Rebels And Other Strangers.

Together Alone: Albert Camus summed-up his existentialist masterpiece L’Étranger in a single sentence. “In our society any man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death.” Helpfully, he added: “I only meant that the hero of my book is condemned because he does not play the game.”

THE FRENCH NOVELIST, Albert Camus, summed-up his existentialist masterpiece L’Étranger in a single sentence. “In our society any man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death.” Helpfully, he added: “I only meant that the hero of my book is condemned because he does not play the game.”

 

Refusing to “play the game” is a pretty good description of a rebel. Camus’ hero, Meursault, is a rebel without a cause. Or, to be fair, he’s a man whose only cause is to live life on his own terms. Depending on how far you believe society’s claims extend, this makes Meursault either an existential hero, or a sociopath. Certainly, it is his lack of empathy that costs him his life.

 

Of more concern to me than the Meursaults of this world are the rebels with a cause. Far from wishing society would leave them the hell alone, these rebels are passionately committed to changing it. Generally speaking, however, society has as little time for these mavericks as it does for those who attempt to refuse its claims. To be any kind of rebel, therefore, is to find oneself an outsider: feared and resented by those for whom the rules of society are no more burdensome than the rules of respiration.

 

These rebels-with-a-cause respond to their outsider status in different ways.

 

For many, society’s indifference – or outright hostility – towards their attempts to improve the lives of its members breeds a compensatory sense of superiority – bordering on contempt.

 

“What is the matter with these people?”, they complain. “Why can’t they see that we’re just trying to make things better for them?”

 

The self-evident benefits of their proposed reforms convinces them that all those individuals and groups obstructing their efforts are, at best, ignorant, or, at worst, wicked.

 

Either way, they stand disqualified from playing any part in the processes of reform. That such high-handed and anti-democratic elitism might reduce, rather than enhance, the prospects of their proposed reforms winning majority acceptance is dismissed as unimportant. Majority acceptance is not a necessary precondition for effective social reform: not when you have the power of the state at your back.

 

Such is their faith in the efficacy of their reforms that the ingrained opposition of existing generations of citizens is not regarded as important. Once the reforms come into effect, social attitudes and behaviours will begin to change. Future generations will be born into a “new normal”, and the complaints of their parents and grandparents will give rise to much rolling of eyes and shaking of heads.

 

The pain of estrangement experienced by these rebels’ is overcome by re-making society in their own image. In Camus’ terms: by making it illegal to cry at your mother’s funeral.

 

The other kind of rebel-with-a-cause responds very differently to the pain of being an outsider. Far from wanting to impose their reform agenda on the sceptical masses, these rebels are forever searching for the arguments with which to convince their fellow citizens that their reforms are worthy of adoption.

 

Because it’s only when the society they perceive as injured or diseased is ready to embrace the means of its own recovery that these rebels will be able to do what they have been longing to do their whole lives – shrug-off their outsider status and once again breathe in society’s air without choking on it. In Camus’ terms: by persuading people that, at their mother’s funeral, shedding tears is not the only acceptable way of displaying grief.

 

In the end it boils down to the question of how rebels-with-a-cause perceive society.

 

Is it nothing more than a lump of human clay to be kneaded and pummelled and moulded and scraped into an acceptable shape – whether it likes it or not? And if so, what does that tell us about the self-perception of the sculptors – or should we call them the Übermensch?

 

Or, should society be thought of as the place where everyone comes together, and no one gets left behind? What the Swedes call the folkshemmet – the people’s home. Located in this context our rebel/outsider becomes someone temporarily estranged from their family. Society ceases to be a collection of human resources waiting to be engineered, but of mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, longing to be reconciled.

 

Revolution means coming home.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 24 February 2017.

Booking Beneficiaries Into Rehab

It's For Their Own Good: Equating beneficiaries with drug addicts has long been one of the Right's most potent rhetorical strategies against the welfare state. It has now been given the official imprimatur of the Ministry of Social Development's senior medical advisor. What's next: "Arbeit Macht Frei" ?

 

THE EVIDENCE is said to be compelling: “for most individuals, working improves health and wellbeing and reduces psychological distress.” In fact, so convinced of the health benefits of employment is the Ministry of Social Development’s (MSD) senior health advisor, Dr David Bratt, that he equates putting patients on “welfare” with putting them on “an addictive debilitating drug with significant adverse effects to both the patient and their family (whanau) not dissimilar to smoking.”

 

Just think about that for a moment. The MSD’s senior health advisor is telling his fellow doctors that helping their patients access the state assistance to which, as citizens, they are legally entitled, is the same as “putting them on” methamphetamine, heroin or some other kind of “addictive debilitating drug”.

 

The Right’s decades-long rhetorical effort to associate being on a benefit with being hooked on drugs has thus been given the imprimatur of settled medical science. Henceforth, going to the MSD will be the equivalent of checking yourself into rehab. Everything that happens to you there will be about getting you off your welfare addiction and back into the healthy lifestyle of paid employment.

 

Of course, as medically verified drug addicts, the “welfare dependent” citizens themselves have no opinions worth considering. Everybody knows that junkies lie, cheat, steal – even prostitute themselves – to feed their habit. It is, therefore, vital that they not be mollycoddled by their case workers at the MSD. What is required, and what will, from now on, be meted out to these “addicts” is the “tough love” they so desperately need – and which the failed policies of “welfare entitlement” have for so long denied them.

 

And, just in case there are people out there in the community who object to this characterisation of New Zealand’s pioneering Welfare State as nothing more than a government sponsored tinnie house, the Ministry of Social Development has instituted a regime involving compulsory drug testing for “jobseekers”; tough sanctions for those with outstanding arrest warrants; and mandatory attendance at classes devoted to imparting parenting skills.

