, any increase of the productive forces, extension of trade, development of the state and of law, or beginning of art and science, was only possible by means of a greater division of labor. And the necessary basis for this was the great division of labor between the masses discharging simple manual labor and the few privileged persons directing labor, conducting trade and public affairs, and, at a latter stage occupying themselves with art and science. The simplest and most natural form of this division of labor was in fact slavery…This was an advance even for the slaves…We may add at this point that all historical antagonisms between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes to this very day find their explanation in this same relatively undeveloped productivity of human labor. So long as the really working population was so much occupied in their necessary labor that they had no time left for looking after the common affairs of society – the direction of labor, affairs of the state, legal matters, art, science, etc. – so long was it always necessary that there should exist a special class, freed from actual labor, to manage these affairs; and this special class never failed to impose a greater and greater burden of labor, for its own advantage, on the working masses. Only the immense increase of the productive forces attained through large-scale industry made it possible to distribute labor among all members of society without exception, and thereby to limit the labor time of each individual member to such an extent that all have enough free time left to take part in the general – both theoretical and practical – affairs of society. It is only now, therefore, that any ruling and exploiting class has become superfluous and indeed a hindrance to social development, and it is only now, too, that it will be inexorably abolished, however much it may be in possession of the “direct force.” (Frederick Engels, Anti-Duhring, p. 200-1)

Translation: “Free people must be made slaves in order for their descendants to be made free again.”

If this makes sense to you, academe may be your oyster, but that mollusk is smothering you.

(And how ‘bout that moving goal-post, “the productive forces,” that just never seem to get developed enough to justify our release from servitude?)

Podrunks – and all Rationalism’s kin – love the notion that the Anomie and Agony brought down upon the “Unhistorical” was ‘Necessary,’ because in this grand System sadism and greed get magically transmogrified into something ‘noble.’ It’s a sausage grinder for the soulless that takes all the assorted carnage of capital and turns it into a ‘mission.’

They’re doing it all for us, don’t you know. If we were only ‘smart’ enough to grasp essential Truth we might drown in our own blood with more grace.

Doesn’t this story sound familiar?

Don’t you hear it when Madeleine Albright decrees the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children after the first Gulf ‘war’ ‘necessary’? Or when Bush the Lesser (as Arundhati Roy dubbed him) says the same about the current one?

In the podrunks’ ‘World,’ all the deaths of other people’s children and parents and cherished is ‘necessary,’ ‘acceptable,’ ‘worth it.’ They stare at us coldly, marveling at our ‘naïve emotionalism,’ our ‘stupidity,’ when we scream at them, “What if it was your daughter, your son, being blown to bits?! What if it was you?”

But at that last question they smile, because they know it will never be them, because different rules apply, to them, the ‘masters of the world,’ they who can proclaim themselves the ‘Idea’ becoming Itself, they who represent ‘Reason.’

The ‘concept’ is ‘pure,’ the living reality, sadly, ‘unpure;’ and so the striving to become one with The Concept becomes the driving force of History – and anything, any people, that gets in Its’ way must be relentlessly mowed down…

Whether you find this story gripping or a real yawner, what’s indisputable is that it is a story – a story drenched in our ancestors’ blood, and our own.

What if we changed it?

Of course if your past has its roots in Europe this fairy tale, far from causing you obvious psychic pain, may actually wrap you in a warm glow of unwarranted superiority.

But if your past resides in “The Unhistorical” it mires you in psychic muck – which it’s best not to have, thank you very much.

I think we should stop telling ourselves this story.

Continue to "Progress" - Part 2

* This pattern is wearing away, like the system itself.

* Another lie: The more Thought works on crap the more it increases in value – as opposed to: “garbage in, garbage out.”

Nascence to End Work

waking up - freeing ourselves from work

Chapter III: Progress (Part 1)

Waking Up: Freeing Ourselves From Work