In Praise of Luddites

Posted on March 18, 2024March 20, 2024 by Peter Scott Cameron

A confession: while I was living in Toronto, Amazon announced that it was planning to begin using robots – these would travel along city sidewalks and make deliveries to individual addresses. It was rumoured that they would start very soon in the city. I couldn’t wait. I imagined messing with them in numerous ways: from simply blocking the robots’ paths to see if I could confuse them, to forcing them to drop off the curb into the line of an oncoming Toronto Transit bus. I took pleasure in picturing assaulting the things with a baseball bat if there were no constables around. I mentioned my thoughts to a friend, explaining that sidewalks were for people, not corporate interests, and every delivery robot represented jobs lost for individuals for whom unemployment in the capitalist economy is the great motivating terror. “Luddite!” my friend exclaimed.

Indeed. Thank you.

Luddite is a pejorative that we have deep affection for, using it, as we do, to insult those we love, and even relatives. It means our victims are resisting technology pointlessly, or they won’t do what we want them to do, such as wasting ten minutes of their short life watching a TikTok influencer with mauve hair explaining why we should use only organic asparagus butter. Luddites are people who are uselessly anti-progress, negative nay-sayers, inept at using technology, standing against the development of human productivity and well-being. They are a bit stupid, unruly and stubborn, a bit like donkeys, we think. However, we are wrong.

Our estimation of Luddites is incorrect, as is our assessment of donkeys. What we think about them is not who they were at all.

The Luddites, in fact, were intelligent and self-controlled craftspeople who correctly foresaw their lives altering for the worse as a result of disruptive technological change. They consciously chose to resist. They wanted to preserve a life that was home-based, autonomous, productive, satisfying, and even artistic.

The Luddites took their name from a “Ned Ludd,” a mythical figure in the Robin Hood tradition, who, legend has it, fought for justice in the same area of Nottinghamshire as had Robin and his merry band. “General” Ludd was said to be more or less up to the same devilry: protecting the poor and powerless from arbitrary exploitation, oppression and debasement, as carried out by the powers that be – Kings, Sheriffs, land owners, and the wealthy.(1)

They were mainly skilled weavers, combers, and dressers of wool, along with cotton trade artisans, who worked as independent craftspeople in their workshops in homes and cottages. As a group, they were described as highly disciplined, organized and effective. They were also well supported; despite bribes and threats, no one ever betrayed them to the authorities. Given that they operated merely for a fifteen month period in 1811 and 1812, in an area that included only parts of five counties around Nottinghamshire, it is remarkable how well they became known and how long they have been remembered.

The accurate view of them has been buried in propaganda propagated by authorities of the day, and perpetuated by the corporate and technology interests of our own time. Our current Techno-Nottingham Sheriffs would have us believe, in a form of false consciousness, that, for example, watching a video of nature online is the same as being in nature, or that we should be enchanted with the prospect of artificial intelligence.

Yet, despite all the efforts to discredit the Luddites and our use of their name as a deprecatory label, their call echos still, if mostly in the subconscious level. I believe we know that they were on to something. Their cause, in fact, is one that resonates in all of us: our humanity itself. They were not fighting against machinery; rather, they were fighting for what it means to be a human being.

But were they not violent, you ask? If violence can be committed against inanimate objects, I suppose that we have to say yes, they were. They attacked the new factories at night and destroyed the power looms and other machinery. In some cases they burned buildings, including factories and in a few cases, the homes of owners. However, there were no known instances of Luddites attacking or killing human beings. (There were instances of personal violence during the period, when members of the starving general population rebelled against the terrible conditions of the time but these killings were not carried out by followers of General Ludd.) Despite the actions of the Luddites being directed at machines and not people, authorities responded with everything they had, including shooting, imprisoning, transporting and executing people who they believed were part of the cause. In less than a year and a half, their resistance collapsed, although the broader unrest noted above continued because of the dreadful social conditions of the time.

On a most basic level, the Luddites were just protecting their livelihoods, but you could say they were prescient. They did not hate machinery as such. What they hated was the life that the new industrial age devices was bringing, and they saw that life with clarity. Workers in the new factories quickly became near-slaves, held to their work hour after hour, day after day, in dirty, hot, and dark conditions. Foremen walked the aisles with whips, to ensure absolute focus on the mind-numbing and body-damaging toil. Women were abused, sexually and otherwise, and children who did not perform up to standard were beaten. The prevailing industrial theory of the day – not so far removed from the ideas of some of our present titans of the gig economy (2) – was that one should pay enough so that workers would not starve, but not so much that they would not be hungry, literally speaking.

