The New York Times is visiting an issue that I came face to face with five years ago when I was teaching in Zhengzhou. Specifically, they are looking at the fact that college graduates, on average, early barely more than migrant laborers. Incidentally, the major arguments of their four commentators: a manufacturing heavy, export-oriented market; test-oriented, one-size-fits-all education; and a large gap between the top schools and the rest. One factor mentioned that I had not thought of is the demographic shift that is causing lots of older workers to retire from the blue-collar sector, leading to more openings there than in the thin management class. Altogether, I am rather impressed by my own analysis of five years ago (if not my spelling), although I think I focused somewhat too heavily on the political prospects of the cell-phone proletarians.
My perspective five years on is largely on the overwhelming importance of demographics and regional differentiation. My students observed to me back then that there were good jobs available in the west of China, which was and is the major growth area. Nonetheless, the tendency was for them to either remain in Zhengzhou, or to go to coastal cities like Shenzhen, Ningbo, Shanghai, Beijing and Tianjin. These are precisely the areas that have the oldest and most long-standing development, and are therefore faced with a glut of skilled labor while simultaneously facing the retirement of their blue-collar workforce. The relative unwillingness of young workers to go West is continuing to feed the sharp distinction between Xinjiang, where opportunities abound, and the coast, where they are limited.
At the same time, the population bulge caused by the post-war baby boom and subsequent sharp reduction of births under the One Child Policy means that there are substantial generational effects visible in the job market. The lack of managerial opportunity is to some degree a reflection of China's policy decision to continue to promote manufacturing. But the small income gap between educated and uneducated labor is large part a reflection of the growing demand for blue-collar workers caused by the retirement of large numbers of the sixties and seventies generations, who found work when heavy industry was the overwhelming emphasis of government policy.
It seems to me that many of America's economic problems are similar generation effects. It is a known issue that the differed benefits offered to labor unions in the fifties and sixties are part of the failure of American manufacturing as these commitments come to term. It is also worth noting that many issues came to a political head in America when they affected the white-collar middle class. In America, as elsewhere, the decline of manufacturing (and its outsourcing) led to a movement to white-collar labor, construction and service; it was only when Americans discovered that low-skill white-collar labor could be outsourced that it began to be a political issue.
I have grown too cautious to make predictions, only observations. Nonetheless, fun to revisit an old concern of mine.
Thursday, December 9
Thursday, November 18
Drugs, food, memes and civilazation
It has been nearly four years since I posted. I find that my intellectual center has shifted, and I have substantially less free time than in the previous two most intensive periods of posting, and yet I have, if anything, a greater need for a journal of my musings, if only for my own future reference. We'll see if there is any regularity here.
I recall one of the more striking epiphanies I had with aid from some poisonous mushrooms. It occurred to me that everyone was on drugs of some sort, and that there was a fundamental disconnect between them. Smokers exist in a different social and psychological mien than drinkers or potheads or whatever. The social, cultural, chemical aspects all reinforce each other in promoting a line of distinction between groups, as if there were separate tribes. Under the guidance of my mycological ally, these cultural distinctions condensed into almost visible streams of differing viscosity, spatial dimensions and currents. Drugs promote different paces of motion, types of thought and inclinations toward socialization. These interact and clash with the fluid norms and fixed rules of other overlapping social mien to create cultural pools.
Smokers exhibit gravitational attraction toward each other by the simple acts of bumming a cigarette or asking for a light. At the same time, they are actively repelled by non-smokers, who (in current social formations) are dominant in their demands for clean airspace. These attractions-repulsions push smokers to clumps on the perimeter of social and architectural spaces, which they cohabit - in their capacity as students, workers, tenants or whatever - with people who do not belong to their chemical tribe. There are reasons to believe that their chemical bonds are stronger descriptors of their nature than their occupational containers. Smokers are one type of reagent, they react in known ways to their bonding-pair object (cigarettes) that are modified to only a limited extent by the type of container they are in. Smoker and non-smoker engineers are silver nitrate and sodium hydroxide. The fact that they are both engineers is like saying the two chemicals are both in Erlenmeyer flasks. Smoker lawyers are silver nitrate in pipettes, the same compound in another container. Mixing smokers and non-smokers yields a brown precipitate, a clump of ash and tarry lungs that clumps on the sidewalk beside the exits.
