‘A Woman’s Work Is Never Done!’

Reflections on Criado Perez’s Invisible Women

Tracy King with Invisible Women by Criado Perez

‘A Woman’s Work Is Never Done!’ So joked the three mechanics who worked across the road from me in St Albans, when they saw me hanging out the washing, admonishing Leo who was watering the patio, thus turning it into a pond; and running inside to prevent something from burning. On top of doing all that, I also forced an encouraging chuckle to the three workers over their joke, so they wouldn’t feel like a spare part.

Three studies of work-related stress, in Sweden, USA and Australia, have found that men flourish in the 41-55 hour a week pattern. Whereas women start to wilt round about the 40-hour mark. Why? ‘Delicately nurtured,’ as Bertie Wooster would say? The weaker sex? Unsuited to the workplace?

Invisible Women (Criado Perez, 2019) points to the missing piece in the jigsaw: the other hours that women tend to be working, unmeasured by these studies, outside the official ‘workplace’. Women are already beyond, often far beyond, the recommended 48-hour week.

Perez notes that when researchers have attempted to measure the world’s hours of unpaid work, they have found that women do 75% of it. In the UK, the Office of National Statistics discovers that men enjoy an average of five hours more leisure time a week than women. That might explain the odd feeling I had when I looked at the Guardian Soulmates website and found a whole lot of people (men), who defined themselves in terms of box sets and all-day bike rides. When would I ever have the time to do the sort of stuff I could write in an ‘about me’ section?

Soulmate found, when single men and women start to cohabit, the woman adds to her hours of housework while men’s goes down, regardless of who is employed in the couple. The Australian study quoted earlier found that single men and women, without dependents, were equally capable of doing a 48-hour week of paid labour. It was the ‘encumbered’ women who struggled.

When I started totting up my hours, after reading all these stats from Perez, I found that I was spending six hours a day on weekdays,  mothering. Then I asked myself, was that really work? After all, driving Leo to school, we listen to CDs. Well, I argued back, lorry drivers listen to the radio and they’re still paid. Then again, is it really work when it can be interrupted? Loading the washing machine with muddy football kits is interrupted by Leo asking me to watch his latest ‘cool move’, modeled on the Avengers – ‘No, that wasn’t it! I’ll start again, mum.’ But lots of people say they get interrupted when they work in an office. Does that mean it isn’t work? Sometimes Leo is pretty self-sufficient, but there’s still a background of vigilance: stopping the muddy boots at the door to prevent more work later, making sure he takes screen breaks, checking he isn’t trying to climb out of the bedroom window tied to an elastic band. Security guards, night watchmen, marshals also get paid to be available in case.

Sometimes, on rare days of harmony, it feels like I’m not doing the work, the work is doing itself and I’m stepping back to let a nutritious ecosystem operate. Earlier today Leo was bringing himself up, practising how to be a good host and empathic friend to the child of my mate who has had to go into hospital. The two fetched themselves snacks, played with lego, negotiated….

On the other hand, don’t managers get paid? – and more highly than the workers they are organising, as the managers’ work is particularly valued.

More challenging than all of those doubts is this: I love Leo, and chose to reproduce, so how can I then downgrade the whole thing by calling it a job? Yet can’t we love our jobs and our colleagues? Can’t we choose and believe in our jobs?

And does love require this ragbag of dull and wearing activities? The essentials of being a parent, fulfilling that role that no one else can fulfil, do not require any of the above list. Women have been conned into thinking that being a good mum involves a host of activities which could be farmed out or left out without any detriment to the child or the relationship. In fact all relationships would probably improve if women had more leisure.

Setting aside the problem of this so-called ‘women’s work’ – mainly housework and caring work – not being paid, nor carrying with it work-free holidays or days off to be ill, setting aside the financial aspect just for now: it still seems really important on health grounds to count the hours and make sure that no-one in our midst goes over the healthy limit of labour per week.

That could mean cutting down on paid work, it could mean cohabitees or co-parents taking on more paid work or housework to help the balance, it could mean paying for more domestic help. One Domino’s Pizza meal for a family would buy several hours of cleaning. Yet hiring a cleaner is painted as a rich person’s luxury while take-aways are normal. Or it could mean that some of the stuff just has to not get done. Homes and children need to be dirtier, meals simpler; children more self-sufficient.

Husbanding the hours also requires some clarity on what counts as work: stuff done for other people? Stuff that is not intrinsically enjoyable? Stuff without which life could not go on? Stuff that is goal-orientated? For now I am putting hobbies (Do I have any?) self care (but not grooming to please others), entertainment and absolutely mutual enjoyment into the non-work category, as well as sleep, and eating, when not required to monitor table manners or rise from the table to fetch glasses of milk; oh, and staring into space – the bliss! It’s tricky to know what counts as leisure, especially as we may pretend to ourselves and certainly to others that we are having fun, laughing as I did in the first paragraph at unoriginal put-downs masquerading as jokes. And that blurs the lines between work and leisure.