The result has been well documented: gruesome factory conditions, ghastly tenements, increasing crime and corruption, starvation, disease, addiction and alcoholism, demoralization and mental illness. Descriptions are nearly unbearable to read:

Not one father in a family of ten in the whole neighbourhood has other clothing than his working suit, and that is as bad and tattered as possible, many, indeed have no other covering for the night than these rags, and no bed, save a sack of
straw and shavings…

On the occasion of an inquest held Nov. 14th, 1843, by Mr. Carter, coroner for Surrey, upon the body of Ann Galway, aged 45 years, the newspapers related the following particulars concerning the deceased: she lived at No. 3 White Lion Court, Bermondsey Street, London, with her husband and a nineteen-year-old son in a little room, in which neither bedstead nor any other furniture was to be seen. She lay dead beside her son upon a heap of feathers which were scattered over her almost naked body, there being neither sheet nor coverlet. The feathers stuck so fast over the whole body that the physician could not examine the corpse until it was cleansed, and then found it starved and scarred from the bites of vermin. Part of the floor of the room was torn up, and the hole used by the family as a privy. (3)

Who would not want to resist this?

But of course, over time things did get better, at least in part of the world. In the Western world conditions did improve over the course of more than a century. Working conditions got better, wages grew, and health, housing and living circumstances improved to the point that it can be said that the industrial revolution resulted in a standard of living and personal longevity that was beyond the most fantastical imaginings of everyday humanity. And so, were the Luddites mistaken?

Not exactly. Such working conditions remain in many areas of the world: the clothing factories of Bangladesh, for example. Aside from that, the changes for the better were a result of decades and decades of struggle by workers, by unions of people, by individual humanitarian champions, by agencies and governments who saw the plight of people and responded to it with regulation and legislation. The Luddites were not wrong in what they were seeing.

However, we could say that the Luddites could not see the bigger picture, and so were shortsighted – that change is always disruptive, and technological improvement will ultimately lead to a betterment of life for humanity, if we give it time. But is this true?

I would respond: not necessarily. First, all technological improvement comes with a price tag. The automobile was instrumental in getting rid of the mountains of horse manure on city streets, but now the planet is choking on the exhaust fumes. Cell phone technology resulted in instantaneous, full-time communication among people, but also has resulted in a distracted, misinformed population with their noses stuck in their devices at the dinner table, uninterested in communicating directly with one another. Our rivers, our lakes and oceans, our land, and even our bodies are full of plastic. Reefs are bleaching, birds are dying, animals are disappearing. And overall, we seem to believe that the meaning of life can be found in what we own. To be human, it has become, is to consume. Meanwhile, this wealthy Western world is in a crisis of meaning, wherein thousands, addicted to opioids, are dying in streets and alleys, and where, at least in America, automatic-weapon-carrying young men in a state of anomie are murdering children with great regularity in their school rooms.

There was a more recent span of Luddite-ism in the twentieth century: the short-lived Hippie period and its back-to-the-land movement. The Hippies have been denigrated too, and perhaps some of that is deserving. But at the heart of the movement was a rejection of materialism, a resistance to the conversion of human beings into consumers. The Hippies were opting for a life that was more generous, loving, sharing and made of authentic experience rather than possession of material goods. Of course, pampered Baby-Boomers were ill prepared for the hardship, complexity and skill requirements that life on the land entailed, and so mostly they failed. In addition, it is extraordinarily difficult to try to live outside of mainstream culture; to do so, your customs and ideology have to be very strong, as is, for example, the ethos of the Mennonites. The Hippies did not have this cohesion of practise. Finally, corporate powers recognized the threat and mobilized powerfully during the period to counter the movement and to complete the colonization of the culture. One can see this clearly in the co-opting advertisements of the nineteen-seventies. Consider these paint colours offered for your new Ford Maverick in 1970: Freudian Gilt, Hulla Blue, and the best one, Anti-Establish Mint. It was completely successful of course: the Hippies and anti-materialism became an inside joke. We capitulated and the Baby-Boomers became the most materialistic generation of humanity ever in history.

Given all that, is there any relevance left to consider, if not for the Hippies, at least for the Luddites? I think: yes. I don’t think I am alone in this. Many people are concerned about the quality of our technological life and the associated problems of meaning. Many are disturbed and frightened by what we are doing to the planet and our fellow species with our uncontrolled spewing of fossil-fuel emissions. Many are simply dissatisfied with the state of things: the bombardment of twenty-four-hour-a-day marketing and the ever-titillating yet desolate wasteland of most television, the phones, screens, Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok.

In a sign of cultural health, some groups of teenagers have emerged, in more places than one, who are rejecting the smart-phone lifestyle for something more substantive, including sketching together, discussing Dostoevsky or Kerouac, or simply listening to nature in a park. “Social media and phones are not real life,” one said, correctly. (4) Further, educators are – surprise! – discovering that children learn better on paper than on screens (5) and that banning cell phone use in school improves concentration and outcomes. (6) Who’da thunk?

I think, when remembering the Luddites, that the story of their struggle challenges us to ask: must we accept every technological invention, every change, even when there is a chance it will degrade or debase us? Short of that, must we necessarily accept something new when it will result in our losing something old that we love? The answer is no, of course. The continuing popularity of physical books over electronic readers shows that many are willing to make such a choice. Computer word processing programs are wonderful tools, without a doubt, but is there not something satisfying about starting in writing on a yellow legal pad with a freshly sharpened pencil? Is not selecting, then taking an record album out of its sleeve, and stopping to read the liner notes, a greater pleasure than catching half a song in your Spotify stream as you go about your other business? Of course, these are trivial and we are merely talking about preferring an earlier technology to a newer one, which is a common leaning, especially for those of us with more than a few miles on us.