Without going into further description of other drug tribes, suffice to say that this was mere background to my epiphany of this morning, aided by my new drug of choice (coffee). Incidentally, there are numerous studies calling the enlightenment, democracy, capitalism, modernity at large as the distinctive cultural formations of coffee. It strikes me that this is particularly true. The difference between coffee and tea cultures is perhaps more subtle than The Devil's Cup would have it, but there are differences nonetheless. Are the various caffeinated beverages subcultures of the same tribe? Admixtures of different elasticities? The shared chemical basis of coffee, tea, chocolate, guarana, yerba mate etc implies a history of different contexts for human-drug interaction, but also implies that there is something inherent in the human-plant symbiosis that demands stimulants (especially when we consider that adding ma huang [i.e. ephedrine] and coca implicates much of the subtropical and tropical world in supplying us with uppers). This demands further meditation.
Nonetheless, three further thoughts for future reference. First, the interaction between these substances and human society that produces the most notable cultural forms appear to occur when borders are crossed. In their native setting (if that can be constructed as such), coffee, tea et al do not stand out as rabble-rousers, catalysts or enemies of the state. It is when they encounter an unfamiliar cultural formation that you get things like cafes provoking the English Civil war and capitalism, or cocaine fueling the paradoxical 80s. This effect is strengthened by attempts at control and prohibition.
Second, food is not distinct from these impulses. Rice, corn, even avacados imply certain cultural formations when combined with certain social orders. These lead to a certain mutual dependance where it is hard to ascertain whether corn is controlling us or we are controlling corn (if that is even a meaningful distinction, debt to Michael Pollan as always). The critical factor here is that food and drugs are not merely memes that affect society at the intellectual/social level, comparatively confined to these levels and describable as infections of the social body. Because we ingest them, food and drugs are infections on the physical human body as well, in fact they often manifest as things we would more normally call diseases: everything from lung cancer to diabetes to beri-beri is implicated in the diet-culture-nature-nurture realm of drug interactions.
This is getting hard to keep clean, but if we think of food/drugs as infections on the social and physical body, it becomes hard to disentangle. Where is agency? Where is causation? Nonetheless, it is relatively clear that broad swaths of phenomena appear to be infectious through non-traditional disease vectors. We are used to thinking of infectious diseases as things like smallpox or malaria: transmitted human to human or some other host to human, the proximate vector being biological: a virus, bacterium, fungus, prion or whatever. But these infections have other determining factors - certain types of sociability and spatial factors, as well as genetics are associated with the susceptibility to (and therefore transmission patterns of) AIDS, chicken pox and malaria, to name a few. Can't we consider diabetes in a similar light? It has genetic factors for sure, but susceptibility is also closely associated with social patterns, and its proximate vector of transmission is chemical (sugar). Under this formulation, we should consider disease to be more than a physical disorder, it is also a social disorder, and an ecological disorder.
I recall one of the more striking epiphanies I had with aid from some poisonous mushrooms. It occurred to me that everyone was on drugs of some sort, and that there was a fundamental disconnect between them. Smokers exist in a different social and psychological mien than drinkers or potheads or whatever. The social, cultural, chemical aspects all reinforce each other in promoting a line of distinction between groups, as if there were separate tribes. Under the guidance of my mycological ally, these cultural distinctions condensed into almost visible streams of differing viscosity, spatial dimensions and currents. Drugs promote different paces of motion, types of thought and inclinations toward socialization. These interact and clash with the fluid norms and fixed rules of other overlapping social mien to create cultural pools.
