Nobody's Happy Because Everything's Amazing

A lot of people (over 2 million on YouTube alone) have seen this hilarious and insightful clip (sorry, can't seem to embed it) of the comedian Louis C.K. on Conan riffing about how ungrateful modern generations are despite the era of incredible technological progress we live in. The digital amenities we are privy to (internet; cell phones) operate quite nearly at the speed of light and yet we seem to be, if anything, more impatient than ever. Why are we so unappreciative?


Upon first listen my reaction was probably like a lot of peoples' -- "Wow, this is not only really funny, it's also a great critique of our age and culture." "Man, he's so right." But after further reflection, I've come to think that Louis actually has it entirely backwards.

The problem lies in seeing humans as creatures with discrete and finite wants that can be met by discrete and finite technologies or services. I have a desire to communicate with various friends and family members, whenever the mood strikes me, and at nearly instantaneous speed. A cell phone of five years ago should still satisfy all of these desires perfectly. And yet, what happens now that cell phones have thoroughly infiltrated daily culture? We just want more. Greater speed; wider coverage; more minutes; cooler ringtones. And that's just the phone service. We have also come to expect movies and music on demand; speedy internet connections; constant access to email; GPS capability; and on and on, all from these little handheld devices. The very existence of all these services has not satiated our needs, it has only made us more needy. The astounding levels of convenience we now have available to us on a daily basis do not make us happier -- they actually may detract from our happiness. For we do not in fact have discrete or finite wants; the great secret fueling the advertising and marketing industries is that our wants are malleable and infinite. When one is satisfied it is simply replaced by a new one, and the more of them that are satisfied, the more that arise. Desire is like that arcade game where you hit one groundhog with a mallet and up pops another.

Another problem with Louis's logic is that it is based on the assumption of what I will call "rational gratitude." We should appreciate all that we have, because we should be able to look at our lives and recognize that we have it really easy. We ought to feel grateful because it's so plainly obvious to anyone with a sense of perspective that we have things so good. But gratitude is not a conscious, logical conclusion, it is a deeply visceral emotion, and emotions are not arrived at through rational reflection. Emotions are felt, not thought, and are by and large beyond our control. You truly appreciate something not when you've given it a lot of contemplation, but when you have gone without it. A man who just gotten out of prison feels grateful for his freedom; a teenager who has known only comfort and excess does not. Louis C.K. appreciates his cell phone because he used to have only a land line; how could we expect some kid whose knowledge of telecommunications does not extend further back than her iPhone to somehow appreciate how good she has it?

Haven't we all noticed this trend in our own lives? It's visible on a daily basis. In the early '90s when most internet hookups were through a 56K modem, I thought nothing of waiting a minute or more for some particular image to download; now if a web page takes more than a few seconds to appear my blood pressure starts to rise. Before cell phones and email became ubiquitous, if you tried to contact someone and were unsuccessful, you just calmly went about your business and tried again later; now if we don't have immediate recourse to voice mail or an Inbox we rage against the gods. When cars had top speeds of 20 mph, no one expected to go any faster than 20 mph; now if a car in front of me slows down and causes my speed to dip to 60 I swear eternal vengeance on the moron. Fundamentally, then, this whole phenomenon has to do with expectations: as our capacity to do more stuff more quickly has grown, our expectation of being able to do so has grown along with it. Expectations are not rational, thought-out memes, they are subrational feelings. And as any Buddhist will tell you, misplaced expectations lie at the heart of most human unhappiness.

The more that we can do, the more that we assume we ought to be able to do, and the more that we want to do. So as the flood of digital wonders grows ever deeper, our unwillingness to consider a life without their services deepens right alongside it. And here we see where Louis C.K. got it backwards: It's not that no one is happy despite the amazing amenities we have access to; it's that no one is happy because of them.

Why Do I Write At All?

I'm being far too "meta" with this blog I suppose. Instead of just getting down to the business of writing, I spend my time writing about the business of writing. But then again a blog is by its nature very self-indulgent so can I really be blamed?

I just got done reading a great and sad review of David Foster Wallace's life in The New Yorker and I was compelled to write about one particular topic that as a graduate student I have thought about many, many times, and that seemed to be the constant motif of Wallace's somewhat tortured life: how utterly dreadful the process of writing can be. Of course there are moments when you are inspired and then it is like you are floating with ease and the words can actually pour from your fingertips in full and already-revised sentences, but those moments are by far the minority. Most of the time writing raw text is more akin to being asked really boring questions by well-meaning strangers. It's not enjoyable, you don't want to be doing it after a few minutes, and your mind constantly wanders to other topics. Writing while online, as most of us now do, is particularly dangerous in this regard because it takes just a click and you are on the endless joyride of YouTube or Slate or primitivism.com. So this leads naturally to two questions: Why is writing so torturous, and why do I nevertheless keep on writing?