 

Which is as clear a way of delivering the message: “these people are all drug-taking criminals who persistently neglect and abuse their children”; as the MSD’s bureaucratic masters are willing to venture.

 

The National Party-led Government’s dramatic reform of New Zealand’s social welfare system marks an ominous turning-point in the country’s history. Never before has the state been willing to satisfy so completely the most punitive, the cruellest and the most nakedly sociopathic impulses of its wealthiest citizens.

 

The people behind these reforms know that there are simply not enough jobs to socially integrate the tens-of-thousands of “jobseekers” currently registered on the MSD’s books. And yet, they have no intention of following the example set by previous New Zealand Governments, in which the state itself provided the jobs so necessary to people’s health and wellbeing.

 

What they propose to do, instead, is force as many jobseekers as possible off the MSD’s books. They will achieve this objective by turning the experience of being on the MSD’s books into a nightmare of bureaucratic harassment and social stigmatisation.

 

Before the rest of New Zealand could accept such callous brutalisation, however, the National Party-led Government had first to transform welfare beneficiaries into useless and undeserving sub-humans. Their poverty had to be presented as the consequence of their own lack of application and self-discipline. They had to become idle ingrates: drug addicts and criminals; totally unworthy of decent people’s respect or compassion.

 

And now, because it is not made up of monsters, and for the sake of their hapless children, the Government is insisting that these creatures somehow be “persuaded” to turn their lives around. This time, however, the persuasion is not going to involve the use of carrots. This time the MSD is going to use a stick.

 

And, just as they were in Germany 75 years ago, the doctors are being asked to help. We must hope that Kiwi physicians turn out to be less enthusiastic social-engineers.

 

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 19 July 2013.

The Gluckman Report: Acknowledging The Symptoms, Ignoring The Causes

The Morbid Relationship of Politics and Science: Professor Sir Peter Gluckman's report to the Prime Minister addresses the biological and psychological aspects of human maturation but fails to locate these in their socio-economic and political contexts. Twenty-percent of Kiwi adolescents aren't making the transition to adulthood easily, says the Professor. Did anyone ask if they were raised in the 15-20 percent of families whose incomes fall below the poverty line?

WHAT A SHAME. To hear the news media tell it, the story of Professor Sir Peter Gluckman’s report to the Prime Minister was one of disinterested science versus ill-informed populism. 

In a world dominated by sound-bites and focus-groups, John Key’s hand-picked scientific adviser was heroically making the case for evidence-based policies. 

“Social investment in New Zealand should take more account of the growing evidence that prevention and intervention strategies applied early in life are more effective in altering outcomes and reap more economic returns over the life course than do strategies applied later.” 

So says Professor Gluckman and his team – adding for good measure that: “This will require long-term commitment to appropriate policies and programmes.” 

For those in the policy-making community this must have been an “Alleluia Moment”. Could it be, that after years of denigration and marginalisation at the hands of the political class, experts and expertise were about to make a come-back? 

Well, I for one hope not. At least not these “experts” or this “expertise”. 

Because, reading through Improving the Transition: Reducing Social and Psychological Morbidly During Adolescence, it quickly becomes clear that this “science” is very “interested” indeed – and not in a good way.

THE HISTORY of scientific involvement in the formation of social policy is not a happy one. From the pernicious social theories of the 19^th Century eugenicist Sir Francis Galton, to the authoritarian social-engineering offered up in the Trilateral Commission’s 1976 report Crisis of Democracy: On the Governability of Democracies, the interventions of “disinterested science” have almost always ended up arguing for an intensification of social controls and the consequent curtailment of individual liberty. 

The essence of Professor Gluckman’s argument is that, over the course of the last half-century, the human developmental phase known as “adolescence” has grown longer, and that the discoveries of biological science should be applied to the task of reducing the social and psychological “morbidity” of the “at least 20 % of young New Zealanders” who are failing to navigate this extended period of sub-adulthood successfully.

OH DEAR, oh dear, oh dear: there is just so much wrong with Professor Gluckman’s approach – it’s hard to know where to begin. 

For a start, his thesis is utterly ahistorical – a deficiency which renders most of the report redundant. It neglects to acknowledge that “adolescence” itself is much more of a social than a scientific construct. An ex post facto justification for the very political decision to keep children out of the industrial labour force. 

Prior to the rise of industrial capitalism, women and children had participated fully in the processes of production, and the family formation process was usually underway by the late teens. 

And even after the social reformers of the 19^th Century had put an end to child labour, no legal impediment was raised to employing 12 to 15-year-olds on farms and in factories. 

Those of us over 50 will have little difficulty in remembering people who left high-school at 15, married at 19 or 20 and were parents long before they were 25. No one back then questioned their “social and psychological” fitness for these roles; they were adult citizens in good-standing; holding down jobs, paying off homes and raising families. 

It’s this historical data that Professor Gluckman and his team quite simply refused to confront. 

If there is social and psychological morbidly in New Zealand society, the explanation is not to be found in our genes, or the development of our brains, but in the political and economic decisions that have made the unnatural extension of “adolescence” inevitable. 

Reintroduce full employment and free tertiary education, Professor Gluckman, and watch the morbidity of “at least 20% of young New Zealanders” plummet. Restore State Advances housing loans and the universal Family Benefit, and be astounded at how much earlier those young New Zealanders take on the responsibilities of adulthood. 

To paraphrase Marx: The Scientists have only investigated the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it. 

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 10 June 2011.