Thank you for this post. It really hit home this morning after reading about a toddler’s death in the local newspaper. A mother murdered her toddler son. Bludgeoned him to death. Reading further on, two of the mother’s family members are in prison for murdering family members. The cycle went on. We as a country can do so much better. We submit to the will of the wealthy oligarchs of this country and fail to see but the crumbs we are offered.
This is a wonderful post, and it has given me a lot to think about. I have read it three times already today, and I get more meaning from the post each time I read it. This post also shows your kind and caring character.
Parents care. Parents cannot effectively care for their children when they are forced to compete for resources which causes stress, anxiety, and guilt. Parents will do anything for their children. In America, this often translates into a culture of overwork.
My father grew up poor, and paid for all of his clothes starting at age 12. He was able to transcend the poor, working, and middle classes, and was well established in the upper middle class by the time I was born, in 1987. At my grandmother's funeral (his mother's), people were stating that they wished they were as industrious as my father when they were kids! The sad part about it is that my father died before he was 60, and before his mother. It comes at a huge price.
Overwork kills. Ironically, Stanford University, which has a culture of overwork, produces interesting research on this subject. Jeffrey Pfeffer writes about this extensively in his book "Dying for a Paycheck". He estimates that the fifth leading cause of death is due to overwork in the United States, along with 5 to 8 percent of medical costs being attributed to overwork. Another Stanford professor, John Pencavel, states in the journal article, "The Productivity of Working Hours" [1], that workers essentially lose their productive capabilities when they work past 55 hours per week. For example, if an individual plans on working 60 hours per week, they will work about 9% slower, which causes their output to be the same as if they worked 55 hours per week. This is borne from data out of data from a British bomb factory from WWI. In [1], figures 1 and 2 (page 2060 and 2061) this demonstrates, across four cohorts, doing different types of tasks, that work output plateaus at approximately 48 hours/week. Work output from a 70 hour work week was actually slightly lower than a 48 hour work week. Remember that these individuals were extremely motivated due to war, and that they were doing skilled work (but not creative work) so this is likely an upper limit to human capacity. Also, there is a lot of interesting data published about working conditions from the British Health of Munition Workers Committee.
With respect to your book, "Our Malady": My father, who had a pre-existing heart condition, died from preventable medical errors. The third leading cause of death in the United States is believed to be preventable medical errors [2]. The study I cite has been validated repeatedly by several peer-reviewed research papers. The reason why this fact is never explicitly stated in the United States is because deaths are reported differently here compared to other developed countries. Information about deaths attributed to medical errors, whether they are amenable medical errors or not amenable medical errors, are omitted on death certificates. This forces researchers to have to make estimates about these deaths.
Also, you may want to check out the research published on HealthData.org, from the IMHE group, which ironically does the IMHE coronavirus estimates and projections. They are a world-renowned team from the University of Washington. The peer-reviewed journal articles are solid. You may be particularly interested in "Forecasting life expectancy, years of life lost, and all-cause and cause-specific mortality for 250 causes of death: reference and alternative scenarios for 2016–40 for 195 countries and territories using data from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016" [3], since you like to look into the future and the various possibilities that it brings. You will find other fascinating articles from the IMHE from their special edition journals regarding the Global Burden of Disease [4]. You also have to try out the Global Burden of Disease visualization tool, which allows you to compare causes of death, disability, and also life expectancy, in the past, present and future (all in the same figure), by country [5].
Also, there is an extremely relevant book now, with the pandemic, that is from a Russian author, Nikolai Gogol. The book is called Dead Souls. There is a must-read review article about the book, from The Paris Review [6], called "America's Dead Souls", from Molly McGhee, that is quite revealing. In America, we really do have profound sadism. This book also relates to your description of our bodies as objects to profit off of in "Our Malady".
From "America's Dead Souls":
> "There is money to be made off the dead. Nikolai Gogol knew this when he wrote his masterpiece, Dead Souls, the story of a middle-aged man named Chichikov who buys dead serfs with the intention of mortgaging their souls for a profit. I chose to read this novel at the start of quarantine, when everyone else was reading War and Peace. I had already read War and Peace. It ruined my life. I wasn’t keen to have my life ruined again. I wanted some other grand, sweeping Russian epic to fill my time."
