Dickens’ England

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) is one of the most popular novelists in the English language—albeit these days that means films made of his books. He is not one of my favorites, although I think highly of Bleak House. “Bleak” is a good word for describing Dickens’ work. The dreary settings and the unjust society in which its polarized characters function—too evil, too pure—are perhaps associated with the city of London, but what Dickens reflected was the impact on an agricultural society of the industrial revolution.

The industrial revolution, in turn, reflects a major urbanization of a population and its concentrated employment in factories where machines are initially used, then become the center, then, eventually, displace people. And where machines could not be employed yet, the social methods of forcing people into factories took place nonetheless—as in the so-called “sweated industries” like making matchboxes and lace, industries in which people were paid by the piece.

Just 20 percent of England’s population lived in towns when the first British census was taken in 1801. By 1851, the proportion had rises to 51 percent, by 1881 66.7 percent. The United States lagged far behind England. Here census dates come from the year before: 1800 - 6.1 percent; 1850 - 15.3, 1880 - 39.6 percent.

The unregulated—call it phenomenon—of industrialization brought with it all sorts of ills, not least extraordinarily long working days, child labor, and all sorts of labor unrest, usually put down by armed forces; some people were usually killed. Dickens’ life was also the time of the Luddites. Attempts by labor to unionize were resisted with the Combination Acts (1799, 1800); they should’ve been called “Against Combination Acts”; these were repealed in 1824 as reform began to take hold. Then unionization expanded.

Very slow but eventually effective public reactions to industrialization gradually caused the evolution of the welfare state—which is, viewed in perspective, another concomitant of industrialization, call it its human face.

If now political efforts are mounting to roll back the welfare state in late-comer United States, it may be a symptom of the fact that industrialization is beginning to weaken—at least so far as people are involved, as producers. People are still needed as consumers, to be sure, but today’s reformers, who want to roll back all of the defenses societies have mounted against untrammeled industrialization, seem unaware that if vast masses of consumers are weakened, the machines will also, ultimately, have to stop producing.

Two hundred years of industrialization—now beginning a slow fade. Boy, oh, boy. It will take quite a long while yet before we’re all back to farming—or herding. The smart family will settle in Navajo land and there learn the herding life over several generations before the industrial sun finally sets for good.

My Kind of Story

The following brief legend comes from Tony Hillerman’s The Waiting Wind. The speaker is Joe Leaphorn, retired Lieutenant of the Navajo Tribal Police. He is talking to Bernadette Manuelito, a young policewoman in the same organization. Herewith the legend:

         Leaphorn nodded. “I know,” he said. “When I was a lot younger, an old Zuñi told me their legend… Two of their young hunters rescued a dragonfly stuck in the mud. It gave them the usual wishes you get in these stories. One wished to be the smartest man in the world. The dragonfly said, ‘So you shall be.’ But the second hunter wanted to be smarter than the smartest man in the world.”
         On this Leaphorn paused, partly for effect, partly to see if Bernie had already heard a version of this, and partly to see if she had cheered up enough to be listening. She was listening.
          “So dragonfly converted the second hunter into a woman,” Bernie said, laughing and nodding at Leaphorn.

Wither Small Tenacious Cultures?

I’m reading the novels of Tony Hillerman again, and after the lapse of two decades and counting, they are both fresh and yet familiar. Yet so much has changed! And a thought that I had then now produces a different answer. Back then I viewed the Navajo life and thought that it preserved a genuine cultural deposit and lasting values—but it seemed to me that the relentless advance of modernity would sooner or later inevitably swallow it—despite the fact that large numbers (these days approaching 300,000 people) still lived a more or less traditional herding life in an arid and thinly populated region of the West. Today I wonder.

I wonder because the sunset of the fossil-energy age has become more and more visible, and as it approaches very great changes loom ahead. We remain altogether blind to it collectively, but in another hundred years the fossil sun will set in earnest with unimaginable changes to a peoples staring at computer screens today. With every increase in the price of energy, with every global conflict, with consequent disorders spreading, the Navajo way of life will become ever more adaptive and ours ever more threatened. Hence today I’m far from certain that the vast destructive spread of modernity will actually swallow up the Navajo. If anything they will become ever more ignored. Their way of life produces genuine values—while ours sucks the life right out of what still feebly remains of our pre-industrial traditions. And they will survive—changed but, once more living in harmony with the land and the mountains, better prepared.

Hillerman provides a painless way to obtain knowledge and appreciation of the sophistication and depth of the Navajo culture. It’s a whole lot more complex than reading a few web pages suggests. It must be seen from the inside, not through the distorted and facile lens of our sociology. I recommend his first three especially, The Blessing Way, The Dance Hall of the Dead, and Listening Woman. The early novels featuring Chee are also good. The quality gradually drops off as Hillerman, too, succumbed to the wasting literary disease of overproduction that plagues our times.

Strange to imagine how brief modernity will seem to generations in the future as they look up at a bright and star-filled sky again—star-filled because the harsh light of technical civilization will have dimmed.