1. Why is writing so unenjoyable?
David Foster Wallace described writing one of his novels as "trying to carry a sheet of plywood in a windstorm" and despaired to a friend that the only way to produce a readable book was to write thousands of pages and then throw out 90% of them, "the very idea of which makes something in me wither." It's actually somewhat comforting to hear that a writer as gifted as Wallace felt pretty similarly to me about the act of writing. Putting pen to paper seems so simple. . . Why is it so often dreaded and dreadful?

It's actually ridiculous of me to even ask this question, because it has surely been asked and answered in some form hundreds of time by esteemed writers and what would I know that they haven't already figured out? Still, I'll offer a few observations. First there is a really obvious reason that I don't wish to spend much time on: writing is not fun because writing is hard. Few human brains are equipped without extensive training to take the teeming cluster of ideas, observations, memories, and fragments of ideas, observations, and memories that constantly swirl through the cerebrum and turn them in one take into a single, noncircuitous piece that flows forth and tells a decent story. You might eventually pull it off, but it will emerge after multiple drafts, yawns, stops and starts, tangents that go nowhere, and some seriously poor sentences. Just the mere act of writing a passage only to come to the last word and have to pause as it escapes you is such an inherently frustrating experience. So writing is hard.

But there's a more interesting reason why, at least in my case. Writing is not just hard, it also seems so worthless. It does not produce anything of substance, it only configures and records human thought, which is just one breath in the endless universe of breaths. If like me you have some other activity or hobby that involves the production of some tangible product through manual labor (mine's gardening), you know the complete sense of satisfaction at having actually created a worthwhile object, a product of use and even necessity to humans. And how does writing stand in comparison? Oh sure, it has the potential to stimulate the mind and all that, but who is so foolish as to think that their own writing is among the 0.001% of all writing that actually stands as the substantive, important, and lasting expression of a human idea? A carrot pulled from my garden soil, on the other hand, has the same value of sustenance as any carrot pulled from any soil by anyone, and it is something I helped create with the work of my hands, not my metacognition. So writing for me is such a debilitating task because at some deep and subconscious part of my being I recognize that it is a task with no inherent worth, a task that produces nothing of inherent importance, a task whose end product might be read by 1 or 1,000,000 readers but in either case will soon vanish into the ether. Even if your writing actually inspires people and "makes a difference" you are left with the sickly feeling that you have conjured up something phony, a simulacrum of the actual act of production, and yet you are being rewarded and lauded for your phoniness.*


2. Why do I continue to write?
So given this state of affairs, why do people like me continue to return again and again to the disdainful act? After all, I don't continue to poke myself with sewing needles after having done it once as a child. I don't continue to make myself pass out after trying it in junior high. Again there is at least one superficial reason and at least one more hidden reason. The easy answer is that I continue to write because although the process of writing is tormenting, the end product produces a feeling of glee and accomplishment, delusional though it may be. It is akin to a drug high. It causes the release of some addictive hormone that makes me want to come back for more, ignoring the painful process that led me to the high in the first place. I must admit, for all the sourness of this essay, that when I behold the final draft, or sometimes even the first draft, of a paper I have written I am bathed in pride and I want others to read it to see how clever I am. Why do I blog, after all? So I come back to writing even after it makes me cuss for the same reason I come back to exercising even after it does the same thing: after the cussing, it actually makes me feel good.

But there is another reason, a little less optimistic: I return to writing because it is such an ego-driven act, and we are at heart phenomenally ego-driven beings. Writing is an expression of the self as self-important, the expression of one's ideas as idea-worthy. Again, I would say this has more to do with beholding the end product of one's writing than with the actual act, but my point is that it is more than a visceral, endorphin-ridden thrill. It is an egotistical thrill, and what greater thrill is there? We are a culture in love with ideas, enamored of originality, enthralled with the intellect (except for Sarah Palin). If I, then, am a producer of original, intellectual ideas, what does this say about my worth as a human being? What does it say about the power of my brain? My writing is an expression of me, and if it is enshrined in a journal or a book or a blog then I am enshrined as well. I have crossed over into that vaunted realm of being someone important.

So stay tuned for my next blog posting, because God knows I'm going to write one.


* There is a key phrase in the preamble that may have slipped by without notice, and that is "graduate student." When I speak of my writing I am speaking in large part about academic writing, because that is what I spend my days doing. So it is possible, simply to note here as a caveat, that I may have my target incorrectly mounted. In critiquing the act of writing it's possible that what I really mean to be doing is critiquing the act of academic writing, or perhaps even the edifice of academia itself. Certainly as a repository of written works with no worth to humankind it is unparalleled.

Why I Don't Write More, and Why I Should

Among all the various ways you can slice people into categories, I would describe myself as a person who comes up with a lot of ideas. Not ideas in the sense of material inventions, but in the sense of intellectual embellishments -- the kind batted around so frequently in the echo chamber of the blogosphere. And I am in the ranks of the highly educated, and I am an academic in training, and I am intellectually narcissistic, and so I often think that my ideas are essay-worthy, or at least blog-worthy. I would say that such ideas -- what I would consider to be, as a minimal criterion, the seeds of an interesting discussion -- occur to me at least once every few days. In fact, there is a drawer in my desk that contains multiple sheaves of papers with essay ideas scribbled down hastily during a dinner party or late at night as I try to go to sleep. And I do, in fact, have a blog dedicated solely to the purpose of exercising this writing faculty. So why do so few of my ideas end up there? Why have I actually written up such a tiny fraction of them? Why have I posted a grand total of six blog entries in the almost full year that my blog has been live?

