https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=wqH92S0mkEo
I was actually going to read something, if you don’t mind, from your book from page 12, which I which I liked quite a bit. It’s I suppose it’s funny in a black hearted sort of way. So. There are people today who think life was better in the past. They argue that there was not only a simplicity, tranquility, sociability and spirituality about life in the distant past that is being lost, but a virtue to this rose tinted nostalgia, please note, is generally confined to the wealthy. It is easier to wax alligators for the life of a peasant when you do not have to use a long drop toilet. Imagine that it is 1800 somewhere in Western Europe or Eastern North America. The family is gathering around the hearth in the simple timber framed house. Father reads aloud from the Bible while mother prepares to dish out a stew of beef and onions. The baby boy is being comforted by one of his sisters and the eldest lad is pouring water from a pitcher into the earth and where mugs on the table. His elder sister is feeding the horse in the stable outside. There is no noise of traffic. There are no drug dealers and neither dioxins nor radioactive fallout have been found in the cow’s milk. All is tranquil. A bird sings outside the window. I’m going to read the next section, too. But this is it’s a very interesting paragraph because it speaks to something that that I think has a dramatic origin to a mythological or archetypal origin, which is the idea of the simple life. Where everyone is living in harmony with nature and the depredations of culture have not yet manifested themselves. And it’s a it’s a it’s a it’s a it’s a it’s deeper than that as well, because it actually reflects a truth is that there is a purity about individual individuals that can be corrupted by society. But you have to take the reverse position as well. If you’re going to get things balanced, well, then you add a corrective to this, which is quite comical. Oh, please. Though this is one of the better off families in the village, Father’s scripture reading is interrupted by a bronchitic cough that presages the pneumonia that will kill him at 53, not helped by the wood smoke of the fire. Right. An indoor pollution is still a leading cause of mortality worldwide, often from the romantic hearth. He is lucky life expectancy, even in England, was less than 40 in 1800. The baby will die of the smallpox that is now causing him to cry. His sister will soon be the chattel of a drunken husband. The water the sun is pouring tastes of the cows that drink from the brook. And that would be if the water was good, I would say. Toothache tortures the mother. The neighbor’s lodger is getting the other girl pregnant in the hay shed even now, and her child will be sent to an orphanage. The stew is gray and grisly, yet meat is a rare change from gruel. There is no fruit or salad at this season. It is eaten with a wooden spoon from a wooden bowl. Candles cost too much. So firelight is all there is to see by. Nobody in the family has ever seen a play, painted a picture or heard a piano. School is a few years of dull Latin taught by a bigoted Martinette at the vicarage. Father visited the city once, but the travel cost him a week’s wages and the others have never traveled more than 15 miles from home. Each daughter owns two wool dresses, two linen shirts and one pair of shoes. Father’s jacket cost him a month’s wages, but is now infested by lice. The children sleep two to a bed on straw mattresses on the floor. As for the bird outside the window, tomorrow it would be trapped and eaten by the boy. Well, that’s I love that that section. It’s quite comical in a dark and tongue in cheek sort of way. But it’s a great corrective to the foolish romanticism that characterizes people’s longing for even the near past. No, it’s not unreasonable to say that the typical middle class person, I could say in North America or Europe, but increasingly. Anywhere in the world is wealthier by almost every measure than a billionaire was in 1920. Right. Absolutely. And, you know, particularly, I mean, I can’t remember who it was who said just, you know, just take dentistry. You know, it’s the it doesn’t matter how rich you were in 1800. It was no fun having a rotten tooth. And, you know, and that’s a relatively basic thing that we all can have access to today. So there’s no question that in material ways, our lives are so much better than those of our ancestors. And we tend to read Jane Austen and think, well, wouldn’t that have been fun? You know, but actually, those are books about an incredibly small elite who were rich enough to have candles and go to go to dances. Yes, and even in those circumstances, their social lives were restricted enough so that a single dance could be the social event of an entire year. Exactly. And you if you didn’t fall in love with the chinless officer who took your arm, you might be a widow for the rest of it. I mean, not a widow, a spinster for the rest of your life. So, you know, it was not much fun compared with today. We are so lucky. Everything is so good. And for me, and I think I make this well, actually, there’s an interesting story about this this point. I like to talk about how the big theme of human history is becoming more and more specialised in the things we produce and more and more diversified in the things we consume. So you actually, your jobs get narrower and narrower, more and more specialised. But your life gets richer and richer, you know, because you can consume, you know, movies and exotic foods and all these different things. That’s a great antithesis to the Marxist notion of alienation in labour, right? Because one of the things that’s attractive about Marxism, and it’s understandably attractive, there’s two things, I think one is the emphasis on the unpleasantness of inequality. But the other is the idea of alienation from the created product. But if you make the case that, well, you might be alienated from the created product with regards to the workplace because of specialisation, but in the two thirds of the hours that you’re spending of your life when you’re not working, your life is much more diverse than it would otherwise be. And I think that Covid has probably taught everyone that again, because we’re so isolated now and stuck at home and facing the restriction of all these things that we took for granted. The wonderful restaurants and… And by the way, we do sort of go backwards with respect to specialisation and exchange during bad recession. So in the Depression, a lot of American families, you know, found they were keeping a chicken and growing their own vegetables again. You know, you start to do more for yourself and have less to consume overall. Because if you only could consume what you produce, it would be a pretty miserable life. You had to make your own food, your own lighting, your own heat, you know, everything like that. And but by the way, there’s a really nice story about this concept, because I read it in a book called Second Nature by Haim Ofeck. It’s a beautiful book that I read around 20 years ago, and it’s laid out this point very nicely that we’ve become more and more specialised in how we produce, but more and more diversified in how we consume. And I wrote to him and said, look, this is a fantastic idea. Can you tell me how you came up with the idea and where you got it from and how it developed? And he wrote back and said, I got it from your book, The Origins of Virtue. Well, that’s a good compliment. But I don’t think it’s in my book. And he said, I guess maybe it’s not. I just, you know, but I thought I got it from your book. So that’s a lovely example of the division of labour in the production of ideas, if you like.