Fred Dibnah, techne & Auschwitz

Great TV program over the break on this great entertainer who has amazed me at making things i'd never looked at before like steam engines and pit lifts become fascinating bits of history.

In particular I wish to celebrate his appreciation for craftsmanship. A word that has lost its meaning in a capital/profit driven world. But, as I'm always reminded: what is the point of money if there is nothing to buy with it? What underpins an economy is not the capital, but the wealth of craft and skills in its culture and its people. Of course the rich don't hold this view, because they wish to be held as the pivots of society, but sadly everything around them is built not with their money but the hands of their fellow men.

I'm more familiar with logic than history, and through the sense of logic I would say that a great injustice has been done to the aristocracy. Whipped up by greed, the industrialists turned the crowds against the aristocracy, and supplanted their evolved and refined etiquette with their own cheap gutteral lifestyles and tastes. Now we have a new aristo-crass-y of people with money but no idea what to spend it upon. Combine this with a system that worships only profit and you have an unskilled, automated and pressured workforce manufacturing what amounts to only paper-wealth from the dark satanic mills. There is no place for skill or craft anymore.

Adding to the downfall of craft is the rise of bourgeois arts. Art became more and more isolated from its roots in craft to grace only the pompous stages and picture frames of Europe's monied classes. Where once art had been true to its greek origin as techne, true to the notion of anything that requires skill to make, now art was distilled from the mass produced profit infected produce of the factories. Money, money everywhere but nothing of value to buy.

Likewise a "qualification" these days, like the bank note, is paper-wealth it refers to nothing - a new type of fiat currency. Once 5 years experience would have been qualification, but now this immesurable skill is worthless against the artifice of hurdles and jumps that is a paper qualification. And, upon the subject of the immesurable nature of skill Plato for one has written copiously.

Not that I am in favour of vocational qualifications. Education is not about employment and profit! It is about the mind, it is about broadening horizons, giving the mental skills to master a world. Language, maths, history, religion amongst the most valuable things that exist. Without these there is no man. And, especially in a democratic society where each person is to take responsibility for the country's governance - are these not even the more important? A recent catalogue of naive and embarrassing government re-enactments (esp. the wars) easily foreseen by a public with even a slight knowledge of history and ethics (there is nothing new under the sun - know the past, know the future).

So our pockets are now lined in this age of machines and sweat shops, but alas we are the less wealthy because the quality of what we buy is poor. Once enjoying a single good purchase of something that would satisfy for many lifetimes, now we make do with weekly shopping trips to replace and feed the decaying insubstantial materials that fill our saturated houses.

But what has become worse in recent decades is that even that paper wealth has started to erode. The money that once we had in our pockets (a token recompence for the loss of worth in our labour and our shops) has been eroded by inflation, taxation, and gradual monopolisation of the markets. We are poorer today than ever before, the edifice of our once rich lives fossilised by nominal wealth, government regulation and edifice. The house of cards is held in place by glue now, much of the value leeched away as society turns upon its head and the fight for nominal value tokens tightens the noose ever further.

Economists like Thorstein Veblen argued long ago that the wealth of nations lay in the skill and labour of the people, not in the capital accumulation at the top of the pyramid. The powerful are becoming more and more naive of the most important feature of power, it only exist where people accept the authority. The moment that trust is gone, the power evaporates like darkness in the dawn. The darkness of global authority seems to think that it can exist all by itself, a hark back to that dismal mediaeval belief in Divine Right of Kings. Kings ancient and modern all know that power is a relationship with the people. If they chose to ignore you, then power is gone. Fascists have learnt that you don't need the support of all the people, just enough to provide an army to protect the status quo. Sad are those pigs caught between the authority they sold their souls to and the will of their fellow people! I think always of the pigs who worked in the concentration camps. Doing their days work, taking the money, lapping up the praise of their masters like dogs and driving their brothers and sisters to putrify and haunt their dreams. Pity on all those pigs who become mindless hounds trapped into the bidding of a master... and almost every news carries stories of the atrocities caused by the "police" and "armies" be they China, Iraq or America. People whose consciences are afraid to refuse orders are the bricks that built Auschwitz. This is the cost of the truth that society is built upon its people, and not upon its leaders. It is the people that must chose who to support and work for, and not allow any individual in their ranks to do this work for them.

All this because we accept an authority that has forgotten that it is the skill of each and every one of us upon which the society is built and which Fred Dibnah once rejoiced in so infectiously.