Time was when people throughout the land would have been involved in this slow and time consuming activity. Having just watched the first part of the new BBC series 'The Incredible Human Journey' (which is skirting around the edges of profound Occidentalism - she refers to "us" as the non-African peoples and also as "us" being Modern Humans - obviously the tribes that weathered the 100,000 years in what is now Africa are just as Modern as the diaspora that developed "outside" Africa - what is in a location anyway?) I'm thinking about where what we call loosely "life" began. "Get a life", Americans say but their notion of "life" has evolved over a very long time. Once "life" involved knitting...
So imagine the scene by a fire under an animal hide tent of a woman separating goat flax and spinning it onto a bobbing and a man taking thread and knitting, children playing with sticks in the dirt: all "living" out the "traditional" ways that have been handed down by "ancestors": both doing what is called "living". They sing songs maybe about knitting, imagine the time when they were children living in the midst of this traditional practice.
Is wealth being created? Is the knitted fabric wealth? Is the shell of a snail wealth? It is excreted by metabolism, but the same metabolism that moves the snail and responds to stimulii and feeds and reproduces: why separate the shell as wealth from the reflex reaction to avoid falling off a leaf? Likewise is the fabric excreted from this organism called man any more wealthy than the songs and the time spent meditating and sharing in an ancient tradition. Is a fish drawn from the sea more wealthy than a fish swimming free? The man separated from his surroundings and his traditions is like the fish on the fishmonger's slab ready for sale. So imagine the group "living" out their existence: it itself is wealthy, and while the coming of the winter may hasten their knitting and make fools of those who do not obey The Tradition, it is The Tradition that is life as much as the water that the fish swims in, without which it would die from collapse of its gill surfaces.
Come the upper class capitalist and his machine to "save labour". What of the knitters? They have their Tradition evaporated and their "life" ends. For the better says the capitalist for now they are free from laborious labour and the machines can make 20 times the volume of fabric. That argues the capitalist will make clothes so plentiful and cheap and thereby multiply the wealth of the people. So we sit around the fire as before and continuously change our clothes for there is nothing left to do. The Tradition becomes a tradition of changing our clothes. We'll have this colour or that colour etc etc.
Is this change of any benefit to anyone? I don't see it. It is just change.
Maybe they argue we have more time for "other" things. But what is there in "life" but Tradition?
But the real problem is that the extra wools that are made by machines "belong" to the capitalist not the people of the Tradition. They lose their tradition, and they lose the raw product.
The snail no longer has to travel for food, it no longer has to make its shell, it no longer has to breed: it is all done by machine. But, it doesn't own any of the things that the machine makes! A wedge is forced between the snail and its "means of living".
"Means of Living" now becomes a profoundly important concept. Once upon a time The Tradition meant that everything flowed smoothly - Life was Tradition and Tradition was survival and survival was Life. Now survival is precarious and "means of living" becomes separated from Life itself. Jesus says of the birds - look how their father feeds them... so too once did the Tradition feed us. But The Tradition got broken and it only feeds the half now.
"Means of Living" means "Work" and we have the birth of the modern concept and the confused incomplete idea of life as it stands for people today.
How can "Work" afford us any sense of existence or Life? How can wearing the products of machines enable us to exist? How can we construct a Tradition from the physical matter that we can buy? Sub-cultures and fashions pop up and whither like seeds on barren soil because on this substrate nothing can grow and people cannot Live. We are fish who removed from the river who lie in the desert surviving on water purified by machines and sold by the litre.
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Looked up knitting it's actually quite recent only C2-3 A.D. And this points to another feature of The Tradition things never changed. Its amazing that a particular way of making flint tools will have been concerved for thousands of years. We can't even remain satisfied with a form of communication for more than a decade these days. Maybe we're in a transition stage in human evolution and we'll stabalise in the technology and soceity we are heading - the intermediate stages we call progress now never making it into the fossil record. Or maybe it really was conservatism - people were happy, the tools did the "job" (expectations set by The Tradition) so why change it? Or what we call conservative was massive difference to people who made do with so little. When all you have is sticks, stones and bones maybe diversity looks quite small to those who are used to mobile phones, laptops, palmtops, desktops, blackberrys (where actually there isn't much difference either).
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In the 2nd part of the series the Occidentalism continues where she asks why the "orientals" look so different. Different from what? The dominant race of Homo sapiens sapiens is actually the Mongoloid - the question is why do the rest of us look so different! Caucasoid is the other prevalent race (majority of those in America and Eurasia). The program also skimmed on the answer to this. Sexual selection was the answer that I got convinced by when I studied this at school. Since then and knowing human beings better I think racism is the real answer. Population bottlenecks will result in dramatic selection of genes resulting in distinct changes to the gene pool. Humans being violently territorial and endo-social (I use this to refer to social behaviour that is reserved for kinsmen as opposed to ectosocial where we welcome strangers) will use these differences of appearance to segregate upon. You can imagine people with blond hair for example being viewed as strangers and killed or thrown out of communities. When tribes enslave one another these differences of appearance will then become status symbols as is seen today with Indians trying to look like the enslaving Western members of their own broad-race! Its less romantic than sexual selection but seems to fit better the bloody and agressive terratorial history of Homo sapiens sapiens.
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Part 3 had me thinking. The rise of Erectus over Neanderthals was put down to greater community and places art as a key feature in this.
It also traces argiculture to Göbekli Tepe in Turkey. It is without doubt an important step in mankinds evolution to have turned away from hunter gathering. It opens up the way of life that we have today of sedentary settlement; of fixed property, houses and trading. The creation of fixed stone temples as far back at 10,000BC is evidence of the beginning of this way of life as is the astonishing fact that DNA markers in all modern wheat can be traced to populations of grasses in this area.
What I was left thinking was the contemporary modern mind set of this being "progress" and the triumphant start of the party that we are all invited to.
Certainly modern populations are only possible because of this change of lifestyle. 6 billion people set into hunter gatherer life styles would decimate the planet and starve in the process. We are stuck down this road now.
But what I have had to work to recover is the point of this blog that while this may have been a very ancient way of life that has been developed and adopted it is not "progress" anymore than the peregrin with its sharp beak, sharp vision and speedy flight has progressed over the modest finch with its stout beak, poorer eye sight and ambling flight. They are adapted to different environments.
Western man has entered into something of a feedback loop since taking charge of his own environment so dramatically. It is not that we are free from environment only that we command more obviously our environment. And why do we do that? it is because of pressure from within ourselves and from greater environmental pressures outside. So nothing has changed absolutely.
Much to write but I've run out of time.
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