v)David Herbert Lawrence - What we have lost
Background reading
Life and works - http://www.online-literature.com/dh_lawrence/
Biographical pages - http://web.ukonline.co.uk/rananim/lawrence/early.html
Quotations by D. H. Lawrence
1. We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free of their authority.
2. For whereas the mind works in possibilities, the intuitions work in actualities, and what you intuitively desire, that is possible to you. Whereas what you mentally or "consciously" desire is nine times out of ten impossible; hitch your wagon to star, or you will just stay where you are.
3. All vital truth contains the memory of all that for which it is not true.
4. Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts.
5. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive.
David Herbert Lawrence
Pre-reading text
D. H. Lawrence is best remembered for his great novels, ‘Sons and Lovers’, \Women in Love’, and his most notorious novel, ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, which was banned for many years. He was born in 1885 in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, into a working class family. Despite his humble beginnings, Lawrence went on to become one of the greats of English literature.
What to think about before you read
Before you read the dialogue below, think of the answers to the ten questions that follow.
1. How does the decimation of nature affect the human spirit?
2. Is it too late to retrace our steps?
3. What does retracing our steps mean to you?
4. How have our lives been changed by eradicating natural environments?
5. What is the true cost of removing natural habitats?
6. Who pays for this removal?
7. Can we always trust our intellectual abilities to find the answers to important questions?
8. Is there an alternative way?
9. If so, what is it?
10. What would schooling be like, were it to encourage alternative ways of deciding what way progress should proceed?
Dialogue: What we have lost – DH Lawrence talks about how industrialism has ruined a part of our lives
Thomas Widdison: Are you talking about industry encroaching on countryside – the loss of natural habitats?
David Herbert Lawrence: Partly, yes, of course, we have most certainly lost the places were plant and bird can thrive, but we have lost the habitat of the human spirit – with the loss of our wild places, our natural forests, heaths and the land that has always traditionally been thought of as wasteland – that between urban and what is now merely less urban, that we seem to think we can throw away, discard, as if it wasn’t part of England because of its non-usefulness to us – it isn’t arable land, it isn’t wide enough or long enough or fertile enough to be viable for that. It isn’t within the factory gates and so it is nothing to anybody, and so it is used up, with rusting piles of debris, cast off from the mines and the factories.
TW: But if it doesn’t belong to anyone and it doesn’t serve any purpose, what is its value?
DHL: Its value is that it is a part of England, and if some isn’t preserved, there’ll be no England left. Even in the beginning, when the colliers coming up from the little pits scattered on the green fields like so many open sores, needed short cuts home to their homes, they used to use those bits of land no use to anyone, as we say, to get through without their way being governed by concrete, tarmac and stone. They could wander free and sit and smoke, listening to the little streams tinkling out the old tunes that they heard when they were lads bringing their wenches out here in the first flush of love – the streams jingling bells reminded them of that time and they felt glad, even through the tiredness and the dirt and the grime of a day spent four hundred yards underground.
TW: The trouble is that it isn’t quantifiable – it can’t be converted into pounds, shillings and pence, can it?
DHL: Not at all, except as so much land to build more on, to fill up, as if there wasn’t enough land taken over by paving stones and brick walls. We aren’t leaving them their memories, until all there is left is a name – Middleton, but nothing anyone can recall as being the place they grew up in, the place they found themselves, and the place they could always go to recount the days when school holidays were endless, it never rained, and Mum was waiting at home with something sweet and warm to drink on cold days when snow hurt the ends of fingers.
TW: And the rest, what of that?
DHL: You mean the broader sweeps of land between the towns – surrounding them, I remember. I know it’s gone, it already had when my knees were blackened from falling down, being chased by gamekeepers whose only job, or so it seemed to us, was to protect something that didn’t belong to them. They ran us off, but there was nothing left, even then.
TW: It’s easy to become over nostalgic about the past and the space that has gone.
DHL: I’m not talking about monks passing by on asses, a way of life nobody now alive ever knew, but rather of vales where you couldn’t see much evidence of man’s hand. Now, the trees have all been replanted after being cut for pit props or the trenches on the Somme, but still, a tree is a tree, it’s a shoot of life that takes an age to grow, through the life of a child who knows its secrets, those hollows in its trunk where a tanner might be left for a special time – a mother’s birthday present or suchlike.
