My 2023 year ended in worries.
By coincidence the 2023 CBC Massey Lectures
by Astra Taylor were entitled The
Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as
Things Fall Apart, 2023, Anansi
Press. A summary of the book follows. The book opens with the Roman
goddess Cura,
associated with care, anxiety and worry. A
myth says
she fashioned figures from mud and asked
Jupiter to give them life. A quarrel
among the gods about who owned the figures
was resolved by Saturn: Jupiter gets
their souls after death; Tellus - mother
earth - gets the body when they die,
and Cura gets them while they live. The name
is homo, being made out of humus
or dirt. Romans aimed to be aloof
to insecurity, but to be human is to be
insecure. And caring for others is in our
own self-interest. Insecurity can become
either a conduit for empathy, humility
and belonging or a defensive compulsion to
protect the self instead of caring
for others and the world. Human societies
try to make us feel secure with
money, property, possessions, police and
military. But insecurity is a
birthright: it is existential at all levels
of society. How we structure society
matters.
Autocratic regimes threaten with violence.
Feudal regimes limit opportunity and
mobility. Liberal democratic capitalism has
recently created insecurity by
cutting back the welfare state. Capitalism
does not aim to meet needs, it
generates needs for lifestyles, experiences
and products because contented
people buy less! Our world does not tell us
that insecurity is normal in humans.
The response to insecurity is what we can
change. Looking at society’s inequality
divides us. But looking at insecurity
together crosses the inequality divide of
poor workers and rich owners. Both feel
insecure. Recognizing we’re all
insecure improves our odds of finding a just
collective response. Meanwhile the
far-right listens to anxieties and offers
scapegoats. Our capitalist system gives
workers periodic unemployment but also gives
occasional insolvency to a farmer
or businessman. Capitalism slowly developed
in England as feudal systems were evolving
in medieval times. Peasants had held
customary rights to use land held in common
to graze their animals, collect
kindling, to fish and to survive by access
to meadows, rivers and woods which
they didn’t own. Beginning around the 12th
century that began to
change with an “enclosure” movement.
Communal fields and forests were
privatized and enclosed with hedges and
fences. Commoners living off the land
faced new insecurity. Nonetheless, a quarter
of the land of England and Wales remained
common land until the next wave of
enclosures in the late 17th
century. Enclosure meant peasants became
trespassers and criminals as they were
denied a means of survival. Enclosure can
also be viewed as a model for the
dispossession
of indigenous peoples in the colonies. The old commoners had
hard lives, but they had been free to make a
living from the earth. Wage labour
became the only option for making a living.
Then it took into the 20th
century for more secure forms of employment
to emerge – at least for white men.
In 1940 the Canadian federal government
introduced the unemployment insurance
act – the first national social security
program. In the US, an American
welfare state emerged after WWII with Social
Security, health care supports and
public higher education. Wealth inequality
fell to historic lows. Yet over the
last 50 years that welfare system has been
under pressure so that today work is
increasingly a short-lived contact gig
without benefits. Monetary policy makers have
said job insecurity is “useful” to keep
wages and inflation down. Boosted by
the Covid -19 assistance programs and job
openings, people were emboldened to
seek better treatment and compensation when
the economy reopened. In Canada
emergency welfare measures that provided a
humble $2,000 a month cut poverty
levels by 20% and child poverty by 40%! In
the US, child poverty reached a
record low. Bosses were not amused. Threats
of a pink slip create insecurity that
is important to capitalism. So governments
shut down the assistance programs,
moved to correct inflation and suppressed
wages by increasing job insecurity. It is cynical to presume
people only work under duress. Poor people
evidently lack cash for basic
necessities. Beyond that, there are
invaluable things humans need: connection;
comradeship; meaning; purpose; contentment;
safety; self-esteem and respect. These
become more abundant the more people use
them. Distinguishing Cura’s
gifted insecurity from manufactured
insecurity is important. The latter
encourages us to amass money and objects.
Such accumulation brings its own
problems: the worry about losing wealth or
treasures, or status, or self-worth.
The wealthy feel poor compared to the
wealthier! Even the richest feel insecure.
The systems that promise security undermine
it - for example the strong
centralized state described by Hobbs in his
book Leviathan in 1651. The modern state promises
security rising from rights jointly agreed
upon at the UN. The 1948 Universal
Declaration on Human Rights promised “life,
liberty and security of person” and
the related treaty, the International
Covenant on Social Economic and Cultural
Rights promised “the right to security in
the event of unemployment, sickness,
disability, widowhood, old age or other lack
of livelihood …”. The Social Covenant
also includes security like a basic means of
survival - food, clothing and
housing. Being secure runs through some
national constitutions such as section
7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights
and Freedoms. This security remains
open to interpretation by the Supreme Court
of Canada. It could go further.
There has been lack of emphasis on the right
to security whereas in practice
security by access to basics like food,
shelter, medical care, protection from
violence and a good environment matter
enormously. This access should be seen as
foundational to life, liberty and security
of person. Anxieties can be teachers,
but we must work together to acknowledge our
circumstances and change them to share
a communal security. Communal security is
here when we watch out for each
other, protect vulnerable friends and
neighbours, resist the erosion of the
welfare state, and fight companies contaminating
our air and water. This is
Cura’s gift: an insecurity that makes us
human. Nothing in nature becomes
itself without being vulnerable. Solidarity
is one of the most important forms
of security we have.
Chapter2,
about Barons and Commoners, tells us
of the 1215 Magna
Carta in England that set limits to
the king’s power. A rebellion of
English barons forced the king to accept it.
Clauses 39 and 40 remain clear and
meaningful. “To no one will we sell, to no
one deny or delay right or justice.”