There are a number of reasons, a perceived lack of time of course being one. But I somehow find the time to fiddle away on Facebook and The Onion, so that's a pretty flimsy excuse. A far stronger reason is something more deeply psychological: one of the things that most consistently hampers my ability to express an idea in essay form is the persistent fear that the idea has already been expressed by someone else. This thought I've had seems exciting and fresh at first, but upon further reflection it seems that surely someone else out there has already thought it, written it up, and published it in some medium. My own attempt would therefore be redundant, banal, unoriginal -- and in the world of intellectual discourse few fates are more discouraging.

But this mentality is clearly very counterproductive, as it stymies the very act that the blog is supposed to cultivate: intellectual expression, engagement, and development. So in order to kick myself out of this rut and perhaps appeal to others who suffer from the same predicament, I am going to offer the following reasons for why this fear of redundancy is stupid:

(1) Even if someone else has thought of the same idea as me and published it online or in print, it's still a worthy endeavor from the point of view of my own intellectual journey. It still represents a stage in the ever-evolving path of my own grappling with theories and theorists and all the intellectual back and forth that makes being an engaged citizen of these times so exciting. And this seems especially important to point out in the context of blogging, as opposed to publication in the print media: blogs are all about self-expression and the development of one's personal, subjective discourse, so one should feel absolutely free to engage in ideas no matter how facile or picked over.

(2) Leading from this last statement, it is a truism that the blogosphere is already chock full of repeated statements and redundant ideas. Go and find 10 substantive blog entries on any topic of your choice -- the banking crisis, gay marriage, sustainable development -- and you will find multiple repetitions. Blogging is not a peer-reviewed activity, nor should it be. The multiple iterations of ideas is actually a strength of the form, because it is through these iterations that we fine-tune ideas and hone theories, cut out the fat and get straight to the heart of a topic. Blogging, at least of the substantive variety, is the crowd's (or, to use more up-to-date lingo, the cloud's) way of brainstorming. So why not add to the effort?

(3) Furthermore, not all people out there get their intellectual thrills from the same sources, particularly when we're talking about internet sources, so it's perfectly fine to have the same basic idea expressed multiple times in multiple forums. It increases the chance that the idea will actually be heard and chewed on. So be redundant -- you are actually helping the cause.

(4) In fact, it lends more credence to an idea when it is expressed many times over by multiple parties. Imagine how weak the argument for sustainable agriculture would be if every commentator who wanted to express his support of it decided that Michael Pollan had already made his points for him, so there was no reason to second them. No, ideas need multiple expressions in order to pile on the weight of respectability. Michael Pollan may be a hell of a writer, but if he was the only one making the case for sustainable food systems we'd be in trouble. Blogging is akin to intellectual voting, and God knows we need more voters, not less.

(5) To return to the self-centered perspective of point #1, it is important to see blogged ideas not as fully-formed, comprehensive essays but merely as seeds. You are sowing intellectual seeds, some of which will come to fruition and some of which won't; some of which will be picked up by others and many of which will not; some of which you may return to at a later date and cultivate into a proper essay and some of which you need not bother. This is about development and refinement, not instantaneous perfection.

(6) Finally, this fear of redundancy is just a manifestation of a much deeper fear, that of being judged. When you write up an idea and post it for the whole world to take in (ok, that is perhaps being a bit optimistic about my readership) you have instantaneously put your thoughts, your work, indeed yourself out there to be assessed. What if people don't like it? What if people find it shallow, silly, obvious, or just plain wrong? How can I deal with that shame? But here again we encounter a hurdle over which one simply has to leap. Do not tens of thousands of people face this challenge every day in the world of blogs and journals and books? Is this not in fact a very healthy predicament that promotes a thick skin and a detachment from the opinions of others? And do not other peoples' judgements actually help fuel the very creative process that is the ultimate goal here? Is this most ephemeral of phenomena -- what other people think of me -- really going to stop me from the act of writing that I have been dreaming for all the years that I've been shoving scribbled essay notes into a drawer?

So blog on you wuss, and feel no shame.