....
> "Sound logic, I thought. Surely, surrealism is safe. Except shortly after I picked up Dead Souls, my mother died a gruesome, absurd death, and I quickly found that the surrealism of Gogol was not so surreal after all. Chichikov knew more of life’s truths than I did: no matter how poor, there is money to be made from the dead. The poor are worth more dead than alive."
> "At the end of her life my mother made less than $10,000 a year. Suffering from debilitating depression while caring for her aging parents, she found herself chronically unemployed, undermedicated, and overstressed. In our final phone call, as we navigated her looming eviction, she asked me, rhetorically: “Why are these people harassing me? What good does it do them?” I didn’t have an answer for her. Or I did, but it felt obvious and stupid to say out loud. They wanted money. Everybody wants money. The people in power don’t care if we live or die, as long as they get paid. My last correspondence with my mom was a $2,500 money order (two and a half months of my pay), which I hoped would buy me time to cobble together a more sustainable plan."
...
> "Well, not all of it. I didn’t inherit the assets. She didn’t leave a will, which meant the state of Tennessee inherited her house. What I inherited was her debt."
...
> "I suddenly found myself looking down a double-barreled future of doom and despair. The hospital where my mother died claimed I owed them more than a quarter of a million dollars. Wells Fargo held me responsible for a house I no longer had legal claim to. Creditors and housing developers knew about my mom’s death before my extended family did. I was a few months away from turning twenty-six. Two days after she died they began calling me."
I have been experiencing this a lot with my own family. There were hints before, with talk of the utter requirement for private education, and aversion to taxes. But ever since Cambridge Analytica and Putin have entered the social calculation, there is a split in America between those who do and do not want to live in a democracy. It was surreal to not be able to discuss the pandemic with family, or have people refuse to wear masks around high-risk individuals. By refusing to discuss these things with your actual family, you are saying that your allegiance to your politics is more important. In doing that, these people are rejecting democracy. What's worse, is the absurd notion that you can simply "not discuss politics" and this means you get the benefits of democracy AND you get to be undemocratic. "Talking politics" is what democracy means- if you secretly work against your family and neighbor's rights to education, healthcare, or human rights, you don't have the right to demand a certain kind of treatment. It's truly strange to me that Americans expect to be treated with the kind of respect that comes from doing the work of a democracy while refusing to do that work. I'm referring to the "we can disagree and still be friends" meme, which demands people accept ulterior motives as politics, and treat people who aren't fully honest with them with total respect and friendship. But if you can't articulate your political position to someone you claim to care about, doesn't that make you dishonest? Or when we are expected to listen to lies, but replying with a fact-check is political and rude... so we're required to uphold a lie- either that we live in a democracy, or whatever propaganda is being pushed- and that is "freedom." Isn't that something, when "American freedom" is defined by our ability to hide from the truth and deceive each other. As someone who thinks there is nothing more important than truth and democracy, this is very hard to manage. Thank you Professor Snyder (so much) for articulating this.
This is a vital issue, and I appreciate your writing about it. I am the mother of two grown daughters and I have been keenly aware, over the years, that society pits us all against each other: "working" mothers against "stay-at-home" mothers, parents against each other, women and men laying blame on one another, parents vs. non-parents. Of course, there are valid reasons for some of this; however, I have come to the conclusion that the problem is in the overall structure of our society, and these divisions are misplaced and distract us from finding solutions. The family (however you define family--it doesn't matter)--is very much alone, and many are straining, however imperfectly and against daunting odds, to hold it all together and even to thrive. Thank you.
I would also like to add (to my very long comment) that I do not feel comfortable asking my family members who our president is. Since they "don't talk politics" I don't know what they feel or think about our country, and I have learned the lesson of asking (if it wasn't bad, they wouldn't be hiding it.). I think the only saving grace, is the renewed understanding- and appreciation for- the beauty of democracy. I acknowledge that 40 years of neoliberalism have brought about this aversion to democracy, and I'm hopeful that reps like AOC can harness the power of it again. I hope.
