Things Out of the Past You Would Like to See Revived

[pbrower2a]

(08-10-2019, 09:57 AM)beechnut79 Wrote:

(08-01-2019, 04:34 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: 1. an omnibus culture that can unite people across lines of age, region, ethnicity, religion, and level of formal education. Cinema seems headed that way (we are in the 80th anniversary of the most admired year in American cinema), but there is no obvious equivalent of the Big Band Era.

2. more reliance upon thrift, instead of upon printing money, to facilitate investment and the formation of businesses -- and consumer spending. Thrift of course depends upon people making real money for their efforts, which implies...

3. a return to at the least the real wages that people knew in the 1970s. Technology and productivity support such, but monopolists and bureaucratic elites take even more than the economic growth since then.

4. more reliance upon the liberal arts in education as a means of improving the lives of adults who might get something out of them other than vocational opportunity. The tragedy is not the welder who has a liberal arts degree; the tragedy is an accountant or engineer who sees the world only as economic metrics even if those metrics are people.

On item 1, we still have not moved beyond excessive divisiveness, and in fact I feel it has increased. Following the Big Band Era (which was preceded by the Jazz Age), there was the rock 'n roll era headed by Elvis, Buddy Holly, etc. Then along came solo dance crazes led by the twist, followed by the psychedelic era led by the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Led Zeppelin, et al. After that was the disco era which, although short-lived created its share of backlash, followed then by the even shorter-lived Urban Cowboy crazes which spawned such classics as Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places. Not many cultural institutions of that nature have come along ever since, the closest probably being the country line dance crazed led by Brooks and Dunn.

On item 2, the PTB have been leading us away from thrift for many years now. Part of the reason I believe was that Boomers in their growing up years soundly rejected anything GI, and that includes thrift. The earlier generation lived through the Great Depression which helped them to practice that. But there is irony here too in that it was this generation that paved the way for the ever increasing fetish for ever increasing convenience and also the trend of eating more and more of their food away from home. Some here have forecasted that when this crisis reached the serious stage there will be immense sacrifices asked of many of us, far beyond, say, giving up chocolate for Lent.

On  item 3, there are other issues here such as wages alone. And while you are seeing higher wages offered at fast food and other similar businesses, that all does have to go into the price of the product, and one must wonder whether in due time that could translate to less business and also increasing automation in much the same way that union wages in industry eventually pushed it out of the country.

On item 4, the issue you describe is today affecting all levels of the society, not only those heavily involved in the STEM disciplines. Which in turn made liars out of a lot of futurists who were almost certain that all the advanced technology that almost all of us now kneel at the feet of would produce a society of ever increasing leisure. Not only do most people no longer take vacations, they don't participate that much in meaningful hobbies either. As an example many bowling alleys have closed and traditional service organizations such as the Rotary have been on the wane for years.

I connected #2 and #3 but not #1 and #4. An omnibus culture depends upon entertainment that succeeds at multiple levels. Truth be told, the liberal arts are almost omnibus in themselves. The problem is that they are not for everyone; they are for adults of at least average intelligence or for children who already have adult-level sophistication. The best and brightest kids in America get pushed as early as possible into STEM at the expense of learning the liberal arts that could make life more meaningful and less absurd.

Culture is not in our genes. Western classical music is highly popular in Japan and South Korea (the North-- who needs such when one can instead be connected to the incessant glorification of the Kim dynasty? That is an omnibus culture, but a nightmare!) Donald Trump is German and Scots in origin, and I see no affinity to J S Bach or Robert Burns. But people with an affinity for JS Bach and Robert Burns can as easily love Giacomo Puccini and Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Entertainment is a commodity to be created and marketed just like clothing and cars, and it can be similarly expensive. It is possible to spend as much on cable TV as on car payments... why? Marx called religion the opiate of the masses, but at least religion could promote ethical values and give some modicum of comfort to people in distress. Mass low entertainment does neither. If religion has the potential of bringing comfort to the afflicted and improving the values of the common man as can a temporary narcotic for killing some pain, mass low culture is the equivalent of a heroin habit. How much entertainment can one use?

Back to #1... mass low culture promotes divisiveness in American life. Maybe we are seeing some trends in cinema, but... it certainly divides people by age and region, if not ethnicity.

#2... thrift implies people taking responsibility for making their lives good, planning for emergencies, and some delights in old age. The IRAs end up going to feed the nursing home industry which catches those people who do not die suddenly and cleanly of fatal strokes or accidents. The GI surprise of being able to do some foreign travel and have a nice car for some road trips in one's still-active lare sixties and early seventies or the planned lives of well-off Silent may not be trickling down.

It is easy to lose everything. Poverty has become much closer to the norm for most Americans, and work is no escape. Poverty does not simply means that one gets deprived of excessive indulgence; poverty dehumanizes, brutalizes, and maims life. An economy that has as its basis the assumption that 95% of the people exist solely to enrich 1% of the population degrades most people. Maybe some people can have some snobbish Schadenfreude that others are getting hurt worse and somehow deserve it or whose plight is outside of their concern, but that itself is a fraud.

#3. Low wages have always been an objective of the dominant class, whether feudal lords, planters, capitalists, or a Soviet-style nomenklatura.  Maybe we can justify low wages among fast-food workers because their work is at best something that people outgrow -- until one finds that many of the people doing that work are middle-aged. People go back to it when the industrial plant folds and there is nothing left but that.

Disappearing human work (and wages) can result from the rise of robot work. A solution that I have is to tax it heavily by taxing the profits that robot production creates so that people who cannot get manufacturing or clerical jobs can share in the wealth. Higher profits from technological advances have not trickled down -- and might never trickle down. Maybe we need to tax the generation of information on the Internet, even if that information is little more than the bilge of clickbait articles on celebrities. The literal publishing of books and newspapers is in decline.

#4. What other alternative can one see to the pervasive emptiness that appears in so many lives? Just do more work as if such were leisure, even if it causes one to die a little every day?