TW: Did you know of such places?
DHL: Every child did – we could see the difference in tussocks of grass, in the bushes that had been folded as men had pushed past them on their way home – crouching after their shift had taken all they had. We knew what plants meant – where burdock and bracken grew and what birds would fly out of oaks and what out of sycamores.
TW: Isn’t that side of the country still there?
DHL: It might be there, but instead of kids in their hiding places in trees, those people that look out of patio doors and shiny aluminum framed windows can see them in their play, their make believe world of redskins, and lariats, dry-gulches and makeshift butes and buffalo drinking in long river valleys. The noise of a radio and a lawnmower has done for them just as surely as growing up too quickly did.
TW: Is that the habitat of the spirit you were talking about?
DHL: That and places folk could go to remind them of who they were and something to measure the simulacrum of reality – the copy without a model, against that which they had known and imagined would always be there for them to go back to. That’s what I mean.
TW: Do we still need those places?
DHL: I would say now more than ever, even more than formerly. Back in the days when space wasn’t at such a premium, it was probably taken for granted, and now time has gone the same way, those places would have come in useful – places to escape – there’s no escape now, why people take to drink in ways they never used to.
TW: But haven’t people around here always liked a drink? How has that changed?
DHL: It isn’t the social event that it was, isn’t drinking. Taprooms were joyous places where men who had sweated together and washed each other’s backs in the cold shower blocks at the pit head, could laugh and be free for an hour or two.
Just for that time, they could forget what they had to do to earn a crust. I’ve seen them straggling back after a Sunday afternoon’s drink, and they’d come across an old pile of pit props – concrete and steel now there’s no wood left, and laughing they’d kick them as if their use was entirely unknown to them, even as they ducked their helmets under them on their way to the coal face every day of their lives underground.
They wouldn’t even let themselves be reminded of the labor they were tied to year after year until the mine boss told them that was that and they had no job to go to.
The pits swallowed them up and spit them out with a ten-hour shift between, but then it’d spit them out one last time, either when they were getting too old to swing a pickaxe fast enough, or else the coal had gone. Forgiving men are colliers, and when they come up into all that light, they don’t say anything even when their tracks are covered over with somebody’s driveway or garden path.
But there’s a wound to the soul beginning to make itself felt – like a bruise, which only deepens its terrible ache until it fills all the psyche. Spaces were for salving that ache and those bruises, so that the iron never entered the soul, and they could still find it in themselves to forgive.
What have you got now in its stead – lads working stacking supermarket shelves, never having to get black as a fireback, scraping their lower spine on shining wet unhewn coal, and yet they have no forgiveness in them – no camaraderie – just catch them drinking and its not difficult to feel the hate they feel for having the best of their youth taken away from them, just as the lads that used to work down the mine had theirs taken from them – their daylight too, but let them once get their feet cooling in some little brook that tippled and tripped across their path on their way home and they found something to take away the ills of the day, made their hearts swell again – back to its normal size after being shut up down there for so long.
Workers get in their cars and find more of what they’ve had all day – push and shove, waiting in queues to get home. No dangling their feet for them, no birdsong to whistle to as a shower of rain tip-taps against their hot faces – nothing of that sort left for them to make them smile and be glad to be alive.
What we have lost
TW: But man works this way, he must eat and to eat he must earn, to earn he must work – whatever his actions are called or what they represent.
DHL: But don’t you see that his labor is usurped, the best taken from it until it is mere activity, devoid of any worth – real worth.
TW: But he chooses to do this paid work, does he not?
DHL: Does he choose – is it not Hobson who chooses, there being no alternative but to do or starve – what choice is there in that?
TW: It is the way of the world – this world here and now, that is important, isn’t it?
DHL: That is so, but in making his own bed, man has gone ways that he would have been better not to take.
TW: The rational course, chosen by his intellect, you mean?
DHL: Exactly so, in using his intellect, and in so going against his blood, he has founded his own chains, which he is now powerless to escape or throw off. I believe the flesh to be wiser than the intellect – that we can go wrong in our minds, and do, but what our blood feels and believes is always true.
TW: But he chose this way and now he must follow, what is to be done?