Academia and the Problem of Locality

I suspect that most graduate students who, like me, have spent a number of years ensconced in academia have a love-hate relationship with it. The loves are pretty obvious, and so are many of the hates: the lowly stipends, the banal arguments over arcane concepts, the departmental bickering, the professorial egos. Other critiques of academia are more subtle, such as the contradictions between what the academy espouses and what it actually accomplishes. A good example of this is the fervent embrace of all things sustainable. It is academics who have provided arguably the most diverse and sustained set of arguments in favor of sustainability, and by now the subject is heralded in fields as varied as ecology, sociology, economics, and the countless interdisciplinary programs lying in between. And yet, as recent posts by Ink and Plants Are The Real Capitalists describe, there is a contradiction here: the study of sustainability tends to become abstracted, overly theorized, turned into merely an idea stream, and in the process it loses its connection to the sense of hard-nosed pragmatism, the manual labor, the sacrifice and struggle and work that are its ineluctable companions. As Ink writes, "The dilemma for students of sustainability is that we are torn between the academic pursuit of sustainability, and the gut-feeling urge for immediate applicability."

I'd like to elaborate a bit more on one particular topic that weaves in and out of Ink's essay, a recent arrival on the academic bandwagon whose star has risen even faster than that of sustainability: "the local." A decade ago nearly no one except hippies and organic farmers was talking about local foods or local cultures in the popular discourse, while today scholars can't get enough of building local food systems, reviving local economies, creating local currencies, tapping into localized energy sources, and praising local communities with deep roots. Walk into any advanced seminar on sustainability or the environment or "sense of place" and you will hear reverent praise for the Amish or Native American communities or other indigenous groups worldwide, in large part because of their long occupations and deep understandings of a singular locality. But there is a glaring disconnect between the idea of locality and the whole career track that is academia.

For all of its glorification of place and rootedness, academia is one of the most placeless and rootless sectors of the work world. Look at the resumes of university professors and you will see a repeated pattern: bachelors at one college, masters at a second, and PhD at a third. And chances are they are now teaching at a fourth institution, if indeed they haven't gone on to a fifth or a sixth. This is the hallmark of the contemporary professional class: a career-driven, place-blind wanderlust where salary and prestige take priority over place and local connections. At least doctors and lawyers have some power over where they move, since their particular skills are in demand everywhere. In academia, you go where the jobs are, where the good departments are, where your chosen mentor is -- almost never where your family remains or your roots lie.


Of course, there are plenty of professors who put down new roots in their new university towns, who become deeply involved in local politics or the local arts scene or the local food culture. But that is only after they pulled up stakes long ago and resettled, far from where they came from. Survey any number of graduate students planning a career in academia and you will hear the same story again and again: they have applied to 10, 20, sometimes 30 or more different schools, and they will basically go anywhere. What choice do they have? It is the nature of the academic job market; you follow the career winds wherever they're blowing.

One of the contradictory elements of this arrangement is the powerlessness of a group one would otherwise call blessed. Here you have a class of highly educated, highly intelligent, highly skilled individuals, and upon exiting their training they have virtually no say where they will end up living. Shouldn't all that schooling, all that grooming to be an accomplished citizen at least give you the privilege of choosing where you will settle? I suppose one could call it freedom ("I could end up in Seattle, or Ithaca, or Chapel Hill, or San Francisco!"), but one could just as easily call it deprivation ("there aren't any openings back in Michigan").


But even more troublesome is the flip side of the same coin: the prospects facing the individual who decides to take a stand, to remain local, to stick with family roots. For what you are doing is taking a meat cleaver to your job options. I am from a town in northeast Ohio, and that is where I want to remain. I am six months from getting my PhD, and my wife and I have conversations every few weeks about our future plans. And every time we do, research opportunities and salary and benefits always take a back seat to our #1 priority: to stay where we are. We have a little hobby farm that I grew up on and that are in love with; we have my parents, several siblings, and nephews and nieces minutes away; we have two children who we can't imagine growing up without their grandparents as part of their life; and we have the myriad intangible ways that living in a place that is so familiar adds little doses of comfort to your daily life. But how many research institutions are within a reasonable distance from this town? A small handful. How many teaching opportunities in sociology open up within commuting distance? You can count them on one hand.

I chose to follow the academic path in part because I was so drawn by the ideals that academia stands for: not just knowledge and learning but community, social solidarity, sustainability, a humane future. It is exactly these ideals which have led the academy to embrace all things local, and yet it remains a deep irony that to choose an academic career path means basically abandoning your local desires to the precarious geography of the job market. And yet, in the end, if I am successful in building some kind of career in my town, if we can stay on the farm and raise our kids here, the things I gave up will pale in comparison to the intangibles we stood for. I may be constraining myself in order to choose lifestyle over career, but I will resist being constrained by a job market that will now allow me to stay true to the ideal of a rooted life.

A New Era in Politics: Time for Governance

It has become a cliché in the last week to state that we are now entering a bold new era in American politics, for reasons either racial (our first black president) or partisan (a progressive agenda finally ascendant in the federal government). I agree that we are on the cusp of a new political era, but I attribute it to neither of the two reasons just given. It does have something to do with Barack Obama, but it has nothing to do with the color of his skin or his ideological persuasion. It has to do with his intelligence and the fact that he grasps at an intuitive level the more profound truth about this new era: We are entering a phase of our national evolution, and indeed of world civilization, in which we have to rethink and redefine the very idea of what government is for. The old debates of "big government versus small government" and "conservative versus liberal" are tired remnants of the past, no longer relevant to a world vastly more complex than the age in which they first surfaced. And ironically, the best lens through which to see the nature of this new era is not any iconic speech by Mr. Obama or his acolytes, but rather the desperate fulminations of the right in the wake of the election.

