Growth
Working hours rise, wages stagnate or fall, tasks become duller, more stressful and harder to fulfill, emails and texts and endless demands clatter inside our heads, shutting down the ability to think, corners are cut, conditions deteriorate, housing becomes almost impossible to afford, there’s ever less money for essential public services. What and whom is this growth for?
It’s for the people who run or own the banks, the hedge funds, the mining companies, the advertising firms, the lobbying companies, the weapons manufacturers, the buy-to-let portfolios, the office blocks, the country estates, the offshore accounts. The rest of us are induced to regard it as necessary and desirable through a system of marketing and framing so intensive and all-pervasive that it amounts to brainwashing.
From a positively glistening essay by George Monbiot.
Thus the Great Global Polishing proceeds, wearing down the knap of the Earth, rubbing out all that is distinctive and peculiar, in human culture as well as nature, reducing us to replaceable automata within a homogenous global workforce, inexorably transforming the riches of the natural world into a featureless monoculture.
Is this not the point at which we shout stop? At which we use the extraordinary learning and expertise we have developed to change the way we organise ourselves, to contest and reverse the trends that have governed our relationship with the living planet for the past two million years, and that are now destroying its remaining features at astonishing speed? Is this not the point at which we challenge the inevitability of endless growth on a finite planet? If not now, when?
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Answerable to Nobody
In The Talented Mr. Ripley, a clever young man is charged with the task of dragging an errant playboy back to New York from a life of bohemian decadence in Italy. He finds himself in two minds about his task.
Why should Dickie want to come back to subways and taxis and starched collars and a nine-to-five job? Or even a chauffeured car and vacations in Florida and Maine? It wasn’t as much fun as sailing a boat in old clothes and being answerable to nobody for the way he spent his time, and having his own house with a good-natured maid who probably took care of everything for him. And money besides, to take trips if he wanted to. Tom envied him with a heartbreaking surge of envy and self-pity.
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Wildean Escapology
It is to be regretted that a portion of our community should be practically in slavery, but to propose to solve the problem by enslaving the entire community is childish. Every man must be left quite free to choose his own work. No form of compulsion must be exercised over him. If there is, his work will not be good for him, will not be good in itself, and will not be good for others. And by work I simply mean activity of any kind.
It’s Oscar Wilde’s birthday. Three cheers for the birthday boy!
The Soul of Man Under Socialism is a sacred text of Escapology.
We should be able, Wilde says, to spend our time precisely as we’d like to, slave to no duty or demand from others; and that the best way for society to cater for this is through a kind of non-authoritarian Socialism. In the meantime, of course, there are individual acts of Escapology–freeing ourselves from the grip of the system through clever individualist means–but that we’re brought to this is something of an indictment.
Wilde also uses the word “escape” a bewildering number of times in the essay. It’s quite uncanny. “Scarcely anyone escapes,” he says in his opening paragraph; artists of means are able to escape; Byron and Shelley escaped oppressive England for bohemian Rome.
Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody. In fact, scarcely anyone at all escapes.
We should be free to work as cottage industrialists, to put ourselves into our art or science or craft:
One’s regret is that society should be constructed on such a basis that man has been forced into a groove in which he cannot freely develop what is wonderful, and fascinating, and delightful in him – in which, in fact, he misses the true pleasure and joy of living. He is also, under existing conditions, very insecure.
Minimalism comes up in the form of Wilde’s argument against private property. Not that it’s immoral per se but that it’s a pain in the arse.
The possession of private property is very often extremely demoralising, and that is, of course, one of the reasons why Socialism wants to get rid of the institution. In fact, property is really a nuisance.
I especially approve of this part about rebellion. Rebellion is not a thing to be enjoyed for it’s own sake, no matter what the punks might think. What great things might have been accomplished by, say, Tony Benn or Che Guevara or Richard Dawkins if they had not been required to spend so much energy going against the grain?
Most personalities have been obliged to be rebels. Half their strength has been wasted in friction. Byron’s personality, for instance, was terribly wasted in its battle with the stupidity, and hypocrisy, and Philistinism of the English. Such battles do not always intensify strength: they often exaggerate weakness. Byron was never able to give us what he might have given us.
Wilde also, like Andrew McAfee, suggests appropriate technology might be our salvation:
At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man. […] The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends. And when scientific men are no longer called upon to go down to a depressing East End and distribute bad cocoa and worse blankets to starving people, they will have delightful leisure in which to devise wonderful and marvellous things for their own joy and the joy of everyone else.
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Sleep and Braininess
Start work at 10am and sleep after lunch. If you want to get ahead, take a nap.
Friend Tom Hodgkinson has a nice piece about the benefits of sleep at the Guardian website this week.
More sleep equals economic growth: that is the extraordinary equation that we’re nearing. Which is great. If we can somehow convince the authorities, with the help of science, that sleep is good for productivity, then we’re on to a win-win situation.
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The Handcrafted Life
We returned to Canada after a decade in London, UK with a small child in tow and decided to set-up a sustainable (more on this later) 21st century homestead on 5.65 acres of fir, alder and meadow on Gabriola Island, BC, Canada.
Here’s the blog of friend and New Escapologist contributor Rob West (genuinely not one of my pseudonyms).
Rob and family are setting up home in British Columbia, pretty much doing everything from scratch: building their own house, growing their own crops.
It’s a staggering undertaking. The blog charts the construction of their new home.
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Ernold Same
Remember this? My favourite bit for some reason is the stain he always sits on.
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A Succession of Glorious Adventures
We’ve mentioned How to Avoid Work by William J. Reilly before but friend Reggie sends in this great post full of lovely quotations and contemporary workplace photography:
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Put Your Feet Up
I’ve got an article at the Idler website today:
Having a job, if you’ve a brain in your nut, isn’t much fun. It’s boring, demeaning and disconnected from your personal values. But you know this. You’re an idler. As long as there are rivers to fish or clouds to admire, you’ll never be satisfied with a life of alarm clocks, dimwit managers and machine-vended sarnies for lunch every day.
Also worthy of mention is the new Idler Online: there’s free content every day but £35 gets you access to a digital library of all Idler back issues, idling literature and videos. Plus discounts on purchases from their shop.
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Throw Everything Out!
This article made me laugh.
I wasn’t sure at first. If you hate a book enough to describe its author as a misogynist, why spread the poison by gifting it when you could drop it quietly into a recycling bin? And I don’t relate to the description of fridge door clutter–do people really display postcards and snapshots from people they don’t know anymore?
Anyway, it grew on me. It made me laugh. It was refreshing to read phrases like “most stuff is crap” and “throw that shit out”.
Made me want to throw some shit out.
But I already did. There’s barely anything left. Shit.
Some of the comments are funny too: “Sorry, I can’t throw anything away, because I never know when I might need it. This applies to everything.”
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Agitated
Brad Pitt’s Twelve Monkeys character “discusses” escape:
Sorry. Uh, sorry. I, I, I got a little agitated. The thought of, uh, escape had crossed my mind, and then suddenly — suddenly — suddenly I felt like bending the fucking bars back, and ripping out the goddamn window frames and eating them — yes, eating them!
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