History and individual initiative - December 28, 2011

I didn't walk Anya at all today—Ingrid walked her this morning after I left for work, and then took her to the dog park this afternoon, after which she passed out. My time outside today was going to and from work, like it was in the time before Anya. I drove to work, drove home, and then got a ride back in the late afternoon with my son, and then we both took the bus back and walked the four blocks from the co-op.

In any of the processes we use to shield us from the outdoors, we like to think about our individual decisions, but so much of what we do is dependent upon—and linked together with—a huge mass of people. Taking the bus, this is obvious: the system exists because of all these other people filling up the #10 at 6 pm. Driving myself around in the car it's not so obvious, which allows an odd kind of distortion in political thinking about transportation. Elizabeth Warren did an excellent job of puncturing that kind of thinking in her much-quoted campaign speech:


So does this really deny the Jack London mystique: individuals using their initiative to save themselves and maybe their loved ones if they have any, from the brutal elements? Is this an either-or thing? I don't think Warren is saying that about our economy. And in looking at humans and the elements, it's also a two-handed approach: we take a great deal of knowledge, and a lot of collected-together work by individuals, and we use it as individuals... and as co-operative units. I don't end up walking the dog every day. Most days I do, but sometimes that just isn't the best use of my time in the family.

When we talk about the history, as I've hesitatingly done in this first week of blogging, it's so tempting to try and say "this is how people did things back then." But of course each person had their own specific way of doing things. So I can generalize, and I'm sure I'll continue to do that, but where there is no mandated social norm, and no collective mass commercial or cultural imprint, there will be variations: people in 1870's Minnesota negotiated their own individual and household-wide little dance of firewood, coal, warm clothing and bedding, and body warmth.

When it comes to personal history, what we can do is go back to individual histories. By collecting enough of these, we can get a glimpse at the latitude people had to do that dance. We can see where external pressures dictated the limits of their response. Maybe that's a more productive way of looking at this.

Take, for example, Laura Ingalls Wilder's childhood.