DHL: You are talking from here, rather than listening to your flesh – to your blood, which will never err. Your judgment cannot concede anything to your heart – a thousand years – more – have seen to that, put paid to any hope of letting your intellect be subordinate to your blood.
TW: And you can?
DHL: When leaving thought behind and keeping to my own true self-belief, I can make my heart rule my head, or as we now say, work from a gut feeling. It is more than that, but now it is so subterranean that it feels somehow pagan and irrational to think this way and to feel this way. Feeling and thinking are now separated by rationality, the triumph of Greek civilization, to subvert feeling to logic, as if one mattered without the other, for is not that how logic works?
TW: Logic is what William of Occam conceived it to be; bound to the structures of the mind only, not to the structures of the mind, language and reality, as conceived by Aristotle.
DHL: Enough of this talk of the structures of the mind and their link or otherwise to reality and to language. There is another way – the logic, if we can call it such – I prefer not to use it, the blood instinct.
TW: What is that? How does it differ from rational, intellectual thought, unclouded by superstition – how?
DHL: Let us first start by demystifying what I am talking about and what I am not. To think of the blood instinct, as I will call it, and which is relationally opposite, or at least somewhere other than in the mind, has nothing to do with the mumbo-jumbo you seem to be suggesting – that is a derogatory schools of thought operating to remove the threat posed to Western modes of thinking.
Instead, be more aware of your feelings and then follow where they take you, retiring rationality for as long as you can bear it. As I have said, we have all of us been trained in this rather than that way of looking at the world, have been goaded and chided into thinking that this way is superior in its power to any other way, and yet look where it has led us – into total warfare, nation against nation, when in fact what we refer to as the nation-state, is really nothing more than rationality applied to the ruling of people – an umbrella of rationality that instructs and informs us of where our best interests lie – with at its heart, this logic, this god reason to inform.
Nation states are inanimate objects, but those we call statesmen and defer to as if they were the font of all knowledge where our best interests lie, but who are only really gatekeepers on paths of irrationality, posing as rational self-interest. We are deluded into thinking our interests coincide with theirs, when the reverse is the case – ours are subverted to their dominant ideologies, pouring out as pure reason.
TW: And how could anyone argue with that – is that what you are saying?
DHL: Exactly, when one frame of mind is so all pervasive, any other appears folly indeed, but again, I say look where it has brought us, stooping to what depths as man, so inclined, is capable of. Is not the exploitation of labor a thing so inhuman as to be inconceivable without the ubiquitous reason to deliver it to us an forms that are entirely and easily palatable, for us to swallow whole.
TW: Speaking of the exploitation of labor – is it so if wages commensurate with the amount of labor done are paid?
DHL: It sounds so, or at least I am reassured that you think it thus. How is human dignity laid low, almost made non-existent but by a payment in coin only redeemable at the bank of the hirer?
TW: It doesn’t have to be the same bank.
DHL: I am speaking metaphorically, paid in kind, if you prefer, will that do?
TW: But in what other way could it be paid?
DHL: My point entirely. It is in the contract drawn up between employee and employer that we assume the hired can be asked to do anything, and it will be done.
TW: But if he is being paid, and if he agreed to it in the first place, is it not fair?
DHL: You think so? Would you consider me a friend to ask you to go down that hole in the ground for ten hours every day and not come up for air, for sustenance of any kind – would you?
TW: I hope you would pay me for it.
DHL: Precisely, you are willing to put yourself through any indignity I care to name so long as you are paid in coinage, isn’t that true?
TW: It is.
DHL: But would you go down that hole voluntarily?
TW: Never.
DHL: Then why have I the right to ask you, and having once gained your consent, to force you, to go down it?
TW: Why because I have said I would, have agreed and signed a contract binding me to go down.
DHL: So it is that contract, drawn up by my hand, that is making you go down, is it not?
TW: Yes, my contractual obligations to you as my employer.
DHL: And how does that square with your dignity as a free man, a human being, the same as me? Do you feel in any way inferior to me in signing something that I have framed, for the express purpose of enslaving you in my name for the required number of hours paid at the hourly rate I set, not you, notice, but me, the employer.
TW: If I signed it, I must have thought it worth it, mustn’t I?
