Threads of a society

In my last few posts I've used mid-20^th-century Ireland as an example of a traditional society – say, one without electricity, cars or modern media – and the USA right now as an example of a modern one, but of course there were many types of each, and a spectrum in between. Americans in the 1950s, for example, generally had electricity, running water, and often had cars, radios and televisions, all things that many Irish in that decade did not. Food more often came from a store rather than the field or pasture, paid for with paycheques earned at recognisable jobs. A time-travelling American plopped down into 1950s America might struggle with some pop culture, but they could survive.

Yet Americans then had some things in common with Irish people at the same time; they spent more time with family and less staring at screens, had more friends and spent more time with them, knew more neighbours, volunteered more, trusted strangers more, gathered for political causes more … and were generally happier and healthier. Children played more games, roamed a greater area, read more, and were better-educated at a younger age.

How do we know all this, you ask? Academics and pollsters took detailed surveys of American life through the 20^th century -- “time diaries,” door-to-door questionnaires, phone polls and marketing research – in a way that more agrarian societies like Ireland did not. You don’t get many phone surveys where people have no phones, or market research when there’s little to market. America in the 1950s, then, presents a great test case – technological enough to be well-studied, traditional enough to tell us what we’ve lost.

In his 2000 book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam looked at hundreds of such surveys, and they chronicle the decline of “social capital” in America, the web of relationships that sustain a society. Bowling leagues, churches, political groups, fraternal organisations like Elk or Kiwanis all create and run on social capital, but so do friends carpool to work or who meet at a bar afterwards, families who have supper together, or neighbours who check on the old lady down the street.

Such people might give us encouragement or advice, a sympathetic ear or shoulder to cry on, a loan when we are short of money, a friend when we are sick. Humans are social animals, and   

live longer, feel better, have better health and more meaningful lives when we have such connections, and enough such threads weave together a civil society, a quilt that cushions the weight of the world.

We don’t often stop to thank, or even think about, the person who picks up rubbish on the street, the driver who lets us through, or the neighbours who keep an eye on our house when we’re away, but a decent life depends on such courtesies, no matter how much money we have. In places where we see them removed – say, in a violent ghetto – we immediately feel their absence.   

As a result, Americans today feel far less happiness than their grandparents did, trust others less, and know fewer people to trust in the first place, if survey responses are any guide. We see the results in the crime rate, the suicide rate, and the skyrocketing levels of mental illnesses that were once rare. We see it in the numbers of police, security guards and lawyers – their numbers stayed level relative to the population through the first two thirds of the 20^th century, and then doubled in the last third. They exist to enforce social rules and standards of trust that we can’t rely on anymore, or don’t feel like following ourselves. 

Happy Easter to everyone, and in a few days I'll write about what we don't need to admire in traditional societies. 

Irish childhoods, part 2

Recently I wrote about the memories of my elderly neighbours, and how they celebrated a childhood when people had no money, electricity, cars or conveniences. To many modern Westerners, including most of my fellow Americans, this sounds nuts.

Many Americans my age have never walked a day in their lives, much less barefoot, and they don’t need to check the weather, know any skills or directions, or check on their neighbours – they have little electronic devices that do those things for them. A life without smart phones, without electricity or tap water, without cars or malls, would seem like the most pitiable kind of misery, the condition you donate money to charities to lift people out of. Clearly all these people must be pranking us, or delusional about their own past.

To be sure, my Irish neighbours did grow up with a financial deprivation that most Americans can’t imagine. When we think of poverty, though, we think of inner cities or rural trailer parks, neighbourhoods of graffiti and boarded-up windows, rife with illiteracy, ignorance, addiction, abuse and violence. Yet the average Irish family in the mid-20th century made a fraction as much income as the average inner-city family today, and without the colour televisions or toys that modern families have. If they were that much poorer, you’d suppose, they must have been that much more miserable.

 Yet most of the Irish elders I’ve talked to show exactly the opposite – by all accounts they grew up in close, loving situations, learning self-reliance and responsibility at a young age, without the insecurities and neuroses of modern kids. They didn’t even consider themselves poor --- and they weren’t, in any way that matters.

I’ve heard the same thing, either in personal interviews or in writing, from people who grew up in the USA in the Depression, or on the African savanna, or on a homestead in the wilderness. Even Americans who grew up middle-class in the 1940s and 50s, while not living the extremes of the Burren, typically had much smaller homes and far fewer possessions than their grandchildren do, yet were better educated, healthier and happier than most Americans today.

Of course, most people look back on their childhood memories – even the lousy ones – with a sense of nostalgia, especially as we get old; as our future grows darker, the past looks ever-brighter. Obviously we should take any such memories well-salted, and look for solid evidence. As it happens, we can find quite a bit.