“No free man shall be arrested or imprisoned
… except by the lawful judgment of
his peers or by the law of the land.” The
Magna Carta faded in and out of
fashion. In 1640 it was rediscovered by
those seeking to break free of royal
power. Then it became a tool for colonial
independence in North America. There
is a related story
of the commoners who got protection from the
king’s disposal and privatizing of
his lands at a time when 1/3 of the country
was “forest” owned by the king and
governed by Forest Law – a prelude to
systematic enclosures 400 years later. The
Law allowed commoners their customary rights
to subsistence – to fish in
streams, to let their animals forage, and to
gather nuts, berries, herbs and
kindling. These clauses of the Magna Carta
promised to stop misuse of the
Forest Law by the king and his minions. In
1217, the young Henry III re-issued
the Magna Carta plus a Charter of the Forest
promising the peasantry a right to
the woods to sustain themselves. Although
intended as twin documents, 800 years
later, in 2015, when the Magna Carta was
celebrated there was almost no mention
of the Charter of the Forest. Halting
privatization and returning land to the
commons had become unsettling. Rights
not only protect from
something but are rights to something.
The Charters have a class
bias. Barons just needed the king off their
backs and negative rights do that.
Peasants right to forage in the forests goes
further. Secure existence needs
subsistence and safety. For centuries
peasants fought to defend their common
rights and resisted the enclosure of lands
as best they could. Do we accept
security in a limited way like the security
of private property and due process
as was won by the barons? Or, do we
recognize security as something more
substantive like the material security in
the peasant’s access rights to the
commons. Do we see ourselves as potential
barons, or as commoners? As
public services shrink
there is a tendency to seek security through
the market place where security is
seen as a function of wealth. It makes sense
to us to guard what we possess and
regard the state as a threat and its
taxation a form of theft. This is the
framework of the barons. The Charter of the
Forest, a robust security of the
commons for all, would undermine the
insecurity on which capitalism sees itself
depending. With the security of the commons,
we would not need to aspire to become
like barons. That
commoners’
perspective deserves a revival. Security
should include negative and positive
rights: the right to a decent home; medical
and mental health care; education;
support in disability and old age;
meaningful remunerative work; and a healthy
and inhabitable environment. These are the
modern rights of the Forest Charter.
They are set out in the 1948 Universal
Declaration of Human Rights. Promises
are not reality, but they are better than
nothing. Insecurity is an important
concept because it is forward-looking and
ongoing. It is important to go beyond
the immediate need to eat or have shelter
right now. So
far the Canadian Charter
of Rights and Freedoms has not offered many
affirmative rights. But it is a
living document and it shifts as the courts
interpret it. As of now security of
person includes physical and psychological
security, bodily integrity, personal
autonomy and threats to these. The Canadian
Charter was intended to conform to
the rights in international treaties Canada
had signed. The Universal
Declaration of Human Rights clearly includes
affirmative rights alongside the
civil rights, but the declared rights were
split across two treaties of rights:
one for civil rights and one for economic,
social and cultural rights. Canada
has signed both international treaties so
that food, housing, health care,
education are more than government policy.
They are human entitlements. In
the 2002 Gosselin case,
dissenting Justice Louise Arbour strongly
made the case that the Charter did contain
positive obligations and that the right to
security of the person was engaged
by welfare payments. But the court remained
on a middle ground. The Toussaint
case raised the lack of adequate health
care for a person who had been
seeking a secure status in Canada. She was
eventually given permanent resident
status in 2013 on humanitarian grounds. But
Canadian courts did not consider that
her right to healthcare had been infringed.
However, in 2018 the UN Human
Rights Committee went further and ruled that
her rights had been violated. In
2020 Toussaint began a Charter challenge in
Canada to rule that her section
7 rights had been violated. Late 2022
an Ontario court allowed this case to
proceed, but she died. So far the right to
be provided with essential public
health care is not established. One
cannot be blamed for wanting
to avoid delays in health treatment but that
doesn’t help the many that cannot
afford to do so. Understandable individual
struggles for security of healthcare
without delay at the same time corrode the
public system on which most rely.
Market medicine does save lives, but there
is a paradox. It is structured to
benefit from insecurity and suffering and
aggravates these underlying
conditions. A stressed public system
strengthens the hands of aspiring
profiteers. The science says that an
expanded private system would worsen staff
shortages in both public and private systems
causing wait times and costs to
rise in both. Canada’s public healthcare is
fragile and can require waiting
fearfully to get to see an emergency room
doctor. The Canadian Charter alone is
not the answer, but failing to face
affirmative security of person – the right
to healthcare if needed – calls the purpose
of the Charter into question. Similar
difficulties
occur for homeless people. A community of
homeless people developed in a tent
city on parkland in BC. The city wanted to
move them. In court, a judge asked
where responsibility for the people being
moved went. When the city didn’t
know, the judge said they should stay. That
decision allowed security of person
to include a limited right to continue to
use shelter. This
is not providing the right to housing,
without
which security of the person is vacuous. But
the judge recognized a right not to
have shelter being used to be taken away. Like
health care, housing
is an essential part of security of person.
