Because we are beings of mind and body, all of our productive work involves both ― both thought and physical action. But the proportion of the one versus the other can be very different, depending on the nature of the work.
In his study of early American expansion, The Winning of the West, Theodore Roosevelt observed: “The life of the backwoodsman was one long struggle. The forest had to be felled; droughts, deep snows, freshets, cloudbursts, forest-fires, and all the other dangers of a wilderness life faced. Swarms of deer-flies, mosquitoes, and midges rendered life a torment in the weeks of hot weather. Rattlesnakes and copperheads were very plentiful, and, the former especially, constant sources of danger and death. Wolves and bears were incessant and inveterate foes of the live stock, and the cougar, or panther, occasionally attacked man as well. More terrible still, the wolves sometimes went mad, and the men who then encountered them were almost certain to be bitten and to die of hydrophobia.”
We can imagine a single family, living miles from any other family, having to clear a dense forest in order to build a home and farm, then planting crops, nurturing, defending, harvesting and storing them, etc. Throughout, they’d spend enormous effort, using only simple homemade tools.
Certainly their work was intellectual and required solving many problems. But compared to work done in the advanced economies of today, also much more physical. So perhaps one way to measure progress in the context of production is precisely how inventions help us spend time and energy less on physical and more on intellectual labor. The labor that, so far, only we can do.
Meanwhile machines clear the ground, till, plant, harvest, lift, move, transport, and on and on ― all much faster and better than we ever could ― while we instead envision and, if all goes well, arrive at better answers to our never-ending questions.
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