But what about more profound and far-reaching change? What about genetic editing or artificial intelligence? What about a million of us living on Mars, in SpaceX City, as Elon Musk would have it? What about living in a Meta-verse designed by a Zuckerberg?

One can say that it is futile to resist technological change: after all if we choose not to do something, someone else will do it. We might not want to select our children, through gene-editing, to become blond, blue-eyed Aryan ideals, but someone will. We may not want Musk’s chip planted in our brain so that the internet can be directly connected to our precious consciousness, but some will pay for that. We may prefer to read and research the history of Western Civilization for ourselves, but others will prefer a summary generated by AI. We may find pleasure in producing a poem or other piece of writing, a song, a painting, a photograph – but there will be others that would rather have AI do that for them, and they will see it as the same thing.

It is hard not to observe that we have become slaves to our technology. We, in our fun-land Western Civilization live a life of unbelievable wealth, health, and comfort, without a doubt due to our technology. There is a lot to be said for light bulbs, television, and central heating on a cold winter’s night. And yet…personally, I cannot help but feel sad when I see a group of adolescents sitting on a stoop, each one of them a gorgeous bundle of vibrating life, yet all of them with faces buried in phones, while the sun shines, and the street flows by. The birds that are still left sing directly to them, but they do not hear.

Convenient technology can become our master. Mary Shelley, writing about science and technology, saw that likelihood. Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, his creation, says, near the end of the story: “You are my creator, but I am your master;- obey!” (7) In this, do we not hear the ghostly and premonitory whisper of artificial intelligence?

The lesson of the Luddites is to question. They challenge us to discern and to resist if we do not like what we see, and to opt for the richness of authentic experience. As Marguerite Duras put it, “Everything seems to be done in order to spare man the effort of living, both in his work and his daily living. It’s terrible.” (8) Or, as Lao-tze said, centuries earlier: “Let there be labour-saving devices that are not used.” He was speaking, even back then, to the tendency of technology to distract us, even to alienate us, from the natural flow of life, from that the directness of experience that is our birthright. (9)

Even if Luddite resistance is futile in the big picture, is such resistance not fundamental to who we are? Do we not have a right to say no? Is there not nobility, dignity, in refusal?

I think so. I believe we should take courage from our Luddite brothers and sisters and resist, where and whenever we feel it, whether such resistance is futile or not in the bigger picture. Eschew the electric scooter, and take a slow walk along a city street on a sunny day. If you do see an Amazon robot, try not to get arrested, but you will have my blessing if you knock it off the sidewalk. Close the Facebook page, and call up the real friend whom you actually care about. Turn off your TikTok feed and dance a little jig yourself. The effort of being a living, breathing human animal is worth it.

_____________________________________

1. Sale, Kirkpatrick. Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution. Persus Books Group, 1995.

2. Greenhouse, Steven. Major US corporations threaten to return labor to ‘law of the jungle:’ Trader Joe’s and SpaceX are among businesses challenging the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Board. The Guardian, March 10, 2024. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/10/starbucks-trader-joes-spacex-challenge-labor-board.

3. Engles, Frederick. The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. Translated by Florence Kelley Wishnewzky. Information Age Publishing, 2010. See particularly pages 29-40.

4. Vadukul, Alex. ‘Luddite’ Teens Don’t Want Your Likes: When the only thing better than a flip phone is no phone at all. New York Times, December 15, 2022. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/15/style/teens-social-media.html?searchResultPosition=1.

5. MacArthur, John R. A groundbreaking study shows kids learn better on paper, not screens. Now what? The Guardian, January17, 2024. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/17/kids-reading-better-paper-vs-screen.

6. Root, Tik. What happens when a school bans smartphones? A complete transformation. The Guardian, January 17, 2024. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/17/cellphone-smartphone-bans-schools.

7. Shelly, Mary. Frankenstein (1818 text). Oxford Wold’s Classics, 1994, p. 140.

8. Duras, Marguerite. Me & Other Writing. Dorothy, A Publishing Project, 2019, p. 82.

9. Cathart, Thomas, and Daniel Klein. I Think, Therefore I Draw: Understanding Philosophy Through Cartoons. Penguin Books, 2018, p. 86.

On Retirement Part I: Being

Posted on September 18, 2023September 21, 2023 by Peter Scott Cameron

For the last part of June and most of July, every day a big bumblebee arrived at the livingroom window and buzzed around for a while – not bumping into the glass like the foolish houseflies, but just checking it out, floating. I thought of Muhammad Ali. “Float like a butterfly” – and do what a bee does. The big window is my favourite in the house, a place to daydream now that I am retired, overlooking, as it does, the lush yard, the swamp beyond, and further beyond that the Green Mountains of Vermont. The bee arrived each day as K. and I watched world tragedies without end unfold in vivid colour on the BBC news.

