wealth

The Wealthy Need The Poor

~ Roger JG Albert

Just a quick note to start off the day. The title says it all. The wealthy need the poor. In fact, it doesn’t matter who ends up poor, it just matters that many people do. I mean, who can know if someone is wealthy if there are no poor people around to compare them to? No, poor people are essential to the wealthy for many reasons. First, they make a great cautionary tale, as in, “see what can happen to you, my child if you don’t put your nose to the grindstone, work hard, aspire to the things that make us rich and believe in free entreprise, because mygawd it’s our way to glory and eternity.” Of course, in the same vein, they are also a great example of how not to live your life. “Those people have made a poor choice in parents. You’ve at least started life not making that mistake!” They are also a great source of cheap labour and can’t save any money so everything they make goes right back into the hands of business. What a great setup.

Actually, it’s  really quite simple. We live in a class society no matter how much we attempt to deny it. Wealth and poverty are a consequence of that, not the cause. So we have rich and poor people as an inevitable consequence of the way our society has evolved. Wealth is a major moral goal so poverty must be a major moral failure. So we merrily blame the poor for their circumstances and for all the ills of the world. We don’t have the good sense to see who and what are really to blame.

Strangely enough, there is no such thing as ‘capitalism’, which is a word that would describe a system of wealth accumulation that can be compared to the evil isms, socialism and communism. Capitalism is an a-historical concept that fails to take history into account. Capital accumulation and the rapid concentration of wealth in finance capital will come to an end. What will come after? I have some sense of that in very broad terms but that’s the subject of another post.

The Trouble with Wealth

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 1 Comment

We all want to lead the good life, but what does ‘the good life’ mean? In our world it means to live a life in comfort, economic and physical security and good health. It means being a moral person. It’s hardly ever pointed out, but being a moral person in our world generally means conforming to the ideals and goals of a market economy within a system of private entreprise and possessive individualism. Morality, although it’s often thought of as a set of abstract principles detached from everyday life, is actually determined by the dominant socio-economic structures of our society. Being a ‘good’ citizen is, undoubtedly, an aspect of being a moral person, but most of us never give a second thought to the role that nations have played in our history or what roles they play in our lives now. Countries or nation-states like Canada, the US, Spain and France, are political structures that support private entreprise and that nominally employ a representative form of government that is generally believed to be democratic. I would argue that the states I mentioned above as examples are not democratic in their essence and do not act in the interests of their populations except in rare circumstances and often tangentially at that. Of course, their main objective is to convince you that they do act in your interests. Most of us believe it because we have no knowledge basis to think otherwise.

We’ve been convinced that the key to leading a good life is to get a ‘good’ job, work hard, be frugal and buy things, as many things as possible because they are often what give our lives meaning. I’ve written about this before. Do a search of my archives. I don’t want to get sidetracked here, so I’ll move on. Suffice it to say that one major ideal in our world is the achievement of prosperity with includes good health and enough wealth to lead a comfortable, secure life.

So, what are the social consequences of the drive to achieve prosperity, especially from the perspective of those who have it? Well, the achievement of a certain level of prosperity and wealth is a major moral imperative in our world. So, if you have prosperity, you are a moral person. If you don’t, if you’re poor or somehow lacking in the trappings of wealth, you are an immoral person. It’s really just as simple as that. Yes, there are exceptions and not all of us, by any means, buy into this ideology. What I am arguing is that most of our social institutions are geared to supporting private entreprise, the pursuit of wealth, and possessive individualism. So, for example, our governments are set up to treat the poor, the homeless and those with marginal physical and mental health with disdain and as objects of derision and opprobrium. Being poor carries with it shame and guilt because a person’s poverty is a clear sign of their immorality, of their incapacity to achieve the prosperity to which we all aspire. We rub people’s noses in their poverty at all possible turns.

Human life, in our world, has little intrinsic value. The value of human life is contingent on how productive we are, how prosperous we are, how clever and smart we are. Unfortunately, those qualities are much more easily achieved for some of us than for others. We do not have equal opportunity. Racist exclusion, the marginalization of women and generational inheritance of advantage all play a role in how we ‘end up’ in life.

I’m not saying that individuals have no responsibility for how they ‘end up’. They do. But the structures of our society militate against certain groups of people making them immoral even before they attempt anything. From a start of immorality, it’s very difficult if not impossible to achieve the moral objectives of prosperity and wealth.

Of course, this is all very complex. We can discuss that if you like, but, essentially, the one thought I want to convey here is the idea that poverty in our world equals immorality. So much of how we organize the world and think of ourselves and our neighbours stems from that basic principle.

