[This essay was published on or around 2017-06-21 by Ireland-based journalist Brian Kaller, at http://restoringmayberry.blogspot.com/. It is reprinted here with the author's kind permission. Readers may wish also to look at two other pieces of writing touching on Mr Kaller's topic, both by USA-based blogger Brian Miller (and mentioned by Mr Miller in his blog comments at Mr Kaller's server space):
- "Small Town Resilience", at http://www.wingedelmfarm.com/blog/2015/08/23/small-town-resilience
- "The South is a Neolithic Fort", at http://www.wingedelmfarm.com/blog/2015/06/27/the-south-is-a-neolithic-fort
The owner of this present blog, Toomas Karmo, hopes to write some
comments of his own here, developing a few of Mr Kaller's themes or a few of Mr Miller's themes, or a few of both, at some point in the next
few weeks - perhaps as early as the first week in 2017 July.]
********
In the last few months I've been writing a lot about how our modern
society differs from any traditional one, and not necessarily for the
better. The phrase “traditional societies” covers a lot of ground, of
course; basically, I’m defining it
as life before we began using energy at the breakneck pace we are today.
I mean the cultures that existed before
roads became jammed with cars travelling at high speeds, before
Hollywood media took over and replaced local culture, and before people
in
the modernised West began to spend their lives sitting in cars or
staring at screens.
Those things didn’t all happen at once, or all together – as I argued a few weeks ago, 1950s America presents a well-studied intermediate case of a somewhat modernised country whose traditional culture was still vibrant and functioning. Ireland in the 1950s, meanwhile, still relied mostly on human and animal labour.
Those things didn’t all happen at once, or all together – as I argued a few weeks ago, 1950s America presents a well-studied intermediate case of a somewhat modernised country whose traditional culture was still vibrant and functioning. Ireland in the 1950s, meanwhile, still relied mostly on human and animal labour.
Dividing human societies into the traditional and the
modern means making sweeping statements; obviously cavemen lived differently
than Ancient Greeks, who lived differently than American pioneers, who lived
differently than 20th century Irish. Of course I’m not saying that all
traditional peoples lived the same way, or that any of them were wonderful and
without tragedy – and of course some were horrific.
I am saying that, despite the superficial differences in language and dress, my elderly neighbours share some commonalities with all the generations who came before them, and -- despite the similarity in accents and dress -- are now culturally separated from their grandchildren in the same village.
I am saying that, despite the superficial differences in language and dress, my elderly neighbours share some commonalities with all the generations who came before them, and -- despite the similarity in accents and dress -- are now culturally separated from their grandchildren in the same village.
Until recently, for example, few humans spent their lives
travelling long distances, except for the occasional sailor or nomad. Even most
foraging tribes generally travelled over a limited area, and farming people not
at all. Like most traditional people, my Irish neighbours grew up tied to a
place, knowing it as they knew themselves, and having a responsibility to keep
it healthy for their grandchildren. Of course archaeology
shows evidence of times and places when humans destroyed the land, often out of
ignorance of what they were doing, but more often people lived in the same
places for centuries or millennia, which they could not have done if they had
not practiced a sustainable kind of management.
Until the last few generations, few people were rootless
– even nomadic tribes circulated around a certain area during the year, and
were tied to their family. Most modern people tell only the songs and stories
manufactured for them by a faraway industry, but traditional people belonged to
a landscape and a way of life, to a clan and larger people with their own
stories and songs that told of their history. Even if they were poor, most people did not
feel poverty as we might today, for their lives were not spend drifting through
a sea of strangers.
When my neighbours told me of the history of their place,
they described all the local families and their histories, stories of
local
lords and landowners, rebellions and tragedies –
and this despite the land being devastated so often by famine and
exodus.
Memories don’t reach back so far in the USA, but in small towns here,
you meet people who take a similar pride in the place where they belong.
The children in Ireland today have some of these
relationships, but you can see it fading as they relate more to Youtube
or the
latest global teen fad than they do to elders in the same town. In the
USA,
where this process has been going on the longest, we think of it as
normal – we
expect that teenagers will relate to the media and not with their
families. But most humans in history did not make
the same assumptions about young people, and I have heard people from
many parts of the world report the same erosion of their local identity.
