“surfeit makes us truly strangers to one another, and misery or scarcity makes enmity between us, and brings to the fore the smallness of man.... Economics really does matter.”
Do you have any favorite quotes yet from Weber’s book, or an online link handy?
Spirit, in the late 40s my Mom was washing clothes, in the dead of winter, in a river, in the mountains of Italyl. That's not that long ago.
I tell my parents still, I would have died at 16 from not wanting to live that life. They laugh heartily because they know that I know, even though I never actually lived it.
During that time, everyone did need one another, but it didn't make them better people or better Christians, when all is said and done. A very contracted nature and an abiding jealousy was part and parcel of the peasant class. And while I think jealousy is not a defect known only to peasants, to peasants who really are bright, energetic and hard workers but who can't climb out of that pit of misery because of economics, it gnarls them.
There is an Italian saying Patria e Pagnotta (a loaf of bread). It's sort of hard to translate, but it amounts to this: your fatherland is the land that can feed you.
The opposing side to all of this is that surfeit deadens us.
Earlier this week, I read something that said Satan's optimum view would look a lot like suburbia. Not because people who live in the suburbs are great sinners, it's rather the oppposite, they're kind of dead.
Milton Freidman (I think it was him, anyway) was chronicling the very early 18th Century and he said that a lot of the Puritans were not going to church, and instead were pretty bent on having a 'good time', if you know what I mean. So much so, that laws began to be enacted to get them to shape up. My kind of people: real, live, honest-to-goodness sinners. You know, the kind that neeed The Physician.
In the end, perhaps the scarcity/surfeit thing is a wash and as such not worth much in terms of providing a rememdy, if a rememdy is indeed needed.
Spirit, in the late 40s my Mom was washing clothes, in the dead of winter, in a river, in the mountains of Italyl. That's not that long ago.
I tell my parents still, I would have died at 16 from not wanting to live that life. They laugh heartily because they know that I know, even though I never actually lived it.
During that time, everyone did need one another, but it didn't make them better people or better Christians, when all is said and done. A very contracted nature and an abiding jealousy was part and parcel of the peasant class. And while I think jealousy is not a defect known only to peasants, to peasants who really are bright, energetic and hard workers but who can't climb out of that pit of misery because of economics, it gnarls them.
There is an Italian saying Patria e Pagnotta (a loaf of bread). It's sort of hard to translate, but it amounts to this: your fatherland is the land that can feed you.
The opposing side to all of this is that surfeit deadens us.
Earlier this week, I read something that said Satan's optimum view would look a lot like suburbia. Not because people who live in the suburbs are great sinners, it's rather the oppposite, they're kind of dead.
Milton Freidman (I think it was him, anyway) was chronicling the very early 18th Century and he said that a lot of the Puritans were not going to church, and instead were pretty bent on having a 'good time', if you know what I mean. So much so, that laws began to be enacted to get them to shape up. My kind of people: real, live, honest-to-goodness sinners. You know, the kind that neeed The Physician.
In the end, perhaps the scarcity/surfeit thing is a wash and as such not worth much in terms of providing a rememdy, if a rememdy is indeed needed.