Escape 18: Our Bodies, Our Deaths.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 1 Comment

Escape 18: Our Bodies our Deaths: What evil has history wrought?

Chapter 6 in EFE ends with a section called The Demonics of History.  How to summarize Becker’s arguments here?  Not without some difficulty: every sentence is jam packed with meaning.  In the last post we noted that money is the new immortality ideology but ‘new’ here means after the fall of primitive society and the rise of classes some 10 to 12 thousand years ago in some parts of the world, much later in others.  But, it’s complicated.  As Becker writes:

If we say that ‘money is God,’ this seems like a simple and cynical observation on the corruptibility of men.  But if we say that ‘money negotiates immortality and therefore is God,’ this is a scientific formula that is limpidly objective to any serious student of man…We see the changes from tribal modes of achieving power to money modes right before our eyes.

 In the early days of French ‘exploration’ in North America, once the Huron, Montagnais and other tribes understood the power of the invaders from Europe they didn’t need to be coerced to let go of their previous immortality ideologies.  They were confronted by a relentless and powerful new god, one that did not want to compromise with theirs, a god who showed that the only way to salvation and eternal life was in the worship of it and it alone.  The earliest ‘conversions’ had been gotten with bribes and coercion, but in time that was no longer necessary.

Think; if a race of men with advanced learning, health, and weapons were to land on our planet and tell us about the god who sustains them in Alpha Centauri, a new religion would sweep over large numbers of people overnight and discredit most of our institutions. 

 So, money represents real earthly power, but its power is sacred.  Money gives power now!  No need to wait on an earthly death for apotheosis.

Man has become dependent on social symbols of prestige that single him out as especially worthy of being remembered in the eyes of the gods and in the minds of men.  But for an animal who actually lives on the level of the visible and knows nothing of the invisible, it is easy for the eyes of men to take precedence over the eyes of the gods.  The symbols of immortality power that money buys exist on the level of the visible, and so crowd out their invisible competitor.  Man succumbs easily to created life, which is to exercise power mainly in the dimension in which he moves and acts as an organism.  The pull of the body is so strong, lived experience is so direct; the ‘supernatural’ is so remote and problematic, so abstract and intangible.

 Indeed the pull of the body is strong but it’s the body that is the source of sin.  The body dies and that’s not an acceptable outcome for such a narcissistic species as our own.  That’s why we divide ourselves into body and soul.  The body dies but the soul lives on.  The soul is an immortality project in the real sense of the term.  The body leads us into temptation.  It’s the source of all death and guilt.  As I get older, in my penultimate years, I feel that as the life drains out of me I am betraying our most cherished immortality symbols and I must feel guilt for the loss of life.  But the immortality ideologies that dominate the planet now are betraying me because their promises of immortality are empty ones.  It’s interesting to me how the symbol of the devil represents “physical, earthly, visible power and on this planet easily holds sway over his more ethereal competitor, spiritual power.” (p. 85)

As we noted earlier we need evidence that we are being heard by the gods in our search for immortality; that assurance does not come easily.  But if we can convince ourselves, as the Calvinists suggested after some initial stumbling, that how we conduct ourselves on this planet may be an indication of where we will end up after we die, that can give us some comfort but it also can bring on anxiety.  As Becker writes:

No wonder economic equality is beyond the endurance of modern democratic man: the house, the car, the bank balance are his immortality symbols.  Or to put it another way, if a black man moves next door, it is not merely that your house diminishes in real estate value, but that you diminish in fullness on the level of visible immortality – and so you die…the decline of traditional religion has eclipsed the god whose eyes judged merit according to the goods you piled up…In other words, modern man cannot endure economic equality because he has no faith in self-transcendent, otherworldly immortality symbols; visible physical worth is the only thing he has to give him eternal life.  No wonder that people segregate themselves with such consuming dedication, that special ness is so much a fight to the death: man lashes out all the harder when he is cornered, when he is a pathetically impoverished immortality seeker.  He dies when his little symbols of specialness die. 

 This is a long quotation but I feel no qualms in putting it down here for you to read. It sums up a great deal of Becker’s thought in this chapter.  Over time we came to distrust invisible symbols of immortality.  As Becker writes: “Immortality power, then, came to reside in accumulated wealth.” (p. 87)

So, in a world dominated by secular immortality symbols, where we judge people on their possessions how do we understand the concept of sin?  In a world where our immortality is gotten by bartering with the gods, sin meant distancing oneself from invisible power.  It might mean angering the gods by not performing a ritual properly or by ignoring prescribed behaviours.