The second post-election cliché is that the conservative movement is being split in two by a heated internal debate. On one side are the moderate Republicans, many of whom found Obama to be a reasonable and nonthreatening candidate, and some of whom even voted for him (the list of big-name conservative defectors is impressively long and has been dissected many times in the media). In this wing the mood is conciliatory and cooperative -- a recognition that their party is in dire straits and their interests would best be served by reaching out across the aisle rather than building a wall and hurling hot oil.

On the other side is the far right, the "true" conservatives by their own assessment, the unrepentant, unbowed, and unwilling witnesses to a landslide. I have had a chance to listen to several right-wing radio hosts since election night, and their manner of dealing with Obama's victory is at once pathetic and comical. They seem like lonely souls trudging through an echo chamber of cognitive dissonance. All they can muster are infuriated whines that Rahm Emanuel gives the lie to Obama's pledge of bipartisanship, and a pitbull-like insistence that Obama is a left-wing radical now savoring the chance to spring his revolutionary platform on an unsuspecting public. That he has duped the populace and will now commence his term as an underground Marxist. More stealing from the rich. More social programs. More big, bloated government.

It is certainly beyond question that the Republican party is battered and bruised. It is also undeniable that it is being roiled by in-fighting at the moment. But let this not mislead you into believing that they are on the verge of some great transformation. Pay close attention to both factions within the party and you'll see that the fundamental message is the same: let's regroup, let's rearticulate our identity, and let's reassert ourselves on the national stage. They want to reclaim the mantle as the party of ideas. The problem is, the world has moved on and their ideas are no longer relevant.

One of the chief sources of George W. Bush's disastrousness as a president was his extraordinarily simplistic view of the world. There were no nuances or complexities or contexts. There was us and them. Good and evil. Freedom-loving people and terrorists. Free markets and socialism. Everything is a zero sum game and the world exists in 1950s black-and-white clarity. And Bush's worldview is simply a distillation of the conservative ideology that dates back to the early 1960s, when the likes of Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley first gave it form and respectability. Now, you can build a number of reasonable arguments against that philosophy, but at least it had a certain amount of relevance at the time it was first articulated. Even when Nixon schlepped it into the 1970s and Reagan resurrected it in the 1980s, it was still a worldview that addressed the context of those times. But. . . those times have changed. So when you hear the same refrain still being repeated nearly 30 years after Reagan took office by both the AM mouthpieces and even the once-respectable John McCain, the arguments and their arguers appear like dusty anachronisms.

The very dichotomous terms that the right casts the argument in, desperately trying to get the American public to go along, are hopelessly out of date. Big versus small government. More social programs versus cutting spending. "Spreading the wealth" versus "spreading opportunity." The world today is vastly more complex than the one these trite, empty platitudes originally addressed themselves to. What does it mean to speak of "small government" in a world where military threats are multiplying, health care costs are spiraling beyond the means of all but the wealthy, and environmental crisis threatens the very foundation of civilization? What does it mean to speak of "cutting spending" when a financial meltdown is bringing the global economy to its knees? What does it mean to speak of "spreading opportunity" when the end of the fossil-fuel economy is in sight, the manufacturing sector is feeble, and at times the entire industrial edifice seems in danger of crumbling? I'm not arguing that modern times call for more government or higher deficits or less opportunity. What I'm saying is that these arguments are just too simplistic, they no longer address themselves to the realities of a highly complex and interdependent global society. It's like believing that the entire emotional, psychological, and logistical complexity of a modern-day family can be captured by how many times they eat dinner together. It's not that this isn't important -- it's just that it represents only one tiny part of the overall phenomenon.

What I believe the Obama victory represents is a shift from the age-old focus on government to a new focus on governance. That is the new era we have entered. To simply think in terms of government and how big or small, how involved or relaxed it should be, is to lock ourselves into a box and shut off other possibilities for fresh, creative, innovative policy making. Governance is not just about the power of the state, it is about creating synergies between government, business, and civil society to find real solutions to real-world problems -- not sloganeering aimed at cartoon problems. Governance has more to do with the decision-making process than the decisions themselves. Its keywords are transparency, accountability, responsiveness, and equitability. It stems from a recognition that a crucial ingredient for a healthy, progressive, peaceful society is not just economic or military or political outcomes, but the social relationships that shape and give rise to those outcomes.

The right does not seem to get this. In fact, it does not seem interested in process-oriented governance at all. It seems to prefer lobbing hate-filled bombs at some straw man called government. I believe that Obama does get it, and this is what his ascent to the presidency heralds. Damn right we need change, but it's not just about dissociating ourselves from the last eight years -- it's about preparing for the next one hundred.

