The past month I have been trying to work on renovating and refurbishing a house, one of those buildings that constitute the 'typical' British working-class dwelling, a terraced house with two floors and two or three bedrooms, nothing special. But it has meant a lot of my time has been spent away from the computer, and doing manual work, hence the lack of articles here on this platform. This activity has, however, had a twofold consequence: Firstly, manual labour is great as a counterbalance to all that sedentary work most of are doing these days and which causes so much preventable ill-health (lower back pain, anyone?). And secondly, the performance of physical work (an increasing rarity these digitalised days) has made me think about out changing attitudes to this kind of activity and the economic, social and political restrictions imposed on us if we are trying to perform amateur, DIY manual labour.
The phrase 'make do and mend' is of course familiar from those British posters and slogans from the homefront during World War Two, which of late have become popular graphic icons, like the 'Keep calm and ...' script in bold capitalised sans-serif font on tote bags, tea towels and greetings cards. Behind this post-modern trivialisation of what at the time was a real necessity lies a fundamental change in attitudes. What was encouraged in WWII - to make do with what you had and to mend/fix what was broken, worn, damaged - appears to now not just be forgotten (as in people simply no longer knowing how to fix something through ignorance or lack of skills) but to be actively discouraged.
Active discouragement of the amateur individual, as opposed to the expert, credentialed, accredited performer of a task, comes on a number of levels. The most blatant is legislation, generally under the guise of 'health & safety' so beloved of British organisations, and the backbone of many an HR department's office jockeys. This can take the form of the patently ridiculous, like the warning sign that a device might contain hot water plastered on the electric kettle in the tea room of one place I worked at. But it can go beyond a minor inconvenience. In Germany it is nigh on impossible to buy separately a length of electrical cable and a plug and socket, in other words (for the less technically-minded) it is pretty difficult to buy the stuff you need to make up your own extension lead, while you can of course buy, at a nice premium, a ready-made extension lead of designated metric lengths, in any DIY store. Apparently this is to keep you, the unqualified, amateur DIYing consumer safe from electrocuting yourself, since the mystic arts of electrickery are so arcane that only a fully-trained, examined and diploma-credentialed German electrician could possibly be in the position to deal with this dangerous stuff safely. Before you think this is far-fetched, a German resident told me some years ago that if you were renting your home and wanted to change a light bulb, strictly speaking and following the letter of the law you had to get your landlord and/or a qualified electrician to do so, otherwise this dangerous activity would put you in breach of one of the umpteen insurances every German is meant to have. Thankfully even the good people of Germany have retained some common sense (a rare commodity these days) and on the whole tend to ignore this injunction, so that shopkeepers will still sell you lightbulbs without you having to produce a certificate of electrical safety.
The other main active discouragement of the amateur is less hilarious and far more effective. This is the bane of any attempts to conserve both expenditure and energy, namely inbuilt obsolescence. Expenditure means your expenditure, on having to buy a new version of the old thing that was perfectly fine until yesterday, when one tiny component broke down that actually only costs a few pence (or cents) on its own but that is so integrated with lots of other really expensive stuff that you can't just repair, you have to replace. Energy means literally the energy it takes to make said component, from the raw materials via the manufacturing process to the transportation routes to the consumer. Inbuilt obsolescence is the capitalist, profiteering antithesis to any attempts at eco-conscious, planet-saving green living.
Energy can be measured not just in current output (how much your car pollutes right now), but in historic terms called 'embodied energy', meaning how much energy has been used in making something (so how much pollution was involved in manufacturing your nice new electric vehicle in the first place). Embodied energy as a concept fits best with houses, hence also my time and personal energy efforts spent in refurbishing one. Here in Blighty a vast amount (I forget the exact figures) of the housing stock is pre-WWII, never mind even pre-1900. All the retro-fitting in the world of 'smart' devices cannot make these old houses any better in terms of energy consumption for heating. And most modern insulation methods do not work well with old houses, which tend to have solid walls not cavity walls, or are even counter-productive, like cement render instead of breathable lime render... I could bore you for ages, because about 15 years ago I was quite active locally in investigating and promoting sympathetic eco-friendly upgrades, sympathetic to old houses that is. The upshot is that two things tend to get completely forgotten by the Eco Evangelisers, namely:
a) one size does not fit all, as said above, and older houses need older solutions, and
b) most importantly older houses (old things generally) carry a huge amount of embodied energy with them.
Embodied energy is the stumbling block the advocates of new, better, shinier eco-fascism trip over quite happily. Most of the carbon footprint of a building comes from the time of its construction. Newer buildings are more carbon-intensive than older buildings. A building that has stood for decades if not centuries has stored up all the energy that was used long ago in its building materials, its construction methods, basically its carbon footprint. The older the house, the more likely all the material to build it was sourced locally. My 1850s house being a case in point: solid rubble stone walls sourced from a quarry up the hillside less than 50 metres away, lime for the mortar from limekilns less than 5 miles away, timber from ballast used in (sailing) ships coming back to Britain from Scandinavia. The reason why we have such diversity, to use a buzzword, of building styles across the globe is that back in the day before experts told everyone what is best for them, local people had quite happily worked out for themselves what kind of materials and construction methods are cheapest, most durable, keep you cool/warm as appropriate etc. If you do the maths so beloved of the modellers (like our friends the climate alarmists or epidemiologists), you can make an argument that the sheer amount of embodied energy sat in your pile of bricks and mortar, or stone and mortar, far outweighs any carbon output through fossil-fuel based heating for the next century. For these reasons embodied energy tends to be left out in the calculations presented by the climate hysterics.