Sin is the experience of uncertainty in one’s relation to the divine ground of his being; he no longer is sure of possessing the right connection, the right means of expiation. 

Sin, in a Christian sense, defines a situation, created by certain actions or thoughts, that distances the believer from his God.  It’s a denial of the symbolic side of humankind.  And, of course, it’s our symbolic side that is the seat of our immortality.  The body betrays us, drags us down.  No wonder we often speak of the body in terms that connect it to the earth and in doing so we can barely mask our loathing of it.  Sex is ‘dirty’ unless of course it’s sanctioned and made acceptable by the application of essential rituals to ‘cleanse’ it.  In this sense, it’s easy for men to think of women as the source of evil and death.  Men can think of themselves as purely symbolic creatures whereas women’s bodies are the source of temptation and descent into death.  Women bleed monthly, they bleed in labour, they give life, but in so doing create death.  They are the carriers of death by giving birth.  The idea is perverse but any simple and cursory study of the ethnographic record easily demonstrates how widely it was, and is still, accepted.  I will explore this further in subsequent posts, but for now I have to wrap up this already too long post.

So what does it mean to sin in a secular world?  Well, I don’t agree completely with Becker in his conclusion here.  He claims that we’ve avoided sin by “simply denying the existence of the invisible dimension to which it is related.” (p. 89) But, in my mind to sin in a secular world that promises victory over death by the accumulation of wealth, sin must be the inability to accumulate wealth.  The poor, by definition, are sinners of the worse kind.  But how do we atone for this sin?  In a Christian world simply asking for forgiveness and promising to lead a better life can be enough.  In a secular world it’s not so easy.  Of course we make the poor pay for their ‘sin’ by treating them like shit.  “There, that will teach you for not being wealthy.”  Becker concludes:

History is the tragic record of heroism and expiation out of control and of man’s efforts to earn expiation in new, frantically driven and contrived ways.  The burden of guilt created by cumulative possessions, linear time, and secularization is assuredly greater than that experienced by primitive man; it has to come out some way…The point I am making is that most of the evil that man has visited on his world is the result precisely of the greater passion of his denials and his historical drivenness.  

Escape 17: Money: The New Universal Immortality Ideology

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 5 Comments

Escape 17: Money: The New Universal Immortality Ideology

That’s the title of Chapter 6 of Escape from Evil.  We all take money for granted, it’s such a common feature of our lives.  It’s funny how we think about money.  Technically, money is a social relationship.  It doesn’t refer to the stuff we carry around in our wallets.  Coins are technically called specie and the folding plastic (used to be paper) things are banknotes.  They are actually the physical representation of money.  So they’re kind of like a metaphor.  Chapter 6 is Norman O. Brown’s chapter.  Otto Rank and Brown share a unifying principle in their work, the universal urge to immortality.  It underlies everything they write about.

In a pre-scientific world a person could get some kind of immortality by leaving behind children.  That’s not entirely satisfactory because for men it’s never certain that your children are really your own.  In this circumstance it’s not a bad idea to have a back-up plan.  How about leaving something else behind that reminds the living of how great a person you were?  How about things, physical things, things you know are yours.  Surround yourself with things and maybe you have a little insulation against insignificance.  Leave many wondrous things and maybe you gain a little immortality.  Yes, indeed, have your name placed on buildings…that will not thwart the grim reaper but it will be a lasting symbolic reminder of your life on this planet.  That’s about all we can expect.  It’s not much, but for an animal like ourselves we need to reach out and grab any bit of hope we can.

Money it seems is a great way to get yourself a little sense of immortality.  If you can, have a likeness of your face stamped into gold coins.  Yeah, that ought to work.  Money is a new magic object.  As Becker writes: “Money is the new ‘totemic’ possession.” (p. 75) Money soon became the new ritual focus.  The old rituals were just not doing it anymore.  Time to move on.  Money was the perfect replacement for the old rituals.  Becker quotes Mary Douglas from her book Purity and Danger:

Money provides a fixed, external, recognizable sigh for what would be confused, contradictable operations: ritual makes visible external signs of internal states. Money mediates transactions; ritual mediates experience, including social experience.  Money provides a standard for measuring worth; ritual standardizes situations, and so helps to evaluate them.  Money makes a link between the present and the future, so does ritual.  The more we reflect on the richness of the metaphor, the more it becomes clear that this is no metaphor.  Money is only an extreme and specialized type of ritual.

