>So in a sense I had a "choice" to go this
>route; but I do need the money, and if it isn't this it's something else. I
>still have to work.
ahh, we all have to work--no matter what social organization of the economy we have. this won't cut it, then. for, even in some groovy utopian future, some work will have to be done. that we all are enslaved under capitalism is not the issue. the issue is precisely as you posed it: that somehow some of us actually engage, despite all that, in noble bodily labor that has it's own rewards (ahhhh weber, dear weber, work in and of itself, for its own internal rewards...). the rest are striving, effete leftists who disingenuously disavowed that path....
yeah.
i was pointing out that your narrative valorizing bodily labor reinscribes a form of macho one-upmanship that is the product of intra-class warfare. to simplify a grand historical narrative just a bit (well, more than a bit): it has some roots in the renaissance, but becomes most prominent in the work of the romantics, particularly in this country -- a revolt against urbanization, against mechanization, against the routinization and rationalization of life under an emerging industrial order.
it is reflective of a pervasive anti-intellectualism, as well. a feminist prof used to claim that the 60s left was full of men who liked to pride themselves on their manly macho, bodily labor roots. it was a badge of honor that made them somehow more authentic than the children of the upper-middle class professional strata, it was a bodily labor, tho, that was a particular kind of bodily labor where ditch digging is noble, while wiping bottoms and scrubbing counters and washing dishes is...well...let's not talk about *that*... such that ditch digging is familial and communal work while the other...well....let's not talk about *that*. what, pray tell, is wiping bottoms and scrubbing counters and washing dishes?
as such, it leads you to write:
>Yes; and I saw the film with Stephen Fry (liked it). Manual labor for no
>purpose other than to enrich the overdogs is, of course, empty labor. But
>manual labor to help enrich one's community, one's family, oneself, is labor
>of the highest order. Socialists used to think this way, before they went to
>college, got tenure.
>
>DP
you assume that the college educated and advanced degreed have never done manual labor and did not do it while in college and somehow don't appreciate or do labor done to enrich one's community, family, self. well, if you're a woman with a family, it is highly unlikely that you escaped the noble labor of enriching family or community.
i was also pointing out that this macho valorization of bodily labor is reflected in the ways in which my ex and male friends come to view the kinds of choices they have or don't have, where they imagine they have a degree of freedom, some intrinsic rewards that can't be had by their friends and family doing work that, in their minds, is somehow more stultifying than doing manual, bodily labor.
i find the anti-intellectualism--the spewing against theory--amusing most of the time. in the end, though, it's a crutch that enables one to limp along, traversing from one point to the next, without ever realizing that all these denunciations of the intellectual life are precisely the kinds of rhetoric that meant that people like my ex and his friends bought into their "choices" and refused to pursue the life of the mind because it was all just bullshit navel gazing.
to speak this way about learning, knowledge, and the joys that are associated with intellectual labor simply reinforces the idea that an education is a waste of time. it operates in the same way as the "poor little rich kid" motif does in film: the rich are really unhappy and the poor are really happy, so striving for a better life is pointless since you'll just end up alone and unloved.
keepin' it real,
kelley