> Yes, the answer is obvious--if you use the standards of people living
> in
> industrial societies! Here's an interesting fact: in temperate
> climates,
> adults in hunting and gathering societies spend about 10-12 hours a
> week
> working; the majority of their time is spent on family interactions,
> religious rituals, storytelling.
What about crushing confomity or inequality? What about quality of life? Independence? Achievement? Lifespan?
Isn't there a bit in Doug Henwood's book Wall Street that cautions how a terrible factory job in the third world may for female workers represent a limited form of liberation set against the rural patriarchy and its stifling social relations? Mabye it was somewhere else, but it's a good point - that is, the past or the 'natural' or traditional life ain't quite as rosy as people like to imagine.
I think living a long life and doing, as far as possible, as you please is a good thing for anyone and it's something that wasn't at all possible until well into the last century. That it's still not fully achievable suggests to me that more work needs to be done, not that we should roll back our gains.
> Let's compare that to the 50+ hr workweeks
> for many people in our society. What is objectively better:
> sacrificing more
> of your life to make profits for capitalists, or spending more time
> with
> family and friends? If we use the standards of hunting and gathering
> societies, the answer is pretty obvious!
Yes, work is often dreadful but I still call foul on your analysis.
(Oddly enough in my experience working for 'worthy' people, be they environmentalists, hippies or putative leftists, has always been a worse experience than working for outright capitalists.)
How - and why - do you think our socities evolved out of hunter-gatherer mode? The way you tell it makes it sound like utopia which strikes me as odd. I would suggest that the very fact that society evolved at all indicates
> Again, I'm not saying this to claim that we should "go back" to
> hunting and
> gathering societies. I'm trying to stress that what we consider to
> be a
> "universal good"--life in industrial society--is in fact a
> moral/ethical
> standard produced by people living in certain social conditions.
I'm sorry but this is taking post-modernism much too far - though, I admit, taking it out of American and French universities was too far for me. Universal good does not belong in quotation marks. To write off progress as some kind of cultural illusion, or false consciousness if you like, is frankly further than I am willing to engage in a debate. I had a startlingly similar conversation with someone a few weeks ago.
Jason.
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