 Money, in fact, is religious.  It has become the new immortality ideology.  It provides life like no other ritual could.  The more of it you have, the more mobility you have, the more liberty you have, the more assurance you have of your value to others.  Life is mobility, death is immobility.  From this perspective the poor are the walking dead.  It’s not surprising that zombie movies are so popular these days and that zombie characters are often made up to look like ‘street’ people.  Money gives life, it is life.  There is no other way to put it.  I take exception to some extent to Becker’s analysis here.  If as Marx points out money is the average commodity then ‘commodity’ is the god here and not money.  Or to put it another way, the market is the thing.  Money is a representation of the relations of the market.  The market is the venue par excellence of exchange, gift giving and receiving.  It’s why we feel so good on a shopping spree and down when we are short of cash.  We are feeling a little connection to the gods. It sucks to be poor.  No connecting to the gods for you!

I’m not going to go into a lot of the content of chapter 6.  It’s a lot about how money came to have such power a long time ago, how it came to have supernatural power.

A little money goes a long way, but a lot of money goes a lot further:

And so we see how it was that money came to buy many things: if it was magic, people would give anything to have it.  As Géza Róheim put it in a very happy formulation, “originally people do not desire money because you can buy things for it, but you can buy things for money because people desire it.”

That’s a bit convoluted as a way to state it, but it’s clear that the evolution of money into want it is today was fairly slow.  Now, banks have replaced churches and cathedrals as the favoured display of immortality.  How many new cathedrals have you seen built lately?  How many bank towers?

Ah, money.  The best thing about it is that it can be accumulated and passed on.  In our time, we’ve made this into a sacred duty.  We sin if we don’t save.  We get chastised by the finance minister for not saving while out of the other side of his mouth he is urging us to spend otherwise we’ll find ourselves in a depression…which reminds us way too much of failure, immobility and death.  Spending means life and prosperity, even if we accumulate guilt as we borrow our way to communing with the gods.  When the bills come in after Christmas, then what?  But still, we believe in it.  We trust it.  It can be good to us, at least some of us.  Best of all,

…[money] radiates its power even after one’s death, giving one a semblance of immortality as he lives in the vicarious enjoyment of his heirs that his money continues to buy, or in the statues of himself and the majesty of his own mausoleum.  In short, money is the human mode, par excellence of cooly denying animal boundness, the determinism of nature.

 Enough for now.  I’ll finish up dealing with Chapter 6 of EFE tomorrow as Becker addresses what he calls The Demonics of History.

Ernest Becker 12: Guilty as charged!

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 4 Comments

Ernest Becker 12: Guilty as charged!

To understand the primitive mind you must understand guilt. Understanding the nature of primitive economics demands that we know what guilt is.  Guilt is not a weakness as Nietzsche and Freud thought.  Brown seems to have picked up from them this same perspective on it.  Becker, however, argues that guilt is not a weakness and to understand it this way means that an understanding of primitive economics must remain elusive.  Guilt arises because there are so many binds in life. One of these binds is that of a child who inevitably loves the people who provide her with nourishment and life but who can also frustrate her in the things she wants or doesn’t want [as we witnessed shopping this morning].  Love can quickly turn to hatred and ‘destructive impulses’ and it can be hard on the ears too.  This is one kind of bind, but as humans we experience many, many binds.  Guilt

…is a feeling of being blocked, limited, transcended, without knowing why.  It is the peculiar experience of an organism which can apprehend a totality of things and not be able to move in relation to it.  Man experiences this uniquely as a feeling of the crushing awesomeness of things and his helplessness in the face of them. 

 Think about it:  How are you feeling right now about what the Harper government is doing?  Are you feeling angry and upset?  Have you signed petitions declaring the tar sands to be the work of the devil?  Are you feeling disempowered because you can’t really do anything about it?  That sense of disempowerment is guilt.  We also feel a certain sense of guilt because we know we might be benefitting from the wealth created by the tar sands, but we don’t want to stop driving our cars and using plastic products.

We feel guilt when we don’t feel ‘enough’ gratitude towards those who nourish us and that can include our society or culture (using Becker’s word).  We owe everything to our society, even our sense of self-worth so we naturally feel subordinate to it but at the same time we resent it for constraining our actions and imposing upon us ‘unreasonable’ obligations like having to pay taxes.

This real guilt partly explains man’s willing subordinacy to his culture; after all, the world of men is even more dazzling and miraculous in its richness than the awesomeness of nature…An attitude of humble gratitude is a logical one to assume toward the forces that sustain one’s life; we see this very plainly in the learning and development of children. 

