Overloaded: Work Ethics and the Early Death of a Generation

I have been defined as sick—with fatigue disorder—since last September. I am slowly on my way back though. How did I get here? To a situation in which I practically collapsed, unable to remember any thing, unable to read, understand recipes, watch television or look at a computer screen? How did I end up prioritizing work more than my family? I do not want to prioritize work, I never decided to. I just ended up doing it, as if by pure accident. Last summer I spent working—my head kept spinning like crazy while my body was on vacation. I have a good boss who sent me to the doctor, who took me off work. Most people are not so lucky. 

I was born in the middle of the first generation in the 'developed world' who will probably die at a younger age than their parents, despite life conditions which are presumably better than those of our parental generation. We have not experienced any major wars, our workplaces are generally safer (from an accident-at-work perspective), we have continuos access to better and more varied food (but maybe not as safe from a toxic perspective), giving birth is not dangerous in our (geographical and social) part of the world, we have more leisure time than ever before (apart from some Stone Age societies, see Marshall on that), we need not worry about survival (but we do anyway, because survival has taken on a social rather than a bio-systemic meaning). 

Nevertheless, our condition is really questionable. We have not only access to better and more varied food, but also to really bad food, we have ready access to sweets, alcohol and bad fats, which threaten our health quite directly. Our food and environment is contaminated by toxins, it has been genetically modified with the main objective of hyper-production of cheap food, it is produced by extremely un-sustainable methods. 

We have much less access to time for relaxation, socializing, exercising, value oriented structuring of our working days, sensible work ethics and eating habits. We are focused on high quality output performance in every little thing we do; at work, when making love, planning families, during pregnancy, parenting, when going on holiday, designing our homes, cleaning them and refurbishing them...  Even in our habit of 'prioritizing' soft values and family, and in being relaxed about everything, we are focused on output performance. The bread we bake, the marmalades, jams, cakes and cookies we make and the gardens we grow need to be perfect—in a shabby chick, relaxed and a well orchestrated and planned haphazard-looking way. If we are not burned out by 40 and thereafter having learned how to turn down our demands on ourselves, we will die by 70... 

The politics of a cup of afternoon moka...

Today's big cup of moka

I have been working a tiny little bit on the concept of virtual soil today. I haven't seen anyone else doing anything on a concept in the least close to it. It holds a potential to be really interesting but it needs to be discussed thoroughly with friends. What's the point of a concept like it? It is not the same as, but similar to virtual water. It is similar in that I have initially described it (in the Danish magazine Global økologi/Global ecology from October last year) as a way of thinking about the global flow of nutrients in the same way as virtual water may be exchanged between regions (in an ideal world of course all in accordance with Smith and Ricardo's ideas of free trade and comparative advantages), e.g. in the form of fruits and vegetables. 

In short, virtual soil should be understood as the consumption of imported nutrients, i.e. such as one understands virtual water (the consumption of imported water), or in other words the consumption of soil from another region than the one in which you live. However, being so deeply a student of political economy and post-structuralist schools, I cannot help being political about it. 

In fact, in my basic conceptualisation virtual soil is a political concept—harbouring the potential to critically discuss both the post-colonial Northern appropriation of land in the South through 'the market'; the geopolitical difference in so called 'ecological footprints'; the impossibility in fulfilling the Millennium Development Goal of poverty eradication by 2015. I also see it holding potential to understand parts of the infected 'land issue' in a country such as Zimbabwe (and the other countries in which this was really a political issue during the 1970's and 80's; Zimbabwe came kind of late and awkward onto that arena), and the effects of global corporate climate compensation policies involving the creation of so called carbon sinks through tree planting in the South. 

When I brew my cup of afternoon moka I use espresso roasted coffee beans from—I don't know where—called 'columbia' I think it is, but definitely produced somewhere in the South, most likely South America. Good quality. Today's cup more expensive than usual because it was a 'crema'. OK. Apart from that I used a moka brewer of stainless steel (lots, really lots of water going into producing it, and it was produced in Italy probably with Swedish steel, so that's within my 'region', OK, but its base of copper is probably, let's guess from the Zambian copper belt). 

Now, I have by that cup of coffee been drinking not only the water going into growing the bush and the beans, but also a wee bit of South American resources in the form of nutrients from the soil where the coffee grew. As it was regrettably not ecological coffee, I also drank pesti- and other 'cides, while simultaneously also contributing to the pollution of and (hopefully not) degeneration of soil quality in the area where the coffee bushes were grown. I have also supported international companies profiting on my coffee drinking habit. One might argue that at least some money, i.e. resources goes back into the local community—but that's not really true, unless the coffee was fair trade, which it wasn't. The workers get minimal salaries and have few possibilities to move out of their predicament, i.e. no poverty reduction through my afternoon coffee... 

