Skip to main content

Look for the scientists!

The long-term cause of what is happening in our society is that we are losing our old industrial society.  It is doing what it did once for us, that is to say, moving to those places where old hunting and gathering and agricultural societies are ready for the next step, to those places where the raw materials are to be found (or accessed), and where agricultural wages make factory jobs look really good, even when those wages are far below ours, here.

What we need to do is to look for the scientists.  They are exploring what it is that comes after the age of coal and steel.  It is they who are finding new energy sources, new ways to produce food, new avenues of communication, new understandings of what it is to be alive, and how life can prosper. 

We need to go there!  We need to provide encouragement and funds to train more scientists, and more engineers and craftsmen (sic, sorry, shorthand) to turn their findings into jobs and a better life.  Re-doing the industrial revolution is a fool's errand.  That is already being done, where industrial production is being re-established, and at wages we do not even want to go back to.  It is very difficult to run for political office in Pennsylvania or Ohio or Michigan and know that the future of Pittsburgh and Akron and Detroit is not in what used to be, but in what must come next. 

A wise, rational, civilized society knows that the past is prologue, and not recoverable, or even desirable.  In plain language, some jobs aren't ever coming back:  some workers will never find work again, or surely not that work.  A civilized society does something about those people; does not simply ignore them, or con them.  It helps them. 

But the long-term solution is to look for the scientists.  They are the genesis of what we can become. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more