In my book, "It Takes the Whole Damn Village," I suggest that we close the classroom, a place of child apartheid. The rest of the book describes how the child will learn from intentional villages—the village learning environment—comprised of about 35 people, with about a fourth of them under the age of 18. Mothers and fathers can always be with or close by their youngest, until the child wanders off pursuing her curiosity for the rest of her life, with guidance from pathfinders, trackers, guides and beacons (teachers, tech monitors, assistant teachers and masters). Every child is fully integrated into daily life, with plenty of exposure to adults whom they know and whom their parents trust; every child has his own access device (phone, tablet, laptop), which he primarily uses to look up information when he's looking for it, due to the other stimuli he's exposed to. Except for the tech, this is how the following people grew up: Abraham Lincoln (50 weeks in the classroom); George Washington (apologetic for being unschooled); Benjamin Franklin (considered an outstanding intellectual in Europe, two years and three months of school); Thomas Edison (kicked out of school, likely because of autism). There are many others. The Industrial Revolution destroyed the village, but it's not too late to reclaim it. There's still a faint memory of village life, where all of us should be able to live.
To Kristina: "when "American freedom" is defined by our ability to hide from the truth and deceive each other". Yes, but you know Hannah Arendt once said to her friend, Karl Jaspers, "Although truth may well be the exact opposite of opinion, truth is nonetheless obliged, politically, in every democracy, to go about in the guise of opinion. In other words, the body politic cannot and ought not to decide what truth is, and the only way to protect the freedom to speak the truth is to protect the freedom to speak one's opinion".
In any case, sometimes I wonder why people believe it is so important to politicize everything. A democracy is not about a world in which everyone has to be talking about politics, it is about a civil society where there can exist state-free zones and spheres of life separate from the political order of the state. If I had a choice between being free to say whatever I wanted about my political opinions to friends and family and alienating them and not talking about politics, I would definitely choose the latter option. As Joseph Roth put it, "There is nothing more important than being a private person, than loving your wife, taking your children on your lap . . . Public affairs are only and ever shit, whether it’s the nation, politics, the newspaper, the swastika, or the future of democracy".
Finally, Emmanual Levinas: "A state in which the interpersonal relationship is impossible is a Totalitarian State"
thank you so much for your sensitive reflection about the importance of children. There is an old Talmudic maxim which says: "Don't call them your children, but your builders"; it is a play on a Hebrew word, bonayich, which depending upon how it is vowelized can mean 'children' or 'builders'. I think that the sense here is that our children will build the future. As Hannah Arendt said, "Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from ruin which, except by renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world"
I MUST edit my 2006 book, "It Takes the Whole Damn Village" and get it out into the world. I describe the village learning environment versus the classroom. I turn physical classrooms into apartments while keeping what's left of the rest of the school for community culture and small businesses. I reorganize society to more resemble the time of Abraham Lincoln, who saw only 50 weeks of classroom time, George Washington, who apologized for his lack of "education," and Thomas Edison who was kicked out of school (likely autistic). I hire more teachers and teachers' helpers. I end child apartheid, I build true and trustworthy community. It's available on Kindle, but I have much more to say, 15 years later. But still, I say, bottom line, "END CHILD APARTHEID!!"
Many young adult Americans do not want to have children or want only 1. We average 1.65 children per mother. This below the 2.1 children needed to maintain the population.
As my childless, mid-thirties children say,"American capitalism is not child friendly.Children cost too much, take too much time and if your child has a problem your life is ruined. Even if your child does nor graduate from college with a solid major like engineering, he will have a doggy, paycheck to paycheck life."
Thank you for this post. It really hit home this morning after reading about a toddler’s death in the local newspaper. A mother murdered her toddler son. Bludgeoned him to death. Reading further on, two of the mother’s family members are in prison for murdering family members. The cycle went on. We as a country can do so much better. We submit to the will of the wealthy oligarchs of this country and fail to see but the crumbs we are offered.
This is a wonderful post, and it has given me a lot to think about. I have read it three times already today, and I get more meaning from the post each time I read it. This post also shows your kind and caring character.