In addition, the copper in the brewer's base was we might suggest from Zambia, where people for decades have been forced to work in the mines to be able to pay for the colonisation of their lands as well as, first their hut taxes, then their children's school fees and books, and the few consumer goods they can afford on the very small (bachelor) wages they receive. All this is part of my cup of coffee. I am through it basically appropriating soil purely to satisfy my perceived need for a good tasting kick, soil which might otherwise have been owned by local farmers (ideally; realistically probably by local Big Men) and used for producing 'real' food, not luxury drinks. I am in other words consuming other peoples  access to that piece of soil's nutrients through my coffee.

Dancing Boys and masculinity

The expressions of contempt after the show of the documentary film The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan are many, on the Internet and in regular news media, also in Sweden where the film has not even been announced yet. War Lords' sexual abuse of young boys who have been sold by parents or are street children is the theme of the film. At the same time, the global scale of accusations of sexual abuse by priests within the Catholic Church (which has been discussed for some years) has forced us to start reflecting and debating men, sexuality and religious practices in a more honest manner than before. At least we will do so for some time.

Which are the linkages between the dancing boys in Afghanistan, the boys (and girls) abused within the Catholic Church, the boy lovers of the male Athenian elite or the male sex cult among the Marind-anim? And what is the line we may draw between our husbands/boy friends, Afghan War Lords, the Athenian male elite and the Marind-anim men? Why was it that Aristophanes bold suggestion of a female sex-strike against war did not, and will not work? If we want to stop sexual abuse of children, is it enough just to get all adults to understand how wrong it is (which in itself is a huge task) as suggested by some? Or is the problem quite a different one?

One might throw out the idea that the linkage is (in these particular cases masculine) power, i.e. the subtle power of discourse, practice and tradition, as well as the outright power to force ones will upon others. A power, which is legitimated by symbolic violence, to quote Pierre Bourdieau, involved in acceptance of a situation by the one being subjected as well as the feeling of having the right to subjugate. Our cultures—the Afghan, European, American, Athenian and Marind-animian—are all deeply rooted patriarchies, they are each others brothers and cousins. All, but the Marind-animian have the same origins in time and place. As subtle (as well as overt) power is embodied by all members of society, through discourse, practices and traditions sexuality becomes just one among many arenas through which to express it, whether in relation to other men, in relation to women, or in relation to children. As such the former Swedish parliamentarian Gudrun Schyman was right when she argued that there is not much of a difference between Swedish men and the Taliban.

Power leads to the abuse of children and other collectivities defined as 'weaker', 'lower' or 'less worthy'. In other words it will not help to get women into the picture in Afghanistan, or into the Catholic Church—neither will the abolishment of celibacy which might actually fill quite an important function to some—or the Athenian elites or ending the male sex cult among the Marind-anim. The add-women-and-stir strategy has not worked yet, despite having been tried for quite some time. Had our societies been the opposite, a similar add-men-and-stir strategy would not have worked either. We need to re-organise our societies around the central values of respect of other if we want to get rid of child abuse, or any other kind of abuse. In other words we must root out the Taliban among and within ourselves.

Mad Men

I received the first season of Mad Men as a birthday present from a good friend. Since I am working only part time I decided to watch the series when I was not working. I have made it through the first five episodes. While being incredibly well made, the series gives me the creeps! It is beautifully filmed and acted, the scenery oozes of the early 1960's, with odours from the 50's sipping through...

While watching, I realise that Mad Men is not at all about the 1960's. The 60's is merely used as the fond against which our contemporary anxieties are displayed. Men's fear of and attraction to independent women and their simultaneous admiration for the 'tamed' Lady. Their difficulty in reading the relational undertext in times of social change is matched by the women's confusion over their own bodily re-actions to the imprisonment by socially defined happiness, or the use of sexuality in the politics of survival in the work place.

The series show us that we are still in the loop—but probably at the end of it, or maybe rather at the end of the first one. The loop take-off was the early pre-revolutionary feminist writings in Europe and the North American Colonies, while the speed slowed during the early and mid-19th century it picked up again during the 20th, particularly during the 1920's, the 1940's and 1960's onwards. Mad Men tells us that while things certainly have changed since 1961-62, we still behave the same way, we still have the same expectations, the same ideals, we are still hunting for perfect-ness of a very particular kind; bought and not-bought at the same time. We are searching for authenticity, and when it cannot be found we go shopping for it.

Love, says one of the characters, does not exist, it was invented by people who want to sell stuff... Or in another phrasing; if you are so numbed by life and circumstance that you have lost touch with yourself, your authenticity, you will need people like the guys in Mad Men to invent it, and money to buy it. On the same account, it seems we find the stability of the very old gender structures guiding the lives of the characters in Mad Men as well as in our contemporary private and working lives, from the US to China, the North Cape to the South...