Land grant universities and the Infectious West
General January 27th, 2006
This post is a little different from my normal ones, in that it’s an essay I wrote following today’s lecture. In class, we have 50 minutes of lecture and 30 minutes of discussion. We’re talking about post-industrialism right now. I started writing this, just for me, as a way to finish the thoughts I had in class (and tried to voice, but did a poor job of stating what I meant.) Maybe foolishly, I’m posting it here. If you’ve got comments on this, buy me drink and we’ll talk.
I think key to looking at post-industrialism goes back to industrialism itself and the land grant universities, like Illinois. Coming off of the Civil War enterprise, the Morril Act was a rebuilding path for states, and also a way for the U.S. to move forward. The focus was on education to improve agriculture and mechanical skills — and they did. Because of advances in farming, many of which came from land grant universities, more and more people were able to come out of the fields. Instead of having to worry about how to put food on their plates, they could focus on other vocations. This opened up expansion and growth in the industrial age, but it also allowed for growth of classical studies, fine and applied arts, and liberal studies. The start of the service industry came from the fact that everyone didn’t have to be farming anymore, and could devote time to the ‘lighter side’ of things. We can sit in a lecture hall today and argue post-industrialism as it was incepted and how it’s aged 40 years later precisely because we don’t have to be sowing a field right now.
What’s missing from some of the discussion/reading is that the progression from agricultural to industrial to information is more than a progression - it’s dependency (but no longer a pyramid.) We cannot live in an information age without sustaining ourselves agriculturally and industrially. This implies a strong divide between blue-collar and white-collar work; perhaps to go so far as to say the white-collar workers can enjoy their “enlightened” view of the information age by standing on the backs of the blue-collar agricultural/industrial worker. Since our society has placed so much value in moving towards an information age, it makes sense that the previous two ‘classes’ are declining (perhaps with prejudice, or maybe just through the natural progression/evolution) and the information strata is growing. Globalization has helped with this issue, as other countries have been eager and ready to take on the agricultural and industrial pick up the United States has left behind — and the U.S. has been more than happy to ‘farm’ those essential needs out to them, perhaps without enough thought about the prudence of that (on both sides.) But more about that in a moment - I’m not done analyzing the perceived divide between blue/white collar work.
The irony in illustrating the divide between the information and pre-information age is that, like industry assisted in the automation and advancement of farming, the information society has improved agriculture and industry in a trickle-down fashion. Through ’smart farming’ (or precision farming,) farmers are using computers to calculate almost all aspects of agriculture. “Infomating” is a term that defines the shift from doing a task to controling an information system that does the task - welders no longer weld, but they operate welding computers. This is a product of the information age that has reborn agriculture and industry. It’s entirely possible to be a white-collar farmer, or welder, or mechanic. (In fact, I would argue that this has hurt the auto repair industry, as fewer technicians in the field know how the pieces actually work - they just diagnose them with computers and replace them with elsewhere manufactured parts. This is a far departure from the auto mechanics of our parents’ age who rebuilt engines and components in-house. I contend this is more wasteful and more expensive than other repair methods.) Likewise, the “information society” has evolved so much that it itself contains classes. As an IT worker, a large majority of my job are rote tasks that could easily be qualified as modern clerk or blue-collar jobs. (Relocating computers, basic installs, primitive troubleshooting.) “White-collar work,” as I see it, is more along design, development, integration, management. Kumar (or his citings, I can’t recall) were dead-on that this has made a rift in the information age. There are dead-end IT jobs, and the extension of telecommuiting and “the world office” add not only social, but physical and sometimes continential splits between “blue” and “white” collar information-age workers.
I guess you could argue that the blue/white collar description never applied, but it certainly doesn’t now in the information age, at least in its traditional forms.
On to globalization, and the nebulous topic of being “better” or making the world “better.” I think, regardless of perspective, it’s clear that globalization is the next logical step in the post-industrial view of the world. It’s not a U.S./Western (I’m going to start blending in Western because these are European mindsets as well,) value to stay in agriculture. To counteract the supply/demand, it makes sense that we would look to the world stage to supply that need. Similarly, given that other geographical areas can meet those needs, many foreign societies are more than welcome to accept our level of agricultural development (which, remember, includes significant advances in industrial and information resources (sometimes 100 years worth.) These are good things, as these countries want to be ‘players’ in the global economy as well. (What it introduces are interesting places like Bangalor, India where the most advanced technology information society is literally meters away from abject poverity. We’re talking high tech information centers next door to non-electric, dirt floor huts.)
I don’t view post-industrialism as a utopia (or even a goal.) It’s just a way some people have defined the way our society has evolved in the last 40 years. I don’t think that view is shared by the world. I don’t think it’s a model we need to try to make other countries adopt. In fact, one could argue it’s Western greed along post-industrial lines that has forced other countries *into* this model where they may not have chosen that path for themselves, if given a choice.
What’s wrong about the current way the United States has participated in post-industrial expansion and/or globalization is how we’ve tried to instill Western culture and values into the world scene. Trading and interacting with other cultures is critical to our progression as post-industrialists view it, and that’s fine. But those interactions are never that isolated. Democracy, Western religions, pop culture — all those things seem to go with it, whether it’s intended or not. While these certainly are not bad things from a Western perspective (who doesn’t want their culture expanded and idolized by the world?) they often disregard pre-existing forms of government and society/culture in those developing areas, with sometimes tradgic results. Buy oil from the Middle East? No problem. Try to infuse democracy and government to form “stability” in the area? That doesn’t work, or at least sets up to be a much, much harder task than it sounds. Then we start a 20 year old Oil War. And not an easy war — one of those sticky ones like Vietnam that have no clear definition of objective, winner, loser, and never-ending supply of collateral damage on all parties.)
It impresses, and depresses, me that the U.S. can be a “melting pot” for so many cultures and viewpoints internally, but when we negotiate on the world stage, we tend to tip that pot over and pour smooth, hot, molten, clingy Westernism everywhere. We have a way of smothering those cultures — regardless if they want it or not, or if they’re ready for it or not. Again, I’m not advocating that Western culture or post-industrialism is or should be a goal — but anyone who’s played a Civilization-type game (either as a board game or computer game) knows that you can’t take a sticks and stones society and give them the space shuttle. It’s a process, just like it was process when we went through it (can I say we developed it?) — and you can’t necessarily short-stop that. I like that the prof mentioned China skipping post-industrialism altogether and instead looking at a blend of industrial and information age _at the same time_. The process into the information society cannot be the same for all societies/cultures in the world - what kind of arrogance do we shed as a nation to think everyone is just like us?
And, as it turned into near the end of the lecture, we haven’t yet gotten “top heavy” enough to address issues of global health, and the “betterment” of the world. I think *that’s* the Utopia - but that’s the thing about perfect societies — they’re like the end of the rainbow, or the sunset. No matter how fast you run or much you want to reach it, it’s always a little further away. But that’s also where my view goes full circle. Health, mortality, cancer, AIDS, birth defects… Solving those challenges will give birth to the next era (post-information?) just as better farming moved us from agriculture to industry. What would society look like without disease? What new challenges could we conquer? What’s next?
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