I know it was the same guy. Scoff not: I recognized him. Like all sentient beings, bees live according to their biological patterns of course, but at the same time, they are individuals like our cats, our dogs, our chickens, and ourselves.

In any case, I have seen this on PBS, in a documentary by Martin Dorn, who stayed home during the pandemic and studied and filmed the bees in his garden for a year. (1) He showed that they have habits, traits – you could even say personalities – and that they keep individual travel and visitation schedules, according to whatever whims are driving them, beyond their biological predispositions and imperatives. This strikes me as a good way to live: to follow a schedule that comes not from without, but within. Just like me, now. After seventy years, I have a personal schedule that is free of the relentless overlay of outside demands.

It begins with grade one at King George school. Six-and-a-half-years-old, I have lucked out and missed the calamity of kindergarten, newly introduced in Northern Ontario. Still, there I am: having been free and wild on the streets and alleys of our small town, I now find myself expected to go to the same place every day, to the same dull room, to sit unmoving in the same confining desk under the hostile eyes of the sadistic Miss Scott.

Miss Scott: she is the first among a number of bad bosses. In the first few days of class, she has us come up to her desk one at a time and sing Oh Susanna or such, a cappella, standing in front of her: excruciating enough. Then, based on what she hears, she divides us into Canaries, Robins, and Crows. I am a Robin. The poor Crows probably never sang again, not even in the shower. What sort of person does that to children?

Years later I mentioned her to a cousin who is ten years older than I am, but who also had Miss Scott. He flew into a tirade, sputtering and cursing. He had never forgotten her either.

Seventy-five percent of Americans name a bad boss as the number one stressor in the workplace. (2) But despite Miss Scott, and later Kenny and Frank, I don’t really think it was only bad bosses that made me not want to get up and go to work – but they coloured that world, to be sure.

Kenny and Frank are drill operators and hence my bosses when I work as a helper during summers as a university student. Kenny has spent thirteen years in the Kingston Pen for manslaughter after jamming a broken beer bottle into the forehead of a barroom opponent. He is okay most of the time, but you don’t want to rile him, if you follow me. A year after I work with him, I hear that his clothing gets caught and he is dragged into the business end of a big auger machine, breaking every bone that could be broken in a human being, before the helper could turn the machine off. I don’t hear how he fared after that.

Frank, on the other hand, has not been to jail, but is a wife-beater and drinks twenty beers a day. He can single-handedly pick up the two-hundred-and-fifty pound drop-hammer and place it on the equipment trailer – not that much if you consider the world dead-lift record, but still. At one point he rushes at me with fists clenched vowing to kill me after I drop a drill rod down a three-hundred-foot borehole. Terrifying to have that raging hulk come at you: I can still feel the adrenaline. He only stops when I threaten him with the thirty-six inch pipe-wrench, which I cock like a baseball bat. He comes to his senses and just curses me out; a good thing, as the pipe-wrench would not have been enough to stop him. No doubt these guys contributed to my having a bad – or at least a sceptical, you might say – attitude early on toward the supposed pleasures and benefits of the workplace.

Fortunately the work and the bosses got better after this, and once I became a boss myself, I improved a lot on my first role models: low bar, I know. Lest I create a completely negative impression here, I must say that management and working conditions improved dramatically over the years. I worked for terrific people and excellent organisations.

Early bad bosses aside and given great improvements in the nature of the work that followed, it remains something of a mystery that I don’t remember ever really wanting to go in to a place of employment. I preferred to stay home and do things I wanted to do, by myself, probably with a coffee pot and the radio playing in the background. I suspect this feeling is common enough. It is true that you hear of people describing how they can not wait to get to the office in the morning, to accomplish this and that, and see the gang, etc. However, the reluctance of Covid-era remote workers to return to the office surely indicates something different for many of us.

I have thought that perhaps I am just lazy, but that seems unlikely. I have degrees aplenty, which certainly required work, and I did accomplish things in years of community mental health work and in teaching that I am most contented to remember. I know that in my way I made the world a better place. And I was a decent boss. Yet, the mental health work was trying; it wore me out. At the time I was studying Zen Buddhism and so I tried to emulate the scholar warriors (3) and to take heart from the teaching of the bodhisattvas: “Remedy suffering wherever it is, whatever form it takes and whoever causes it.” (4) This helped me, and then the years of teaching were easier. I experienced failure of course, but overall, I found success at both. And so now I retire happy, perhaps with some not-unusual regrets over missed opportunities or paths not taken, but with the knowledge that I did my best.

Not wanting to go into work might simply have been a result of my introversion. In any case, I can say I don’t miss it. I’m happy to stay home, and like the bee, figure out each day what I want to do. I have no empty feeling, no existential panic in face of blank canvases of days.