Until our era people rarely used money, or needed to. Of
course money did not exist in prehistoric days, the first 99.9 per cent of human
existence, yet those humans traded with other tribes all the same. Even after
the ancient Sumerians invented the first coins, though, few people used or even
saw a coin even there, and of course most people on Earth were not in Sumeria.
A medieval peasant might never have seen money or needed to use it either, they
worked, of course, but to grow food and raise animals, like most humans in any
time and place. The giant detour that our work makes – to work for someone
else, to get pay, to put in a bank, to withdraw, to spend at stores, with
governments and companies taking a cut out of every transaction – didn’t exist.
I'm not claiming they lived in an idyllic Eden; of course they could be
terrorised by war or disease, but so can many people today ---
Westerners have simply been shielded from these realities for a few
generations. Keep in mind, also, that medieval peasants might have
worked
far fewer hours every week than we do. Also, keep in mind that their
work was
necessary and meaningful, and often done together as a family – it was
time
spent with the family, not away from it.
Also, I’m not just comparing our modern world with
prehistoric or medieval life, with no spectrum in between. My elderly
neighbours here, growing up in Ireland in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, would have
had money and used it, and even started their own business enterprises at young
ages to get pocket money to spend. Those gave them treats, though; most of what
they needed they knew how to produce for themselves. Some tell me they didn’t
need to use money more than once a week, and that was small amounts from a
hiding place.
To give you an idea of how little they needed money,
Ireland in the 1970s saw a bank strike that lasted over a year – across the
country, no one could withdraw money for more than a year. Of course, some
people used a village credit union, or used the post office as a bank, as Irish
people do today. Nonetheless, most people’s money was in banks, no one could
withdraw for months, and yet life carried
on as normal.
You can even see this to some extent in America in the
1950s and 60s – again, a world further along the spectrum to ours, but still
less dependent than we are on a constant money stream. Banks then had tellers,
not automatic cash machines, and most people visited them once or twice a week.
People went shopping less, and instead of the dizzying number of products our
stores carry, shops had staples that people used for cooking, or simple clothes
that were more durable. ATMs didn’t exist, but people didn’t need them.
In every society that I know of – except our modern one
-- children learned from parents and older relatives, and stayed close to their
families until they came of age. In most of those children accompanied their
parents as they hunted, ploughed, washed clothes, cooked food and all the other
necessities of life, and learned the skills they needed to be adults. Children
in more recent centuries went to schools, as my elderly neighbours did, but
most countries children could walk to school, were taught by local people who
were also part of the community. Most did not do what parents often do today,
to send their children away to giant cement compounds to be raised by
strangers.
In early America, for that matter, school took fewer
hours of the day and fewer days of the year. They did not experience
what
modern children do, of being warehoused for 20,000 hours of their
formative years. Yet many of those schools taught students far more, at
earlier
ages, than under our giant bureaucracies. If you want to see the level
of education that many rural children received, read the letters of
Civil War soldiers conscripted from homesteads. Or keep in mind that the
Lincoln-Douglas debates, whose complex sentences often flummox college
students today, were meant to be listened to, not read, and by simple
farmers.
Until our modern society came along, no people shut their
elders away in nursing homes, rarely seen by children and grandchildren and
with only other dying people for company. In most traditional cultures elderly members
of a family lived with their children or relatives, and most religions had some
variation of the fourth commandment to honour one’s father and mother. Elders,
though weakened in body, had a lifetime of experience that younger generations
needed, whether in raising children, dealing with neighbours or handling
emergencies. From a position of respect they could pass on the songs and
stories of their people, giving children an umbilical link to the generations
who came before.
We see the same pattern in other animals with some
intelligence and family life; elephants, for example, need the elder members of
the herd to keep the younger ones in line and show them how to deal with
threats. When park rangers in South Africa introduced young elephants to a new
preserve, after the older members of the herd had been killed, they found the
young animals made unwise decisions for decades, only slowly learning, through
trial and error, the right way to live. For generations many people in America
today have grown up in the same situation, without elders to guide them through
their lives, until we now have a population of children in adult bodies.
