French yellow vest protesters stopping traffic in November. MKTH Photo.
I've linked this in something like three times now, which is pretty unusual.
Lex Anteinternet: The Year in Review | Catholic Answers (Mid Week At...: The Year in Review | Catholic Answers Really fascinating economic discussion starting at 20:00. I've been posting some topics on Dis...
It's a really remarkable discussion as a whole, in no small part due to the comments by Father Hugh Barbour, the Catholic Answers Chaplain and a Norbertine Priest.
A lot of people have the sense in this time that something just isn't quite right in various ways. It's a nagging sense, hard to pin down, but it's produced some remarkable movements and results, not all of which are laudatory in every fashion. I'd put this general vague sense of something being wrong, and something felt to being wrong, and something actually being wrong, to a bunch of things we've seen around the globe, quite frankly, in recent years, whether you like them or not. The election of Donald Trump in the United States, the success of the Brexit referendum in the UK recently, the Yellow Vest protests that started off in France and then spread to other European locations. All of it in a way touches upon something being amiss, and the reason I keep coming back to this podcast as it remarkably touches upon and defines a bunch of it.
In this podcast there's a point at which, probably starting around 20:00, the panelist start discussing the economy and hit upon some remarkably Distributist point, which is probably not surprising in some ways as Distributism has its origins in Catholic social teaching. Chances are the points raised would enrage people from the left and the right, which Distributism itself does, if not simply confusing them. But the discussion goes beyond that and touches on some other sensitive areas that people hate to discuss in our modern era.
In this era, there's a popular notion afloat on the far left that what we really need to do is to pay for university education for everyone. This argument acknowledges the fact that starting at some point in our post World War Two history education when from being an economic advantage to an economic necessity. The problem with that argument however is that it may in fact have started to jump the shark quite some time ago. Upper level education prior to World War Two was sufficiently rare that to simply have a bachelors degree meant you were guaranteed a white collar job, as we've discussed here before. This remained the case into the early 1970s, as we've also discussed before.
It was no longer true, however, by the late 1970s. College wasn't a disadvantage by any means, and it still definitely isn't, but simply having an English Degree or some Liberal Arts degree no longer meant that you would walk in the door of Amalgamated Amalgamated and get an entry live executive job. The news seems to have never caught up with people, but as education became more and more common, and as degrees became more and more diverse and with some of them becoming more and more meaningless, their value became less and less. Indeed, there was a period in the 2000s and the 2010s when Juris Doctorates were becoming meaningless, and that was always the lower middle class fall back occupation, it's glorified status now withstanding. Since that time, the JD has somewhat recovered but in part because people dropped out of the market and some law schools closed.
Anyhow, while we may have very well reached a point where skilled trades are once again really good jobs, there's something still out there that doesn't quite feel right. Maybe we're just not where we are going yet.
Be that as it may, it's mentioned in this show, and its' correct, that there was in fact a time once, and not even all that long ago, when a person could graduate from high school and enter a trade job of some sort right off the bat, expect to make a good middle class living, and expect to be able to support a family. Even when I graduated from high school in 1981 that was the case, although it was rapidly ceasing to be the case.
Now, it's largely eh case that families must be supported by two income earners unless the family is willing to economize greatly or a member of the family has a job in the upper middle class at least. Gone is the era when a person could, usually, leave high school and support a family on the job that he entered thereafter.
This gets into a certain social view about "what is life about".
Engraving on the Byron White Courthouse in Denver Colorado. On the other side of the courthouse the somewhat contrary quote "Alternate rest and labor long endure".
Above is a saying found on the Byron White Courthouse, the Federal Courthouse, in Denver. It's an impressive structure meant to send some sort of imposing message, and this phrase certainly does. It seems to really sum up the American Work Ethic as its come to exist. Get a good education, leave your home, leave your family (maybe leave your spouse if you need to for your career), get a good career, and work work work.
It contrasts remarkably with this:
The Big Speech: Liesure, by W. H. Davies
- What is this life if, full of care,
- We have no time to stand and stare.
- No time to stand beneath the boughs
- And stare as long as sheep or cows.
- No time to see, when woods we pass,
- Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
- No time to see, in broad daylight,
- Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
- No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
- And watch her feet, how they can dance.
- No time to wait till her mouth can
- Enrich that smile her eyes began.
- A poor life this if, full of care,
- We have no time to stand and stare.
It also contrasts remarkably with a quote on other side of the courthouse which states "Alternate rest and labour long endure". Americans aren't much about rest.
They aren't much about simply living either, it seems.
There are entire old countries where the pace of life at first charms Americans and then enrages them. Italians don't seem to be in a particularly big hurry. The French and Spanish really aren't either. What's up with that.
Well, maybe what's up with the opposite is a good question.
The widespread careerism in American culture really begs some questions. The big begged question is "why"?
Poverty is undoubtedly a hideous thing to endure, but let's be frank that no how much a person acquires in the way of material this or that they're doing to die. Jim Morrison the songwriter and poet of the 1960s was right when he stated; "Nobody gets out of here alive".
