New to the Blogosphere

I know that writing a blog is different from writing a paper, but I haven't exactly figured out how yet. I’ve never written a blog, but I’m an old pro at writing essays, so it makes sense that I automatically jumped into paper-writing mode when I started this blog entry by identifying a main theme or thesis and supporting examples. I'm not sure I'll continue to approach blogging like academic writing, but for now I guess it works. Also, if these are rambling at first, bare with me.

The main theme I identified for this week is "challenging assumptions." In our readings and classroom discussions we have questioned our thinking about the encounter between Europeans and the Empires of the “New World.” We have seen that terms we take for granted like the New World, the Americas, pre-contact period, and pre-history carry inherently ethnocentric assumptions. We have re-evaluated our definition of Latin America, and concluded that it is more of an academic construction than a definite area. Indeed, this is all very collegiate of us.

For me, the most interesting idea that’s come up in the first week of the semester is challenging the idea of progress throughout human history. This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot in recent months, and it’s so fascinating to think about it gives me chills sometimes. There is an underlying assumption that humans have gotten smarter throughout the centuries, and that better technology improved the world and people’s lives. I’ve been seriously questioning whether that is true.

It's true that technology has gotten more complex. Modern technology is superior if the point of technology is to reduce the amount of human energy spent on tasks like food production and transportation. In the 'developed world' we indeed spend very little human energy on food production (about 2% of our population are farmers, right?). With technology it's possible to travel to a place in a matter of hours that would take months to traverse by foot.

But I think it's becoming apparent that the costs of that saved labor can be hideous, deadly, and ultimately ruinous. How many lives have been lost in the past century for the petroleum we have come to depend upon to produce and distribute food, to get from one place to another, and to sustain the global economy of manufacturing and exportation?

Even some of the poorest Americans can afford to eat meat every meal at fast-food restaurants, thanks to cost-efficient but environmentally destructive factory farms that are bad on so many different levels. Meanwhile, millions in Africa starve to death because their traditional ways of living in their environment have been lost, and their resources have been extracted and sold.

We often talk about the superiority of Western medical technology, especially how much it has improved life-expectancy over the course of the last couple centuries. However, I’ve heard that the statistical increase in life expectancy is misleading because when you factor out infant mortality (which has decreased), the average adult today is only likely to live a few years longer than an adult in the 1850s. Also, we probably wouldn’t need as much medical care if our society as a whole was healthier, and there wasn’t such a strong dependence on hospitals and doctors to treat our illnesses.

Anyway, the point I wanted to make is that we need take a hard look at if what we are doing really is smarter and better. Because if we assume that science and technology have always solved more problems than they create, and continue to rely on technology to solve our problems, we could miss the opportunity to make simpler changes in our lives and our society that just make more sense.

I have one final example of how the idea of progress throughout history demands reconsideration. Dr. Becker mentioned in class the idea that many hunter gatherer groups probably lived leisurely, and probably worked very little o feed themselves compared to agriculturalists who sometimes worked from sun-up to sun-down. Modern-day people work at their jobs for eight or nine hours, often longer, and that’s not including housework. I read part of a book by Max Oeslagger called The Idea of Wilderness which addressed this same idea. It's a huge book, and I've only read the first 50 or so pages, partly because I think Oeslagger idealizes what he calls "the Eden-like conditions" of hunting and gathering, but nevertheless his ideas are appealing and thought-provoking. He mentions that archeologists and anthropologists think that hunter-gatheres were actually healthier than their agriculturalists peers (and Dr. Johnson in the Anthro Dept and confirms this is true). So what exactly about agriculture is so superior? I’m not going to try to answer that now, but it’s interesting to think about.

Ok, so if my dad isn’t already chuckling at his hippie daughter when he reads this, I’m going to throw one more thing in here. There's this theory out there that says the concept of original sin in the book of Genesis is a story about people who stopped trusting God or Nature or Whatever to provide enough food, so they stopped living the leisurely life of hunting and gathering, and started farming and storing food. It’s in this book Ishmale by a guy named Daniel Quinn, and probably other places too.

Sorry Dad, blame in on those damn liberal nuns in high school.