Phoebe and I have recently begun reading ‘Farmer Boy’, a book written by Laura Ingles Wilder about the childhood of her husband Almanzo. It’s charming, set in the 1860’s and like all the Little House on the Prairie books, is based on real events and deals with the day to day functioning of the family and the interplay of the members. Reading about the processes that they used to engage in to survive and prosper in those days makes me feel like I’m displaced in this age.
Relative to the Ingles, the Wilder family were financially well to do, but the overriding message that comes across is the importance of solid family support structures, systems, principles and roles. Underpinning their resilient and spiritually rich lives are loving and respectful behaviours, in turn supported by rules and expectations of the children’s conduct and adopted values enabling a strong sense of self worth, place, heritage and privilege.
Daile and I yearn for these simple way points in our lives, and those of all the kids. Obviously I’m long enough in the tooth to know that things are not all good, or all bad, but I wish that I could have been alive in those days, when time was measured in seasons and natural rhythms rather than hours and minutes, when parsimony was valued above economic output, when generalists were valued as much as specialists, and when dare I say it, there was at least in principle the concept of honourable behaviour over profitable behaviour. Corporations were not yet in full swing, being a recent invention on the back of the industrial revolution, and wouldn’t get ‘personhood’ for another 20 years in the states. Principles held sway over profit and those who dealt dishonestly were pariah’s rather than pillars of society. Having said that, it was in 1865 that the thirteenth amendment was ratified in the US and slavery was finally abolished during Lincoln’s tenure after the Southern States seceded from the union on the threat of it, resulting in the civil war and over half a million deaths. It’s hard to imagine these days that the President was a man of principle first and an adroit politician second. When was the last time they had one of those?
I would love for some of the old concepts of thrift and utility to be more venerated in our modern society, so that craft and being in touch with natural materials and working with the land rather than against it were understood and supported philosophical positions. We need to achieve a harmonious or at least a less discordant relationship with the environment that supports us, and still has to support our kids and their families.
Those who appreciate this are left with the displaced hollow feeling that I have when they read of times gone where it was still possible to avoid the corrosive blandishments of an entire culture hell bent on retailing everything under the sun as if everything under the sun had a price and someone to buy it.
By the time most of our kids are in their teens they will have fully internalised the idea that they are not expected to actually produce anything themselves, but find satisfaction in the products of industrial society – even scoffing at anything homemade. They will almost universally think that fun is synonymous with alcohol and consumption in general, that they should be satisfied with a passive life and a minimum level of personal significance or sense of self, (with corresponding rises in teen neurosis). By the time they are ‘useful members of society’ they will see our natural heritage in terms of ‘productivity’, ‘yield’ and ‘economic value’, will view those who sit on the periphery of mainstream thinking as ‘weird’ and those who don’t aspire towards the trappings of industrial society as mildly amusing eccentrics.
By the time they reach middle management positions those views will have hardened in many, so that they will not feel (or at least will be numb to feelings) any guilt in ‘flicking’ (firing) an honest man because he’s not motivated to bust his guts in a soulless job that has no meaning other than a means to pay for the food and shelter that he can no longer extract for himself through husbandry of the land that we all inherited.
Ah, I know it’s not all bad, but it’s hard to read books like that, and not hanker for the simplicity and raw life giving and taking hardships that made you or broke you against nature itself, rather than the sucker punch of marketing machines the size of small countries.
It’s not that long ago after all that we were all living off the land, and it was that way for millennia. I guess it’s not surprising that the yearning for it seems so natural, it’s genetic programming. It’s in your genes, not your jeans.
No comments:
Post a Comment