Society

Here’s a history of one of the most versatile tools ever.

UPDATE: The history of duct tape!

Whoa.

In ”Much Depends Upon Dinner”, Cameron Stracher discusses the family dinner. Apparently studies prove its importance. For instance, one from Columbia shows

teens from families that almost never eat dinner together are 72% more likely to use illegal drugs, cigarettes and alcohol than the average teen and that those who eat dinner with their parents less than three times a week are four times more likely to smoke cigarettes, three times more likely to smoke marijuana and twice as likely to drink as those who eat dinner with their parents at least six times a week.

This strikes me as soft science; obviously, a lot of related variables lead to such outcomes and dinners on the fly are more symptom than cause. But maybe not. Dinner is significant.

In the first chapter of his autobiographical Up From Slavery, Booker T. Washington tells us:

I cannot remember a single instance during my childhood or early boyhood when our entire family sat down to the table together, and God’s blessing was asked, and the family ate a meal in a civilized manner. On the plantation in Virginia, and even later, meals were gotten by the children very much as dumb animals get theirs. It was a piece of bread here and a scrap of meat there. It was a cup of milk at one time and some potatoes at another. Sometimes a portion of our family would eat out of the skillet or pot, while some one else would eat from a tin plate held on the knees, and often using nothing but the hands with which to hold the food.

Slave owners set tasks for even a young child that made family dinners impossible in the slave quarters. To Washington, eating together meant eating “in a civilized manner”; that he saw it as important we see in his contrast of that ritual with food taken by “dumb animals.”

Dining together, the charm & weight of tradition bears down on us as children; we learn and grow. The family civilizes us, helps us transcend our brute nature, supports us as we fumble toward maturity.

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I raised this question tangentially in the comments to one of my recent posts. Here it is more plainly:

Which behavior is worse: 1) expressing racist views, i.e., that some people should be treated better or worse than others on the basis of race, or 2) abusing individuals, but not on the basis of race? (Stipulation: (1) and (2) are not necessarily correlated.)

Discuss.

Michael Blowhard discusses. Worth reading for the anecdotes about Susan Sontag and other wacko culturati, and also for the main idea. Strange, difficult people may or may not be overrepresented in the arts, but there certainly are a lot of such characters among successful people in some walks of life. Some of these people have obviously gotten under Michael’s skin, and this is one of his more forceful essays (and the better for it).