DHL: But is that true, don’t the straightened circumstances you and your loved ones find yourselves in make it expedient to agree. But before you answer that question, answer the one I asked earlier – about how going down a hole in the ground squares with your dignity as a human being – a man – can it be squared?
TW: Since you put it that way, I suppose it is beneath my dignity to go down that hole, particularly since you do not have to follow me. But what has this to do with blood instinct?
DHL: It has to do with that instinct being driven out by a manufactured need, shortages engineered and tailored to constrain you, my good friend, to agree to having to do something that compromises your dignity – to do something not even a dog would do. Shall I go on – shall I talk about how the principles of rationality and reason, with exploitation masquerading in those names, comes to taint all relationships and render love as something countable. Shall I go on?
TW: Do, please, I seem to have fallen to your argument, though I am surely with the majority in thinking your logic is flawed.
DHL: What you say is the best sign that you have been entirely won over by reason, leaving yourself vulnerable to its power, not being able to see that there could be a way that takes another, entirely different route to that taken by the lords of the rational – engineers and lawyers, and everyone that is subsumed beneath its flat, uniform surface.
TW: But how do the forces, if that is what you say they are – how do the forces of reason work against man, as you seem to be implying – how can that be – we know that since the philosophical side of man tends to the rational, that in acting rationally, he is acting in his own best interest – surely?
DHL: One man, I forget who it was now, said he could move the World with a lever and a fulcrum, if he had somewhere to stand. That is your problem – that you have nowhere to stand to attempt to put the World off course. In arguing for the predominance of rational thought over any other mode, let us call it, you are stuck in your own mould as a product of it – of rational man and what he has made of the world. You have no place to stand – even if you possessed a big enough lever, and that all important fulcrum from which to move the planet and everyone on it.
TW: What then can I argue, and what can you put to me that will convince me that what you say is right, for just as surely, if I have no standpoint, as you are saying, I cannot accept the truth of any argument you can put forward against what I believe in my heart of hearts to be true.
DHL: That is the mountain I have to climb – you are right, and it is one that many shrink from attempting to climb, being content finally not to rock the boat of normality.
Robert L. Fielding
Background reading
Life and works - http://www.online-literature.com/dh_lawrence/
Biographical pages - http://web.ukonline.co.uk/rananim/lawrence/early.html
Quotations by D. H. Lawrence
1. We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free of their authority.
2. For whereas the mind works in possibilities, the intuitions work in actualities, and what you intuitively desire, that is possible to you. Whereas what you mentally or "consciously" desire is nine times out of ten impossible; hitch your wagon to star, or you will just stay where you are.
3. All vital truth contains the memory of all that for which it is not true.
4. Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts.
5. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive.
David Herbert Lawrence
Pre-reading text
D. H. Lawrence is best remembered for his great novels, ‘Sons and Lovers’, \Women in Love’, and his most notorious novel, ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, which was banned for many years. He was born in 1885 in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, into a working class family. Despite his humble beginnings, Lawrence went on to become one of the greats of English literature.
What to think about before you read
Before you read the dialogue below, think of the answers to the ten questions that follow.
1. How does the decimation of nature affect the human spirit?
2. Is it too late to retrace our steps?
3. What does retracing our steps mean to you?
4. How have our lives been changed by eradicating natural environments?
5. What is the true cost of removing natural habitats?
6. Who pays for this removal?
7. Can we always trust our intellectual abilities to find the answers to important questions?
8. Is there an alternative way?
9. If so, what is it?
10. What would schooling be like, were it to encourage alternative ways of deciding what way progress should proceed?
Dialogue: What we have lost – DH Lawrence talks about how industrialism has ruined a part of our lives
Thomas Widdison: Are you talking about industry encroaching on countryside – the loss of natural habitats?
David Herbert Lawrence: Partly, yes, of course, we have most certainly lost the places were plant and bird can thrive, but we have lost the habitat of the human spirit – with the loss of our wild places, our natural forests, heaths and the land that has always traditionally been thought of as wasteland – that between urban and what is now merely less urban, that we seem to think we can throw away, discard, as if it wasn’t part of England because of its non-usefulness to us – it isn’t arable land, it isn’t wide enough or long enough or fertile enough to be viable for that. It isn’t within the factory gates and so it is nothing to anybody, and so it is used up, with rusting piles of debris, cast off from the mines and the factories.
