Fabulous exchange unfolding on Twitter/X.
First, Alex Nowrasteh quotes this from some news article:
The banana is Britain's most popular supermarket item, a green and yellow embled of globalisation, cheap, tasty, nutritious and amusing to eat. It has quietly achieved dominance while traditional British crops have fallen by the wayside. Over the past fifty years, the average consumption of turnips has plummeted, while consumption of bananas has more than doubled.
And adds:
The banana is a powerful image of globalization, the turnip is the sad reality of nationalism.
To which John Carney says:
Okay. Let’s go.
The turnip sustained European civilizations for centuries. The banana wilts at the first sign of a supply chain disruption. Which one sounds more resilient?
It's bewildering, these people who are so determined to hate the world we live in that they insist on trashing things that seem to me to be obvious gains. Has John Carney ever eaten a turnip? Blech. And it isn't just John Carney, I've seen a lot of this lately, including an exchange that went like,
Twitter warrior A: All these tarriffs will make it hard to find fresh vegetables in the winter.
Twitter warrior B: We'll just go back to eating what's in season like nature intended.
Intentional poverty! What a fabulous idea, right-wing nationalism and left-wing eco-fanaticism get together to make life worse for everyone. Let's substitute chicory for coffee, pawpaws for pineapples, canned vegetables for fresh ones.
It makes me crazy, this desperate trashing of whatever we have and insistence that things must have been better at some other time or in some other place. I've lately seen both 1971 and 1957 held up as times when life was way better than now; yes, let's go back to life without air conditioning, ATMs, the internet, and 70 years of medical miracles.
Trump, meanwhile, has been talking up the 1890s as the time when America was richest, which is flat-out insane. Half the country didn't have running water.
Jeremy Horpedahl calls this "Returning to a pre-modern standard of living to own the libs" and posted this figure from a British government report on the diet of a typical urban working family in 1912:
And here I am, all alone, liking turnips. A damn hardy vegetable that turnip. Or was it a rutabega I ate?
ReplyDeleteWhy is it so hard to admit that we have it good?
ReplyDeleteBecause things don't make people happy; and because our society isn't designed to help people be happy, but rather just to consume things.
It's like money. You can have little to none of it, but if you're a healthy, well-adjusted person with friends, family, community, etc, you can be extremely happy none-the-less.
Having more money is better, because it makes it easier to be and stay a healthy, well-adjusted person... but having money doesn't automatically make you into one of those.
More money means you can eat better food, get better medical treatment, see a psychologist / psychiatrist to help you sort out your demons, let you spend more time with friends and family, live in a place where you can access a like-minded community easily and regularly, and so on...
But if you don't have friends? Nor family that you like? Nor any interest in being part of a community? Nor a willingness to see a doctor, whether for mental or physical health? If all you have is money and a generally miserly attitude of stubbornness, self isolation, and empty consumerism? Then you're going to be miserable.
Now, ask yourself honestly John - does our society condition people to want to actually better themselves and their lives? Or does it condition them to be helpless, so we can sell them things which we claim will better their lives for them? Do we make it easy for people to come together and form communities? Or do we subtly but intentionally deprive people of avenues of interpersonal connection, so that they feel more lonesome, so that they'll buy more things to try to fix the problem? Do we put effort into helping people think clearly and rationally? Or do we invest colossal amounts of money and resources into promoting irrational behavior and emotional thinking, the better to drive impulse purchases of things?
In short, does our mass media endeavor to embolden our citizens to be better people? Or does it strive to manipulate them to be better customers?
You know the answer, John. Why are you asking the question?
@G - I cannot imagine what a society could do to make people happier that ours is not doing. Maybe in some sense life was easier when it was more of a struggle just to get by, when limitations on mobility meant most people had to associate with their neighbors, work close to home, etc. But I'm not going back to 1971. Several European countries now have "ministers of loneliness" or similar positions but from what I have read they are not having any impact. What, exactly, could any society do to make people "better"?
ReplyDelete"I cannot imagine what a society could do to make people happier that ours is not doing."