Nor does it bother me that I have no role and no status. I had a foretaste of this. In 2010, after some trials in my personal life, I decided to change how I was living. I wanted to stay home, to live more creatively, to write some and take a few pictures – and to move back to Canada. With few prospects, and no money to speak of, I resigned my tenured professorship. I recall the feeling, after I moved, of sitting on a park bench in Toronto on a cold November day, the wind whipping in from Lake Ontario, known to no one around me, with no persona, no role, no position – just another bozo on a bench, with no place to go and nothing to do. It was absolutely exhilarating.

Of course, I had to eat and pay the rent, so I built a late-season career as an online adjunct professor, with a couple of courses at my old college and some from other institutions. “Full-time work for one-third the pay,” an ex-colleague joked. True enough, but I loved it. I woke on my own time and read awhile with coffee and classical music on the radio. Sometimes I would go out on the balcony of my high-rise apartment and watch the homo sapiens racing to work on foot, in cars, on the busses and streetcars. I watched with satisfaction – not with schadenfreude, although there was something comical to all the intense hotfooting around, something that I can’t quite name. Mainly I felt empathy for these people along with immense gratitude that I no longer had to do this. After all the decades, I finally got to stay home.

I still had demands: course sites to build, clever assignments to create, tests to post, emails to answer, and useful feedback to give on submissions. Enjoyable enough tasks, but now I am glad to be without them. I am relieved not to wake up each Tuesday morning and to log on to sixty or a hundred essay assignments waiting in the mailbox, all begging timely review and grading. I liked my work very much, and especially liked working on my own, but I’d had enough. A clear example of Cameron’s Second Law: Good things go on too long.

By the way, it says something about human nature that although students had a full week to submit assignments, almost all of them came in about a half-hour before the time limit. Also, despite there being 167 other hours to take an online test, most were completed in the hour before the deadline.

In any case, in online teaching, I had gone as far as I could go. As a professor – never mind the formal “course assessments” that have been foisted off on teachers – when the semester ends, every educator worth his or her salt thinks “how could I do better?” After my last semester, this spring, my answer was: nothing. I could do no better. Time to go, then.

Although it is not the case so far, I expect I will miss the students more than some other things. You won’t hear me complaining about younger people. Some, of course, were happily illiterate or worse: resentful participants, just putting in time. But most wanted to accomplish something, wanted to learn, wanted to make something of themselves. And they cared about this world, about climate broiling, about racism and sexism and institutionalized inequity, and most wanted no part of these and other injustices. They helped me to feel optimism, to believe there was some hope for the human race.

Optimism is important when you have retired and are getting older, when your bones ache inexplicably and these warty things start growing on your bulgy, once-svelte body, and all the musicians and singers and great people who populated your world start dropping dead – and as well, you have all the time you could want to ruminate about the television news.

It must be said: it is critical not to end up being that old codger in his nasty recliner, Keystone beer can in hand, sitting in the corner of the room jawing at loved ones about the deplorable condition of the world and the decline of civilization as we know it. These things are true of course: the world is in deplorable condition, and civilization is in decline, but that is no excuse to sit around and allow yourself to develop OBD – Old Bastard Disorder. OBD, by the way, is not gender-typed; you may be a man or a woman, or in keeping with fashionable ideology, anything in between or outside of those categories, and still succumb to OBD.

No, you have to stay optimistic and carry on, even while, for example, a dreadful little psychopath slaughters the good people of Ukraine, or given climate change, when it looks like your grandchildren will live on a planet much like the one in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road – or while the whole country of Canada is on fire (and, to boot, firefighters say that people are stealing their equipment when they are not looking, as CBC reported about the Kelowna fire).

And the whiners: oh my God, the whiners! These people complain when the cell signal is poor – meanwhile, I remember that my parents, for decades after the Great Depression, saved string out of fear of not having any in the future. It is hard to think that civilization has not gone down the pipe when a Yellowknife story described people complaining about the (successful) evacuations. Days before the fire reached the town (the fire never made it, in fact, due to the diligence of the firefighters), 95% of the population had been evacuated hundreds of miles by air, or guided down the one two-lane highway, with the government providing free gas from tankers along the way – brilliant! Yet the paper quoted a person complaining that the government had acted too slowly, that the evacuation should have been done sooner, even though the fire had not reached the city. In the preceding days, she could smell the smoke in her office even with the “HEPA” filters going full blast, and it was “uncomfortable,” she reported, with a straight face. Perhaps she also was put off that the civil servants did not offer fresh trays of sushi and avocado-on-toast as well, along NWT Route 3 as she headed south. Another evacuee, safely ensconced at a paid-for motel hundreds of miles south of the fire, complained that there was “nothing to do.” One wonders why the news providers give these people any air time, but that is another problem, I suppose.

So, yes, it is hard to stay optimistic knowing these knuckleheads are out there, and I am not even talking about the Marjorie Taylor Greenes of the world – this one, an actual American Congressional Representative elected by real citizens eligible to vote, who believes the California fires were caused by Jews firing lasers from outer space. On purpose. No, I say I won’t even talk about these people.

