At the annual Czech sociology conference held this week, the program committee included my paper in the main part of the opening day. I gave a talk on “Income Poverty and the Joy of Life”, which was not controversial and did not arouse any great attention.
The whole conference was interesting for me because I was able to spend a few days in an environment of people asking difficult questions about human of human behavior, reading even more complex books, and doing all kinds of research themselves. Sometimes simple, sometimes very complex. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m all of their attitudes in life, but that ability to think has value in itself. Over the next few days, I’ll return to each of these in a couple of posts lectures. And, of course, there were some people who didn’t ask any questions, but just used to do sociology for a living. As in any field.
It’s just good to remember that this intellectual micro-world can only live because some other people get up at 4:30, do physical hard labor in factories or a lot of monotonous hours at the conveyor belt or doing something else that isn’t even a little bit uplifting. It’s actually a very special kind of parasitism, albeit on the level. It’s also good to remember how terribly important it is that the ordinary working world survives and that people thrive in it. Because when a manufacturing plant closes or a farming cooperative goes out of business, more and more dominoes fall, until one day the intellectual research. I’m just not sure that my younger colleagues realise that.