Zeitgeist Addendum.

High Medieval agriculture: tools and techniques

The God Delusion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgKLmxIu1y4&t=0s&list=WL&index=7

Metamorphosis

Kafka Against the Machine- “The Metamorphosis,”

Kafka’s depiction of the relationship of Gregor Samsa with his family in the Metamorphosis is one of obligation and is functionally a transactional one. Samsa is a reactive individual who has no core sense of self. This story is the struggle of a man against the expectations of his nuclear family and the business world. It is the years of life lost in paperwork and drudgery; it is the banality of the existential reality of the mass majority of those who have enough to not starve but never enough to be free. Freedom is some chimera, redefined and chased by thinker after thinker. Kafka is intellectually press-ganged into existentialism, though he does not write non-fiction, his themes gallop with the same impulses that were afoot in the early twentieth-century European literary scene. Kafka’s theme regarding the human condition in the Metamorphosis is that the state of the individual in the modern world is one of a social robot

The man, especially the young man in a familial setting, is expected to provide. In this case, he is providing for his sister and his parents rather than a wife and child. His boss is unforgiving, as we learn when he visits the home. Sales is not a forgiving profession, driven by market forces outside of the control of any single person. The salesman must sell or die, so when Gregor begins this transformation, which could be seen as a sickness, he dies in the eyes of the profession. The need to work for a firm is a modern one, driven by the need for personal capital to survive. But this is not a modern office job, but a job which takes him on the road. Most sales related professions have a commission based salary. If this is the case, Mr. Samsa is working on a knife-edge.

It is not our vices which repeatedly assail us, but our virtues. In Gregor Samsa we see the results of a person doing the right thing and being destroyed in the end as a result. Shame itself motivates Gregor to stay in the room, even as those in the house begin to shut him away as a horror. The call of his mother is half-reminding, half prodding- to slave on for the good of the tribe at the expense of his individual health. He is being driven by circumstances before he has even had time to properly take in the changed facts of his existence. All of his vital energy was spent on others with not a second’s self-reflection about the actual nature of his relations in his life. Gregor had been lurking in that confused space that we call the now, unable to collect the past nor to rise to any future. He has done everything society expects of him, and the expectations of that time are greater than what would be accepted in the present day.

Note that Gregor has worked for five years without a sick day. This is surely a stroke of luck, but of course, the larger institutions will be business as usual, even when this particular example of a Kafka-esque circumstance is presented to them. His boss shows up to berate him through the door. It is implied that the chief clerk could be harassing them for debts, and his sister Greta is crying. This is a lower middle-class life on the precipice of falling back into poverty. The chief gives him a speech, filled with high language and outrage, essentially saying he cannot believe that Gregor is now not working. He was entrusted a cash payment, conceivably for travel, and he is now barricaded behind a door, answering only yes or no. No one is trying to understand, except for his sister, who is lost in fearful sorrow. Her reasons likewise could be varied. We learn his work has been unsatisfactory. This is at-will employment before the term mattered, before the labor movement fought to the near death to ensure there were employment laws. The insect was forbidden from being depicted on the cover, which the initial publisher wanted to include.

In response to the queries of the chief clerk, Gregor indicates that he did not report this indisposition to the office since he wanted to get over it. His perceptions have changed. He wounds himself to escape the room, gripping the key in his mouth as he has lost both his hands and the use of opposable thumbs. The father is angry when Gregor scares the literal wind out of the chief, seeming to threaten his son with physical violence. Gregor is chased away by his father, only able to make a hissing noise in retaliation as he is pushed back by a stick. He has lost speech, and is now an animal, indeed, to call him an insect, usually an insult, is descriptive. He cannot communicate, something we take for granted and even assume is happening. Something is always lost in translation, but he has even lost the use of language. One suspects that giant insectoids do not have vocal cords. Yet again, this condition mirrors afflictions or different states of psychological health.

Treating the mentally ill or deformed by simply locking them away in private was practiced widely in eras where scant public health infrastructure was in place. People were kept hidden and fed scraps until they died, regarded as shameful things by their families. The difference here is the fall into madness or insect form, depending on the actuality of what is happening here. This was an era when mental health spas came into being, and he could at least hope for decent treatment. Bedlam was the fate of those who underwent this process in centuries past, a word which carried with it such dread that it has become a synonym for pandemonium and a literal hell.