Back in the day things like cars, central heating boilers or refrigerators may have been clunky, energy-hungry machines by modern standards, no 'A' rating for a million miles. But if they broke down, very often the able amateur DIYer could fix the thing cheaply, quickly and competently. This individual competence was possible without three years in college, or industry affiliation, or whatever the modern restrictions want to impose on self-sufficiency and self-reliance. And the bitter irony is that we have come so far now that even the 'expert' can no longer fix the broken device. If you take a modern car to a garage, the mechanic might be credentialed, but they themselves can no longer fix the problem, since all they do is shove a computerised diagnostic kit at the car, which then tells them that an entire circuit board needs to be replaced costing hundreds of pounds or dollars, instead of just a little diode costing pence or cents.
And then of course there is the simple fact that, more often than not, the older car, boiler or refrigerator was just better built, from better materials, more durable and less sensitive to the fine balance of umpteen electronic components having to be kept happy in digital harmony for the blasted thing to keep working. Breakdowns were not only more likely to be fixable by the user/owner, but also less likely to happen in the first place. Everyone in the Western world knows some variant of this story told by an elderly relative or friend who proudly announced that they have had their trusty Potterton climate-changing gas boiler, affectionately known as 'The Beast' because of the size and rumblings emanating from the cellar where the device is housed, which has been faithfully chugging away for the past 30 years without so much as a wheeze.
Since this a blog ostensibly about the comparison/contrast between our modern world and medieval times, a few words about the distinct lack of inbuilt obsolescence in the Middle Ages. For starters, materials were expensive. Expensive to acquire and transport, to manufacture, to manipulate (literally: to move or fashion with your hands). Most things were recycled and reused as much as possible, from the mundane (second-hand clothing left in wills by wealthy folk to their servants or poor relations) to the sort of things that get modern day (art) historians excited, as when Roman stonework turns up reused in a medieval church. Of course technology was simpler, more 'clunky', and therefore easier to make in the first instance never mind easier to repair, but let's not forget that even in the Middle Ages there were specialists and 'experts'. Every manor, village and town had at least one smith (metal working being quite a specialist skill), and in the agricultural society that most of medieval Europe was the ploughman was the most sophisticated specialist out on the field. In terms of agricultural technology, the complexity of a large plough as they were used from the 13th century onwards would not be surpassed until the advent of the modern combine harvester, hence the ploughman was an expert with the necessary training route (via apprenticeship to a master) to operate such machinery 'safely and effectively', to put it in modern parlance. The expert ploughman was a valued, trusted and indispensable labourer at the top of the peasant hierarchy. Not for nothing did the fourteenth-century poet Langland make a ploughman the central character of his eponymous epic, Piers Plowman. But let's say some part of the plough broke down. What the ploughman himself could not fix on the spot, the local smith, carpenter or farrier could, with materials that were readily obtainable. This form of localism mixed with 'clunky' low-tech meant that, compared to the modern consumer, most medieval people were extremely self-sufficient, self-reliant and autarchic at individual level. And autarchy at individual level is the antithesis of modern capitalism, for if a person, or 'worker' in the Marxist sense, can do something themselves without the intermediary of the merchant, landlord or 'expert', then the entire basis of capitalist profit (or exploitation) falls flat. A worker who owns the tools of their trade is autarchic, and similarly a consumer who can make or fix something themselves without the intermediary of the professional expert is autarchic.
You do not have to go back to the age of steam (although personally I am rather a fan of the Steampunk aesthetic), never mind the pre-industrial world of the Middle Ages, to find a technological level that is durable, reliable and can by repaired by the non-expert if needed. Most things built without chips or 'smart' devices, so stuff from the 1960s through to about the early 2000s, is a perfect compromise between modern functionality and durability. Maybe 'Vintage' is the answer.
[This blog will be on hiatus for a few weeks while I am away on holiday. Posting will resume in September, likely with something topical around the theme of travel.]
Thank you for your really informative comment. It’s wonderful to hear that I’m not alone in banging the drum for older is more durable and often all round better.
What a fantastic article! I love the way it calls out the hypocrisy of all the climate change, fake recycling etc. propaganda of today. Some years ago, I realized that everything is blamed on we individual citizens, and always by wealthy folks living in giant McMansions and flying on private jets, thus using more resources than most people. (They can all go to Hell.) Eat less meat! Take shorter showers, with a low-flow shower head. Use less heat! Don’t cool off in the summer! Smaller toilet tanks to save water (so we can flush twice, what a farce). Don’t water your yard/flowers/garden! Buy an electric car! Recycle plastic crap! And on & on, while corporations use all the energy and create all the pollution they want. I agree 100% with all of Tardigrade’s comments. (Full disclosure: I am the sister with the vintage stuff.) My cook stove is 1950. My clothes washer is a 1975 Maytag, which cleans the clothes better & faster than my previous new front-loader. My food blender is mid-1960’s. Many of my kitchen utensils are vintage, as they work so well, and last. Most of my furniture is vintage or antique. Once I obtain a piece of old furniture that I like, I never replace it…why would I? All of this stuff was already manufactured long ago, so this is ‘real’ recycling. Estate sales, yard sales, second-hand stores, etc. are great sources for finding stuff. Including clothing, and linens, which is now almost all cheap crap, made to be disposable like everything else. Does anyone else here remember making your own clothes, and mending same? And the prices can be amazingly low! I hope my 2006 Subaru Outback keeps going, as it has no computer screen on the dash. I wish I could own a 1960’s vehicle, but I’ve no qualified mechanic to work on it. It’s a good feeling, once you realize you don’t need most of your ‘stuff’, which we mostly bought due to successful marketing propaganda.