Specialization and its Discontent: Two Responses to "A plea for the translucent university"

My good friend Marty and I have stated on our respective blogs^1,2 that what we are setting out to do -- each on our own at first, but with the long-term plan of synthesis between our two idea streams -- is carefully construct the full-fledged, holistic, complex argument for sustainability: what it is, what it is not, and how to go about achieving it. He and I have been lobbing arguments and counterarguments back and forth since we met some five years ago on a market garden in Stoughton, Wisconsin, and it only seems fitting that we continue the same pattern on our blogs. Given that we have decided to devote our blogging efforts almost entirely to intellectual exposition (skipping the cutesy photos of family and pets, reviews of our local Starbucks, and all the other flotsam that marks the blogosphere), and that we are essentially producing twin blogs on the same overarching theme, it makes sense that we turn our efforts to crafting a dialogue rather than separate monologues. So in the spirit of this endeavor, and as a tribute to his intellectual prowess, I offer two brief commentaries on Marty's most recent blog entry about overdevelopment and the division of labor in modern society.


I. The Drudgery Report

An underlying issue that makes several appearances throughout Marty's post, but is never the center of attention, is that of economic specialization, or what is often called in more technical terms the division of labor. It is certainly the case that the entire economic sphere in any advanced industrialized nation such as ours is marked by increasing specialization of skills and tasks. A graphic designer of long ago may have done a little bit of everything, from planning to drawing to execution to printing, whereas today an employee of a graphic design firm may only work on one specific software program to optimize one specific website widget for one specific corporate client. Or, to continue with the academic thread begun by Marty, a typical scholar of old -- particularly in the humanities and social sciences -- was a true polymath, entwining history, philosophy, and a dash of political economy or sociology into a compelling magnum opus. By contrast, today an academic can rapidly climb through graduate school and go on to achieve tenure without ever venturing outside the bounds of a single theoretical line (say, substantivist economic sociology) and a single methodological technique (for example, network analysis). Indeed, as Marty points out, the substantivist network analyst is all but compelled to stay within those narrow bounds simply to be able to wrack up the list of publications and conference presentations that counts for success in an increasingly fractionalized academy.

Now, the opinion one has about specialization depends largely on one's general worldview. To stick with the academic examples: economists by and large think it is the greatest gift that capitalism has bestowed on the human race, while sociologists tend to see specialization as the forerunner of increased outsourcing, class conflict, and inequality. From my own observations of cultural discourse, it seems that the general opinion among the public is closer to the economist's view than the sociologist's, if only because specialization is the handmaiden of economic "progress," and few dare criticize the progress that allows them hot showers, iTunes, and a wide selection of breakfast cereals.

There are, of course, more critical views of economic specialization. The most fundamental and damning is the one brought up by Marty: that the returns from specialization in the form of a general advancement of societal wellbeing have become increasingly marginal. When we went from people sewing their own clothes to textile workers making clothes for everyone else, few can deny that this level of specialization increased the greater good. When we have gone from a general level of autonomy and know-how in our daily lives to having "experts" manage our finances, our diets, our schedules, our children, and our marriages, then the trend has gone too far. The benefits to society are no longer worth the costs.

But I actually wish to focus here on a different critique of specialization, and it is one that is not often broached -- the only reason I can surmise being that it simply makes people uncomfortable to look the truth in the eye. My concern is not the rising level of helplessness that accompanies specialization, not the the loss of autonomy, not the proliferation of so-called experts, but the sheer drudgery of the workplace. When you're only good at a few things, then those few things tend to be all that you do. And when you only do a few things all day, every day, and increasingly come to be relied on by those above or below you to do exactly those few things, you have the recipe for anomie, boredom, and dissatisfaction.

The ranks of the generalists, the jacks of all trades, the polymaths, have thinned. The world is too complex for them to be effective anymore. Markets have expanded, rules and regulations have proliferated, the sheer amount of stuff grows unceasingly, and the quantity of information at our disposal has exploded. What the whole universe of work -- corporations, non-profit organizations, government agencies -- needs more than ever are 100 different variations of data managers, often entering and sorting and displaying data that is two or three levels removed from any real-world application, or at least any that truly matters.

It is bad enough to be little more than a cog in the giant industrial-capitalist complex -- but then again most of us are. But how much worse when your function as a cog is just a series of rote activities with minimal creativity and only the faintest connection to any form of social progress that seems significant or worthwhile. Think of the utilities technician, checking the same valves or filters or machines each day and marking their status on the same photocopied forms. Think of the tens of thousands of administrative assistants in college offices of development or medical clinics or public relations firms, inputting data into spreadsheets or assembling newsletters. Think of the accounting clerks, the legal aides, the web programmers, the lab assistants. Or for that matter the accountants themselves, the lawyers, the web designers, the scientists. More to the point, think of the number of people you hear about or know who tire of the rat race, who are harried and overtaxed, who derive no satisfaction from work but continue working because they can't see any other way to conduct a life.