 There are so many different binds in life.  Have you achieved in life all you could?  If not, how do you feel about that?  I can’t remember where I read this but it’s the story of a multi-billionaire who was unsatisfied with his accomplishments because there was someone yet richer than he was.  He actually felt guilty about not being the richest person alive.  I feel guilt when I don’t speak up when I think I should.  Do you?  How do you feel when you see someone being abused and do nothing?  That’s that old guilty feeling.  At trial we may be found guilty and that means only that we’ve not been good and properly subordinate to our society.  In this way we are an embodiment and personification of guilt. We can then be used as a scapegoat in the struggle to ensure the gods are happy. Guilt keeps us in line.

We feel guilt for being poor and guilt for being rich and more: As Becker writes,

One can be in a bind in relation to one’s own body, which is the guilt of anality; to feel bound and doomed by one’s physical appendages and orifices.  Man also experiences guilt because he takes up space and has unintended effects on others – for example, when we hurt others without intending to, just by being what we are or by following our natural desires and appetites, not to mention when we hurt others physically by accident or thoughtlessness.

If we stand out in a crowd, if we are too prominent we experience guilt.

Some individuals achieve an intensity of individuation in which they stick out so far as that almost each day is an unbearable exposure.  [think Hollywood here, Justin Bieber in particular.  His notoriety must be near unbearable for him at times]

Of course just being human with faces unique to ourselves makes us stand out in nature.  In that we’re way ahead of other animals.

Faces fascinate us precisely because they are unique, because they stick out of nature and evolution as the most fully developed expression of the pushing of the life force in the intensity of its self-realization.  We don’t understand why the life force is personalized in this way, what it is trying to achieve; but we flatly know that it is personalizing because we have our heads and faces as empirical testimony, and as a burden of guilt. 

 Headhunting was not just a particularly gruesome way of killing.  It was a way of destroying the most personal and individual aspect of us.  In primitive society and in France not so long ago, it was dangerous to have a head!  Taking a head was probably a way of sharing guilt and atoning for our own sin of sticking out.

Probably the most important dimension of guilt is its social nature.  What did Brown mean when he said that social organization was a structure of shared guilt, “a symbolic mutual confession of it?” (p. 35) What Brown concluded was this:

Mankind has so many things that put it into a bind that it simply cannot stand them unless it expiates them in some way.  Each person cannot stand his own emergence and the many ways in which his organism is dumbly baffled from within and transcended from without…This is why the main general characteristic of guilt is that it must be shared: man cannot stand alone.

 What you do when you give a gift is lose guilt, if only temporarily.  Giving is a way of re-establishing balance or even putting obligations on others.  In real terms, guilt motivates individuals to strive to achieve social standards of acceptability.  Shopping relieves guilt and raises spirits. In a society like ours where possessions and the market rule, having no possessions or money imposes a huge burden of guilt to the point that it drives people into physical and mental illness.  To be idle in a society founded on work is to be guilty whether idle by choice or not.

If guilt is the experience of fear and powerlessness, then immersing oneself in a group is one way of actively defeating it: groups alone can make big surplus, can generate extravagant power in the form of large harvests, the capture of dangerous animals and many of them, the manufacture of splendid and intricate items based on sophisticated techniques, etc.  From the beginning of time the group has represented big power, big victory, much life…[we feel giddy in victory, depressed in defeat]

 If we thus look at both sides of the picture of guilt, we can see that primitive man allocated to himself the two things that man needs most: the experience of prestige and power that constitutes man a hero, and the experience of expiation that relieves him of the guilt of being human…Man needs self-esteem more than anything; he wants to be a cosmic hero, contributing with his energies to nothing less than the greatness and pleasure of the gods themselves.  At the same time, this risks inflating him to proportions he cannot stand; he becomes too much like the gods themselves, and he must renounce this dangerous power.  Not to do so is to be unbalanced, to run the great sin of hubris as the Greeks understood it.  Hubris means forgetting where the real source of power lies and imagining that it is in oneself. 

 So, the individualism that characterizes our world is based on the fantasy that we somehow control our own lives, that we are in charge.  To some extent we are, of course, but fundamentally we are not.  Again, I could point to others who have explained this much more clearly than I can or that Becker has.  I think here of Norbert Elias who argues that there is no such thing as a human individual.  We are a system of interdependencies and interweavings.  The real power in our lives lies in our social relations not in our individual initiative which is meaningless unless it is socially guided and sanctioned.

