Life as a Spectator Sport

Bear with me--I'm feeling my way here. I've been dwelling for a couple of days now on what it means to disconnect from contemporary life, and out of that has come some conclusions.

The first one is that no matter how Americans brag about our "democratic way of life," we've allowed ourselves to succumb to a dictatorship. We're told what to eat, what to wear, how to be entertained, what constitutes health and how to attain it, where to live, how to think. The fact that it began with an economic dictatorship hasn't kept it from progressing to a political dictatorship, no matter how prettily it's clothed in the latest fashions. We may have elected the people in power, but the money behind them is what keeps us in thrall.

So opting out of contemporary society means much more than just hanging out the laundry instead of using an electric dryer, or changing to a different kind of light bulb. It requires people to leave the emotional and intellectual country in which they live and migrate to a new one, and emigration has never been easy. Throughout recorded history only a small fraction of any country's population has been able to do it without some kind of necessity or coercion. The "wild West" plays a big part in American folk history, but the fact is that until late in the 19th century, most Americans stayed safely in the settled eastern cities and nearby rural areas. So it's no wonder that most people aren't willing to leave their supposedly safe and settled lives now.

Another conclusion is that it isn't really technology that keeps people in line. We like to blame technology, but I'm no Luddite. My grandson was injured in a traffic accident recently, and I'm profoundly grateful for the emergency room, the MRI machine, the highly trained doctors and nurses and technicians, and whatever equipment and knowledge will be required to repair his herniated cervical disk. Technology allows society to do many good things. The problem with technology is that we've used it to substitute a virtual world for the real one.

No, I'm not blaming the internet. Virtual reality was here long before Tim Berners-Lee first conceived of the world wide web. Virtual reality arrived with the first daydreams and idle imaginings, a very long time ago. But the world in general didn't get overly caught up in it. Too many other things demanded one's attention--plants to harvest, animals to tend, babies to nurse, houses and barns to build and mend. Real life had an unpleasant way of intruding upon fantasy.

It wasn't until concentrated forms of energy (i.e. petroleum) became widely available that virtual reality began to overtake the real one. That's not to say pre-oil industrial society didn't have its own problems, but in my opinion, they were mostly problems of greed. Machines amplified the labor of one person so that fewer people were needed to produce goods (or far more goods could be produced with the same number of people). The profit from both machines and people stayed mostly with the owners of the machines, just as profit from people's labor has always belonged not to the laborers, but to the people for whom they labored. But that's a moral problem, one that has always been with us. It's not the fault of technology.

The current problem with technology began when labor itself began to be portrayed as undesirable. No one really believed that--it was a pretty fiction designed to entice people to buy things. But it sounded good. It appealed to social do-gooders (and I use that term for want of a better one, not in any derogatory way), distressed with the endless drudgery of women, minorities and the poor. It appealed to the growing middle class in developed countries as a way to display their wealth. It appealed to manufacturers who saw their sales and profits going away after the good times of World War I. It appealed in a huge way to the huckster, the dreamweaver, the story-teller who could make you believe that if you only purchased his wonderful new whing-ding, you'd be happy. And of course, it appealed to plain ordinary men and women who just wanted an easier life.

But in one of those classic examples of the law of unintended consequences, it seems that labor isn't so bad after all. This isn't some kind of pseudo-Victorian treatise on the sanctity of labor. That's a bunch of hogwash, written by men who benefited from other people's labor and by women who never had to do any of it. But manual labor is what connects us to reality. It keeps us mindful of the limits of our natural resources--you don't waste water that cost muscle power to get out of the ground. You don't mindlessly discard food that you had to sow, harvest and preserve, or raise, butcher and preserve. You tend to take care of things that you worked hard to acquire or create. The throw-away society grew out of not having to work hard for the things you have. Yes, disposability was a marketing device intended to make us spend more. But it wouldn't have worked anywhere near as well if it hadn't been accompanied by relentless denigration of manual labor.