But enough! Remember: OBD. In retirement, with time and space to think, you have to navigate this and other similar things. One immediate solution is to limit how much you watch the news, which is what K. and I have done: hence, the half-hour of BBC with the visiting bee.

As for the rest – what to do with your freedom from schedules, tasks and bosses? If your health is decent (that’s another story: more later), it isn’t that hard. Take a walk down the dirt road and check out the wild turkeys. Plunk yourself in the yard and read The Consolations of Philosophy that has been gathering household fallout on your bookshelf. Like K., get out the watercolour kit and paint a picture. Play your vinyl version of Sticky Fingers, or stream the Queen’s Own Highlanders piping The March of the Cameron Men on your phone, if you really must. Grow some tomatoes or sunflowers. Dust off the disused Yamaha and play My Wild Irish Rose. Write a mystery, however crappy, or a letter to the editor. Volunteer, if you are up to it, to take a person even older than yourself to a doctor’s appointment. Send a few bucks to the local fire company or the U.N. Refugee fund. Meditate and find compassion in your heart for the Miss Scotts and the Kennys and Franks of the world, for surely they must have suffered, as did their victims. Sit on a rainy September day, when the leaves are just beginning to change from green to yellow, and stare out the window. Step outside into the air and sniff it. For God’s sake, avoid OBD, although I think it is good to stay a tad crusty. Probably the best advice I’ve ever read that applies to retirement is to “chop wood, carry water.” (5)

But I take inspiration from my visitor: the free, black and orange insect who, for a while, came by regularly during news time, and reminded me of the inimitable Muhammad Ali and his counsel. “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” Right. Got it.

Next: On Retirement, Part II: The End Game.

1. Dorhn, Martin. My Garden of a Thousand Bees. Passion Planet, 2023.

2. Abbajay, Mary. What to Do When You Have a Bad Boss. Harvard Business Review, September 7, 2018.

3. Deng, Ming-Dao. Scholar Warrior: An Introduction to the Tao in Everyday life. HarperCollins Publisher, 1990.

4. Marchese, David. Talk (Matthieu Ricard). New York Times Magazine, August 20, 2023.

5. Fields, Rick. Chop Wood, Carry Water: A Guide to Finding Spiritual Fulfillment in Everyday Life. Penguin Publishing Group, 1984.

My Covid Trauma

Posted on July 14, 2021July 24, 2021 by Peter Scott Cameron

Covid-19 is in retreat here in North America, where populations are vaccinated. After more than a year of staying home, holding Zoom meetings without bothering to wear pants, and streaming shows on television until brains are leaking out our ears, most people are glad to return to crowd activities: eating in restaurants, attending musical performances, ambling around street fairs and flea markets, heading out to the theatre.

Not me. I am reticent. I want to see my closest friends and family members, most of whom I have not seen for sixteen months. But I do not want to join groups of people that I do not know. I am reluctant to go to the folk concert at the playhouse. I do not want to attend the talk on old barns hosted by the county historical society. I do not want to join fans at the stadium to cheer on the beleaguered minor-league baseball team. You won’t see me at the Raspberry Fest. nor the Balloon Fest. I expect not to join the crowd to see the Rockin’ Old Codgers on the outdoor stage down at Lake Desperation. You will not find me soon at the clam-bake at the firehouse.

There have been many articles written about mental health strains arising from the isolation of Covid. Obviously, people react to isolation in different ways, and many have experienced severe loneliness. In my case, I am by temperament a satisfied introvert, not normally prone to feelings of loneliness, and so staying home during the pandemic has not been hard on me, and anyway, I’ve had a stellar companion. I will even say that in some ways it has been a pleasure. So, it is possible that I have just reverted to a more natural form as a result of not going out.

My reticence is not worry about catching Covid. The vaccinations have proven to be very good, and I am confident in the data. I know there are unvaccinated people in the stores in the village taking advantage of the mask-optional guidance, wandering around, spreading their germ and virus-laden emissions with absolute disregard, but so what. Those creaturely emissions, coming from both upper and lower regions of the human body, although not always thrilling, do not worry me any more than they did in my previous life.

Another possibility: an article in The Guardian discusses the idea of how our brain, the hippocampus, needs to be reset.[i] The brain’s ingenious plasticity helps us to adjust to changing situations. In this case, neuronal networks that we use to engage in social activity shrink during periods of isolation. We arrive at a new homeostasis in order to cope with less social connection. Then, once isolation ends, we again have to adjust, and initially interaction produces anxiety, until we achieve another homeostasis wherein these networks are restrengthened. Fair enough, though this strikes me as more of an extravert’s narrative than solid science. Regardless, I am not so sure that is the case for me. After all, I felt no anxiety at staying home in the first place.

My own theory is simpler. What I think is that that the comforts and serenity of being home for sixteen months have become linked by contrast with the external political and social trauma of these last years. Mix that in with intrinsic introversion, and perhaps an excessive amount of time to think about the insanity of the larger world in absentia, and I have ended up not wanting to be part of that world. From afar, I have lost trust in people.

