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C.S. Lewis was wrong, then.
Technology has devalued a man’s labor. Handcrafting loses out to machine tooling. Conscript armies lose out to professionals with air support. Local farmers lose out to plantations in the third world.
There was and is no war. Liberalism’s love affair with the profit motive made it quicker to incorporate these changes in value. Our more authoritarian competitors either got with the program or, again, lost out.
Machine tooling in no way devalued a man's labor, because the machines were built and run by men. Amusingly, this held into the computer era (except during WWII, for obvious reasons), which was a point in the culture war.
In theory, a situation can arise where men's labor is just as vital as ever but still devalued because a small number of men can do the work of many. I mean, people would starve to death without grocery stores but they still can't charge you $500 for a loaf of bread. There are just too many competitors ready to step in and sell for less.
Is that what's going on with male labor? I tend to think so. I find it telling that the Japanese character for a man combines "strength" and "field." And that traditional cultures strongly preferred male children regardless of whether it was a dowry culture or a brideprice culture. I think that before the industrial revolution, having an able-bodied man in your family could easily mean the difference between life and death.
Theory or no, that is not the story of the Industrial Revolution.
Just means Japan's language is old.
Well would you agree that before the Industrial Revolution, male labor was vital on an individual level in a way that it is not in the present day?
More vital than today, perhaps, but the breakpoint was not the industrial revolution.
Ok, and would you agree that compared to some point in the past, a smaller percentage of men is necessary in the 21st century to do the vital work of society such as supplying food and maintaining infrastructure?
Certainly, given the employment-population ratio, but be aware that separating out the vital work from the non-vital work is extremely difficult. Part of this is I'm not sure if the question is whether men's labor is essential or whether a person's labor is essential. With society in a Malthusian state, all labor is essential for survival. The Industrial Revolution got us out of that, but didn't change (or perhaps even bent towards men) the relative necessity of men's labor versus women's.
Ok, I'm not sure what we are arguing over then. The claim made was this:
I take this to mean that as a result of technology, an individual man's labor is not as valuable as it once was. While it may be true that men's labor (as a group) is more valuable than ever, there's no men's union. In other words, men don't negotiate as a group and therefore individual men are in a much worse bargaining position than in the past. Do you disagree?
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