The bombardment continues: On Work
Jan. 7th, 2008 05:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rebeccmeisterI'm reading a second book by Wendell Berry, one recommended by my father and entitled Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition. Much of the book is a critique of EO Wilson's book Consilience, but some of the themes from earlier works carry through. Here's an excerpt that works well with something that ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
annikusrex noted during her travels in France:
As a norm of expectation or ambition, then, heroic discovery is potentially ruinous, and maybe insane. It is one of the versions of our obsession with "getting to the top." Unlike the culture of the European Middle Ages, which honored the vocations of the learned teacher, the country parson, and the plowman as well as that of the knight, or the culture of Japan in the Edo period which ranked the farmer and the craftsman above the merchant, our own culture places an absolute premium upon various kinds of stardom. This degrades and impoverishes ordinary life, ordinary work, and ordinary experience. It depreciates and underpays the work of the primary producers of goods, and of the performers of all kinds of essential but unglamorous jobs and duties. The inevitable practical results are that most work is now poorly done; great cultural and natural resources are neglected, wasted, or abused; the land and its creatures are destroyed; and the citizenry is poorly taught, poorly governed, and poorly served.
When AK was in France, she witnessed a national holiday where the nation's employees had a chance to show their work to the public. She found it quite curious to see the janitors alongside other employees, showing off the special gloves they have selected for particular duties, and the other implements important to their work. One of the recurring themes in Berry's work is the honor of ordinary work, as in the above passage. I wonder if this helps to restore a sense of meaning to the things we seek to accomplish, and in the very least it's a good reminder for me against getting caught up in the arrogance which is all too common among academic circles. I continually have to question what I am seeking to accomplish in my dissertation work, and perhaps a good portion of the answer is that I am learning about the meaning of my work rather than trying to make any particular scientific breakthrough. Would the Academy disagree? Perhaps, perhaps not.
annikusrex noted during her travels in France:As a norm of expectation or ambition, then, heroic discovery is potentially ruinous, and maybe insane. It is one of the versions of our obsession with "getting to the top." Unlike the culture of the European Middle Ages, which honored the vocations of the learned teacher, the country parson, and the plowman as well as that of the knight, or the culture of Japan in the Edo period which ranked the farmer and the craftsman above the merchant, our own culture places an absolute premium upon various kinds of stardom. This degrades and impoverishes ordinary life, ordinary work, and ordinary experience. It depreciates and underpays the work of the primary producers of goods, and of the performers of all kinds of essential but unglamorous jobs and duties. The inevitable practical results are that most work is now poorly done; great cultural and natural resources are neglected, wasted, or abused; the land and its creatures are destroyed; and the citizenry is poorly taught, poorly governed, and poorly served.
When AK was in France, she witnessed a national holiday where the nation's employees had a chance to show their work to the public. She found it quite curious to see the janitors alongside other employees, showing off the special gloves they have selected for particular duties, and the other implements important to their work. One of the recurring themes in Berry's work is the honor of ordinary work, as in the above passage. I wonder if this helps to restore a sense of meaning to the things we seek to accomplish, and in the very least it's a good reminder for me against getting caught up in the arrogance which is all too common among academic circles. I continually have to question what I am seeking to accomplish in my dissertation work, and perhaps a good portion of the answer is that I am learning about the meaning of my work rather than trying to make any particular scientific breakthrough. Would the Academy disagree? Perhaps, perhaps not.