I said to my daughter recently, in jest: I am suspicious of most people I don’t know, and the rest I don’t trust. There was a time when I thought that human beings were mostly good, mostly creative, mostly thoughtful – with shortcomings: warfare, exploitation, prejudice, zero-sum competitiveness, indifference to the plight of others at least, and stunning cruelty at worst.

But these last years have eroded even that understanding that I had. Needless, unjust wars rage everywhere – Yemen, Ethiopia, Syria. Oppressive regimes proliferate: Belarus, Myanmar, China. Dangerous idiots run countries: Bolsonaro in Brazil. Islamists kidnap school children in parts of Africa, especially girls. The Taliban is taking over Afghanistan again, after twenty years of fruitless warfare. Half the population of the U.S. remains loyal to a defeated demagogue. A large number of American legislators, supporting the lie of a “stolen election,” attempt to subvert the American Democracy. Hooligans, misfits, conspiracy theorists and “ordinary” people storm the American Capitol in a deadly riot based on…nonsense. All the others: Xi Jinping and the ruthless suppression of Hong Kong’s democracy activists; deranged Q-Anon believers; the preposterous militias – Oath-Keepers, Proud Boys, Three Percenters, New York Lightfoot Militia; the yahoos in our nearby village charging around in their giant, gas-guzzling pickups with big Confederate and Gun flags mounted in their truck beds; the crypto-militia people from Connecticut, in their compound behind our house, flying their huge flag upside down on the hilltop for a month after Joe Biden was elected;[ii] the “Don’t Tread on Me” flags mounted on garage roofs; the Fox Propaganda network being the most-watched “news” network in America; the shameful exhibition of the now dead Rush Limbaugh receiving the Medal of Freedom. The climate -change deniers.

The anti-maskers, the anti-vaxxers, the Covid-deniers: I expected that we would pull together in the face of our life-threatening pandemic, but no, not at all.[iii] Looking with a sociological eye, if society is a tapestry made of good-willed cooperation for mutual survival, then that tapestry is careworn and very frayed.

No. I say to you that the big world of people is not to be trusted, thank you very much. It is not fear; it is aversion.

I sit outside at the table with its big blue, yellow and orange umbrella; the sun shines high-hot overhead, but the air is cool because of the just-passed thunderstorm that left the Ostrich ferns sparkling with heavy drops that make them tremble. The yellow yarrow plants and the pink bee balm are dripping too, as are the purple coneflowers, the white Shasta daisies, the delicate blue hollyhocks, and the pink joe pyes. Swallows are soaring and diving, eating their requisite 850 mosquitoes a day, with my approval. I have a new book in one hand, a freshly lit cigar in the other, my Panama hat on, and snazzy reading sunglasses dangling at the end of my nose. All set.

K comes out in her bush-whacking outfit of old jeans, beaten flannel shirt, and red bandana, sickle in hand, and socks over pant legs to ward off ticks. She is off to thwack some underbrush in the back. I turn my old mug to gaze in wonder at her beautiful face, which is the same age as mine – wonder at the grace that has been bestowed upon us. We are old, old friends, and lovers twice: this time the second, last, and only time now forever.

I still look for our small white dog who used to come to lie on grass as I read. Sandy died last spring of nothing in particular: old age, her body just stopped working. It was a sad day. It is possible she was the sweetest dog in the world. She was a rescue from Kentucky, who had lived her first six years at the end of a cruel, short chain and been abused there: beaten, one supposed. She was wary of most men other than myself; one assumes her abuser was a man. Who the hell does that to a little white dog?

One of the cats, Dudley, is in the yard – I think he’s a tabby, although people here call him a Maine Coon Cat. What do I know, I’m from Canada. He is black and brown and tan and silky and so very friendly; it is a pleasure when he comes to sit on your lap. I call him “Big,” to honour his large front paws with the extra toes. He is crouched beside the shimmering Japanese willow tree that K and I planted as a Tree of Peace.[iv] Rather than burying a hatchet underneath the plant, we laid in a homemade, partially-bent pipe shillelagh made by one of K’s wackier Irish uncles. A ghastly-looking weapon, we buried it, followed by a short ceremony, and the newly planted willow over it has flourished ever since.

I keep an eye on the cats – they are as loveable and funny as cats can be, but they are both hunters, and when I can, I interfere. I scare off the chipmunks, robins, and the brown rabbits – who this year have come into the yard in numbers larger than ever. Wild turkeys – strutting and confident and yakking to one another – cross the road in front regularly. Now and then a turtle: this year I have seen both a painted and a small snapping turtle. They cross from the pond and swamp behind us, passing through the yard – the cats are no threat to them, but the gravel road that they have to traverse to get to the second pond has danger. I have known of people who run over them intentionally. I wonder why they take this journey from one pond to the other – to see relatives, perhaps? The woodchucks: I love their rolling, musical gait – the cats might try to bother them, but I think the woodchucks would hold their own. Still, I am watchful.

