Life skills and Druid values

There are a lot of things I’m good at. I can bake and brew, I’m good with textiles and at all manner of make do and mend techniques. I can tell different kinds of wood apart, even from bits lying on the ground and I know how to use them; what can be burned and what cannot, and how to make a fire. I can make a blanket, mend a sock, cook a meal from scratch over an open fire, I have a wealth of stories and songs to keep the people around me amused, and a grasp of first aid. I am good at problem solving and at reasoning things out. During most of human history, this skills base would have stood me in really good stead, making me a valuable part of any community. Not so now.

Our ideas about what is a useful and valuable contribution have changed a lot. I think this is because access to resources is now entirely about money, and has little to do with skill or prowess. How else could a man who does not understand that all children cannot be above average end up running the education department? We’ve come to assume that wealth and utility are one and the same. Someone who does nothing but pick up their dividends, is treated with respect, while someone poor, no matter how much good they do, is woefully undervalued.

I think in turn this is a consequence of no longer living in ways that connect us to our neighbours. When your individual success impacted directly on friends, family, fellow workers and neighbours, I think we all had a much clearer sense of who was useful and to what degree. What you did, and how well you did it was of far greater relevance in terms of everyone’s wealth, than your pile of gold. In a famine, that pile of gold may be entirely worthless. I think we also used to be a lot better at finding ways for everyone to be useful. The habit of consigning large numbers of people to the trash heap, is very modern indeed.

The more basic and essential a form of work is, the less we pay people to do it. The more abstract the work is, the more we value it. Thus toilet cleaning is not well rewarded, but you can lose vast sums for your bank, as a banker, and still expect to pick up a bonus. In some areas of life, we actively reward failure, with handsome pay-offs.

The more complex our systems are, the harder it is for anyone to understand them or have oversight of them. The more complexity we have, the more we seem to believe that we need ever greater levels of complexity. We must have guards to guard the guards who watch the watchers, and someone must be employed to manage them, and someone else must manage those managers, and a third party will be needed to make sure that the managers who manage the managers are doing so in accordance with a complex set of rules and requirements. And yet we have rising incidents of malnutrition in the UK. We don’t take good care of our elderly. Our roads are full of potholes, our prisons full of illiterate people, and our positions of power populated by idiots. All that work, and so little of any obvious use going on. But it is almost valueless to be able to cook a meal, or fill in a hole.

Whatever the answer is, I am certain that every greater abstraction and complication isn’t it. I remember reading a piece by Marx about how being a small part of a production line alienates workers from their work, and turns us into machines. We’d barely got started when he explored those ideas. We’re ever more obsessed with turning ourselves into the machine, and ever more oblivious as to where that machine is going.