TW: But if it doesn’t belong to anyone and it doesn’t serve any purpose, what is its value?
DHL: Its value is that it is a part of England, and if some isn’t preserved, there’ll be no England left. Even in the beginning, when the colliers coming up from the little pits scattered on the green fields like so many open sores, needed short cuts home to their homes, they used to use those bits of land no use to anyone, as we say, to get through without their way being governed by concrete, tarmac and stone. They could wander free and sit and smoke, listening to the little streams tinkling out the old tunes that they heard when they were lads bringing their wenches out here in the first flush of love – the streams jingling bells reminded them of that time and they felt glad, even through the tiredness and the dirt and the grime of a day spent four hundred yards underground.
TW: The trouble is that it isn’t quantifiable – it can’t be converted into pounds, shillings and pence, can it?
DHL: Not at all, except as so much land to build more on, to fill up, as if there wasn’t enough land taken over by paving stones and brick walls. We aren’t leaving them their memories, until all there is left is a name – Middleton, but nothing anyone can recall as being the place they grew up in, the place they found themselves, and the place they could always go to recount the days when school holidays were endless, it never rained, and Mum was waiting at home with something sweet and warm to drink on cold days when snow hurt the ends of fingers.
TW: And the rest, what of that?
DHL: You mean the broader sweeps of land between the towns – surrounding them, I remember. I know it’s gone, it already had when my knees were blackened from falling down, being chased by gamekeepers whose only job, or so it seemed to us, was to protect something that didn’t belong to them. They ran us off, but there was nothing left, even then.
TW: It’s easy to become over nostalgic about the past and the space that has gone.
DHL: I’m not talking about monks passing by on asses, a way of life nobody now alive ever knew, but rather of vales where you couldn’t see much evidence of man’s hand. Now, the trees have all been replanted after being cut for pit props or the trenches on the Somme, but still, a tree is a tree, it’s a shoot of life that takes an age to grow, through the life of a child who knows its secrets, those hollows in its trunk where a tanner might be left for a special time – a mother’s birthday present or suchlike.
TW: Did you know of such places?
DHL: Every child did – we could see the difference in tussocks of grass, in the bushes that had been folded as men had pushed past them on their way home – crouching after their shift had taken all they had. We knew what plants meant – where burdock and bracken grew and what birds would fly out of oaks and what out of sycamores.
TW: Isn’t that side of the country still there?
DHL: It might be there, but instead of kids in their hiding places in trees, those people that look out of patio doors and shiny aluminum framed windows can see them in their play, their make believe world of redskins, and lariats, dry-gulches and makeshift butes and buffalo drinking in long river valleys. The noise of a radio and a lawnmower has done for them just as surely as growing up too quickly did.
TW: Is that the habitat of the spirit you were talking about?
DHL: That and places folk could go to remind them of who they were and something to measure the simulacrum of reality – the copy without a model, against that which they had known and imagined would always be there for them to go back to. That’s what I mean.
TW: Do we still need those places?
DHL: I would say now more than ever, even more than formerly. Back in the days when space wasn’t at such a premium, it was probably taken for granted, and now time has gone the same way, those places would have come in useful – places to escape – there’s no escape now, why people take to drink in ways they never used to.
TW: But haven’t people around here always liked a drink? How has that changed?
DHL: It isn’t the social event that it was, isn’t drinking. Taprooms were joyous places where men who had sweated together and washed each other’s backs in the cold shower blocks at the pit head, could laugh and be free for an hour or two.
Just for that time, they could forget what they had to do to earn a crust. I’ve seen them straggling back after a Sunday afternoon’s drink, and they’d come across an old pile of pit props – concrete and steel now there’s no wood left, and laughing they’d kick them as if their use was entirely unknown to them, even as they ducked their helmets under them on their way to the coal face every day of their lives underground.
They wouldn’t even let themselves be reminded of the labor they were tied to year after year until the mine boss told them that was that and they had no job to go to.
The pits swallowed them up and spit them out with a ten-hour shift between, but then it’d spit them out one last time, either when they were getting too old to swing a pickaxe fast enough, or else the coal had gone. Forgiving men are colliers, and when they come up into all that light, they don’t say anything even when their tracks are covered over with somebody’s driveway or garden path.