We had a comical possum who for a time made a sojourn every day about noon, coming down out of the field behind us, crossing the yard from the north-west corner, inspecting the compost pile, rolling down to the front of the house through the thicket of bishop’s weed, and then to the road. I loved his saunter. There was no trouble with either of the cats. He would walk along the side of the road – heading east toward Vermont, one might think. He made it back later, because the next day, there he would be, repeating the journey – until one day he didn’t. Alerted by a big, black turkey vulture, I found him on the road, halfway down the hill. He had been hit; his head squashed. I dragged him off the road and into patch of orange daylilies, muttered an apology for the human beings to the Animal Master, and left him for the vulture, who all the while had circled, riding the air streams, in no hurry, a picture of ancient patience.

The black cat Golly, the better hunter, recently caught a young rabbit, early in the soft evening. I saw him carrying it, and ran after him, hoping that it was not yet killed and that I could force him to drop it. A mistake, as it turned out. He deked left, but I went after him, and drop it he did. But the rabbit did not move as I approached, although I could see that its eyes were open, and it was still breathing. As I picked it up, I realized that it was paralyzed; I could tell from the limp, crossed legs, and because it did not wiggle to escape me. Golly had been carrying it by the back of its neck, and obviously the spinal cord had broken. I thought about killing it myself but could not bring myself to do so. All in all, it would have been better to have left the cat and the bunny to their deadly dance. Sadly, I placed it in the tall grass at the edge of the yard. To me, the small being seemed calm, but that could have just been the paralysis or shock. I went out later and it was dead. Once again, I mumbled an apology to the Animal Master, this time noting that it was in the nature of this cat to hunt. Golly cannot do otherwise.

Can human beings do otherwise? Is it just as natural for human beings to wage war with one another, to commit atrocities against other human beings? Perhaps it is in our nature also, to believe in crazy ideas, and then act out against one another based on these absurd conceptions, causing no end of harm. Perhaps this is as much part of us as taking more than we need, and purposely denying others as we do so. But if so, we are cruel and unlike the cat, we are capricious in our cruelty. For we do have our frontal lobes that provide us with alternatives, with the capacity to anticipate, to assess, and to judge, and ultimately to act with moral understanding. Normally, unless deprived or abused in childhood, we have reason, and we have a conscience. Compassion is every bit a part of our nature as human beings, as hunting is part of a cat’s nature.

Yet far too often we turn our backs on these finer qualities and refuse to use them. Or, worse, we mis-use them, as for example, when supposedly for moral and religious reasons, Taliban men stone to death a woman for trying to educate girls, or a self-identified Christian stands outside a gay club with a sign that says, “Jesus hates fags.”

Our human condition is that we suffer. We must labour for our survival. Women suffer pain and danger in childbirth. We suffer losses and disease. In evolutionary terms, older and newer parts of our brains are in conflict, resulting in ongoing psychological distress, as Freud described. Most of the time we desire more than we have, and our wanting pains us. We experience love and beauty, yet all the while knowing that someday we will die and lose all. But the worst of the human condition? It is the suffering that we humans intentionally inflict on one another.

I want no part of the latter. This is what my time alone during the pandemic has brought to consciousness. This is my Covid trauma. In solitary thinking, I have come to understand that I remain a naïve idealist, as I have been since I was a fresh-faced student. Thus, I am often disappointed with human behaviour. I find it impossible to blow this stuff off and just live.

Yet, we must be in the world, if not of it. Nobody lives outside society and culture, just as nobody lives outside nature. And so, what to do?

Keep the lights on, at least, in the museum of human compassion. Stand and speak and act for what is good. We must choose kindness whenever possible. And of course, personally, I know I have to just get over it: starting by taking small steps to be in that world. Go to a diner and have a toasted club sandwich – with fries, of course. Go to a Sunday afternoon chamber music recital at the old music hall. Take a drive with K and a camera to Burlington, Vermont. Look forward to the possibility that we see good old Bernie Saunders on the streets of that town.

Above all: remain calm. Meditate. Tend my own garden. Be in the world but keep part of myself separate and sacred from that larger world.

Know the personal

yet keep to the impersonal:

accept the world as it is.

If you accept the world

the Tao will be luminous inside you

and you will return to your primal self.[v]

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[i] Clark, Kareem. “The Neuroscience Behind Why Your Brain May Need Time to Adjust to Un-Social Distancing.” The Guardian, July 9, 2021.

[ii] In American flag protocol, the flag flown upside down means: Dire distress: Imminent threat to life and property.

[iii] I was naïve to have been surprised at the lack of thoughtful civic cooperation. It has been no different previously. See, for example: Barry, John M. The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History. Penguin Books, 2018.

[iv] The “Tree of Peace,” the Great White Pine, is the symbol of peace-making in the traditions of the Haudenosaunee. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_Peace

[v] Mitchell, Steven. Tao Te Ching, New English Version. HarperPerennial, 1988.