Europe
Ruth E Jones wonders why the canaries stopped singing on the morning of 24 June and considers some important questions
The referendum has been a wake-up call across the voting and non-voting spectrum and many of us have learned a huge amount about our own myopia. While many are paying a very high price as direct targets of unleashed primitive hatred, and we all have to take a stand against this, we have also been shaken awake from our decades of negligent sleepwalking.
Privately educated away from my working class and agricultural labouring roots into an uneasy identification with North London’s ‘prosecco politics’, I am feeling less conflicted right now than I have in decades. Everyone who voted voted for what they believed in and, no matter how much we might abhor the conscious motivations, we have to acknowledge that people were voting for the kind of community and society they want to be part of, with core assumptions about work to do, neighbourhoods to live in and a sense of cultural belonging and identity.
And this is where we need to follow the queen’s invocation to stop and think about what is really going on here. Why did the canaries in the coalmine stop singing on the morning of the 24th?
Just two weeks before the referendum, I was in the heart of Silicon Valley at a lunch table with a rather harried chap who, in his own words, had ‘escaped’ from the artificial intelligence conference going on next door. He was reeling from being surrounded by the brightest young minds in IT, all on a euphoric high, sharing their technological know-how and inventions – think BoJo (Boris Johnson) and Nigel Farage meet the Stepford Wives – ‘because we can’.
Now that we are awake, rather than fighting between ourselves and our near neighbours, we need to look and see the real threat to life, work and community as we know it – the exponential tsunami of technological advances which we are welcoming with open arms and eagerly paying for, to boot. Klaus Schwab at the World Economic Forum, like the queen, becomes another unlikely bedfellow in these ‘interesting times’…
I live in Medway, a place where life used to revolve around the dockyard. After the closure, in the void left by the erstwhile working class, ‘Chav’ came into being as a best attempt to find an organising identification. In my practice, I hear time and again the desperation of those wondering ‘what is it all for’ once they have reached the end of the list of acquisitions and experiences that were meant to make for happiness.
Anyone who knows something of idleness, be it enforced by illness or injury or elected as a meditation practice, will know the rigours of underemployment of the mind and body, and the depths of anguish it so quickly leads to. For decades the elevated death rate in men in the first two years of retirement has worried the Swiss authorities. Even the most enlightened spiritual teachers need their lineage and community to sustain them. So, what about the endemic under- and un-employment that is coming: how will we manage in a world with radically less work to hold our communities and our sense of ourselves together? Taxi and lorry drivers, lawyers and doctors are all in line for technological redundancy – a Silicon Valley start-up entrepreneur proudly announced their new app to replicate the benefits of that most human-on-human intervention, craniosacral osteopathy. Therapists and counsellors, too, if not replaced by apps and websites, then paid for by who and how exactly? And this is coming, not in decades, but soon. It is happening now and is not going to stop. In their referendum, twenty-three per cent of the Swiss voted to try to prepare themselves and change the social economy by introducing a basic income for all.
As the work roles of the late twentieth century disintegrate, what will we do instead? How will we hold together as a community? How will we hold ourselves together psychologically and physically without work to shape our days, weeks and identities? How will we feed and clothe our bodies, and the young and vulnerable, in the absence of labour? What will we be for?
This is the danger the referendum has woken us to. It may be that ‘Leave’ voters outside the ring of gold which is the M25, like birds before an earthquake, were better placed to feel the unconscious vibrations of the real threat to all our humanity: this, the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
This is the ‘far more in common with each other’ of Jo Cox’s inaugural speech that urgently requires us to join forces and fight for.
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