And what satisfaction is there to derive? What is the most common refrain we hear from those individuals who do love their jobs? That it is varied, that they are never bored, that each day is different. But what about the rest? What about those whose work responsibilities compel them to do the same thing, if not each day then each week? The same reports to create, the same accounts to reconcile, the same training session to give, the same database to maintain. The human mind grows dull and atrophies with such repetition. Discontent grows as our specialized training pushes us further and further from creativity and spontaneity and a sense of ownership over the tasks we perform.

Let me insert here a couple of caveats. There are two things I'm not saying. First, I'm not saying that everyone in the modern working world hates their job. There are plenty of people at all levels of the labor hierarchy who love their work and are even driven by the competition and the deadlines and the stress of it all (though many of them simply haven't reached burnout stage yet). Anytime you offer up a radical critique of a societal norm you open yourself to the counter that "Surely some people are happy with the status quo." And some people surely are -- but exceptions do not a rule break. Second, I'm not arguing that in some golden past we all lived lives of endless diversity and diversion. Work and life were full of drudgery back then, too -- particularly for housewives, peasants, and slaves. What is unique about the present state of affairs relative to several centuries ago, I think, is how this drudgery, this sameness, this refinement of skills and narrowing of freedom in the workplace has now permeated all levels of the economic pyramid. Specialization may raise the narrowly-measured "standard of living," but I would simply ask: At what cost to our selves?

II. From Diverse to Perverse: The Trajectory of Modern Farming

My second commentary flows directly from the first but hones in on one specific sector of the workforce: farming. Few economic actors display the consequences and the tragedy of hyperspecialization like that of the modern-day commercial farmer.

The trajectory of American agriculture since World War II, and particularly since the 1970s, is marked by two intertwining phenomena: the vast expansion of the scale of most farms coupled with the contraction of their scope. The typical conventional farmer of today plants crops on far more acreage or raises far more heads of livestock than did his grandfather, but produces far fewer kinds of products. Row crop farmers grow one or two grains and have no livestock; dairy farmers raise one or two breeds and feed them grains grown by the row crop farmers; chicken, hog, and apple farmers do nothing but raise chickens, hogs, and apples. By contrast, a typical Midwestern farm prior to WWII might raise cattle, a few hogs, a small flock of chickens, grain for the animals,vegetables for self-consumption, and a handful of apple trees as an afterthought (for some fascinating indirect evidence, see page 25 of this report). Not only the tasks performed by the farmer but the actual crop or animal at the receiving end of those tasks would change week to week, if not day to day. The farmer's labor cycle was marked by diversity rather than sameness. Was it a land of milk and honey in which farmers were the most blissful souls in the country? Not by a long shot -- but that has more to do with political economy, commodity prices, and the urban-rural divide than the so-called drudgery often attributed to earlier eras of farming. The small diversified farmer almost by definition has a more varied work week because she is not tied in to a single crop, and the effects of that variety on the human psyche are subtle but powerful. By contrast, modern commercial industrial farming epitomizes the specialization that has crept into nearly every sector of the economy. I am compelled here to pull a quote from Leopold Kohr directly from Marty's blog entry. This passage would have been equally appropriate as part of the first commentary above, but I find it particularly apropos when discussing the beleaguered farmer:

"Our life's experience is confined to a narrow segment whose borders we almost never cross, but within which we become great single-purpose experts.... Instead of experiencing many different things within surveyable limits, as did our enviable ancestors, we experience only one thing on a colossal plane."

From a stark economic perspective, this phenomenon is entirely positive. Industrialized, specialized farming has allowed fewer individuals to provide more food on less total farmland than once thought possible. There is no doubting this basic fact of production -- but are there not a number of more insidious consequences?

First, related to the point made in my first commentary, this level of specialization takes a lot of the joy out of farming. Your average city-dwelling nonfarmer may find it hard to believe, but farming has traditionally been an occupation that its practitioners found so deeply fulfilling that they would claim it was "in their blood." As the classic literature on agrarianism will tell you, despite the exacting physical labor, farming has long been experienced as a deeply fulfilling activity. But ah, times have changed. Some of my own research among farmers in Wisconsin reveals how the satisfaction of farming a small piece of land has turned into the repetitiveness and stress of farming massive acreage with industrial machines. Farmers told me that their occupation was no longer a lifestyle but "just a business." One identified himself not as a farmer, but as a "risk manager." And another told me quite plainly, "It's just not as fun as it used to be."

A second consequence is ecological, for the handmaiden of specialization is monocropping. It is not just that corn and bean farmers only grow corn and beans -- it is that they grow them in vast fields of a single variety, laying out an agronomic grid that runs completely counter to how natural forces operate and keeping those forces at bay with liberal doses of biocides. When you shed the cows and the chickens and the small grains, you only need a few machines to accomplish your farming system; and when you only have machines for planting and harvesting corn and soybeans, guess what you grow? One extreme version of this monocrop specialization is potato farming, which dispenses with any crop rotation at all and simply grows potatoes this year, next year, and every year until the system buckles. What is the ecological response to this form of agronomic specialization? Massive disease buildup in the soil, which explains the fact that potatoes are among the most pesticide-intensive crops grown today.

