Part IV
Offhand I can think of several sources for the unease that has dogged my life and made me yearn for a simpler, more stable order: psychological, religious / spiritual, social. Price disorientation. The music kids play nowadays.
Historical. In Part III I listed a few changes which seemed significant—at least noticeable—in my generation. Before that I mused about the steady increase in price as a feature of the modern economy, and began with a general notice of the disorientation prices in particular generate.
But if it’s “impossible” to reduce prices today, it’s far more impossible to revert to a former society, a former state, former relationships, and even former values. (Maybe “values” isn’t a good choice of words: Honesty, courage, and other character traits run through history. I mean something more like the things which can grow or ebb in importance—the use of “Mister” or other titles, for instance.)
Suppose I wanted to live in a place where I knew people and people knew me. (Let’s assume that they liked me and I liked them.) (Not always a given, is it?—but let’s not get into that.) Suppose we had local schools and strong church congregations, stable occupations in healthy industries, sufficient food from local places, and general contentment with our material needs. We bought a lot of goods made by small, regional businesses, sold by local merchants. I would visit my ancestors lying in their generations in my church’s cemetery; it might be a pressing problem for our congregation to acquire another half-acre, to accommodate our future dead.
***
Very well. In addition to my first caveat, I skipped blithely over others. “Strong church congregations” ignores some of the, shall we say, unpleasantries, which have—ahem—punctuated Judaeo-Christian history. Religious co-existence has happened in various states at various times, but generally under a state religion, and non-conforming beliefs were at risk. Worship at the discretion of the individual is a product stemming, as far as I know, from the founding of the United States of America, which is a product of The Enlightenment. I’d like to keep that part of modern life.
That means though, that people will be living side by side with each other, tolerating beliefs unlike their own. Doesn’t that mean they devalue the teachings of their faith? Won’t people begin to intermarry? Won’t religious faith then weaken?
Ok, let’s say there’s only one religion. There has to be a system to keep it that way: Doctrine, establishment of and teaching of doctrine; officers—a hierarchy, a bureaucracy—to enforce the observance of doctrine. Finally there have to be…punishments. Levels of punishment. Thus a Church has to have many of the powers of the State itself. You certainly can’t have this nonsense of people going into the religion business for themselves.
That sounds ominous but let’s suppose we have some way of separating regions of faith, within which each could maintain itself within its boundaries. They could be regions of a large modern nation, or in the United States, individual states, or counties. So people could relocate a not inconvenient distance if they didn’t like things where they were. That leaves me the problem of maintaining boundaries, preventing intermarriage, preventing intermingling of populations, regulating travel, regulating perhaps places sojourners or truck drivers could stay, or wander to.
This idea has already led me into the weeds, and I’m only thinking about religion. Further, various countries have coped with the same issues throughout history, back into ancient times; therefore I could look to them. I’ve had a peek or two. I haven’t found “solutions”; I’ve found a number of ways of coping with their situations. All of them have tended toward…unpleasantries.
All in all I’d say we have less to disturb our equanimity, on this point, than other times and places.
***
When I dream of my pretty little town I assume of course there would be people of different “races” in it, although my imagination doesn’t see any detail. I don’t know if different people are living next door, or in their own neighborhoods, except that it’s by choice. I don’t even think about other circumstances that would sort people out—but there would be more of the rules and laws, extending principles that regulate people from other provinces. And that’s not ideal. Further, a “race” of other people can mean almost anything, depending on what makes you uncomfortable.
More weeds. These problems have given everybody a lot of grief over the ages, so I don’t think there’s any better arrangement from the past to recapture.
***
My little town / city / county had “healthy industries” that provided “stable occupations.” That’s the broadest cover-up maybe I have ever thrown over my anxious self.
In the 20th century cars and trucking largely displaced railroads as modes of transportation. Their changes to society has been enormous and probably couldn’t have been imagined. Roads and highways have changed the very landscape, and the automobile industry spurred growth of the construction industry, the oil industry, the steel and rubber and glass industries, on and on. Cities inflated over the landscape. Whereas previously people might spend their entire lives within a radius of twenty-five miles, people could now drive twenty-five miles to work in the morning and return for supper.
Railroads in their own way had done quite as much. From their commercial beginnings in the 1820’s—a 9-mile stretch from Summit Hill to Mauch Chunk Pennsylvania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauch_Chunk_Switchback_Railway , the first 13-mile part of the Baltimore & Ohio—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_railway_history by 1869 the first transcontinental line was joined. Their growth, and their symbiotic growth with steel and coal companies, brought on the height of the Industrial Revolution. Railroads tunneled through mountains. They dominated life in some places—“being railroaded” meant, more or less, being run over. Passengers traveling across the Great Plains amused themselves by shooting out the window at buffalo. https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/knudsen/sec3d.htm
The automobile, the railroad, steel, coal and many other industries raised towns and cities in their bow waves; in their wake, cities coughed and struggled, and numerous towns died. Industry changed life in coming and going.
***
I have confined myself to America; therefore I have been touching at the same time fruits of the Enlightenment. It was the Enlightenment that inspired bold notions of equality and self-rule, formulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. But those documents are also by held by many historians to have sealed the rights of Property…and Property’s twin is Wealth, and its other twin is Money. Taken together, those matters are the privilege of whatever is a society’s upper class. But Washington, Jefferson, and all those making fortunes in the New World, weren’t being admitted to the gentlemen’s club. They were new people, new wealth, not of the ruling class so long established. So the colonialists made their own club. “All men,” in this light, meant “Us too.”
The phenomenon of new wealth disrupting a social order, in the person of the people who gained the wealth, had happened before the Enlightenment. In the Renaissance, in the rise of urban centers in North Europe after the tenth century, again and again, increased food production, expanding populations, trade, wealth, led to a rise of “new” people, and social orders were upset. The Middle Ages, after raiding Vikings and others abated by the by the 900’s, were beset by other tensions, never-ending struggles, anxieties over fragile and swaying societies. Some threat was always coming from some quarter.
Therefore, I take my uneasiness as a condition of my being. Even when a people live in peace and have no immediate fears about war or general violence, something will be changing. New and different things come to us, as fast as a young species like us grows, and our very ways of being human and organizing our societies, change. Pottery. The wheel. Metals. The sailing ship. Money.
Money is a slippery concept. It has a mystique; it’s a container that houses many of our aspirations; it’s a wrapper around our insecurities, a security blanket. It has a mysterious ability to persuade people to hand over goods, given money in return. Money can be a hard concept for a child to grasp. Once we get the ideas of money into our heads and grasp, then for a while prices and values seem natural and inherent—and then they get weird. The longer I live, the weirder prices and developments become. The hands of money continue working on human clay. Looking backwarsd, I see money, wealth, exchange, conquest blur into the beginnings of a restless humankind.
Growing up and growing older, even from twenty to twenty-five, is a process of discovering that endless, protean energy. My comfortable, comforting little city, only expresses a recurring dream. Something is always stressing the way I believe things ought to be. Yet it’s just as natural for me to go on dreaming: I do have to sleep, and the dream gives me rest.