What would people do for work? (22)

Two problems strike me right away:

1.     It wouldn’t work on a practical level. What would people do for work? How would they afford to buy goods from outside (like computers or olive oil or mechanical pencils)? Who would do all that farming? Etc.

2.     It would be claustrophobic, it would feel like a cult.

 

I present these not as objections to be resolved but as issues that are fundamental to the desire I have (that I think many of us have) to live differently—and to the more ambitious, more fantastical desire for a better world.

 

What do people do for work? At one level the answer is obvious: Some are teachers, some doctors, some farmers. We need plumbers and electricians, butchers, bakers, carpenters, tailors—maybe, if we take the local production thing far enough, blacksmiths, cobblers, joiners, and so on. But all of these jobs are internal to our town: they are hired by and paid by citizens of our town—which means they don’t bring in money from outside.

 

So presumably there are things like graphic designers and software engineers too, who work remotely or open offices in our town. (This already opens up potential contradictions with ideas we may have about the ethical validity of the larger economy, but let’s accept such compromises, for the time being at least.) But clearly, more labor has to go into food-production than in most places. And more labor has to go into everything else that we want to do on a smaller scale or with less automation: raking leaves, cleaning streets, transporting goods, making tools and fences and so on.

 

This presumably means we’d have to make do with less—less excess, less luxury, fewer amenities—and that makes sense, because less waste should mean less to waste. There is no principle so good, so effective, so honest as necessity. It is admirable not to waste because one is conscientious, but it is much better not to waste because one has nothing to waste, because one needs everything one has. To quote something I quoted long ago in these crumbs: “superfluous goods make life superfluous.”

 

But how much less is too much less? Because, for one thing, I think we are not prepared to do without everything—to never have olive oil again; to make our own fabric, our own paper, our own pens and pencils; to do entirely without microchips. And what if we want to travel outside our town, visit the city, buy a book published elsewhere? Complete isolation is no good. We would like to be a city on a hill perhaps, but not a city in a bubble.

 

Part of the point of thinking of a town is that it forces these questions to arise. If we take this town not necessarily exactly as I’ve described it but as an instantiation of any particular set of ideas about how a city ought to be run, food produced, buildings built, etc., then the questions raised here (how much would we have to do without—and are we prepared to do without that much, in the interests of sustainability, community, non-alienation?) is quite simply the question of whether that set of ideas is viable.