A final consequence I want to touch on is the loss of biodiversity. Vast fields of a few varieties of corn, soybeans, wheat, canola, etc., completely destroy the floral diversity that once graced our farms. Farmers choose their seeds from an ever-narrowing genetic base, a situation that some term "genetic erosion." Specialized apple farming -- or more properly, the cessation of apple cultivation on individual farmsteads nationwide -- has helped reduce the total count of named apple varieties in the US from 8000 at the turn of the last century to about 700 today³, and of these 700 we see only a small handful with any regularity in the marketplace. Or how about this statistic? 99 percent of all the turkeys in the US are the same breed -- and it is a breed that cannot even sexually reproduce on its own because it has been bred to be so meaty!⁴

^----

You cannot really come down and say that specialization is "good" or "bad" -- it is a matter of degree. The division of labor was a great thing at a certain, early point of human economic development. It was a great thing, for example, at the time when Adam Smith was writing. It is a fine thing when it frees us from certain tasks (mending our own shoes; building our own vehicles) and creates more time for leisure, for social interactions, for pursuing meaningful hobbies. But the kind of specialization which marks our work lives only seems to have caused us more stress, less leisure, and less quality time with family and friends. The academic narrowing that Marty references is part of this larger societal trend, and as in all other sectors it is questionable whether more and more specialization continues to yield positive outcomes for humanity. Historically specialization tended towards more noble purposes, but the declining returns being won from an overspecialized economy are a signal that things have swung too far in the opposite direction. My intent in this response essay was to discuss a few of the ways that specialization affects us where it counts the most: at the personal, human level, at the level of our lived experiences and our very happiness. It's time to become specialists at being generalists.

The Shape of Things to Come (on this humble blog)

Despite the schizophrenic subheading of my blog, I do in fact intend for this outlet to have a fundamental and integrated theme, though it may not be present in all of my posts. Observations on fatherhood or secondary education or the evolution of one's emotions over time, all of which are stored somewhere in my brain and will someday make their way to the blog, may have little to do with the theme, but writings on agriculture, gardening, food preservation, work, and other topics certainly do. This theme, to sum it up in a single though inadequate word, is sustainability, by which I mean not only sustainable agriculture or sustainable development but societal sustainability in the largest sense -- the kind discussed at great length in works such as Jared Diamond's Collapse (another good review here) and Joseph Tainter's superior (here's a brief discussion why) but underacknowledged The Collapse of Complex Societies. Indeed, a truly sustainable agriculture (which is to say, not the mere existence of a handful of ecological farms across the country, but an entire landscape of sustainable farming) requires a sustainable society in order to flourish, just as a truly sustainable society rests most fundamentally on a sustainable agriculture.


Thankfully that's as much as I need to say in order to demonstrate why this is such a crucial topic, because my friend Marty over at 'Plants Are The Real Capitalists' has already accomplished this with more lucidity and brio than I could have managed. Read his post if you want the full justification for why a project such as his and mine matters (and I'm stretching the meaning of the word 'project' in applying it to such a meager output to date). What I wanted to say in this post is far more prosaic.


An awful lot of ink has been spilled writing about sustainability -- what it means, what are its main tenets, the different forms of sustainability, etc. It is certainly a positive thing that the word and the concept have gone from fringe to mainstream in only 20-odd years, but one result of all that ink is that there is little consensus on what sustainability stands for, and even less on how we would actually go about achieving it. And all the time, more and more ink keeps getting spilled (here's a good example). Yet I would contend, and I hope to show via this blog, that sustainability does not have to be so complex after all -- that it essentially comes down to a discrete number of ideas or, if you like, principles. What I have found over the years as I have given a lot of thought to sustainability and its connection with agriculture is that no matter how many different angles I take on the topic, no matter how many different tangents I run off on, no matter how many different facets of sustainability are brought to my attention, they always link back to a set of core concepts. Oftentimes an idea will strike me and stick with me -- an idea perhaps worthy of being blogged -- and as often as not I realize later that the idea basically "reduces to" one of these core sustainability principles. And it is my belief that these concepts can essentially be mapped out with a series of essays, each one concentrating on a different principle of sustainability and the sum total comprising the full-fledged depiction of what sustainability is, why it's important, and why it is basically synonymous with what Marty and others have called "a new agrarianism." So, as if the subheading of my blog were not overambitious enough, my intent over the life of this blog is to be that mapmaker -- to lay out my axioms of sustainability and agrarianism through a series of essays. This will seem especially laughable when considering the tiny handful of people who might actually read the blog (I believe I've shared it with four individuals to date), but that's not really the point. If an idea has intrinsic worth then it doesn't matter how many people come into contact with it -- its worth remains. And there is no intellectual idea more worthy of our attention at this point in the history of our species than how we will sustain ourselves in the immediate and not-so-immediate future. First and foremost we have to feed ourselves. But I'll get to that later . . . . .