Guilt makes the world go round.  How and when we feel guilt is determined by social expectations.  Whenever we feel guilt, whenever we feel blocked, we need to expiate it by some form or another.  When we feel an especially strong attachment to our social group in times of awful stress, we may be in a position to relate to what a mother said upon hearing of the death of her son overseas in war.  She said in so many words: “If only I had another son to sacrifice too.  I feel that what I’ve done already is not enough.”  She could not have acknowledged in stronger terms her unconscious realization that she was completely dependent and beholden to her society while realizing at the same time that her sacrifice had not made any difference, had not made her society a better one.

What the hell is ‘quality of life?’ Part 3

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 1 Comment

So, I’m back at it.  Lately I’ve been reading a book called The Truth About Art: Reclaiming Quality by Patrick Doorly.  Doorly refers to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Persig in very flattering ways.  Persig’s book is all about quality and what it means.  For Persig, quality is in the interface between things.  It’s not a thing itself.  As an aside, nowadays we’ve perverted the concept of quality to the point where quality only means ‘good’ or ‘high’ quality.  Apparently poor quality doesn’t exist anymore.  Now, when we speak of quality goods we always mean good quality goods.  That’s pretty stupid, in my mind, but that’s the way language seems to evolve.  Returning to my point, there is no question in my mind that quality exists in the interface between things.  I, being a thing, can find another person, also a thing, either good or bad, of high quality, or of questionable character and quality.  Quality is in the judgment I make about something even if that judgment is largely socially constructed.  I may find a Mercedes of higher quality than a Toyota Tercel but ‘society’ has already made that judgment for me by reference to the price of the vehicles in question.  The value of the vehicles, strangely enough, may have little to do with price.  But I’ll leave that seeming contradiction for a discussion at another time, after I’ve finished reading Doorly and re-read Persig.  Again, back to my story.

So, quality of life is partly an individual thing, a judgment about how a life is lived, but it’s also about the ‘price’ and ‘value’ of that life itself and how it can be lived.  Life implies mobility. Dead things don’t move. The more we have ‘life’ in us, the more we move.  In our world, personal, individual mobility is gotten by having money and good health, of course.  No money, no mobility, no life. Poor health equals poor mobility.  So, having money means to be alive and to be poor means to be immobilized and socially dead in the eyes of the majority of people in our world, including poor people themselves when they (generally) buy into the moral assumptions about quality and value that drive us in our daily lives.  So, what is a high quality of life in our (moral) world?  Well, it’s having some mobility and the ability to make choices the immobilized cannot make.  The poor and unhealthy are essentially stuck, blocked and unable to move in the marketplace or in just plain physical terms.  Being stuck/blocked is essentially the definition of guilt.  Guilt here is a social concept, addressing just how well one ‘fits’ within the moral wall of the ‘community,’  large or small.  In our world, being guilty is not being mobile, without wealth or health.  We [as a pronoun here used in the broadest and most inclusive of terms] generally have no great sympathy for the poor or the ill.  We speak sympathetically of the poor and the ill but culturally we have institutionalized suspicions that the poor are that way because they are morally weak and people who are ill have only themselves to blame or their families, who should look after ‘their’ ill because they are often responsible for whatever family illnesses there are.  Never mind that most ‘poor’ people are that way not out of any moral weakness but because of circumstance, family history, and the fact that there are rich people in the world.  ‘Poor’ people are as necessary to a ‘properly’ functioning society as wealthy people but we can’t let them think they are important or necessary.  We need to make them feel guilty for not being wealthy.  After all they are poor because they are morally weak.  Let’s be clear about what it means to be morally upstanding in our world.

To be morally upstanding in our world is to be wealthy, healthy and male above everything else.  If you aren’t those things, it’s your duty to give the best impression that you actually are those things.  Drive a car you can’t afford, live in a house you can’t afford because you need to give others the impression that you are a morally upstanding member of society.  It’s no surprise that most of our laws centre around private property. It lives at the core of our morality.  But so does business entreprise, the factory-system, individualism, hard work and maleness to name a few.  To test this view, just think of the things ‘we’ hold dear and the things ‘we’ loathe, fear, detest or for which we have little regard or esteem.  Need I make a list?  How about a couple of examples.  In our world, individualism is a ruling moral force to such an extent that labour unions are scorned by many people even those who would benefit from their existence because they are collective organizations.  We hold individualism to be of such importance these days that business corporations are now considered legal individuals.  Even though corporations are made up of groups of people aligned together to produce a result, that is to make money, they are considered legal individuals.  Unions are not considered legal individuals, rather they are thought to be evil because they contradict

