It would seem that our modern advanced societies are just stuck with their modern equivalent of Dickens’ Circumlocution Office. Stuck with both its dreary nannying state bureaucracy and its late-stage-capitalist blah blah. .......Yes, America has a significant fringe tradition of separatism from the state leviathan (most famously the Amish) but not even the fiercest 21st century backwoodsman has any idea how this could be scaled up. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/take-me-to-your-experts
You've made the same basic observation that Jane Jacobs did in her book "Systems of Survival." Her book is about ethics. It contrasts two ethical systems: "Guardian" (warrior) and "Commercial" (worker). https://amzn.to/3wUBOIL
The book Moral Mazes talks about how in big corporations people lose touch with reality and are only interested in how things appear (i.e., to their boss, or on their resume). This might be related to moving from a focus on absolute outcomes (worker) to relative outcomes (war).
Yes, exactly! Also people in the productive sector develop warrior mentalities when they do not need to take responsibility for actually producing things.
Great piece! Víctor Davis Hanson has written much on the seasonality of war and how premodern cultures had to set down their swords to harvest with ploughshares and then return.
Because we have a professionalized military, there is no conscription and therefore no tension between these two modes. Some people can work on the domestic front while others work abroad. You will notice one of the reasons the military is ineffective is that it has both turned many warriors into bureaucrats and tried to take people who are not good at fighting or working (increasingly fat mouth-breathers) and put them on payroll, which is why being in the military now is actually lower status than when it was only men with Punisher stickers on their trucks working for it.
I too have experienced the meditative effects of manual work. I am prone to depression, and have found that there's no better remedy than getting up and doing whatever, wash the car, cut the grass, pull weeds, make something, fix something. It's remarkable the effect on one's mood. I'm also a praying person and there are similarities in the apparent healing effects of both. One of my biggest regrets is not choosing an occupation in which I could work with my hands.
Yes. The above post is very human-centric. Very uninclusive for creatures who do not happen to be human, actually. I can't think of any other species organizing itself in warrior and worker populations except humans, beyond the male-female divide. Not even ants or bees. As far as I know (I'm definitely no expert, I have only read a book by E O Wilson), worker ants become warrior ants on a given signal.
To some degree, all of this is "war by other means" -- both the teenage girls and the ladies who lunch can't raise their status by working so they spend their effort on social aggression. "Work" usually has an element of being non-zero-sum, at least when considering a small set of workers.
Sure. They can't play the old-fashioned human status games, of arranging advantageous marriages, accumulating titles, and territorial conquest, so they resort to stupid handbag games.
Given your analysis, I think you can look at this in two ways: from one perspective everyone is a warrior in the sense that most leisure time we have is used to prepare for conflict or improve your odds of winning in conflict (building status and alliances, building physical strengths, learning things etc). from another perspective everyone is a worker in that warriors are also work when they prepare for war or fight (being a criminal is a type of job, as is being a solder, and when you have nothing else to do either option may be more interesting, especially for young men).
> "Engineers who program machines all day still focus on the material world. That, I believe, should send them into worker mode. I have no hard data, but I think there are some loose empirical indications that support this assumption: I'm not alone in observing that workplaces heavy in engineers are comparatively free from drama."
I think is true, but it's another way of saying that most workplaces with a lot of engineers are also mostly men, and men don't create as much (social) drama among each other?
Oddly, your comment makes me think of killing slugs.
When I'm on a killing spree, I'm thinking of Temple Grandin, the super designer of slaughterhouses and her suggestion that the same person shouldn't be made to kill off cow after cow day after day, because it is mentally straining to just kill and kill and kill without pause. When I have killed about a hundred slugs I'm feeling mentally exhausted. Anders, on the other hand, can kill a thousand slugs (yes, literally) and feel just fine. He also looks when he is doing it: He has told me about the fascinating differences in internal anatomy between different slugs. When I'm killing my paltry hundred slugs, I always look away. I place the slug in a pair of scissors, look away and cut. Or I step on the slug without looking closely.
For Anders, killing slugs is work. For me, it is war. Every time I'm killing a slug, I feel that I'm killing someone.
Few humans, however, disagree over whether killing humans is work or war.
>>but it's another way of saying that most workplaces with a lot of engineers are also mostly men, and men don't create as much (social) drama among each other?
It is part of the explanation. Maybe a big part of the explanation. But men can definitely make drama too. Then it is called politics.
I have such tendencies too. Especially with snails with shells - they are cute! However, the Spanish slug will kill everything that grows if I don't kill if first. Poison (copper sufphate) is by far the most effective means, I have found out.
When I read your writing, Tove, I have the sense of gazing into a very clear lake, observing the creatures moving around on the gravel at the bottom of the lake. Thank you!
Thank you, I'm feeling genuinely moved. I could compare to process of writing to something akin to wading in mud, so everything alluding to clear water is a great compliment.