Smokers exhibit gravitational attraction toward each other by the simple acts of bumming a cigarette or asking for a light. At the same time, they are actively repelled by non-smokers, who (in current social formations) are dominant in their demands for clean airspace. These attractions-repulsions push smokers to clumps on the perimeter of social and architectural spaces, which they cohabit - in their capacity as students, workers, tenants or whatever - with people who do not belong to their chemical tribe. There are reasons to believe that their chemical bonds are stronger descriptors of their nature than their occupational containers. Smokers are one type of reagent, they react in known ways to their bonding-pair object (cigarettes) that are modified to only a limited extent by the type of container they are in. Smoker and non-smoker engineers are silver nitrate and sodium hydroxide. The fact that they are both engineers is like saying the two chemicals are both in Erlenmeyer flasks. Smoker lawyers are silver nitrate in pipettes, the same compound in another container. Mixing smokers and non-smokers yields a brown precipitate, a clump of ash and tarry lungs that clumps on the sidewalk beside the exits.
Without going into further description of other drug tribes, suffice to say that this was mere background to my epiphany of this morning, aided by my new drug of choice (coffee). Incidentally, there are numerous studies calling the enlightenment, democracy, capitalism, modernity at large as the distinctive cultural formations of coffee. It strikes me that this is particularly true. The difference between coffee and tea cultures is perhaps more subtle than The Devil's Cup would have it, but there are differences nonetheless. Are the various caffeinated beverages subcultures of the same tribe? Admixtures of different elasticities? The shared chemical basis of coffee, tea, chocolate, guarana, yerba mate etc implies a history of different contexts for human-drug interaction, but also implies that there is something inherent in the human-plant symbiosis that demands stimulants (especially when we consider that adding ma huang [i.e. ephedrine] and coca implicates much of the subtropical and tropical world in supplying us with uppers). This demands further meditation.
Nonetheless, three further thoughts for future reference. First, the interaction between these substances and human society that produces the most notable cultural forms appear to occur when borders are crossed. In their native setting (if that can be constructed as such), coffee, tea et al do not stand out as rabble-rousers, catalysts or enemies of the state. It is when they encounter an unfamiliar cultural formation that you get things like cafes provoking the English Civil war and capitalism, or cocaine fueling the paradoxical 80s. This effect is strengthened by attempts at control and prohibition.
Second, food is not distinct from these impulses. Rice, corn, even avacados imply certain cultural formations when combined with certain social orders. These lead to a certain mutual dependance where it is hard to ascertain whether corn is controlling us or we are controlling corn (if that is even a meaningful distinction, debt to Michael Pollan as always). The critical factor here is that food and drugs are not merely memes that affect society at the intellectual/social level, comparatively confined to these levels and describable as infections of the social body. Because we ingest them, food and drugs are infections on the physical human body as well, in fact they often manifest as things we would more normally call diseases: everything from lung cancer to diabetes to beri-beri is implicated in the diet-culture-nature-nurture realm of drug interactions.
This is getting hard to keep clean, but if we think of food/drugs as infections on the social and physical body, it becomes hard to disentangle. Where is agency? Where is causation? Nonetheless, it is relatively clear that broad swaths of phenomena appear to be infectious through non-traditional disease vectors. We are used to thinking of infectious diseases as things like smallpox or malaria: transmitted human to human or some other host to human, the proximate vector being biological: a virus, bacterium, fungus, prion or whatever. But these infections have other determining factors - certain types of sociability and spatial factors, as well as genetics are associated with the susceptibility to (and therefore transmission patterns of) AIDS, chicken pox and malaria, to name a few. Can't we consider diabetes in a similar light? It has genetic factors for sure, but susceptibility is also closely associated with social patterns, and its proximate vector of transmission is chemical (sugar). Under this formulation, we should consider disease to be more than a physical disorder, it is also a social disorder, and an ecological disorder.
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