the global love we have for individuality and it’s ideology, individualism.  So, we live in a world circumscribed by a more or less well defined moral wall.  Imagine a place, say an old English castle, surrounded by a high wall with the king’s residence in the middle and the rest of the people living in concentric circles around the middle depending on how close they are to the king in moral terms.  You have to know where the poor live.  Yes, right up against the wall and maybe even outside the wall.  It’s no wonder we struggle so much trying to look wealthier or healthier than we are.  We are constantly testing each other, trying to determine where we reside in our moral world.  Go to a party where you don’t know a lot of people and the first question you will be asked is “So, what do you do (for a living)?  If you say you’re retired then be expected to be asked “Planning any trips abroad?  Our daily conversations are laced with attempts to determine where we stand in relation to others around us on the moral spectrum.  How close to the king do you live?

So, to get back to my original concern here with quality of life, I have to say that quality of life is judged finally on where we ‘reside’ in our moral world.  The closer we are to the king’s domain in our world, the better we think of our quality of life.  But that’s not the end of the story.  There is a social dimension to the quality of life and a responsibility we have as a community to respect all people who reside within our moral walls.  The king could never keep his castle without the help of ‘his’ people.  The wealthy in our world are the same.  No poverty, no wealth.  The wealthy need the poor, not only to make their lattés but to collect their garbage, repair their roads and cars and to buy the products they sell.  The wealthy 1 percenters in our world would be lost without the buying power of the rest of us.  Yet they have little or no respect for us.  Well, why should they?  The poor have no moral standing in our world.  They deserve their lot in life, don’t they?

What the hell is the ‘quality of life?’ Part 2

~ Roger JG Albert

So, as I noted in my last post I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of quality of life. People use it in many different ways; it’s easy to establish this observation by just entering ‘quality of life’ in a Google search. It’s often associated with medical issues and how the quality of life is diminished with, say, the need for blood dialysis. That said, without dialysis, there is death. Take your pick, a reduced quality of life or death. I’m thinking most people would chose the former option although their opinions may change if they ever find themselves on dialysis. There is a dialysis centre close to where I live so it would be less of a hardship for me to attend it than for someone who lives a long way from a dialysis centre. But there are lots of other ways that medical conditions are thought to reduce the quality of life. Blindness, deafness, the loss of a limb and cancer are a few things I can think of that many people would argue reduce the quality of life. Maybe they do. I’m not entirely sure. I’ve had cancer and lost a kidney because of it but I’m not convinced that my quality of life was reduced because of it. Of course, I had a great medical plan and an understanding employer at the time. If I had been unemployed and poor 11 years ago when I was diagnosed with kidney cell cancer, things would have turned out very differently, I surmise. I have a lot of ‘cultural capital’ too. That means that with my Master’s degree and social status, I was able to access services and information that people with less education might have found difficult if not impossible to access or even know about. Knowing how to do research is a key to my quality of life, I can assure you. Poverty sucks! I was poor once and I’m still not wealthy by any means but I haven’t forgotten about the time when our children were very young and I didn’t get a teaching contract I expected. I had to go to the ‘welfare office.’ They turned us down. It was very difficult. Good thing we had (and have) a very supportive family. Family came to the rescue more than once for us in the days before I got a full-time teaching contract.
Quality of life is not a static thing. It comes and goes. Great quality of life very seldom ever lasts forever I would think, but poor quality of life resulting from poverty or ill health can be a life sentence for some.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my former students. I had thousands of students over the 36 years I was a college instructor, 29 of those at North Island College on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. I’m still in contact with a few of them. Some I know are now lawyers and doctors, probation officers and nurses. Some, in more recent times, have arrived at NIC from India and Africa, mostly Nigeria. They traveled a long way in an attempt to improve their education and consequently their quality of life and their life chances in general. A few of them have gone of to Saskatchewan to continue their studies. From Port Harcourt in Nigeria to Saskatoon. Now there’s a change of climate for you. It’s a good thing humans are so adaptable. The Nigerian students I had demonstrated a wonderful sense of determination and enthusiasm. They were game too. I took two of them to the lake here a couple of summers ago and they were able to paddle my canoe around (with an outrigger attached, mind you). They had a great time.
Other students I had came from the local area, the majority of course. Many of those have gone off to university here and there but some have gone north to work in the oil and gas fields in BC and Alberta. They’ve left the Comox Valley and Campbell River because there is very little work here that pays a decent wage. Those students of mine who stay here to work have limited choice where employment goes. I wonder if my students who found it necessary to travel away from here to work (as thousands of men and some women have done leaving the East coast maritime provinces to work in Alberta at Fort McMurray in the tar sands industry), feel that their quality of life is improved or diminished because of what they’ve done to get work. People have migrated in search of wealth and work for centuries. Is that a worse fate than staying in one place for a lifetime?
More yet to come…

Why is Kevin O’Leary so smug about being on the right?

