“The point, I think, is to be found beneath the surface layer of politics, and beneath the lower layers of nationhood, ethnicity, and culture too. The point, as ever, is spiritual. If our nations seem hollowed-out, if our countries seem to be prey for the Machine, surely it is because they have no soul. If people, place, prayer, and the past are the group upon which real culture is built, many of us today would have to look at our own countries and conclude that they have no real connection to any of these. Blame the immigrants if you like—it’s always the easiest option—but they didn’t strip the soul out of the West. We did. Do you think you can build your country around nothing but money and then complain when people want to come in and earn some of it themselves?” (Kingsnorth, Against the Machine)

I got thinking today about garbage trucks. More specifically, I got thinking about the workers on those garbage trucks. Even more specifically, I got thinking about how it seems there are less workers on garbage trucks these days than there used to be.

For most of my life, a garbage truck had two workers on it. Someone who drove and someone who would jump off and empty the bins into the truck. My town, like many others, has adopted the trucks with the big mechanical claw on the side of it that lifts the garbage can from the curb and dumps its contents into the truck. It now only takes one worker to both drive and operate the claw.

It reminds me of grocery stores. When I was a kid, every cash register had two workers: a cashier and someone to bag the groceries. I remember when they got rid of the bagger job, all of a sudden you were expected to bag your own (or the cashier might do it for you). Today, in many grocery stores, a single worker can oversee a dozen different self-checkouts.

My grandfather worked his whole life in a GM plant. The threat of automation to jobs is nothing new. I think what is important to keep in mind is that it's not often an abrupt replacement. It's usually many small, different changes—often presented as opportunity for efficiency or skill learning—each one making human work slightly more redundant. Death by a thousand paper cuts.

In 1958, Hannah Arendt pondered what happens to a society of labourers that becomes "liberated" from the bonds of labour when labour is all this society knows. Of that, she wrote, "surely nothing could be worse."

“As you get older, you realize both why home matters and how fragile and elusive it is. Then you find you are living in a world whose forces have set out to destroy your sense of home wherever it can be found.” (Kingsnorth, Against the Machine)

I can still smell my grandmother's house. She's been gone now for going on ten years but the memory of her cooking is still there. It's a more visceral memory than almost anything I have from any of the houses I grew up in. It taps into something deeper, a tradition of cooking that was brought with her out of Poland and re-rooted itself in her home in Oshawa. Some of her kids have carried it on in small ways, but I think a lot of it has been forgotten.

Our disconnect from a sense of rootedness, or home, is hard to notice. It's not one thing, nor is it immediate. It happens slowly, subtly over time and through many different things. It's the loss of the traditional way of doing things in exchange for faster and easier. It's the unfamiliarity many of us feel towards the natural world, even that which is directly around us. It's the forgetting of stories, of songs, of cultural artifacts that hold deep significance to where we came from. It's the creeping dominance of a digital world and culture that is swallowing everything else.

The last few Christmas Eve's I have attempted to make a Polish dish for my family meal. It's a small nod to that sense of home I feel when I think of my grandmother's house. This year we attempted a Sernik, a Polish cheesecake. All four of us were involved in this tricky process of making something we'd never made before. It was fun—and delicious.

"But a value system which glorifies wealth and accumulation, which builds itself on a platform of want, which inflames and creates more of it daily through a marketing machine that colonizes the human mind—this is what every spiritual tradition in history has warned against, and with good reason." (Kingsnorth, Against the Machine)

Just tagging off yesterday's post here with a followup quote from the book that I think hits what I was getting at a bit better. The point here isn't to say that a religious society is better or more just—far from it. Nor should we equate modern religious identity with its pre-modern versions. Capitalism has consumed religion just as much as anything else. But, there is wisdom to be found in these traditions if we are willing to listen.

Something I've been reflecting on over the last week as I've been working through Kingsnorth's book has been the way wealth, excess, and the pursuit of gratification has become aspirational in modern society. There was a time in pre-modern societies where avarice was considered a sin—when those who profited off the financial exploitation of others were shamed. This isn't to say it didn't exist, but it was not celebrated in the way it is today.

One of the myths that capitalism relies on is the way excess (prosperity) is presented as the grand goal for all. Rather than put limitations around wealth, we talk about it as something that anyone can attain with just a little hard work or the right timing of the market. This myth operates at both a local and a global level, driving the idea that the world will be a better place when everyone lives like the richest nations. But not only is this not possible, it begs the moral question of if this is even something we should aspire towards. A question that Kingsnorth notes was being asked by the British economist, E.F. Schumacher in the 1970s:

"The foundations of peace cannot be laid by universal prosperity, in the modern sense because such prosperity, if attainable at all, is attainable only by cultivating such drives of human nature as greed and envy, which destroy intelligence, happiness, serenity, and thereby the peacefulness of man."

The thing that makes ethics so tricky in our age is that we are trying to work out individual moral choices against the backdrop of a capitalist system that has made virtues of what was once considered vice. Lifestyles of excess are presented as normal and the pursuit of more is seen as the sign of a good life. What I think Kingsnorth is so rightly pointing out is that this has not always been the case; and we may need to be more critical in asking what this has cost us.