Yet housing is a commodity in a
market system that condemns millions to
perpetual housing insecurity. The
alternative is funding high quality
environmentally sustainable non-market
housing
available to those who need it – a kind of
commons. The ideal currently embraced
is private ownership, leaving totally
inadequate public provision of housing
for those who need it. As a result, the cost
of shelter surges as people cannot
find or pay for adequate shelter. The poor
are displaced from their homes and
communities as the cost of housing goes
further and further up the income
ladder. Fairly affluent people gain an
insurance for their housing in difficult
times by supporting a commoner’s approach to
housing with generous public
investment and strong tenant protections. Housing
is racialized,
with non-whites more insecure and burdened
by rent and mortgage debt – like
unaffordable or unsuitable or inadequate
housing in Nunavut. Building high end
private high rises in Nunavut will not yield
the aggressive returns investors
seek. So advocates press for good quality
public housing. Is housing a speculative
investment or a social good? Does it enrich
developers and financiers or
provide shelter and dignity for ordinary
people? Affordability is not the
issue. This is about increasing inequality
where a small number of people can
afford a lot of money for a house, inflating
rents and prices across the board
further enriching a lucky few. The housing
system has become a mechanism to
increase wealth for some as it provides
housing insecurity for many others. In
Finland housing is
guaranteed in the constitution. Sixteen
percent is social housing and that
comes from over a quarter of the new
construction. One in seven Helsinki
residents live in a social housing unit. It
is cheaper and more humane than
leaving them on the streets or locking them
up. In Austria, 26% of overall
housing stock is non-market – about half of
Vienna’s homes are owned and run by
Vienna. Social housing shelters 60% of the
population. All rents are low from
this competition. Having a comfortable and
affordable roof is critical for
security and happiness and, some say,
productivity. Early 20th
century socialists thought the poor deserved
beautiful, safe, central buildings
to live in. The city keeps standards high by
setting reasonable budgets and
inviting developers to compete on quality –
not price. Here is the right and
also the thing itself. It is what a positive
right to material security looks
like – backed by policies and public
investment that prevents markets from
undermining everyone’s well-being. Ironically,
a landlord
takes a “security” deposit when she agrees
to a rental arrangement and the
financial world talks of securities when it
bundles different kinds of loans
and sells the package with a promise of
future interest payments to investors.
These products bring insecurity to all of us
since they rely on increasing
household debt and passing the risk on to
others. In 2008, that led to a
financial shock causing millions to lose
their homes and jobs in the US, plus
an international financial crisis. Yet
today’s housing market is a securitized
commodity where mortgaged debts are bought
and sold. Across
North America big
corporate landlords scoop up apartment
buildings and houses to securitize the
rental streams promising big returns to
investors for years to come and making
it harder for ordinary people to buy homes.
These are the corporate bodies more
likely to threaten eviction and less likely
to deal with needed repairs.
Experts think that for every affordable unit
created by government fifteen
become unaffordable by the financialization
of rental housing. Securitization
is tied to systemic insecurity. A few
profits may boom but if the bubble bursts
we are all made to pay, as in 2008. Securitization
is no
accident. Both Canada and the US encourage
private sector lending and that
facilitates securitization. This was
originally intended to find ways to
encourage home ownership and take pressure
off government financing. A recent
report says “housing has become by far the
most valuable asset on earth, worth
more than 3 times the global GDP and more
than 20 times the gold ever mined.” In
both the US and Canada,
the middle-class who benefitted was mostly
white and non-Indigenous. Racist
policies kept whole communities impoverished
and insecure. Both countries have
similar situations from their different
paths - social housing held back by
cost cutting governments. And cost cutting
extends to public healthcare. Canada
and the US could afford to provide
attractive, sustainable and affordable
social housing. Yet both offer forms of tax
credit that are incentives to
private ownership: mortgage tax-credits in
the US; and capital gains tax
exemption on a primary residence in Canada.
Just removing that Canadian tax
exemption would fund considerable social
housing stock. Purchasing housing presently
is a substitute for a viable welfare state.
A house is place to live but also a
de-facto retirement account, an emergency
fund and inheritable wealth. It is an
investment. Without this the security would
be inadequate. So
are we with the barons
or the commoners of the Magna Carta?
Do we want our rights to be left
alone, or rights that offer substance to the
security of person of all?
Chapter
3 Consumed by
curiosity is about education. It
tells the author’s counter-culture
grandmother
and mother settling in Yukon in 1969 to
establish a Buddhist outpost near
Whitehorse. The author’s mother entered
Carcross, an alternative
counter-culture school – egalitarian,
grade-free and different. At one time it
had been a residential school. Students now
ran the school with teachers to
build autonomy, curiosity and security. This
influenced Astra’s childhood. The
1970s were a time of
student protests, chronicled in Ronald
Inglehart’s book about them -- The
Silent Revolution. He describes an
intergenerational transformation
of values that he designated
“post-materialist”. The generations grew up
in
different contexts. The post-WWII context
was far less economically and
physically insecure. Needs were being met
and the welfare systems expanding.
The 70’s generation could afford to
experiment. Their parents were survivors of
the Great Depression who valued safety and
subsistence above all. The shift was
from “survival values” to “self-expression”
values with a need for love,
esteem, intellectual and aesthetic
satisfaction, belonging and purpose.
Security
in a community is important. It can stifle
democracy or strengthen it. Inglehart’s
research found
post materialist attitudes spreading around
the world, but around the turn of
the millennium things began to move in
another direction. Authoritarians
re-entered the election mainstream. Then
Brexit came to England, and emboldened
leaders in the US, Hungary, Brazil and
Italy. Conspiracy driven movements
gained converts and influence. Insecurity
brings an “authoritarian reflex”. It
is subjective and relates to one’s sense of
the future rather than one’s
objective circumstances. Inglehart died in
2021, but in 2019 he pondered on the
authoritarian reflex in Canada that like the
US has 1/3 of the population
basically conformist to notions that
obedience and discipline are keys to a
good life. He wondered the form it would
take. Less than 2-years later the
“Freedom Convoy” occupied Ottawa to protest
Covid Vaccine mandates – with
support from 1/3 of Canadians and cheered on
by right wing movements around the
world. The protesters were not the poorest
or most oppressed. In
the 1980’s the author
enjoyed a counterculture childhood in a
1960s “time warp” where she was
encouraged to learn by curiosity and
exploring her interests. Seeking
belonging, she spent a year in a
conventional elementary school but then
quit. Post
materialism had provoked a
right-wing backlash. By
the 1970’s the labour
coalitions that had safeguarded economic
security for working people were under
assault. Traditionally-minded people were
alarmed by the post materialist
thinking around patriotism, nationalism,
family life and social hierarchy.
Political conservatives backed by big
business capitalized on this anxiety. In
1979, 2 years after The Silent
Revolution, Margaret Thatcher became
Prime Minister in the UK. A year later
Ronald Regan became President of the US.
Thatcher used policy to push society away
from governments and their programs,
and from collectively working in unions for
better treatment. Her vision was
away from communities and needs and towards
individual citizens going it alone.
The
author grew up in
this new form of capitalism: key industries
were deregulated; public goods
privatized; taxes on the rich lowered; and
the consumer frenzy of the 1980s was
unleashed. Freedom became access to goods
not to the welfare commons. Employment
became precarious; education a path for
upward mobility; and competition the
best way to keep afloat. Wealth and power
concentrated at the top. Everyone
else was free to buy things. Humans
have enjoyed owning
things since antiquity. Consumption of food
and water, arts and culture, tools
and ornaments sustain us. But consumption
varies across societies and some
early societies saw some consumption as a
problem. In the 18th
century Adam Smith’s theory of consumption
put anxiety at the centre. After his
work, private consumption was not considered
a problem. Money and things beyond
a minimum do not bring happiness. Wealth
brings more anxiety. Yet our society
assumes that we must have a promise to
chase, some incentive to drive us, so we
don’t cause the wheels of commercial society
to stall. A corporation doesn’t
just make things, it makes us want to buy
them by making us unhappy with what
we have so we keep buying even though our
bellies and closets are full.
Advertising goes back to Roman times but it
has evolved. During
the Great
Depression advertising tapped into our
unconscious fears and aspirations. By
2025 global advertising will hit 1 trillion
dollars of annual revenue -enough
to end world hunger many times. Advertising
is now personalized and automated. It
can mess with our heads and make us feel
anxiety or bad about ourselves and
others. In 2022 TikTok was circulating
videos about body image, mental health,
suicide and eating disorders to the accounts
of 13-year-olds. Facebook was
aware of negative impacts on young users.
It’s known people seeped in consumer
culture feel physically worse. The result? A
bonanza for those purporting to
sell cures! Astra
thinks we need more
than good coping strategies from popular
advice givers. We need political
solutions – perhaps taking a tip from the
16th century officials who
tried to stop excessive spending by the
wealthy. Why not ban private jets or
limit the number of personal homes? The EU
has moved to outlaw businesses using
“disposability” or planned obsolescence. It
has promoted the notion of
“fixability” or the right to repair. Since
Covid 19 those on the right with
anxieties can easily end up sucked down a
robust
“wellness-to-far-right-conspiracy-pipeline”
– a toxic combination that spilled
into the off-line world of the late 2022
Ottawa blockade with the Canadian
trucker convoy. People may have good reason
to feel beleaguered and afraid but
they don’t deserve to end up with
conspiracies – dogmas that are the
antithesis
of the examination and questioning that
“research” requires. Conspiracists do
not question authority or expertise – they
reject them and take shelter in the
certitude of their dogma. Security,
insecurity and
curiosity share a common origin – the root
the Roman “cura” worry, care,
attention and study. The radical openness of
curiosity challenges the
aggressive certitude of a dogma – like that
of the anti-vaccination
conspiracists, climate change deniers and
woke-bashing authoritarians attacking
academic inquiry and historical truth. The
expansion of access
to post-secondary education in the 1950s
fueled The Silent Revolution allowing
post-materialist
values. But the Thatcher-Regan period
attacked curiosity-directed
education. Regan called this a luxury and
imposed a higher cost on university
education.
A study showed self-actualization was indeed
the aim of those students. In the
early 1980s it was “back to basics” in
Ontario with government paying 86% of
university
operating revenue. By 2020 in Ontario the
government paid 43% of the operating
revenue. When
Astra enrolled in
high school in 1993, after her home
schooling, the concern was employability –
not self-realization. Her curiosity no
longer steered her. Steering came from
the system’s sticks and carrots. She was in
a mixed school, but after the first
year was whisked into a “gifted” stream that
left Blacks and Latinos behind and
gave her insights for her later research
work on expanding access and promoting
curiosity. She went on to university. Education
should be:
public, that is: publicly funded; universal,
that is available to everyone at
any stage of life; reparative, that is:
addressing past and current social
inequalities; free, that is: free both in
cost and in unbound curiosity. From
her grandmother and
mother’s time in Whitehorse, Astra learns of
an important 1971 policy paper by
the Yukon Native Brotherhood Indian
Control over Indian Education and a
document Together Today for our Children
Tomorrow given to Pierre Trudeau
in 1973, which led to a land claim and
treaty with the Canadian federal
government. Talking with a member of a Yukon
nation she learns that for 1st
nation people in the north everything is
relationship: yourself, family,
community and the land – not your
land. Teaching was, and is, by story.
Knowledge is not separated from context and
separate expertise. Knowledge comes
from a web of inter-related relationships. Astra’s
grandmother died
in 2021 in Whitehorse, with Buddhist
ceremonies. She mentions the Zen coming
together procedure: Segaki
noting: when
communities come together to ensure material
security for everyone it is a kind
of Segaki. Increased material security helps
keep people open minded, tolerant
and curious whereas rising insecurity causes
dogmatism, rigidity and bigotry to
spike. Today the young report rising sadness
and distress, the old are getting
lonely and depressed. Employment is
predicted to remain unstable and inequality
to rise. Climate disasters are more
commonplace. Does this mean more
authoritarian times? Astra does not think it
has to be so. But we can’t repeat
the postmaterialist mistake – economic needs
matter. Material security can help.
Chapter
4. Beyond Human Security, begins by
introducing the
US National Intelligence Council four-yearly
Global Trend reports. The
2017 report warned of pandemic. The 2021
Report A More Contested World of
extreme weather, water misuse, sea-level
rise, geoengineering, societal and
governmental
change, unequal burdens, instability,
conflict and more. Offering five
scenarios: broken globalization; Chinese –
American competition; liberal
democracy revival buoyed by technological
innovation; a world of siloed blocs
leaving Climate change unaddressed and poor
states collapsing. The fifth
conjures a global renewed human security
initiative. Young people rebel across
borders advocating for environmental policy,
then public health and poverty.
Green parties take power in Europe, the UN
is re-vitalized, China joins
followed by Australia, Canada and the US as
environmentalists sweep elections.
But would a UN Human Security Council be
enough? Our problems are that our
societies and governments seldom take other
beings’ survival or thriving into
account. Are there more holistic views of
security? Time
has everything to do
with security and insecurity and that’s true
of climate change. Burning fossil
fuels uses plant growth, decay and storage
over eons by the earth. The history
of coal burned in the UK at the start of the
Industrial revolution joins the
history and then the Saudi oil and American
gas reserves and more recently the
Canadian Tar sands. As we burn this legacy
of energy assembled over millennia, the
climate changes and things that developed to
fit together over time do not work.
Leaves and insects come and go before hungry
birds arrive. This world out of
joint impacts our security. Indigenous youth
feel particularly insecure. How do
we react - build a bunker? No. We approach
the crisis with curiosity, asking
how we work together to transform relations
with the non-human world. We
don’t know what comes
next, and time is of the essence. But it’s
not too late for good or bad changes
to the future. Our extinction as a species
is not preordained. So we should turn
our insecurity into solidarity and organize,
vote, divest, strike, blockade,
replenish and sue. The courts are being used
to protect our security and to
protect the environment. The
Ontario government of
Doug Ford in 2018 dramatically reduced
established greenhouse gas emissions
targets. A group of young people filed a
lawsuit Mathur v Ontario, claiming
the change was an unscientific and
unconstitutional breach of their Charter
s.7 rights to life, liberty and
security of the person and of these rights
in
those yet unborn. Emotional duress is a sign
of insecurity. Climate change,
pollution, poverty and insecurity converge
for Indigenous people in and around
Thunder Bay. In April 2023 the case was
rejected – but with findings by the
judge that as a result of climate change
Ontarians are facing increased risk to
security of person and Ontario contributes
to the problem so Charter s.7
is at issue. And that such special
circumstances could justify positive
obligations under s.7 (i.e. require
measures to provide security of
person.) A
young indigenous
litigant in the case lamented that there
should be more laws for the land
itself. As the Anishinaabe view it the land
does not belong to anyone to
exploit or provide things to consume, but we
all belong to the land. Security
lies in living inside a circle with the land
and other beings, not outside it. There
have been
international efforts by the young to use
the law to protect their security and
the land, sometimes successfully. Colombia’s
supreme court treated the Amazon
rainforest as a legal person to be
protected, rather like a company can be
considered a person with human rights in the
US. Mother Earth is recognized in
the constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia.
And an ancestral forest and a river
are recognized in New Zealand and the Ganges
and Yamuna Rivers and tributaries
in India. Ordinances
have been
passed in the US to bestow rights on nature
and in Quebec rights were
acknowledged for Magpie River – an
indigenous advocate noting humans are not
above water and the animals, we are part of
a whole. This clashes with Western
thought and law that have placed humans
above other animals and nature.
However, communist governments in Russia and
China have very much treated
nature as somethings to be shaped to fit
their needs, often with disastrous
consequences for the people. This
elevating of humans
to dominate nature is backfiring. Climate
change will cause 83 million
additional human deaths by the end of the
century and a Lancet Planetary
Health article suggests extreme
temperatures were responsible for 10% of
deaths 2000 – 2019 (5 million lives).
Granting rights to nature will not stop
this but it may slow it. As the
international committee has said, every ton
of
CO2 prevented from entering the atmosphere
can reduce the severity of climate
change. Every little battle matters. A
small town in rural
Western Pennsylvania fought a Penn Electric
Company project to create a big
injection well to pump fracking waste into
empty boreholes. Similar wells have
had seepage of toxic fluid into local
aquifers, tainting drinking water.
Injection sites have been linked to small
earthquakes. The 4.3-mile clean
stream filed the case to the township and
won. In
1516 Thomas More wrote
his Utopia (“nowhere!”) as common
land was being enclosed with the aid
of sheep – money makers of the day. They
propelled enclosures as they were let
loose to eat everything. Later, the same
animals were used in Scotland to
advance the highland clearances. The
privatization of land and the birth of
market society not only cost humans their
homes and the ability to sustain
themselves but farmed animals were forced to
follow industrial modes of
production. Wild places disappeared and
paved the way to the Sixth
Extinction. Settlers
in North America
brought plants and animals and diseases with
them and the animals did what
Moore’s sheep did and trampled over
indigenous territory and hunting rights.
Until settlers, the idea that animals could
be “owned” was alien to peoples of
the eastern seaboard. Settlers believed
domestic animals were private property
and wild ones common property. In England
the notion of the commons was
shifting. In the colonies the idea of
commons had disappeared by the late 17th
century and the indigenous versions of
commons were ignored. To settlers, land
without fences was proof of lack of
civilization. This thinking was developed
in the philosophy of Locke. Privatization
was justified if the owner was
“improving” it by mixing labour with the
work of nature. Others (poor people or
indigenous people) would let the lands go to
waste. Locke was not disinterested
– his visions of America as a vast open
field helped steamroll the indigenous
commons and legal systems for his imperial
employers. Owned hogs and cattle
were massively destructive as they spread
over indigenous lands. Settlers
pushed forward over depleted land and
indigenous lost the wherewithal to
sustain themselves. Decimated
in Eurasia, New
World beavers became an important commodity
for hats in the old world. Deadly
for beavers, this also created
inter-indigenous wars over trapping and
controlling beaver supply. In the Canadian
Southeast, there was a policy of
annihilation of beavers for a buffer zone
from US rivals. Beavers died and
their ponds with riparian life disappeared.
Today, beavers and the marshland
they create are considered vital in a
warming planet. Astra
tells of her
family’s move in her childhood to Arizona
and living next to her father’s
parents. Grandparents baked sugar cookies
with bacon grease for a vegetarian 7-year-
old and had her dispose of the trash in a
disused mineshaft. Nearby military
attracted attention dropping water in like
fashion and tainting the water
supply. Astra could see a connection, but
Grandma was libertarian – she owned
that old shaft and what she did with it was
her business. Astra became
concerned with pollution. Grandma introduced
Hardin’s 1968 article about “the
commons” which argues they are bound to
fail. Astra points out that this isn’t
necessarily so and that Global Trends by
Elinor Ostrom researched a
variety of “commons” and got a Nobel Prize
for her work. Yet Hardin’s
simplistic article has remained a reference.
Ostrom was a capitalist but also
curious and reported what she found. Commons
are capable of operating
successfully and sustainably for centuries. Predictions
of insecurity
can include some positive changes. A
Seewepeme Indigenous leader argues in a
co-authored 2015 book Unsettling Canada
that the colonial land claim – crown
ownership of the majority of Canadian
land - should be shaken up to allow
for Aboriginal title. Canada’s courts have
chipped away at the crown ownership.
In
1993 the Supreme Court recognized the
principle of Aboriginal title as a
form of collective ownership, but it did not
rule on the particular land in
question. The decision caused uncertainty
for forestry, oil and gas industries.
But the court’s ruling remains despite
governments granting permission to
private companies to drill, mine and log
unceded land. To the Aboriginal
litigants, their land rights come with
corresponding duties such as protecting
the lands from irresponsible and
unsustainable development. There
have been scoffers
like Garrett Hardin whose 1974 book Lifeboat
Ethics: The case against
Helping the Poor – argues the
privileged few should save themselves and
reduce the population of the global poor. It
is essentially white
supremacist.
Denialists reject climate
change and social change in a
“petro-masculinity” that talks up things
like red
meat. It has been shown that those
supporting a notion of a hierarchy of
species also tend to believe in a hierarchy
of humans. Five
hundred years after More
wrote of the plague of sheep let loose on
the English commons, livestock have
devoured the earth. They make up 62% of all
mammalian biomass, deforesting
swaths of land and producing huge amounts of
carbon while all wild animals add
up to 4%. Remaining wilderness is largely
protected by Indigenous peoples who make
up 5% of the world’s population. A 2020 UN
report says pandemics emerge from
human activity. The
way factory farming
is set up favours new plagues and the
American Public Health Association has
called for a moratorium on factory farming.
More than a Human Security Council
is needed – a council needs to extend to all
living things. And the myth of the
Great Chain of Being with humans on top
needs to go. We are embedded in a great
circle of life, non-life and even half life
– like viruses. We must work with
the natural world. We
need to work with each
other. We must turn climate anxiety into
climate solidarity. Cap and trade
simply creates markets for selling rights to
pollute – in California oil and
gas emissions have gone up. The scientists
behind the UN reports are clear –
everything must change: energy; food;
transportation and welfare. Naomi Klein
suggests a baseline of security and green
job guarantees could facilitate those
big changes. Nature needs rights and humans
need a bill of obligations – such
as not taking anything unless we replenish
it, so that ecological limits are
recognized. The natural world as an
inclusive circle is a more accurate paradigm
than the hierarchy. What
to do? Should fossil
fuel executives have a licence to incinerate
the planet? Where does a watershed
end if everything is interconnected. How do
we have freedom and dignity for all
and respect ecological limits? What is
certain is that human security at
nature’s expense will not work.
Chapter
4. Escaping the Burrow, includes
references to Kafka who, in addition to
being an internationally known author
had a day job for 14 years in Prague in the
Workers Accident Insurance
Institute, a semi-government agency where he
wrote numerous reports. He had
talent and conscience and was known as an
industrial reformer. The Institute
insured about a third of Austria’s
industrial workforce. He confessed an
interest in insurance. Indeed, insurance
wrestles with an unpredictable future,
threats and vulnerabilities and how to
compensate for past harm. It is
technology for managing risk - and that
means managing insecurity. We
are all vulnerable to
aging, illness and bad luck, but also to
injustice and oppressive and exploitative
systems. We can cover past loses or we can
be preventative. We can make
defensive systems for security, or we can
make systems of support and care that
acknowledge our vulnerability. Insurance
forces us to face our own frailty and
mortality. However grateful we might be for
commercial insurance when the car
is totaled, there was the 2008 Wall Street
crash when the company insuring
bundles of overrated mortgage derivatives
was only saved by a massive
government bailout. But thousands of people
lost their homes and their jobs
while the company executives took their
bonuses. Commercial
insurance
began with sea transport. Early forms go
back thousands of years to Babylon and
China but the form we know goes back to the
17th and 18th
century, a period that included the
transport of enslaved people. Lloyds of
London dominated and today remains one of
the world’s leaders. Recently the
company apologized for its role in the slave
trade and promised to invest in
black and minority ethnic programs, but
without financial commitment. Today
insurance is one of the biggest industries
in the world and the US today has a
huge market for insurance. A significant
part is private medical insurance – a
sector that exists because of ongoing
efforts to undermine wider and full public
health care. Private insurers report record-
breaking profits while customers
pay dearly. They profit from people’s
insecurity. Climate
change creates
new contradictions. Insurers underwrite the
world’s carbon producing coal
mines, fracking sites and oil and gas
pipelines. The coverage makes the
projects possible. Lloyds is backing about
40%. The money to pay future claims
is invested in – oil and gas! One perfect
storm hitting only Florida could
cause a crisis like 2008. Extreme weather
has insurers on the hook for
trillions of dollars of potential liability,
but recent events have increased
costs. These risks are traded rather like
the bundles of mortgage securities
prior to 2008. And, not surprisingly, making
the world seem less secure sells.
Risks can be infinite as can be the premiums
so it becomes important to push
for security for the many. It is also
important to find ways to objectively
evaluate and respond to risks, and to apply
pressure to the financial sector to
reduce support for the fossil fuel industry.
Pressure on insurers is used by
those opposing the Canadian Trans Mountain
Pipeline. Today
we understand the
future probability of events. Modern
probability goes back to Pascal in 1623.
Then, in the ferment of industrialization,
cause and effect was linked to
accidents – unsafe factories, collapsing
mines and faulty railroad tracks
rather than luck, paving the way for social
insurance and the end of worker-blaming
and Kafka’s work. In 1883 Germany, Bismarck
created the first social insurance
for security in sickness and old age and in
the event of workplace accidents –
as a right, not charity. In 1910 a Royal
Commission in Canada produced a report
providing principles for a benefits program
that was independent of who caused
the accident. At about the same time New
York lawyer Crystal Eastman gathered
information on industrial accidents in
Pennsylvania to produce a book Work
Accidents and the Law. She helped put
together legislation for New York
state, challenged in court but then
subsequently strengthened. Later,
Roosevelt’s
Secretary of Labor produced a series of
programs in common for economic
insecurity. Astra
tells us of her
activity leading up to her formation of the
Debt Collective, beginning
with leaflets to help people resist debt and
stay afloat. She argues that the
person who gets into debt is not the only
person responsible, noting that the
poor Black homeowners -- who were blamed for
the 2008 Wall St. crash for taking
out loans they couldn’t afford-- had
been communities aggressively targeted for
predatory subprime loans. These were
the loans bundled into securities and
peddled by the insurance companies. Astra
herself was affected by the crash – she
defaulted on student loan payments and
her debt mushroomed. Since
1970, the corporate
sector has pushed back on worker gains.
Canada and the US rank low on social
spending among wealthier Western countries.
Ordinary Canadians and Americans
are more exposed to the hazards or
unemployment disability and old age than
they were. More people have to resort to the
“plastic safety net”. Debt is a
kind of makeshift insurance for people
without recourse. Canadian households
have the worst debt ratio of any G7 country.
Seniors’ debt and student debt are
both serious problems and rising interest
rates and housing costs make things
worse. Yet in 2022 when Biden announced a
plan to reduce $10,000-$20,000 of a
student debt, immediately lawsuits appeared
and a massive outpouring of opposition
on TV and Twitter with demeaning depictions
of the indebted. The powerful use
debt for profit and domination. The indebted
person is easily blamed for a financial
and moral failure. For
Aristotle and the
early Christian church, the creditor was
immoral. Usury was associated with
avarice and sloth. Poor people could get
emergency funds on terms they could
afford. The ability of the rich to grow
fortunes was constrained. That changed
during the rise of industry and of
capitalism with ideas that did not see risk
as something to be managed collectively, but
as a means of amassing wealth and
exercising social control. In 1390 the Lord
Mayor of London said usury only
applied to loans without risk! That loophole
caught on. And double talk
developed. Corporate default was called an
unavoidable cost of entrepreneurial
risk taking. For the poor, default was taken
as a sign of moral failure. Today,
banks get bail outs, debt relief for the
poor is rare. Predatory
debt contracts
played a central role in the development of
the British colonies. The Hudson
Bay Company paid Indigenous trappers with
its own “beaver tokens” so that the
trappers had to buy provisions for the
winter hunt at the Bay and they then
returned hoping the bounty of the hunt would
pay off their debt – but it rarely
did. In the US, mortgages were used to steal
Indigenous land. Whereas in the
UK, creditors could not take the land from
the debtor, that was not the case in
the US. Indigenous Chiefs would mortgage
lands for wheat so land became a kind
of security. This made land an asset and
facilitated the dispossession of
Indigenous land. Now, some 200 years later,
this device is being used against
the mostly white farmers on the Canadian
prairies by corporate investors. Any
farmer with enough debt is going to be
tempted. Banks add to this by offering
large loans on inflated prices. Things
that had empowered
farmers and shared risk in the 1980s,
collective marketing, cooperative control
of grain elevators, and subsidized grain
freight rates were dismantled for more
market-friendly approaches as Canadian
policy favoured large scale production
for export at the expense of social and
environmental factors. Farmers’ income
fell to 2% of gross revenue as transnational
agribusiness increased profits.
From 1986 to 2018 farmers paid $93 billion
on their debt - $10 billion less
than the subsidies they got. That means we
the public effectively paid for the
bank profits on farmers’ loans. Farms
can sell for things
like water and farmers can end up with money
for retirement but things are more
complicated. You might want to keep working
and pass the land to the children.
Many farmers sell, then rent back. And for
new farmers, renting is the only
possibility.
Ideas of changing farming to better respond
to climate change requires many
farmers moving to different socially
sustainable ways. Farm rental makes doing
that
hard. Smaller scale growers are organizing
at the local level, but the problems
farmers face requires government
intervention like reviving land bank
policies. Astra
turns to her Debt
Collective which currently organizes around
a range of financial obligations:
student debt; back rent; credit card; fines
and fees linked to parole and
probation. The attacks on welfare in the
70’s dovetailed into increasing household
indebtedness and mass incarceration. “Defund
the police” makes
sense by restoring the balance between
social services and policing. We can’t
police our way out of poverty, mental health
and addiction. People locked up
are said to owe a debt to society whereas
the rich who benefit from an unequal
economy are not presumed to owe anything and
benefit from police protection of
their property and wealth. The people
portrayed as a security threat are also
those deemed a credit risk - the Black,
brown Indigenous and poor. Moreover,
the state contracts with private probation
companies that gouge people for
services and debt collection using ethically
and legally questionable means. The
extensive carceral
debt in Missouri helped galvanize the Black
Lives Matter movement – 33,000
arrest warrants for a city of 21,000 people.
In Montreal, unhoused people who
make up 1% of the population get 40% of the
tickets for bylaw infractions and
the debt from these can be enormous.
Providing housing for residents would be a
better way to protect public safety than
issuing tickets to people who have
nowhere to go. Large amounts of public funds
go to ticketing and jailing. The
no-panhandling law in Ontario results in
huge amounts spent persecuting with
jailing, ticketing and paroling people who
just need some social assistance.