But there’s a wound to the soul beginning to make itself felt – like a bruise, which only deepens its terrible ache until it fills all the psyche. Spaces were for salving that ache and those bruises, so that the iron never entered the soul, and they could still find it in themselves to forgive.
What have you got now in its stead – lads working stacking supermarket shelves, never having to get black as a fireback, scraping their lower spine on shining wet unhewn coal, and yet they have no forgiveness in them – no camaraderie – just catch them drinking and its not difficult to feel the hate they feel for having the best of their youth taken away from them, just as the lads that used to work down the mine had theirs taken from them – their daylight too, but let them once get their feet cooling in some little brook that tippled and tripped across their path on their way home and they found something to take away the ills of the day, made their hearts swell again – back to its normal size after being shut up down there for so long.
Workers get in their cars and find more of what they’ve had all day – push and shove, waiting in queues to get home. No dangling their feet for them, no birdsong to whistle to as a shower of rain tip-taps against their hot faces – nothing of that sort left for them to make them smile and be glad to be alive.
What we have lost
TW: But man works this way, he must eat and to eat he must earn, to earn he must work – whatever his actions are called or what they represent.
DHL: But don’t you see that his labor is usurped, the best taken from it until it is mere activity, devoid of any worth – real worth.
TW: But he chooses to do this paid work, does he not?
DHL: Does he choose – is it not Hobson who chooses, there being no alternative but to do or starve – what choice is there in that?
TW: It is the way of the world – this world here and now, that is important, isn’t it?
DHL: That is so, but in making his own bed, man has gone ways that he would have been better not to take.
TW: The rational course, chosen by his intellect, you mean?
DHL: Exactly so, in using his intellect, and in so going against his blood, he has founded his own chains, which he is now powerless to escape or throw off. I believe the flesh to be wiser than the intellect – that we can go wrong in our minds, and do, but what our blood feels and believes is always true.
TW: But he chose this way and now he must follow, what is to be done?
DHL: You are talking from here, rather than listening to your flesh – to your blood, which will never err. Your judgment cannot concede anything to your heart – a thousand years – more – have seen to that, put paid to any hope of letting your intellect be subordinate to your blood.
TW: And you can?
DHL: When leaving thought behind and keeping to my own true self-belief, I can make my heart rule my head, or as we now say, work from a gut feeling. It is more than that, but now it is so subterranean that it feels somehow pagan and irrational to think this way and to feel this way. Feeling and thinking are now separated by rationality, the triumph of Greek civilization, to subvert feeling to logic, as if one mattered without the other, for is not that how logic works?
TW: Logic is what William of Occam conceived it to be; bound to the structures of the mind only, not to the structures of the mind, language and reality, as conceived by Aristotle.
DHL: Enough of this talk of the structures of the mind and their link or otherwise to reality and to language. There is another way – the logic, if we can call it such – I prefer not to use it, the blood instinct.
TW: What is that? How does it differ from rational, intellectual thought, unclouded by superstition – how?
DHL: Let us first start by demystifying what I am talking about and what I am not. To think of the blood instinct, as I will call it, and which is relationally opposite, or at least somewhere other than in the mind, has nothing to do with the mumbo-jumbo you seem to be suggesting – that is a derogatory schools of thought operating to remove the threat posed to Western modes of thinking.
Instead, be more aware of your feelings and then follow where they take you, retiring rationality for as long as you can bear it. As I have said, we have all of us been trained in this rather than that way of looking at the world, have been goaded and chided into thinking that this way is superior in its power to any other way, and yet look where it has led us – into total warfare, nation against nation, when in fact what we refer to as the nation-state, is really nothing more than rationality applied to the ruling of people – an umbrella of rationality that instructs and informs us of where our best interests lie – with at its heart, this logic, this god reason to inform.
Nation states are inanimate objects, but those we call statesmen and defer to as if they were the font of all knowledge where our best interests lie, but who are only really gatekeepers on paths of irrationality, posing as rational self-interest. We are deluded into thinking our interests coincide with theirs, when the reverse is the case – ours are subverted to their dominant ideologies, pouring out as pure reason.
