[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> So we have bought a whole lot of stuff? What about all the productivity
> advances from, say 1955 to date? Was all this productivity used to surround
> ourselves with the toys of the information age? Maybe. Maybe this is why we
> didn't go to the 30, then 20 hour work week that Theobarld used to
> write/talk about.
[snip]
There is a lot of truth in this. People didn't get artificial hearts
in the 1950s. And 1950s automobiles (Ford Customlines, Chevy Delrays
and Plymouth [???]s...) did not have air conditioning or air bags.
Etc.
But doesn't this all get back to "the will of the people"?
If The United States had adopted "The Scandanavian model" instead
of the Ronald Reagan (AKA Ronny Raygun, et al.) model,
maybe cooperative social intelligence applied to shaping
"the market" (or whatever one wants to call the second
government of "captains of industry") might have led to
shorter instead of longer working hours with some but not
quite as many techno-toys, etc.
But I think there is a problem with reducing working hours
below some number around 35 per week: That at a certain
point people would start feeling like their "free time" was
their real life time, instead of feeling they had to work.
Would persons who did non-self-validating jobs 2 days a week
be as good "workers" (AKA "robots", if I understand the
Slavic etymology of that word rightly...) as persons who
work at least 7 hours per day 5 days per week? As Marx
supposedly said, quantity can change into quality.
-
This New Year's Day holiday (yes, I live across from a church
and lots of people went to services this Tuesday...) has
brought me the pleasure of savoring the lovely winter
light, intermixed with reading Hans Blumenberg (no, he's not
the new NYC mayor...) explain how the discovery that
light had a finite velocity contributed to the
demise of the Platonic valuation of "intuition" by
making the true order of the starry heavens something
rationally constructed rather than immediately
percieved.... Lux mentis lux orbis.... --Such experiences and
thoughts are not compatible with "the daily grind", not
to mention the "rat race".
So, tomrrow I will go back to my bleeding-edge tech job
where the conditions of work are not as far degraded from
the 50s as in many other places, and I'll survive the
workday in part by trying to bring some humanistic
culture to bear on designing a web page to display
what effects one failing component has on other components
in a computer network, --and in other part by that rightly
bemoaned by also self-preservative psychological
"defense mecdhanism": "splitting".
I work among
persons many of whom are far more rigorously
schooled than myself, and whom I think are generally
happier than I am, in part because their highest
aspirations are much lower, in part because my
"cop out" graduate studies (in a non-certificatory
part of an education school rather than in a "real"
comp sci or physics department...) -- my studies which led to
a "second rate doctorate" in human communication
led me to study Rabelais and Husserl and Freire and
so forth, instead of doing something really important
like writing a dissertation on the statistical difference
in memory retention of material where the inter-word
pauses are X vs Y milliseconds (yes, I once encountered
someone who was earing a PhD for precisely that
great leap forward of Die geistige Welt (the world
of human cultural self-formation)).
G-d bless Ameridca (we neede help from somewhere --
anywhere...)!
\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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