That's no cause for despair, but it is a cause to question why the concerns of the writers of I'll Take My Stand were so disregarded and came true. There's a lot to criticize in their Agrarian manifesto, but their point that a life didn't have to be based on material acquisition but could be centered on something else, just as Wendell Berry made in What Are People For?, are correct.
And that gets us back to the podcast. It notes that at one time a fair number of people wanted to graduate from high school, get a local job, get married, and have a family life in the town in which they grew up in.
That's undoubtedly completely true.
Indeed, I recall hearing an interview of a World War One veteran who had lived a life just like that. He graduated from high school prior to World War One (only a minority of men did that at the time), went to work for a local insurance broker, and then ultimately, after his service in the Great War ultimately married and ended up owning the brokerage.
Stuff like that was quite common. My grandfather on my father's side left home, with his parents consent, when he was 13 years old, worked in San Francisco, and then went to Denver where he started working for the Swift meat packing plant that was there. He later moved with that firm to Scotsbluff and, from his labors, was able to buy the plant that was in Casper Wyoming. A lack of a high school degree apparently didn't hinder him in becoming a businessman.
As an aspect of this, one of the things they also note in the podcast is entering the pursuit of farming, by which they mean being an individual or family farmer, rather than a corporate farmer. That was also common at one time but it's very hard to do for a lot of reasons now.
Wyoming Stockman Farmer from February 1919. Would there have been a place for that girl to have farmed in 2019?
My point isn't that we need to return to a prior golden age, because there isn't one. Rather, my point is that something happened to society, and its reflected in the economy, that's made living for simple and human goals and pursuits much more difficult and people sense, lament, and regret that.
It's hard to say exactly what it is or even when it occurred, although I have my theories. And it would be folly to suggest it had one singular cause. It undoubtedly does not. But somewhere, and I'd argue seemingly after World War Two, the national culture changed from where getting a (good) job to support your family changed to getting a good job because careers are life.
Indeed, this is the current ethos of the American culture and it's also the subject of much discontent amongst Boomer regarding Millenials, Gen X and Gen Z.
I've written about it before, but Boomers, who in the 1960s seemed to be symbolized by ideals expressed in The Graduate or Easy Rider, came into their own in the 1970s as one of the most careerist generations taht ever lived. Indeed, probably the most careerist. The U.S. has always had careerism as a feature of its modern culture, but not before the 1970s was it really assumed that the career was the defining aspect of a person's being. The change was fairly remarkable.
Indeed, it's reflected back to us in popular culture. If we look at the movies of the immediate Post World War Two generation we see goals and aspirations that are quite a bit different from what they'd later be. In The Best Years Of Our Lives we see a bank executive returning to his upper middle class life (somewhat out of place in its depiction, frankly, as being in a small city), but everyone else simply goes to work and hopes to find a job to support their civilian life. That entire approach to life is glorified in Its A Wonderful Life. In Marty we see it reflected with admiration again.
By the 70s and indeed the 80s something else was going on. Having graduated high school in 1981, I can recall there really being no other option for most of us, economically, but to go to university or at least college. No work, outside of oilfield work, was readily available that paid well enough to get by with rare exceptions. So going on was simply assumed, and indeed largely necessary. When we were queried by a high school history teacher about our post high school plans I can recall every single student in the class, save for one, indicating he or she was going on to college or university.
The exception in that case was a Mexican immigrant and one of the best students in the class (we had two high ranking Mexican immigrant students, the other one was the valedictorian and became a physician). He was going to work, as his family had a labor type business of some sort. The teacher was shocked, but that was his goal and that is no doubt what he did. Indeed, he'd be one of two of our Hispanic colleagues who did that, the other being a student who went right to work in his family's radiator shop (and who died very young due to something that was likely due to long time chemical exposure).
I'm not condemning anyone's choice. I'm merely noting it as if a similar poll had been made of similar students 30, 40, or 50 years earlier, a minority of them would have indicated they were going on to university and those who did would have been either very high ranking in their classes, and thereby having had that expectation placed upon them (my father and his siblings fit that category in those time frames) or well connected and living in families that had upper middle class occupations requiring university education.
The point isn't that this evolution occurred, although it clearly did, but that the societal focus changed. At least as late as the 1950s most of life was viewed as life for most people and that was their focus. Starting in the 1960s that started to change and its completely changed now. I hear and read about "careers" all the time. A huge societal focus is to make sure that women have all the same "career" opportunities as men, for example, which means that they not only have the career opportunities but the career expectations that men have as well. For the most part, if a young man indicated that he wanted a local trade job while in high school people would be shocked, although quite a few take that route after they've at least been exposed to college first. A young woman indicating that her plan was to get married and have a home life would be regarded as delusional, and for most young women that is in fact an impossibility.
This is not to say that this should be the focus of everyone. If people want careers that's just fine. But there does seem to be a weariness and even anger with the concept that everyone must be a high achiever and reach "their full potential", with that "full potential" a career goal assigned them on a societal level. There's something to ponder in that.
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