"I can only use this once, and then I have to throw it out and buy another one?" You can just see people scratching their heads in disbelief. How on earth did we get bamboozled into thinking that was a good idea? That's where we get back to the virtual reality. In an ideal world, no one has to work hard. To persuade people that this was attainable--people who really did know better--it was necessary to create another world for them, a world in which automobiles transported us without effort wherever we wished to go, where machines did the laundry and washed the dishes, where soiled diapers could just be thrown out, where machinery kept the house warm in the winter and cool in the summer, where entertainment was as close as a comfortable seat in front of the radio, or later, the television.

And I have to say that the hucksters did a good job of it. Few people in the developed countries are able to live outside that world any more. We've substituted air conditioning for fresh air and open windows, central heat for the fireplace or wood stove around which the family gathered, radio and television for relationships with real people, supermarkets full of factory-produced analogs of food for backyard gardens and local farms.

If the internet hadn't made "virtual reality" a widely-used phrase, we might say we were living in a fantasy world. The problem with fantasies is that eventually you have to come back to reality, and we're about to do so with a big, painful, crash.

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RSS Feed PERSONAL Send email to liz at life-as-a-spectator-sport.com Home I'm a mother, grandmother, a computer professional, Democrat, Christian. I welcome politely worded comments and email, my spam filter throws the rest away, so don't bother to flame me WHY 'LIFE AS A SPECTATOR SPORT' "If you're lucky not to live in the gutters of a slum, but still can't afford to take vacations in the Alps, you're part of that enormous middle class who lives life through the medium of the television, further separated from "real" life by air conditioner, by automobile, by dishwasher, microwave and ice-in-the-door refrigerator, by automatic washer and dryer, and all the other appliances and conveniences that make it possible for America to live life at second hand. I'm not sure why Americans decided that televised drama was better than the real thing, that cardboard microwave food containers were an adequate substitute for real dishes, and their contents for real food, or that cooking, dishwashing and face-to-face conversation wasn't worth the effort and time it required. Someone fed this nation a plastic crate of out-of-season tomatoes and told us it was life and we took them at their word, and we're so much the poorer for it that it's hard to know where to start to list the shortcomings." I wrote this a couple of years ago, but I have to admit it's much less amusing than I thought it would be to see the artifical construct falling apart. THE NON-ELECTRIC HOME Cleaning, 1 Cleaning, 2 Cleaning, 3 KNITTING BLOGS Extravayarnza Knitting Heretic Mind of Winter Pie Knits Persistent Illusion See Eunny Knit The Keyboard Biologist Taleweaver's Ramblings TECHnitting Wendy Knits FINISHED PROJECTS -------FINISHED IN 2006------- Peruvian Cap Tutti-Frutti Socks Shelley's Socks Carol's Socks -------FINISHED IN 2007------- Chain Link Socks Baby Surprise Jacket Valerie & Friend Baby Bonnet Rainbow Baby Socks Girls Pixie Hood Mitred Square Heart Red & White Socks Coffee Cup Pot Holder Nubbins Dishcloth Garterlac Dishcloth Suede Booties Kate's Socks Norwegian Sweet Baby Cap Half Thumbless Mittens Red Mittens for Akkol -------FINISHED IN 2008------- SELF-RELIANCE AND THE FUTURE -- Blogs and websites -- Causubon's Book Club Orlov Food Storage Made Easy From the Wilderness In the Wake Listening to Katrina Survival Topics The Modern Homestead The Oil Drum Notes from a Hillside Farm -- Mailing Lists -- 12vdc Power Living on the Land Rainwater Refrigeration Alternatives Old Ways of Living POLITICAL BLOGS and SITES The political sites have moved BOOKS I'M READING How to Grow More Vegetables, etc. Small Scale Grain Raising ARCHIVES February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 August 2008 July 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003 August 2003 July 2003 June 2003 May 2003 April 2003 March 2003 February 2003 January 2003 December 2002 November 2002 October 2002 September 2002 August 2002 July 2002 June 2002 May 2002 April 2002 March 2002 February 2002