Constraints: bodily and social

I'm still thinking about Solnit on technology and bodily existence as burdensome, but now I'm also thinking about it with some additional bits and pieces.  In particular, I'm thinking about the interaction of bodies and social constraints.

One is to also consider what sort of social constraints might be regarded as some how analogous.  Yesterday we returned to models for negotiating ethnic variety and national identity in the USA and recalled the limits of an assimilationist model based on "Anglo conformity" or even the melting pot.  These are effected by visible, bodily markers of difference which can inhibit the possibility of an individual "melting" or conforming.  Of course movements like Black Nationalism rejected the goal of finding a way to join and the alternate models of an ethnic federation or cultural pluralism do not necessarily regard those visible, bodily markers as barriers.  Nonetheless, in the past a person's membership in a racial or ethnic group could in fact result in constraints upon individual's opportunities.

Similarly, in our previous discussion of Gay New York we considered the phenomenon of "policing" which imposed constraints on public behaviors, learned that the degree social of openness varied from one ethnic, racial, or class group to another, and noted that certain employments allowed more or less public acknowledgement of gay men's sexuality.   While individual men made decisions about how to live, most did so with those community standards in place even as the standards changed over time in response to various factors such as the wavering legal status of prohibition.

A third, somewhat different, line of thought was sparked by stories about space exploration: the special fuel needed to travel really, really far and a test run in which the potential travelers were confined for many months to simulate the boredom of a multi-year space journey.  These are efforts to get way beyond the boundaries of our earthly life!  And as I listened I wondered if our considerable human innovation and creativity might not be better directed to improving the basic life conditions of human beings whose earthly life is sustained on less than a dollar a day in India or the increasing number of Americans living below the poverty life.  Certainly those are conditions that constrain their options and their contributions to common life.