Just as most traditional peoples did not spend their work
hours staring at a glowing rectangle, so they did not spend their leisure the
same way. Children had games that were passed down for centuries – blind-man’s
bluff and Johnny jump-up – that are only now disappearing in an age of
video-games. Elders sang songs that told people who they were as a
people, told stories of love and loss, of heroes and maidens, tragedy and
humour and the human condition. My neighbours grew up with families visiting
each other at night, gathering with the local storytellers and musicians,
listening to the tales and singing along to folk songs they all knew, which had
been passed down through the generations.
The modern era has changed our friendships as well;
almost any humans in history, whether prehistoric tribes or medieval farmers,
Hebrew herdsmen or American pioneers, dealt with a community of people outside
their family who lived nearby, and had to maintain good relations with them.
Small-town people, whether here or in the USA, retain some of this attitude
even today; they have to know their neighbours and help out occasionally, as
they might need help themselves.
You see the difference in the way my neighbours treat
death with the way modern urban people do. When I lived in the modern city and
a neighbour died, we found out when an ambulance parked outside, or a new
couple moved in where the old lady used to live. Out here in rural Ireland, a
neighbour’s death meant girls at the local school without a father, an empty
chair at the pub, a voice missing from the hymns at church, a hole in people’s
lives.
Such relationships soften our reactions to conflict; the
person waiting in line ahead of us might have taken First Communion with us,
and might have scored the winning goal in the school’s football match long ago,
and might have a tractor we need in case a tree falls over the only road.
Again, the details would change from one culture to the next, but every human
society would have a web of debt and obligation like this, to temper our
reactions to conflict and force us to see other people’s views. Enough threads
like that, woven together, form a civilised society.
Only in the modern era, for most Westerners today, do
“friends” largely mean icons on a screen, whose relationship with you consists
of moving electrons around. Today we can “meet,” have “conversations,” “share”
news, and even “date,” all without ever having to deal with the inhibiting
presence of other humans. We can do these things under fake names and pictures,
talking to people we will never meet in person, and say or do whatever we want
without fear of consequences. People can appear and disappear from our lives,
all without leaving any tangible presence, fading like ghosts when bored.
The modern world has many advantages; until the last
century food could be scarce, and even in good years it cost labour and
sacrifice. At the same time, until the last century no humans ate
food that had been flown across the world, packaged in chemical gases to
preserve it and simulate a healthy colour. No humans ate food injected with
other chemicals to make it more addictive. Instead, traditional people ate foods they knew, and had
picked out of the ground or off a tree. Foods belonged to certain seasons, and
tasted like a time and place. Meat came from an animal, hunted or herded, that
had just been killed, unless it was salted and smoked. People recognised their
food as precious and its sharing as sacred, the stuff of religious ritual.
Until ours came along, all human societies had rites of passage to mark
when a girl became a woman, and when a boy had proven himself a man. Becoming a
young man or maiden – what we today call a “teen” -- did not mean that they
would spend more hours warehoused in an institution, or spend their
time with gangs of other teenagers in places of maximum temptation; rather, it
meant taking on more of the responsibilities of adulthood, preferably with
older family and mentors to guide them.
Again, a childhood among the Bushmen or the Vikings would
be very different from each other, and both would be very different than
American pioneer children or mid-20th-century Irish. Each of these eras
had
injustice, disease and starvation, just as ours does. My point is that
we are not sealed in a culture of driving and staring at screens, with
all its advantages and disadvantages in a single package.
The past, with all its possibilities, is still there. We know what more traditional people did well that we do not. We can still grow, cook and preserve food without electricity, play the games and tell the stories that our forebears did, and sing the songs that told of their loves and tragedies. We can learn from the elders who remember these things, before the last of them disappear and the past becomes an utterly foreign country to us.
The past, with all its possibilities, is still there. We know what more traditional people did well that we do not. We can still grow, cook and preserve food without electricity, play the games and tell the stories that our forebears did, and sing the songs that told of their loves and tragedies. We can learn from the elders who remember these things, before the last of them disappear and the past becomes an utterly foreign country to us.
[This is the end of the current blog posting.]
