Specialization
Gilman is an exception to many utopia builders because she did notice grunt work (she'd had to do it) and she did think it should be fairly compensated.
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| In fairness to Gilman, at Fruitlands, |
| the women did much of the work. |
In comparison, one of the more irritating aspects of Plato, More, and many nineteenth century transcendentalists is their conviction that agriculture isn't THAT hard. It is just, you know, work. But anyone can do it.
More's Utopia sends people to the fields for 2 years after which they can come back (unless, of course, they--wink, wink--WANT to stay). The system utterly ignores the issue of specialization. All the education in the world can't replace hands-on experience. Every 2 years means that every 2 years, an entirely new group of farmers would have to be retrained on how to breed cattle and how/when to plant and how to get the best yields. How to butcher. How to harvest. How to help domesticated animals give birth...
It's hard to believe that More was this stupid, and C.S. Lewis is likely correct that More was being extremely ironic in a very English "can't you tell I'm joking?" way.
 |
| Bronson Alcott was a sweet man whom |
| everyone loved--and he was daft. |
As mentioned, Gilman understood the theoretical idea of specialization--especially with people who would care for children--but she never grasped it as a reality. Her main female characters in Herland are supposedly specialists--nature girls who roam about checking trees for bugs and so on (forest rangers, basically)--yet they never seem to be in the woods since they are always sitting around with their boyfriends and attending lectures on the meaning of life.
That is, Gilman utterly fails to grasp what it means to be devoted to a specialty, especially by someone who is not a "meaning of life" philosopher. If the young women truly love what they do (which Gilman claims), they would either...
(1) Roam all over the country, examining trees and noting issues with bugs and growth; they would compile reports; they would give lectures on THEIR specialty; they would get all nerdy with other forest rangers.
The remarkable aspect of the young Gerald Durrell is that he did both of the above. When his family arrived on Corfu, he roamed all over the island, learning the language and collecting animals. He also had the capacity to sit for hours noting the behavior of the insects on the wall near one of the family's homes.
Watch a prepubescent child who is engrossed in a valued (by the child) activity. That combination of energy and obsession is very normal. One minute acting like a dinosaur. The next, learning every single name of every single dinosaur.
Alim reports a conversation with Terry about his childhood. The child Alim behaved very much like a creature who combines roaming/wildness with obsession:
One day early on, I decided to drop eggs from a rooftop. After the third egg, a mentor rushed up the side stairs, several youngsters at her heels.
The mentor, Novine, watched me set an egg rolling until it tipped over the edge. It turned and turned and turned before splattering on the road below. The youngsters giggled. Novine sat beside me. She watched another egg tip and turn and splat.
“What are you doing, Alima?” she said finally. “Is this an experiment?”
“No.”
“You’re learning a great deal about eggs and air and the way things move.”
Juste would have told me I was wasting eggs. Maddy would have told me to clean it all up. And she would have swatted me. Maddy was the kind of mother the mentors had decided shouldn’t be a mother, which was probably why she moved to the mountains and why she took over my care when I showed up. I adored Maddy. I still miss her.
“No,” I told Novine, which was the truth.
I was aiming for the tip and the tilt and the oh-so-satisfying SPLAT at the end. I’d begun to wonder if something bigger might make a more satisfying splat. Two eggs together maybe. Or—
“But you are discovering something,” Novine prodded. “You are uncovering your potential, your interests—”
I suppose I was discovering that I liked to drop things. I wondered what might happen if I filled a container with water and dropped it. The sound would be more crash than splat. The water would push outward in the satisfying way it did when I hit the surface of a pool. I could hurl the egg, not merely drop it, and it would disintegrate faster, make a louder noise—
 |
| Creative-for-the-hell-of-it experiments. |
“About the same time I got in trouble for trying to light things on fire, sunlight through glass, you know.”
He snorted. “Boy’s antics.”
I stretched at that, practically purred like the silliest cat. Terry’s tone was proud, fond, impressed.
“Were you punished?” he said.
“When I caught twigs on fire, Tyra suggested I tend braziers in the temple. I—”
Panicked, but I didn’t want to admit that to Terry.
“I didn’t want to work in a temple,” I said with the same sullen tone I used when I responded to Tyra.
“You wanted to be outside,” Terry said sympathetically. “Moving. Your hands on something. I know the feeling. Lots of rules you have here.”
“The mentors encourage experiments.”
“Sure. But the outcome is always the same, isn’t it? Improvement. Advancement. There are conventions to maintain.”
“That isn’t true where you live?”
“Yeah.” He sighed. “You’d think not. We have so many opportunities, you’d think people could just leave each other be. But every society produces its humorless dictators. Creative-for-the-hell-of-it action gets short shrift.”
 | |
| "[Happens] more often than you'd think," Howard | |
| says about Sheldon and Leonard's science fight. |
Like many utopia builders, Gilman didn't observe the world. She explained it.
To be continued...
Chapter 7
His in Herland or Astyanax in Hiding
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