There are so many times where people seem to inadvertently infer some sort of innate conservatism in our wants and needs. Not just for us people either! If you equate the wonders of modern life to domesticity, looking at a hunting dog, and inferring that he (or she) would greatly prefer to be out in the wild, catching other wild animals and living some sort of dog’s life version of the noble savage’s.
Many of our sentiments towards our modern life often go this way too. The interesting thing is how we sculpt our particular versions of this revisionism to fit into our personal political narratives. Some people long to be back in a world where family and community are of much greater social power (with the unstated presumption that some of the ‘social justice’ controversies would have been solved back then…sadly enough, a mostly complete untruth…). Conversely, other groups of people seem to want to get back to a world of strict social Darwinism (presuming that they would be the victors…by virtue of….how big their house is?).
I tend to take Hobbes at his word, life used to be nasty, brutish, and short. I think that having an annual holiday for us to celebrate the virtues of indoor plumbing and the sanitation revolution it represents is of more worth than celebrating something like …Arbor Day. I like trees too!
I have been considering that this wealth of emerging technology which we as a society have been immersed in for at least a century is actually a zero sum gain, in that for almost every advance in our culture we delete some previous technology. Perhaps not instantaneously, but sooner or later we toss the old stuff out. This would be an interesting idea but when you see that many of the new ‘replacements’ are such that the end user needs fewer and fewer real skills, there might be some real problems brewing.
Getting back to Hobbes comment about ancient life, one of the reasons for this was that for many people in many different cultures lived in a world where all knowledge was owned by the privileged few. I think that the popular notion of how much we should thank medieval monks or maintaining much of our culture during the dark ages misses the point. This was a world where the ‘average guy’ had no understanding of the world (at least in a manner which we would understand).To live in a world populated with mysticism, spirits, and the supernatural relegated these people to servitude for centuries.
How much different is it nowadays, how many people do you know who actually understand how to make a Television, a computer network, or even understand how a motor works? We live in a time where the vast majority of everyone you know, who drives a car, uses cell phones, the internet, and TV…don’t understand how they really work.
This is a new phenomenon, in the 19th and even early 20th centuries, the world was built of a lot of mechanical technology, and as a result there were many ‘mechanics’ out there. One of the strange, emergent properties of our world, where because of mass production techniques, and leveraging technologies, it is possible to break up products into component pieces which are designed and manufactured on different continents. In some ways, we live in a house of cards…luckily the cards are quite resilient, and there are no ‘big gusts of wind’…
As for the dog ‘theorizing’ about the ‘life in the wild’… Maybe there are some things we can learn from this…