TW: And how could anyone argue with that – is that what you are saying?
DHL: Exactly, when one frame of mind is so all pervasive, any other appears folly indeed, but again, I say look where it has brought us, stooping to what depths as man, so inclined, is capable of. Is not the exploitation of labor a thing so inhuman as to be inconceivable without the ubiquitous reason to deliver it to us an forms that are entirely and easily palatable, for us to swallow whole.
TW: Speaking of the exploitation of labor – is it so if wages commensurate with the amount of labor done are paid?
DHL: It sounds so, or at least I am reassured that you think it thus. How is human dignity laid low, almost made non-existent but by a payment in coin only redeemable at the bank of the hirer?
TW: It doesn’t have to be the same bank.
DHL: I am speaking metaphorically, paid in kind, if you prefer, will that do?
TW: But in what other way could it be paid?
DHL: My point entirely. It is in the contract drawn up between employee and employer that we assume the hired can be asked to do anything, and it will be done.
TW: But if he is being paid, and if he agreed to it in the first place, is it not fair?
DHL: You think so? Would you consider me a friend to ask you to go down that hole in the ground for ten hours every day and not come up for air, for sustenance of any kind – would you?
TW: I hope you would pay me for it.
DHL: Precisely, you are willing to put yourself through any indignity I care to name so long as you are paid in coinage, isn’t that true?
TW: It is.
DHL: But would you go down that hole voluntarily?
TW: Never.
DHL: Then why have I the right to ask you, and having once gained your consent, to force you, to go down it?
TW: Why because I have said I would, have agreed and signed a contract binding me to go down.
DHL: So it is that contract, drawn up by my hand, that is making you go down, is it not?
TW: Yes, my contractual obligations to you as my employer.
DHL: And how does that square with your dignity as a free man, a human being, the same as me? Do you feel in any way inferior to me in signing something that I have framed, for the express purpose of enslaving you in my name for the required number of hours paid at the hourly rate I set, not you, notice, but me, the employer.
TW: If I signed it, I must have thought it worth it, mustn’t I?
DHL: But is that true, don’t the straightened circumstances you and your loved ones find yourselves in make it expedient to agree. But before you answer that question, answer the one I asked earlier – about how going down a hole in the ground squares with your dignity as a human being – a man – can it be squared?
TW: Since you put it that way, I suppose it is beneath my dignity to go down that hole, particularly since you do not have to follow me. But what has this to do with blood instinct?
DHL: It has to do with that instinct being driven out by a manufactured need, shortages engineered and tailored to constrain you, my good friend, to agree to having to do something that compromises your dignity – to do something not even a dog would do. Shall I go on – shall I talk about how the principles of rationality and reason, with exploitation masquerading in those names, comes to taint all relationships and render love as something countable. Shall I go on?
TW: Do, please, I seem to have fallen to your argument, though I am surely with the majority in thinking your logic is flawed.
DHL: What you say is the best sign that you have been entirely won over by reason, leaving yourself vulnerable to its power, not being able to see that there could be a way that takes another, entirely different route to that taken by the lords of the rational – engineers and lawyers, and everyone that is subsumed beneath its flat, uniform surface.
TW: But how do the forces, if that is what you say they are – how do the forces of reason work against man, as you seem to be implying – how can that be – we know that since the philosophical side of man tends to the rational, that in acting rationally, he is acting in his own best interest – surely?
DHL: One man, I forget who it was now, said he could move the World with a lever and a fulcrum, if he had somewhere to stand. That is your problem – that you have nowhere to stand to attempt to put the World off course. In arguing for the predominance of rational thought over any other mode, let us call it, you are stuck in your own mould as a product of it – of rational man and what he has made of the world. You have no place to stand – even if you possessed a big enough lever, and that all important fulcrum from which to move the planet and everyone on it.
TW: What then can I argue, and what can you put to me that will convince me that what you say is right, for just as surely, if I have no standpoint, as you are saying, I cannot accept the truth of any argument you can put forward against what I believe in my heart of hearts to be true.
DHL: That is the mountain I have to climb – you are right, and it is one that many shrink from attempting to climb, being content finally not to rock the boat of normality.
Robert L. Fielding
Posted 17th May in:
