'Le Premier Songe', 1900 (Photo by The Print Collector/Getty Images)
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When asked by YouGov on 24 March whether or not they’d find a three-week lockdown easy or hard, 66% of Brits said “easy”.
Those earnest promoters of the work ethic, Dominic Raab and Priti Patel, must be a bit worried. Are we actually enjoying lockdown? Are we enjoying doing less? Are we enjoying being masters of our own time? Maybe we won’t want to go back to work.
The government was expecting an outcry from the people when it extended lockdown. Please, open the factory gates and let me get back in there! Let me rise early again, and scrape the ice from the windscreen! Let me plod through the rain with my enormous jug of coffee and let me buy meal deals at lunchtime! Let me spend my hard-earned cash on after-work drinks with colleagues I hate! Let me never see my children and let me spend long hours standing on buses and trains!
Tories have long pushed the Puritan ideal of hard work for other people. Raab and Patel were among the five authors of a dismal Gradgrindian manifesto in 2012, pompously entitled Britannia Unchained:
The British are among the worst idlers in the world. We work among the lowest hours, we retire early and our productivity is poor. Whereas Indian children aspire to be doctors or businessmen, the British are more interested in football and pop music.
Football and pop music indeed! Around this time, some bright spark in the Tory party came up with the depressing notion of “hard-working families”, enthusiastically taken up by David Cameron, who, as has been noted many times, singularly fails to distinguish himself in that respect in his own daily life.
Then there is former MP for Grantham, Nick Boles. Boles, like many MPs, studied PPE at Oxford, training ground for utilitarians. He is an enthusiastic opponent of the universal basic income, believing that if left alone, Brits will vegetate, or, worse, write poetry:
The main objection to the idea of a universal basic income is not practical but moral.
Its enthusiasts suggest that when intelligent machines make most of us redundant, we will all dispense with the idea of earning a living and find true fulfilment in writing poetry, playing music and nurturing plants. That is dangerous nonsense.
Mankind is hard-wired to work. We gain satisfaction from it.
This sort of thing, as Jeremy Bentham might have said, is nonsense on stilts. If mankind were hard-wired to work, then we would not be enjoying the autonomy of lockdown. Most people don’t gain satisfaction from work, they gain money from it. That’s why they do it.
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Subscribe‘In fact mankind is hard-wired to write poetry, play music and nurture plants’
Perhaps, but only one in a million is hard-wired to write good poetry, or to play music at a level where others might be prepared to pay to listen. Somebody has to produce the food for tens of millions of people, keep the sewers running, clean the streets etc. Already in the US farmers are destroying food due to the lockdown. There won’t be much poetry written when people have no food.
As for UBI, it is one of the most dangerous and insane ideas ever propounded.
Why does the poetry have to be good? Or the music be listenable? It is the creative journey that is important. Or perhaps the output is not very good at first, but becomes joyous and original given the opportunity to flourish.
UBI is dangerous and insane for proprietors of businesses doing stuff that shouldn’t be done, and governments who think ‘the economy’ is something that really exists, or that infinite growth on a finite planet makes any sense at all. For folk who just want to live their lives well, and enjoy the best things in life (which, as you might have heard, are free anyway), it makes a whole lot of sense. Let’s remember that the planet gave us all a UBI before the commons was taken from us.
People want, and need, good food, clean streets, sanitary conditions. I’m certain we can have faith in communities to ensure these things happen, regardless of the underlying economic system.
illich points out that the real transition came when people stopped working for themselves and started selling their labour. personally I have been pursuing that life style for many many years. as Thoroeau points out a man is rich when his needs are few.