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 2 Comments

I’ve long been interested in the way language embodies class and power relations.  Obviously, our language embodies much of our culture, so it’s not surprising that it would embody class relations.  The word ‘poor’ is used to describe many conditions of inadequacy.  ‘Rich’ can describe a chocolate cake or a wealthy person, both desirable components of a valuable life.  ‘Right’ does not only indicate a direction in it’s most obvious sense, but also correctness.  To be correct is to be right, as in right-handed.  In contrast, to be left-handed is to be sinister.  The ‘proper’ adjective used to point to my left-handedness is ‘sinistral.’  Left-handers are sinister.  Of course ‘left’ indicates nothing good.  The sun is bright and right, the moon dark and left . Both these terms in turn are symbols for men and women respectively.  The moon is the domain of women, the sun belongs to men.  After all, who is at the right hand of God, and who at the left?  It’s fairly clear that Jesus sits to the right of God, but there’s a great deal of uncertainty among Christians about who sits on His left. Probably better not to go there.  Where are women in heaven? Not particularly evident, at least not in the heaven I learned about as a young Catholic boy.

Turning this discussion to politics it’s clear what we can expect.  Any conservative political party is on the right of the political spectrum and the socialists, liberals and communists occupy the sinistral left.  Now, isn’t that convenient?  Right is correct, left is just plain wrong, isn’t it?  Our language pre-conditions us to think about conservative (Republican in the US) parties as being right, as in better than those on the left.  Kevin O’Leary, that obnoxious and rude commentator on the CBC about business and finance has no doubt that he is right because he’s on the right.  After all, he represents the interests of business and finance, the natural elements of conservative thinking and of what C.B. Macpherson called possessive individualism.  After all, who can be against business success?  Our prosperity depends on it, or so the argument goes.  The poor are immobile, the walking dead, the wealthy have money to allow them mobility.  The poor are what’s ‘left,’ and they get what’s left when we’ve finished eating.   The wealthy always eat first and are always on the right path…don’t you know?

Homeless People, Mental Illness and Brain Injuries

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 1 Comment

I’m not a front line worker when it comes to homelessness.  I have spoken with many homeless people, heard their stories and, yes, given them money, often in the face of disapproving glances from passersby, as if it were any of their business.  Homeless people are often thought of as threatening, loud, dirty, uneducated, lazy and drunk or drugged out.  There is some truth to these thoughts.  However, homeless people don’t have a monopoly on them.  

Homelessness forces people into the street where their every gesture, their actions, their conversations and their very beings are constantly visible.  If they are street bound, that is, if they have no temporary accommodations, no shelters to sleep in or no tent in the bushes, they are visible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  Being observed all the time, without privacy has to be very emotionally taxing, to say the least.  If the homeless person has mental health issues, a brain injury or an addiction (most of them) , the vulnerability of constant exposure must be enormously distressing, compounding any problems they might already have ‘behaving’ themselves and relating to other people.  Constant surveillance by the police and other agencies cannot but add to the stress of living homeless.  

Most of us, if we have too many drinks, get a little raucous, loud, or a little unruly, can catch a cab home and crawl into bed, secure in our isolation and out of the public eye.  Our homes are our refuge, a place where we can do things we wouldn’t dream of doing on the street or anywhere in public. In fact, if you can afford to rent or own a home, many behaviours and activities not for public consumption become viable.  Drinking to excess, getting stoned, walking around nude, all these things are possible if you live in a home.  Those are the things that make it so liberating when we move out of our parental homes into our own pads.  Privacy is precious and it’s obvious that the more wealth we have the more privacy we can buy.  

Privacy is not something homeless people can afford.  The public life that homeless people lead makes them incredibly vulnerable to being targeted, scapegoated and unfairly characterized as morally unacceptable and less than worthy in the eyes of many.  Mental issues, brain injuries, addictions and other problems are spread throughout the population, but the wealthy can buy themselves into expensive treatment programs and privacy.  Street people don’t have the same advantage.  Our attention is drawn to the homeless because of their visibility.  If we were subject to the same surveillance intensity they are we may not be so quick to judge and reject.