 Can we truly say how safe my elderly neighbours were in the Ireland of their youth? Such judgements depend in part on one’s own feelings, but we can compare some numbers; the entire country of Ireland, for example, had only seven murders in 1951, and in most other years that decade. Now that Ireland has been modernised, the murder rate has increased eight times, even when you factor in the population increase. In the USA, it’s 17 times higher, and in some inner-city neighbourhoods – the ones with more money and opportunity than the rural Irish had – it’s 430 times higher. We call both situations “poverty,” but they have little in common. (1)

Can we say how self-reliant people were? We can judge from their writings that small children then performed daily chores to keep their farm running, managed their own enterprises for pocket money, knew which wild plants and mushrooms were edible and poisonous, and took responsibility over all kinds of muscular tasks that would flummox most modern couch potatoes. That’s not to say that none of them ever got into any mischief, or that none of them took a misguided off-ramp or two along the road to adulthood. We can safely say, however, that not one of them spent their childhoods staring at a glowing rectangle, as generations of American children have.

Can we truly say how happy people were? Not entirely, of course, but we can say that suicides were rare compared to today; once Ireland was flooded with modern technology and Hollywood pop culture, the suicide rate rose almost 500 per cent – almost as high as in the USA. Earlier generations did not have our ability to satisfy every fleeting desires and indulge every impulse, and yet – or perhaps therefore – they did not seem burdened by the lack of meaning so many people feel these days. (2)

Can we say how educated children were? Perhaps -- in 1937, tens of thousands of school-papers from the 1930s were saved in Ireland’s national archives, many from one-room country schoolhouses, and they show children at least as literate as any in the USA today – and as cheerful as the elders they would one day become. Of course, schools and families varied then as now, but even at its poorest, Ireland’s illiteracy rate was only 14 per cent; that’s the same as the number of functional illiterates in the USA now, and we spend many times more money per pupil (3).

Nor was rural Ireland alone in this – the USA a century ago had one-room schoolhouses across the continent, the kind depicted in the books of Mark Twain or Laura Ingalls Wilder. Educators in the early 20th century surveyed schools in poor areas of Mississippi and Iowa, where most of the students also ran barefoot and the average family made less than in Zimbabwe today, and found grade-school students learning Shakespeare and Plutarch, agronomy and chemistry, French and Ancient Greek.

Don’t get me wrong; these times and places saw many injustices, only some of which have healed over time. I’m not saying we should emulate them in every way, even if we could. Nor am I saying their lives were better because of their poverty, for deprivation itself does not necessarily make people better – look at any poor neighbourhood in the USA now and see the quality of people’s lives. I am suggesting that people in Ireland generations ago managed to maintain a society that performed better than ours – that was as literate and educated, as healthy, and far more durable and far less energy-intensive – despite their poverty.

Today many people in my native USA are struggling; many of my friends are working several jobs to afford what they consider a decent life, a life with the same house, car and electronic pastimes as their more successful peers. I understand their decisions – they want to create the best life for their children, and to escape the debt that locks in so many of my generation.

Still, everyone thinks that to be happier in life, or to educate their children better, or be healthier, the solution is to get just a bit more money, so they pursue that goal more and more frantically, as they get older and sicker. I find it useful, and heartening, to realise that there were people who accomplished much of what I want in life, with almost nothing. Over the next few weeks, I’ll look more at what they did right.

1 - (CDC report, “Increase in Suicide in the United States, 1999–2014” - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db241.htm) (Homicide; (Source: 1951-1986 Crime and Punishment in Ireland: A Statistical Sourcebook; Annual Reports of An Garda Síochána 1991-2002; Central Statistics Office Garda Recorded Crime Statistics 2003-2006 using ICCS; Central Statistics Office Headline Crime Statistics Quarter 4 2007) http://www.irishsalem.com/irish-controversies/crime-in-ireland/wasireland-alwaysviolent-jun11.php 1951 - 7 / 3 million = 0.23 per 100,000 2007 – 84 / 4.5 million = 1.87 per 100,000 .23 / 1.867 = 8.087

2 - Suicide rate, Ireland 1950 – 76 (pop 2,963,000) – 29.63/100K – 2.56 per 100,000 2009 – 556 (pop. 4,595,000) – 45.95/100K – 12.1 per 100,000 Increase of 4.7 times. Irish suicide rate has increased almost 500 per cent.

3 -  (Irish Education: Its History and Structure; By John Coolahan, p. 8, citing 1901 census)
 “US Illiteracy Rate Hasn’t Changed in 10 Years,” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/06/illiteracy-rate_n_3880355.html 

Changing generations

I also saw another neighbour – we’ll call her Ava -- who rides her bike back and forth to the village, rather than pay for a car. We can see each other’s houses in the distance but our paths only cross every few weeks, so when they do we catch up on our lives and relatives.

