by Lael Ewy
Snow is our punishment
for the amnesia of summer.
The mind is saddled
with memory—all the better
for our reverences to ride, but burdened,
still, with the baggage of having been,
seeming safe beneath the pines, a swollen,
slumped soldier, frozen to his mount:
the ark of Adam, the idiocy
of a child. To imagine is to project
one’s warm body back
into a bank of snow and expect
warming universal fact.
We live in a snow-cave
and dream its walls,
smoothed by our breathing, closed
against the Elements, its silence
the deafness of the gods.
by Lael Ewy
The history of civilization is also the history of mood enhancement. Mood enhancement is, arguably, an artifact of civilization and also a necessity of its perpetuation. Some primary cultures practice it, but that is often a reaction to long periods of forced inactivity (a rainy reason, for instance), or as a matter of sacrament (Native American peyote rituals).
Civilization and the specialization that it allows help those who have specific skills practice those skills full-time. Through continual practice, those skills can become incredibly refined. Thus civilizations create the grand achievements we associate with them: roads and aqueducts, cathedrals and coliseums. The downside to this is civilization turns one’s skills into salable commodities, not practices performed for the sake of the community or for the sake of the product itself. In response, the worker can conceptualize the activity and formulate it as an art or a craft. Or she can think of what she does in entirely economic terms—as fee for service, as “skilled labor.” Generally, she does something of both.
This process is a hedge against early-stage alienation, and it was the guilds’ stock-in-trade (all puns intended), and why Marx marked their passing with concern. In that, monetization is also a way to stay motivated to work and produce things that the worker will not, himself, enjoy. As soon as one’s skills or the product of those skills become merely monetary, one must temper one’s emotional investment in them. One must increase one’s motivation artificially, and monetization helps do this. Money makes the goods and services of others in the civilization accessible to the worker. It is a mood enhancer because it creates artificial value that substitutes for the practice of the skill. The payoff is a materialist way of life, materialization. As opposed to practicing a skill for the sake of the community or for its own sake, the skill is practiced for the sake of stuff and one’s access to it. Anyone who has ever shopped for pleasure understands how this enhances mood; it is a substitute for the power and competence one feels when one does useful and meaningful work.
Alienated from what one does, the worker begins to think entirely in terms of monetary value, and that value becomes what she works for. She wishes to amass enough monetary value to retire on someday.
But if a thing is worth doing, if it is the expression of one’s particular abilities and skills, why would one want to retire? Specialization and the monetization of skills lead to a lack of balance. The ancient Greek idea of being competent in many areas was an attempt to rediscover the generalist past that we evolved into and that was lost with civilization. Specialization takes normal differences in ability and blows them out of proportion—or rather into the proportions that the civilization demands. The Greeks were able to practice balance and civilization by having slaves do the menial work civilization requires.
Still, the technological enhancements of civilization have given us a remarkable standard of living, but it is clear we lack balance. Over 50% of us are overweight; this is the physical manifestation of our lack of balance. Our massive consumption of drugs shows our lack of emotional balance. The wealthy and middle classes have their mood enhancers prescribed (antidepressants, sleep aids, anti-anxiety medications, pain killers), but that does not stop them and much of the rest of the population from consuming beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tobacco, cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine, heroin, MDMA, and a host of other drugs in order to deal with the distance they have from what they do.
Indeed, opium production, the brewing of wine, beer, and hard liquor, and the cultivation of coffee and tea are all associated with civilization. They would not have been possible without the agriculture that fuels civilization, of course, but given its alienating properties, how possible would the continuation of civilization have been without them?. Added to this are entertainments and sports—leisure time itself—which have ballooned in order to distract us and make us forget about our lack of balance. We would not need a work/life balance if our work did not in some sense involve alienation.
I do not think many of us are ready to give up the blessings of civilization for the sake of restoring balance. But we can create ways of doing and ways of being that help restore it. We will not be able to reverse monetization, but we may be more open to barter. We will not be able to do away with large industries entirely, but we can respect communities more as we do business, helping the worker see the value of what she does. An unalienated worker is a conscientious one, one able to adapt to changing resources and environmental stresses. A conscientious worker is able to appreciate the local wine for the sake of the wine, not merely for the sake of forgetting.