Since Gregor cannot communicate, they assume he is stupid and do not attempt it. Gregor ruminates on the past, seeing lost chances for himself and his family. He secretly planned to send his sister to study music, a dream he could not fulfill himself. Even before becoming a massive beetle or roach, he was only living vicariously, which is common. This is Kafka exploring the lack of self which is inherent in the socially programmed people that populate modern societies. Whether it is the touch of documentarian or didactic in purpose for some grander point which Kafka has in mind, one can see the two approaches blended together seamlessly. Gregor only works. He has no wife, no child, and no real dreams of his own. He has no thought of doing great things, and cannot afford the time to self-reflect.

He was a drone in the societal structure and dominance system that is the nation state, and now he is an insect in an unfurnished room. He was an insect; he now is a literal insect. In reality, nothing has changed other than the physical actuality. His family loves him, but it is a distant love borne of wider property relations. It is not the single person who is alienated, but the family itself is alienation. The family which brings one into the world and that exists in ideal circumstances to usher one out of it if one can avoid being thrown into the dust-bin of a nursing home. Gregor never reads, he isn’t a hero, and he has none. He is a domesticated ball of potential. He practiced the value of respecting one’s elders but in the end, is left a decrepit insect in his home, pushed aside as he scares away renters. Those things that literary professionals would regard as traditional characterization are absent because the life of Gregor Samsa is a vacuum. He is so financially broke that he is broken as a person, and cannot find time for finer things in life. Mr. Samsa is a work-horse, and when he can no longer work due to turning into a beetle, the family he has been caring for reacts by renting space in the house and trying to shut him away. Opening their home has a distinct economic sense- they are living off of his money and need to make up the difference.

You can invert the biblical parable and say, ‘One cannot serve both God and Mammon unless Mammon is, in fact, God for the majority of the earth.' Money is key to this story, more so than any strange spiritually barren theme. Kafka, intentionally or not, has written something that socialists of the day would understand. Gregor dies, and the family moves on in a way that makes his various sacrifices a pointless endeavor. The premise and interactions that make up the Metamorphosis have an under-appreciated commentary on social relations and the effect of property on these relations. Money is at the center of the story, so the critique is not as hidden as one would initially suspect.

Sources:

http://www.openculture.com/2015/10/franz-kafka-says-the-insect-in-the-metamorphosis-should-never-be-drawn.html

October 21^st. 2015, Josh Jones

Working poverty can be a form of slavery. Vassalage, astronomy, mathematics, and monumental architecture all came with civilization. State religion and taxes follow

Current civilization is an economic phenomena and will fall with the economy leading to a break down into earlier social groupings. Causes of the fall were sown in the rise. Culture is an abstract concept.

It changes and adapts but not always well. Culture is an adaptation to the circumstances of its members. 

Reconstruction

Reconstruction

 400,000 Union dead; 300,000 Confederate dead. April 1^st 1865, Lee was outflanked by Grant West of the town, Richmond falls. The Appomattox surrender follows on April 9^th. Reconstruction begins, and lasts 12 years. The 13^th Amendment is ratified. Land ownership was seen as the key to having position in society. Northerners did not think the former slaves would work. Why not enjoy your first break for your unpaid hundreds of years of labor?

Southerners are said to have made a pact among themselves to not sell land to blacks. The slave system did not die with the war. Black Codes were promptly voted into law. Congress acted swiftly and tried to get rid of the Black Codes. Moderates were concerned with over-use of federal power. 14^th Amendment gives citizenship to people born in the US. Section 2 of the Amendment says that any state that denies rights will ave its representation reduced. 15^th Amendment passed and the right to vote given to all males over 21. South is seen as a constant problem.

'Reconciliation' movement begins. The North turns to the so called 'better class' in the South to solve problems. Memorial Day was set up to honor civil war veterans. Orations celebrated the heroism of veterans without reference to the ideas that started the war. A former union general called the eventual withdrawal from the south 'the birth of constitutionalism'. A former confederate general says that slavery had nothing to do with the war. The south wanted to be free enough to oppress others. Segregation is enshrined into law. Douglas tells his successors to agitate.