“It’s amazing the number of people around here who have died lately,” Ava said. “Mick went into the canal last year, Tommy up the road died of cancer, my cousin across the canal died last month, and his wife died a few weeks later – they’d spent their lives together, and she didn’t want to live without him.”

“I knew your man died,” I said – locals say “your man” to mean “the man.” “I didn’t know he was your cousin – I’m sorry.” It wasn’t that much of a surprise to me, though – everyone here is related.

“You’re seeing the closing days of this area,” she said. “All the people are dying off, and they are the last ones who remember the place as it was.”

It was true – a lot of people had died lately. It reminded me of something Dmitri Orlov had said, that after his country had been through a time of stress he looked at his high school class photo, and realised that many of them were dead. Each death was isolated and natural, and didn’t seem part of a larger pattern. But you look back one day and see that a whole generation was gone.

Of course, in his case, his country had been through a time of collapse, and many of the deaths were from stress, drinking, drugs or other problems. Across my part of the USA, I can see this happening among the class that one writer calls the Unneccessariat, as people are increasingly demoralised. Here, it’s not quite the same – most of our neighbours were elderly, and it was their time. But the death and transformation of a community still creeps up on you.

“Won’t their children or grandchildren move in?” I asked. “That’s what most people here do.” All along the canal, family farms have been broken into lots, with a home for each of the children.

“It won’t be the same with the younger people,” she said. “The whole country’s changed. When I was a child, no one had anything here, and you wouldn’t believe how happy people were. But since the boom, people have actually been poorer than before, and a lot less happy.”

“Most people wouldn’t say they were poorer,” I asked. “Back then they just had a few possessions, and now they have big televisions and video games and such.”

“I think that’s what’s making them unhappy,” she said.

Going native

My neighbour's car -- he keeps them spotless in his barn, next to the cows.

Between our house and the nearby village lies three kilometres of canal, mostly on one single-lane country road. I don’t mean one lane each way; I mean one lane, with no shoulders and sharply bounded on either side. On one side a steep drop sends your car straight into the 300-year-old canal, and crosses along the canal attest to the memory of neighbours who plunged in over the years.

On the other side the road is walled in by a dense hedgerow, enclosing the cows and sheep that graze the bog-lands. Between them the road is only slightly wider than one car, so when one car meets another coming toward it, someone has to back off into the nearest driveway.

Locals know the etiquette – the westward-travelling car pulls over, usually flashing their lights at night, and then the cars pass each other. It seems a cumbersome way to drive to town, with people having to get out of each other’s way occasionally, but it also means that the road takes up no more space than it needs to. It’s no wider than an American supermarket aisle, and when I return to my country and see American roads – at least two lanes across, with a lane-sized shoulder on each side – they look like vast rivers of asphalt taking up valuable growing space.

***

I jog along this road when I can, and it gives me a chance to stop and see neighbours. This morning I met a local farmer – we’ll call him Liam – who raises cows down the road.

“How you keeping, Liam?” I said in the local way, stopping on the road and facing him across the hedgerow. After living here a short time I picked up the local turns of phrase, and they are so natural now that when I visit my family back in the USA I get strange looks.  

“Keeping well,” he said, “but the days have been soft.” He means that it’s rained a lot, which is true – we live in the Bog of Allen, and after a week of rain the cows are covered in mud and the fields have become archipelagos of grass in the middle of rippling puddles.

“It’s desperate, hasn’t it?” I agreed. “I’m just jogging during the pause in the rain, but those clouds might send me home again. What brings you out here?”

“I have a calf that keeps escaping,” he said. “I border my fields with hedgerows, dikes and barbed wire, and he gets out anyway.” By “dike,” by the way, locals don’t mean a wall to keep out water, but rather the opposite – a culvert or ditch for water to drain away, and to stop animals from crossing.

“He comes into this field – the neighbour’s field, where he shouldn’t be – and leaves no tracks in the mud,” Liam said, shaking his head. “He must be tunnelling somewhere.”

 “I heard a farmer say that he had barbed wire and a dike, and his sheep still got out,” I told him. “But there was a point where the ground dipped a bit, and the sheep snuck under the barbed wire, and rolled their bodies across the dike …”

“So they don’t leave any tracks,” Liam finished. “Clever.”

“They’re not rocket scientists, sheep, but even they can surprise you,” I said.

“They can be smarter than we realise,” Liam said. “Just about the things that are important to them.”

Locals have been grazing sheep on the Curragh commons supposedly since Roman times.