Parents care. Parents cannot effectively care for their children when they are forced to compete for resources which causes stress, anxiety, and guilt. Parents will do anything for their children. In America, this often translates into a culture of overwork.
My father grew up poor, and paid for all of his clothes starting at age 12. He was able to transcend the poor, working, and middle classes, and was well established in the upper middle class by the time I was born, in 1987. At my grandmother's funeral (his mother's), people were stating that they wished they were as industrious as my father when they were kids! The sad part about it is that my father died before he was 60, and before his mother. It comes at a huge price.
Overwork kills. Ironically, Stanford University, which has a culture of overwork, produces interesting research on this subject. Jeffrey Pfeffer writes about this extensively in his book "Dying for a Paycheck". He estimates that the fifth leading cause of death is due to overwork in the United States, along with 5 to 8 percent of medical costs being attributed to overwork. Another Stanford professor, John Pencavel, states in the journal article, "The Productivity of Working Hours" [1], that workers essentially lose their productive capabilities when they work past 55 hours per week. For example, if an individual plans on working 60 hours per week, they will work about 9% slower, which causes their output to be the same as if they worked 55 hours per week. This is borne from data out of data from a British bomb factory from WWI. In [1], figures 1 and 2 (page 2060 and 2061) this demonstrates, across four cohorts, doing different types of tasks, that work output plateaus at approximately 48 hours/week. Work output from a 70 hour work week was actually slightly lower than a 48 hour work week. Remember that these individuals were extremely motivated due to war, and that they were doing skilled work (but not creative work) so this is likely an upper limit to human capacity. Also, there is a lot of interesting data published about working conditions from the British Health of Munition Workers Committee.
With respect to your book, "Our Malady": My father, who had a pre-existing heart condition, died from preventable medical errors. The third leading cause of death in the United States is believed to be preventable medical errors [2]. The study I cite has been validated repeatedly by several peer-reviewed research papers. The reason why this fact is never explicitly stated in the United States is because deaths are reported differently here compared to other developed countries. Information about deaths attributed to medical errors, whether they are amenable medical errors or not amenable medical errors, are omitted on death certificates. This forces researchers to have to make estimates about these deaths.
Also, you may want to check out the research published on HealthData.org, from the IMHE group, which ironically does the IMHE coronavirus estimates and projections. They are a world-renowned team from the University of Washington. The peer-reviewed journal articles are solid. You may be particularly interested in "Forecasting life expectancy, years of life lost, and all-cause and cause-specific mortality for 250 causes of death: reference and alternative scenarios for 2016–40 for 195 countries and territories using data from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016" [3], since you like to look into the future and the various possibilities that it brings. You will find other fascinating articles from the IMHE from their special edition journals regarding the Global Burden of Disease [4]. You also have to try out the Global Burden of Disease visualization tool, which allows you to compare causes of death, disability, and also life expectancy, in the past, present and future (all in the same figure), by country [5].
Also, there is an extremely relevant book now, with the pandemic, that is from a Russian author, Nikolai Gogol. The book is called Dead Souls. There is a must-read review article about the book, from The Paris Review [6], called "America's Dead Souls", from Molly McGhee, that is quite revealing. In America, we really do have profound sadism. This book also relates to your description of our bodies as objects to profit off of in "Our Malady".
From "America's Dead Souls":
> "There is money to be made off the dead. Nikolai Gogol knew this when he wrote his masterpiece, Dead Souls, the story of a middle-aged man named Chichikov who buys dead serfs with the intention of mortgaging their souls for a profit. I chose to read this novel at the start of quarantine, when everyone else was reading War and Peace. I had already read War and Peace. It ruined my life. I wasn’t keen to have my life ruined again. I wanted some other grand, sweeping Russian epic to fill my time."
....
> "Sound logic, I thought. Surely, surrealism is safe. Except shortly after I picked up Dead Souls, my mother died a gruesome, absurd death, and I quickly found that the surrealism of Gogol was not so surreal after all. Chichikov knew more of life’s truths than I did: no matter how poor, there is money to be made from the dead. The poor are worth more dead than alive."