Montreal’s Defund the Police coalition wants
half the police budget to support
communities most targeted by police with
health, housing, education and
universal basic income. Police budgets
continue to swell! The
struggle against
police violence traces to an understanding
of security. Locke saw a need to
unite for the preservation of lives,
liberties and estates. Adam Smith saw the
need for police to protect valuable
property. Marx saw this as maintaining
inequality. He also witnessed the ban on
collecting firewood in Germany, that
he viewed as the poor wood thief robbing the
owner whereas the owner had stolen
the state itself during the centuries old
process of displacing people from the
state common lands that once sustained them.
Those enclosing argued the result
had public benefits. The security of the
commons made people lazy whereas the
threat of destitution and punishment would
make them work diligently. We are
told that caring for other people undermines
the public good for private gains.
Social insurance and public welfare
encourage people to shirk on the job, visit
a doctor more than necessary, spend money or
study something impractical. The
moral hazard of forgiving student loans is
massive said the Heritage
Foundation. The
real threat does not
come from caring for our fellow citizens,
but from the things that undermine
the public good for private gain: the
financial sector creating derivatives
capable of crashing the economy; lenders
destroying peoples’ lives to collect a
debt; employers colluding to bring down the
price of labour; fossil fuel
companies profiting from the atmosphere’s
destruction. The idea that ordinary
people’s security is something to fear has
to go. In The Affluent Society
Kenneth Galbraith pointed out that the
losses from “shirking” and other
supposed moral hazards are trivial compared
to the total economic and social
costs of promoting generalized insecurity.
He notes that the most impressive
increases in output of Western countries
occurred since people began reducing
risks of the competitive system. So labour
security and productivity are not at
odds! Astra
tells us that the
overall benefits of things like universal
basic income that were given a test
run in 1974 in Dauphin Manitoba transformed
lives, changed economic
circumstances and relieved much anxiety. It
bypassed the stigma of forms of
welfare. Dropout rates waned,
hospitalization rates fell and people’s
mental
health improved. Even for people above the
cutoff, the fact that there was a
basic income “in case” was comforting. Kafka’s
last story, The
Burrows, features an underground
fortress continually fortified against a
lurking danger. Yet a sense of safety eludes
the owner. The luxurious
accommodations become a cell. What makes us
insecure and anxious? Are our fears
real or imagined? A few homeless or addicts
on the street can bring fears,
although those people are the vulnerable
ones. But a homeless encampment in a
rich society should provoke anger. How can
we refuse to give these people basic
shelter and dignity. Cara’s gift of
insecurity bonds us to one another and so
contributes
to a world where someone will someday care
for you too. Buddhists and Stoics
have thoughts to offer. Kafka’s preventive
approach, in his case designing
workplaces that reduce the number of
accidents, is important. No
fault insurance has
been helpful, but should not be pushed too
far. If misfortune clusters in
troubling and predictable patterns – poor
and marginalized people are more
likely to die in housefires, drink polluted
water, drown in debt, get ticketed
by police, get moved by climate change,
these are outcomes not accidents. They
are products of a system that manufactures
material insecurity. Insurance
also looks back
to redress what happened. That means
rehabilitating damaged ecosystems, paying
reparations for slavery, returning land to
Indigenous people, closing the
wealth gap and cancelling unjust debts.
These are acts of solidarity and also
self-preservation.
The economic system is an
objective basis – it is manufacturing
insecurity. Also, Marx and Engels said
capitalism constantly revolutionizes
production disturbing all social
conditions with uncertainty. It is a motor
pushing us to the edge of the cliff
of ecological calamity. The
constant is that
the vulnerable suffer most. The privileged
find ways to shield, and claim
material insecurity is needed to keep
everyone else toiling and productive.
They have rigged a game they cannot win –
they are held stressed and miserable.
They have much to gain from a universal
human right to security that remains
theoretical. Instead of putting a
priority on care, we stigmatize it. We see
the teacher, then custodian, then home
health worker as jobs of decreasing
importance. Our system’s top security is
physical health and financial success. In
contrast, those relying on others are
denigrated as weak, dependent and deficient.
We all need care throughout all our
lives, not only when we are sick. True
security comes from working with others
to make a more caring society. Unlike Yeats, Astra fears
business as usual more that anarchy and
doesn’t need the centre to hold.
Decentralizing can sometimes lead to
regeneration. Many inspiring parts of
modern history had marginalized people
accepting Cura’s gift, finding power in
their shared insecurity to challenge an
oppressive status quo: women’s vote;
weekends; minimum wage; laws against sexual
harassment and racial
discrimination; and some rudimentary
environmental regulations. Ordinary people
took action – stopping traffic in
wheelchairs or blockading pipelines to
protect their territories. The process is
rewarding but intimidating. What’s
needed is just accepting insecurity,
reaching out to people who don’t already
agree, facing the discomfort and possibility
of rejection. Philosophers Kierkegaard
and Heidegger examined care, anxiety and
freedom yet recoiled from the goddess’s
gift. Simone de Beauvoir understood the need
to face the discomforts of our own
freedom and vulnerability. Yet people today
hide behind masks of superiority
and invincibility. An ethic of insecurity
knows that more materially secure and
egalitarian conditions make people less
reactive and more tolerant. Shrinking
the welfare state because we expect the
worst from people ends up hurting
ourselves. Extending trust and support
improves everyone’s security. This
future-oriented collaborative vision of
security adapts the freedom of the
commons for the 21st century.
Finally achieving the right to
security will enable more people to face the
future with confidence and
curiosity – a strength that comes with
flexibility like that of well-rooted
trees. It brings a freedom enabled by
community. As Cura fashioned the
mud, we can fashion our societies. As Cura
called for help from others, so can
we. Caring for communities, institutions and
ecosystems could be the foundation
of a “care economy”. “Taking care” is
an intriguing phrase. It implies
forethought and vigilance while also
reminding us that by taking care of
others, we are, at the same taking, taking
something in return.” … “By giving
the gift of care, we take care of ourselves,
too.”