DeleteHow about socialized healthcare? How about walkable cities and an abundance of "third places"? How about robust mass transit, up to and including a national high speed rail network?
How about socialized education? How about -quality- education? The rest of the world laughs at our system, and dismisses most of our diplomas and degrees as basically worthless. And that fact is reflected in the reality that the average American is deeply stupid and ignorant. How about we actually educate our citizens properly?
How about we properly regulate mass media, which in this country is owned by a small handful of billionaires and used to push their personal biases and foment controversy intentionally for the sake of profit?
How about we operate prisons for the sake of reforming criminals rather than making money off detaining them for as long as possible, and conditioning them to go back in once they get out?
How about we institute a legal system based on civil law rather than common law? How about we reform the police, and actually require them to be highly trained professionals that serve the people, rather than cheap paid thugs with guns who serve the rich?
How about we regulate elections better? Get rid of a lot of the shady money in the background. Reduce the campaign cycle to sane lengths, rather than spending OVER A YEAR with non-stop breathless news coverage of every single inane event and non-news-development. Do something about the Electoral College, and replace "Winner Take All" results with some form of proportional representation.
I could go on.
America is actually rather bizzare in the number of ways it is unique among modern republics. No one else does things quite the ways we do, and yet here you are, insisting we do everything that our happier European counterparts do, when we BLATANTLY DO NOT.
1971 sucked. The only good thing about 1971 was it was no longer the sixties, which sucked even more. No great social commentary here. I was a teenager back then, and when I look back, boy was I f***ed in the head . . . and lost . . .and unhappy . . . and this . . . and that . . . and everything. I'm amazed I survived. Well, that's something good, isn't it?
ReplyDeleteOf course, it wasn't 1971 that sucked, and neither did the sixties. I sucked. But why blame yourself when you can blame something else? As to society, well, it's there, and we all see it, but no one interacts with "society." They interact with their sliver of it. What's amazing is how much your sliver can differ from society as a whole.
We are awash in social data. Just what I need is another study telling me why we don't have good reasons for what we do. I'm sure this endless self-analysis has done great things for us; I just can't think of one of those great things at the moment.
What we do do, though, is analyze ourselves obsessively, until we become neurotic about everything we do. People feel their way through life. If it doesn't feel right, something is wrong, right? But I bet most people who feel things about this and that can't give reasons why. And that makes sense, at least to me, because it's a feeling and not a reason. That doesn't invalidate feelings. But when someone comes along asking reasons why, and they don't know why, they just make shit up or choose one of the multiple choice answers. So when I'm told people don't have good reasons why they don't like candidate x or celebrity y, I say, right, they don't. But they know their feeling is right.
I don't even know if what I'm saying has anything to do with the subject of this post, so I think I'll be leaving now.
Several things:
ReplyDelete1. I know several people who like turnips. I believe my wife is one of them. I understand you cook them with butter, and, well, everything is better with butter. But I admit I've never tried one, or asked for them.
2. When Trump says America was better in the 1890s, I think he means, more or less: a) that businessmen were much freer to run their businesses however they wanted, without interference from the government, employees, environmentalists, etc.; b) that America wasn't much beholden to foreigners; c) that Americans were much more willing to kick ass and take things from other people. Yes, I get it that there were already some unions, and so forth. But I suspect according to Trumps' standards of what's important, he's basically not wrong.
3. I have this memory that you (John) recently said that things really were better in about 1998 than they are now. Certainly more optimistic. Granted, that's a little different than postulating a date in the nineteenth century. But still.
4. IMHO, things are pretty bad in the country now, because of the president and his actions. But I'm a stereotype.
5. Speaking of 1998 and its optimism, there's a possibility I've been considering for a while now, which is that what creates a generalized feeling of well-being and optimism is when the country is on the upside of a speculative bubble. I think that was the case in 1998, and I think arguably we might have seen that in 2006-7 if we hadn't been mired in Iraq. A hypothesis proposed for consideration. Shred it gently, please.
ReplyDelete