> "At the end of her life my mother made less than $10,000 a year. Suffering from debilitating depression while caring for her aging parents, she found herself chronically unemployed, undermedicated, and overstressed. In our final phone call, as we navigated her looming eviction, she asked me, rhetorically: “Why are these people harassing me? What good does it do them?” I didn’t have an answer for her. Or I did, but it felt obvious and stupid to say out loud. They wanted money. Everybody wants money. The people in power don’t care if we live or die, as long as they get paid. My last correspondence with my mom was a $2,500 money order (two and a half months of my pay), which I hoped would buy me time to cobble together a more sustainable plan."
...
> "Well, not all of it. I didn’t inherit the assets. She didn’t leave a will, which meant the state of Tennessee inherited her house. What I inherited was her debt."
...
> "I suddenly found myself looking down a double-barreled future of doom and despair. The hospital where my mother died claimed I owed them more than a quarter of a million dollars. Wells Fargo held me responsible for a house I no longer had legal claim to. Creditors and housing developers knew about my mom’s death before my extended family did. I was a few months away from turning twenty-six. Two days after she died they began calling me."
I hope this was insightful.
[1] "The Productivity of Working Hours": https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ecoj.12166
[2] "Medical error—the third leading cause of death in the US": https://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i2139/rapid-responses
[3] "Forecasting life expectancy, years of life lost, and all-cause and cause-specific mortality for 250 causes of death: reference and alternative scenarios for 2016–40 for 195 countries and territories using data from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016": http://www.healthdata.org/research-article/forecasting-life-expectancy-years-life-lost-and-all-cause-and-cause-specific
[4] The Lancet: Global Burden of Disease: https://www.thelancet.com/gbd#2019GBDIssue
[5] Global Burden of Disease: Visualization and Country Comparison Tool: https://vizhub.healthdata.org/gbd-compare/
[6] "America’s Dead Souls", from The Paris Review: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2021/05/17/americas-dead-souls/
Beautifully written
I have been experiencing this a lot with my own family. There were hints before, with talk of the utter requirement for private education, and aversion to taxes. But ever since Cambridge Analytica and Putin have entered the social calculation, there is a split in America between those who do and do not want to live in a democracy. It was surreal to not be able to discuss the pandemic with family, or have people refuse to wear masks around high-risk individuals. By refusing to discuss these things with your actual family, you are saying that your allegiance to your politics is more important. In doing that, these people are rejecting democracy. What's worse, is the absurd notion that you can simply "not discuss politics" and this means you get the benefits of democracy AND you get to be undemocratic. "Talking politics" is what democracy means- if you secretly work against your family and neighbor's rights to education, healthcare, or human rights, you don't have the right to demand a certain kind of treatment. It's truly strange to me that Americans expect to be treated with the kind of respect that comes from doing the work of a democracy while refusing to do that work. I'm referring to the "we can disagree and still be friends" meme, which demands people accept ulterior motives as politics, and treat people who aren't fully honest with them with total respect and friendship. But if you can't articulate your political position to someone you claim to care about, doesn't that make you dishonest? Or when we are expected to listen to lies, but replying with a fact-check is political and rude... so we're required to uphold a lie- either that we live in a democracy, or whatever propaganda is being pushed- and that is "freedom." Isn't that something, when "American freedom" is defined by our ability to hide from the truth and deceive each other. As someone who thinks there is nothing more important than truth and democracy, this is very hard to manage. Thank you Professor Snyder (so much) for articulating this.
This is a vital issue, and I appreciate your writing about it. I am the mother of two grown daughters and I have been keenly aware, over the years, that society pits us all against each other: "working" mothers against "stay-at-home" mothers, parents against each other, women and men laying blame on one another, parents vs. non-parents. Of course, there are valid reasons for some of this; however, I have come to the conclusion that the problem is in the overall structure of our society, and these divisions are misplaced and distract us from finding solutions. The family (however you define family--it doesn't matter)--is very much alone, and many are straining, however imperfectly and against daunting odds, to hold it all together and even to thrive. Thank you.
