Tag: Covid-19

Thrown into inequality

Image by Korhan Kalabak

We are shaped by time and place as much as by heredity. The collective outlook of each generation is moulded by the interweaving factors of the time and environment we are born into. History is alive in the lives it has helped to forge. The “Generations” that the media love to demarcate and critique, are manifestations of being thrown into this time. The German Philosopher Martin Heidigger referred to this as “Thrownness”, saying that we are at the mercy of the past, the time and place we are born. We are also at the mercy of the present, one which is characterised by our moods.

According to Heidigger, our being is always shaped by some mood or other. Mood is not a subjective veil that is draped over a “truer” objective world, but the essence of what it is to be in the world at all. Talk of being “in a mood”, rather than a “mood being in us” is an example of how each of us describes this sense of mental life being synonymous with life itself. This centrality of mood to experience explains how there can be a “public mood”, or a “mood of the crowd”. Examples of this include a crowd at a sporting event, a collective whose moods rises and fall with the fortunes of a team. A concert is a similar example, so is a political rally. People like to attend these events in person, rather than just watch them on TV, so they can share in the energy of a collective momentum, gyrating in response to a shared focal point. This is something that not only energises and provides catharsis, but also allows us to transcend our own individual experiences. 

The mood of a generation whilst more amorphous, follows in this vein. It is a vague collective feeling or outlook shaped by the time and place into which we are thrown at birth. The events of the last few weeks have been the flashing culmination of years of frustration against inequality that feels embedded and intractable. The tragic example of George Floyd is the tip of a centuries old problem of racial disenfranchisement that has its origin in early capitalism and colonialism. The mostly young protesters who have galvanised around the Black Lives Matter movement, have for years been burdened with expensive higher education, unreachable housing and employment uncertainty. Prior to COVID, this group of people consoled themselves with experiences, forming the basis of the ‘experience economy’. It is no surprise that the shutdown, the economic effect of which has removed this outlet and extinguished the employment that supports it, has led to this explosion of unrest. 

The sacrifice of the shutdown has been borne primarily by workers who have the least employment security, or those essential (i.e. low paid) workers who are putting their lives at risk so that the economy doesn’t completely collapse. These George Floyd and indigenous incarceration protests are a global movement of solidarity against racism, but they are also energised by a simmering resentment of growing inequality. 

The generation gap is always determined by chasms in time, chasms which result in difficult to understand attitudes and behaviours from one generation to the next. What those of older generations don’t understand when they criticise the protests is that they are beneficiaries of a system that is no longer working in the way that it worked for them. A lot of those who are protesting are doing so because they see in George Floyd and indigenous incarceration an inequality that is endemic and fundamental. 

Inequality’s natural mechanism is to compound itself. It compounds via the returns of wealth, but also in the regulations established by politicians to placate those with wealth. The validity of the Black Lives Matter protests is supported by the broader outcry against systemic inequality. The looting, vandalism and “defund the police” sloganeering is an excess that undermines the overall aims of the movement, but they don’t make the movement itself invalid.

Modern Sisyphus

Sisyphus, Antonio Zanchi (1631–1722)

How COVID-19 and remote working, demonstrated the inherent emptiness of corporate life and the unfairness of who gets paid.

So much of the meaning we get from work, comes from our interactions with each other in the office. The Coronavirus, whilst a boon for some, has brought into stark relief the meaninglessness of modern work for many. Triumphant forecasts of the demise of the office, may turn out to be true, which may only exacerbate the nihilism of white-collar professional life. Financial Times columnist Lucy Kellaway, recently wrote a nostalgic paean to the office, noting, “The most important thing — which should make the office less an employer’s white elephant than its biggest bargain — is that it gives work meaning.” What this period has really driven home, is how once the comforts of office life are removed, what many of us are left with is the maddeningly dull and Sisyphean nature of our work.

Part of this is due to the narrow and restricted nature of so much of the professional services economy, what sociologist Max Weber referred to as the “iron cage” of bureaucratisation. The sticky web of rules and administrative procedures that are required to manage the sheer complexity of the modern economy. A complexity that has spawned what David Graeber calls the bullshit jobs of ‘make-work’. Graeber defines this make-work as well-paying jobs that create a veneer of success, but if stopped tomorrow wouldn’t make a difference to the world.

We cloak ourselves in these peripheral pleasures of office life to drown out the tinnitus of existential dread that greets so many of us when we logon each morning.

This make-work is a result of the huge increase of professional services over the last century. With a significant amount of this increase being devoted to the administration of increasingly byzantine bureaucratic functions of corporations and governments. The inherent complexity of our global corporations and government functions, requires masses of people, with narrow skill sets to become well-paid cogs in the wheel, with little connection to the final output of their work. Often this lack of connection is due to there being no final output to be connected to, as strategies continually change, and projects are cancelled. This Hyperspecialisation of both industry, service and job, has become so narrow that many of us have lost any conception of how we actually make a difference in our work.

What made this dislocation bearable for much of the last century was the meaning that we got from one another when we were in the office. The ability to make friends (or lovers), share ideas, perform in front of our peers, develop the political rivalries and alliances that simultaneously infuriate and sustain us. We cloak ourselves in these peripheral pleasures of office life to drown out the tinnitus of existential dread that greets so many of us when we logon each morning. A dread that is likely to only increase as the professional emptiness of remote work becomes clearer.

The point of all this is that there is a greater evil underlying the banality of this professional nihilism. This is embodied by the cynicism of paying someone almost triple what a nurse gets paid, to stand around holding a traffic sign on government infrastructure projects, whilst these nurses risk their lives to fight the Covid-19 outbreak. A similar example in Australia of underfunded volunteer firefighting crews fighting apocalyptic bushfire conditions last summer is another testament to government fixation on the wrong things. This trend of rewarding bit players, in billion-dollar-white-elephant-projects, whilst undervaluing and ignoring, what is referred to now as “essential workers”, is generally appallingly. It is a function of the preference of governments to be seen to be ‘making progress’, ‘chasing growth’ or ‘balancing the budget’ at the expense of all else. Anything that is not within this framework of quantifiable progress, anything that involves community care or supporting actual people in the community, is equivalently priced as being worthless.

Post-Covid predictions like this one, have already become tiresome and will most likely be wrong. But what might stick is how many people may realise, after peering behind the curtain of their day-to-day professional existence, that there might be more to professional life. If this leads to a collective realisation, it might change our attitude toward how we reward our essential workers, softening the debate about deficit and surplus and move it forward to one of value and fairness. Perhaps we will wake up and realise that the nurse, school teacher and fireman deserve not just our applause and appreciation, but more of the spoils.