The more you are immersed in a social reality, as opposed to a physical reality, the more you are rewarded for vicious and self-damaging behaviour: https://reasonedeclecticism.substack.com/p/the-vices-of-social-reality
It would seem that our modern advanced societies are just stuck with their modern equivalent of Dickens’ Circumlocution Office. Stuck with both its dreary nannying state bureaucracy and its late-stage-capitalist blah blah. .......Yes, America has a significant fringe tradition of separatism from the state leviathan (most famously the Amish) but not even the fiercest 21st century backwoodsman has any idea how this could be scaled up. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/take-me-to-your-experts
You've made the same basic observation that Jane Jacobs did in her book "Systems of Survival." Her book is about ethics. It contrasts two ethical systems: "Guardian" (warrior) and "Commercial" (worker). https://amzn.to/3wUBOIL
The book Moral Mazes talks about how in big corporations people lose touch with reality and are only interested in how things appear (i.e., to their boss, or on their resume). This might be related to moving from a focus on absolute outcomes (worker) to relative outcomes (war).
Yes, exactly! Also people in the productive sector develop warrior mentalities when they do not need to take responsibility for actually producing things.
Great piece! Víctor Davis Hanson has written much on the seasonality of war and how premodern cultures had to set down their swords to harvest with ploughshares and then return.
Because we have a professionalized military, there is no conscription and therefore no tension between these two modes. Some people can work on the domestic front while others work abroad. You will notice one of the reasons the military is ineffective is that it has both turned many warriors into bureaucrats and tried to take people who are not good at fighting or working (increasingly fat mouth-breathers) and put them on payroll, which is why being in the military now is actually lower status than when it was only men with Punisher stickers on their trucks working for it.
so then meditation is always soteriological, if only to save the world, if not a soul or two
I too have experienced the meditative effects of manual work. I am prone to depression, and have found that there's no better remedy than getting up and doing whatever, wash the car, cut the grass, pull weeds, make something, fix something. It's remarkable the effect on one's mood. I'm also a praying person and there are similarities in the apparent healing effects of both. One of my biggest regrets is not choosing an occupation in which I could work with my hands.
Things are very different for cats, mainly because control of territory gives access to food and, for males, opportunities to mate.
Yes. The above post is very human-centric. Very uninclusive for creatures who do not happen to be human, actually. I can't think of any other species organizing itself in warrior and worker populations except humans, beyond the male-female divide. Not even ants or bees. As far as I know (I'm definitely no expert, I have only read a book by E O Wilson), worker ants become warrior ants on a given signal.
Aren't you suggesting that most people can switch from warrior to worker mode with the right signal, just like the ants?
Sort of. But the "signal" is much more complicated and long-term in humans, since it involves an entire lifestyle.
well, we're much more complex than ants (or so I like to think!)
To some degree, all of this is "war by other means" -- both the teenage girls and the ladies who lunch can't raise their status by working so they spend their effort on social aggression. "Work" usually has an element of being non-zero-sum, at least when considering a small set of workers.
Sure. They can't play the old-fashioned human status games, of arranging advantageous marriages, accumulating titles, and territorial conquest, so they resort to stupid handbag games.
Very astute as usual. I will need to think more on this as I'm too tired just now.
Given your analysis, I think you can look at this in two ways: from one perspective everyone is a warrior in the sense that most leisure time we have is used to prepare for conflict or improve your odds of winning in conflict (building status and alliances, building physical strengths, learning things etc). from another perspective everyone is a worker in that warriors are also work when they prepare for war or fight (being a criminal is a type of job, as is being a solder, and when you have nothing else to do either option may be more interesting, especially for young men).
> "Engineers who program machines all day still focus on the material world. That, I believe, should send them into worker mode. I have no hard data, but I think there are some loose empirical indications that support this assumption: I'm not alone in observing that workplaces heavy in engineers are comparatively free from drama."
I think is true, but it's another way of saying that most workplaces with a lot of engineers are also mostly men, and men don't create as much (social) drama among each other?
Oddly, your comment makes me think of killing slugs.
When I'm on a killing spree, I'm thinking of Temple Grandin, the super designer of slaughterhouses and her suggestion that the same person shouldn't be made to kill off cow after cow day after day, because it is mentally straining to just kill and kill and kill without pause. When I have killed about a hundred slugs I'm feeling mentally exhausted. Anders, on the other hand, can kill a thousand slugs (yes, literally) and feel just fine. He also looks when he is doing it: He has told me about the fascinating differences in internal anatomy between different slugs. When I'm killing my paltry hundred slugs, I always look away. I place the slug in a pair of scissors, look away and cut. Or I step on the slug without looking closely.
For Anders, killing slugs is work. For me, it is war. Every time I'm killing a slug, I feel that I'm killing someone.
Few humans, however, disagree over whether killing humans is work or war.
>>but it's another way of saying that most workplaces with a lot of engineers are also mostly men, and men don't create as much (social) drama among each other?
It is part of the explanation. Maybe a big part of the explanation. But men can definitely make drama too. Then it is called politics.
My mother just moves the slugs somewhere else instead of killing them. She's very pacifistic.
I have such tendencies too. Especially with snails with shells - they are cute! However, the Spanish slug will kill everything that grows if I don't kill if first. Poison (copper sufphate) is by far the most effective means, I have found out.
"When men create drama we call it politics."
I love that! 😆
When I read your writing, Tove, I have the sense of gazing into a very clear lake, observing the creatures moving around on the gravel at the bottom of the lake. Thank you!
Thank you, I'm feeling genuinely moved. I could compare to process of writing to something akin to wading in mud, so everything alluding to clear water is a great compliment.