I would also like to add (to my very long comment) that I do not feel comfortable asking my family members who our president is. Since they "don't talk politics" I don't know what they feel or think about our country, and I have learned the lesson of asking (if it wasn't bad, they wouldn't be hiding it.). I think the only saving grace, is the renewed understanding- and appreciation for- the beauty of democracy. I acknowledge that 40 years of neoliberalism have brought about this aversion to democracy, and I'm hopeful that reps like AOC can harness the power of it again. I hope.
In my book, "It Takes the Whole Damn Village," I suggest that we close the classroom, a place of child apartheid. The rest of the book describes how the child will learn from intentional villages—the village learning environment—comprised of about 35 people, with about a fourth of them under the age of 18. Mothers and fathers can always be with or close by their youngest, until the child wanders off pursuing her curiosity for the rest of her life, with guidance from pathfinders, trackers, guides and beacons (teachers, tech monitors, assistant teachers and masters). Every child is fully integrated into daily life, with plenty of exposure to adults whom they know and whom their parents trust; every child has his own access device (phone, tablet, laptop), which he primarily uses to look up information when he's looking for it, due to the other stimuli he's exposed to. Except for the tech, this is how the following people grew up: Abraham Lincoln (50 weeks in the classroom); George Washington (apologetic for being unschooled); Benjamin Franklin (considered an outstanding intellectual in Europe, two years and three months of school); Thomas Edison (kicked out of school, likely because of autism). There are many others. The Industrial Revolution destroyed the village, but it's not too late to reclaim it. There's still a faint memory of village life, where all of us should be able to live.
To Kristina: "when "American freedom" is defined by our ability to hide from the truth and deceive each other". Yes, but you know Hannah Arendt once said to her friend, Karl Jaspers, "Although truth may well be the exact opposite of opinion, truth is nonetheless obliged, politically, in every democracy, to go about in the guise of opinion. In other words, the body politic cannot and ought not to decide what truth is, and the only way to protect the freedom to speak the truth is to protect the freedom to speak one's opinion".
In any case, sometimes I wonder why people believe it is so important to politicize everything. A democracy is not about a world in which everyone has to be talking about politics, it is about a civil society where there can exist state-free zones and spheres of life separate from the political order of the state. If I had a choice between being free to say whatever I wanted about my political opinions to friends and family and alienating them and not talking about politics, I would definitely choose the latter option. As Joseph Roth put it, "There is nothing more important than being a private person, than loving your wife, taking your children on your lap . . . Public affairs are only and ever shit, whether it’s the nation, politics, the newspaper, the swastika, or the future of democracy".
Finally, Emmanual Levinas: "A state in which the interpersonal relationship is impossible is a Totalitarian State"
Dear Timothy,
thank you so much for your sensitive reflection about the importance of children. There is an old Talmudic maxim which says: "Don't call them your children, but your builders"; it is a play on a Hebrew word, bonayich, which depending upon how it is vowelized can mean 'children' or 'builders'. I think that the sense here is that our children will build the future. As Hannah Arendt said, "Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from ruin which, except by renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world"
I MUST edit my 2006 book, "It Takes the Whole Damn Village" and get it out into the world. I describe the village learning environment versus the classroom. I turn physical classrooms into apartments while keeping what's left of the rest of the school for community culture and small businesses. I reorganize society to more resemble the time of Abraham Lincoln, who saw only 50 weeks of classroom time, George Washington, who apologized for his lack of "education," and Thomas Edison who was kicked out of school (likely autistic). I hire more teachers and teachers' helpers. I end child apartheid, I build true and trustworthy community. It's available on Kindle, but I have much more to say, 15 years later. But still, I say, bottom line, "END CHILD APARTHEID!!"
Many young adult Americans do not want to have children or want only 1. We average 1.65 children per mother. This below the 2.1 children needed to maintain the population.
As my childless, mid-thirties children say,"American capitalism is not child friendly.Children cost too much, take too much time and if your child has a problem your life is ruined. Even if your child does nor graduate from college with a solid major like engineering, he will have a doggy, paycheck to paycheck life."