It’s 5pm on a Saturday. I have been on the job since 7am. That’s already a ten-hour shift. Now, for an hour, I am practising a pure leisure activity – writing for pleasure. No goals, no remuneration, no survival or caring involved.

Leo is asking me to play football, which I will not enjoy. It will be only for him. I already feel guilty that I am not already doing it.

It’s a challenge to insist on leisure, a challenge sometimes even to think what one would do in that leisure. Too much of it kills you. But so does too little. Heart disease, lung disease and depression are just three of the spectres that lurk for all those who over work. Other more invisible sacrifices made by invisible women are selfhood, soulfulness, identity, voice….

I go to my goalkeeping. Some people get paid to do it.

Feedback so far…..

As the text says, it matters who makes the definitions. If X thinks socks don’t need ironing but Y thinks they do, there’s an issue even before it’s decided who does the ironing. Ditto the acceptable frequency of cleaning, the quality of cooking. It’s not just an M/F thing of course – conflicting priorities and tolerances happen between any co-habiters. A lesbian comedy duo I’ve seen on TV a few times make chore-delegation a theme – difference become polarised until one is the slut and the other has OCD.

—

I think your male audience would have been gob-smacked watching you as goalie.

You have found some interesting facts and statistics for your article, which you have applied to the work women usually do. I understand the feelings expressed, but although I have never blogged, could it be more conversational and lighter even in tone, while making your valid observations? I think you could cut quite a bit, still leaving the ‘meat’ of your argument. (I think I would have simply raised my middle finger to the workmen.)

—

A stimulating and interesting piece. In the UK women statistically live 4 years longer than men. I wondered if there would be any change in terms of statistical longevity if the  number of ‘unpaid hours’ worked were magically equalised? Would women statistically live longer? Would men have even shorter lives? Would this be acceptable in terms of fairness? Quality versus quantity? Divided by fairness! It’s a complicated subject.

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Brilliant, both the writing and sticking to the subject (see previous stories) it is so true and clear.  There are some 9-5 wage-earning jobs, however, that are more like 24-7 in their heads, and therefore not properly “helping around the house”.  Being a single parent and wage-earning doesn’t help, either.

—

Interesting, but an analysis that has been pondered over for many years.  Is it trite and a massive generalisation to say that men and women have different, complementary skills and that women tend to be more nurturing and willing to spend time and effort in doing   the ‘pointless’, unpaid tasks of child-rearing and housework ?

Money does Grow on Trees!

Or sovereigns grow on sovereigns….

Guest Post

The Deficit Myth – Stephanie Kelton                                                         CD Morgan

The two themes at the root of the arguments here are that a right of Guaranteed Employment paid in a sovereign currency expressing a humane political sensibility will facilitate a stable economy because the stabilisers will be automatic. Kelton cites Adam Smith on how money is created interpreted according to Modern Monetary Theory and historical experience of Rooseveldt’s New Deal between the World Wars in support of her ideas.

I joined the Liberal Democrats shortly before the EU referendum having voted for in 1973 when a supporter of the Labour Party though my previous membership had lapsed. I ceased to be a supporter when I became a council tenant. Three friends introduced me to the Liberal democrats during the run up to the referendum. One of them is now a mother, one has returned to America and one has defected to Labour I imagine because she judges Starmer, whom she admires, as the most immediate likely to obstruct the march of the right.

When I started reading Stephanie Kelton’s Deficit Myth it was in the context of thinking about the Liberal Democrat conference having voted for a guaranteed basic income which I liked the idea of but had misgivings about because I could not see how it could be high enough to enable a person to live with rents so high. It is the lack of a right to a home that seems to me to be one of the roots of poverty.

There were a number of ideas I had to get to grips with but I was ready to change my mind or look at them in a new way and I needed to understand in the American context both historical and social. It was hard work though.

She shows her own thought development through her academic and political influences and experience as adviser to the Senate Committee that Bernie Sanders chaired. She clearly has a humane sensibility within which she develops her economic and social ideas. It is not an academic work but this is engaging.

All Creatures are Too Small

Quack History

In the original television series about the 1930s Yorkshire vets, ‘All Creatures Great and Small’, an episode often opened with a close-up of a tweed jacket ripped between the shoulder blades, revealing the shiny blue lining beneath. Or an ancient mackintosh, tied round with a piece of rope for a belt, would spread across the screen like algae on mud.

‘That’s what they’re like up there!’ my Granny would comment gleefully from the sofa. She was proud and relieved to be Cornish and therefore more civilised, although she had lived in Yorkshire for most of her adult life until her husband retired and retreated back down south. ‘Never part with their money!’ (My Granny herself was known to cross and re-cross the road between greengrocers because of tuppence difference in a price.)

A kid in the seventies, I enjoyed the vet series for the animals. But for the adults I imagine that a lot of the pleasure was the delight of recognition, and reminiscing about old times before the War. ‘That’s what people were like there – and then.’ Robert Hardy, who played the senior vet, had grown up in the twenties and thirties and could draw on his own experience to build his character. He and Christopher Timothy, who played the younger vet, both rushed up to Yorkshire to meet the original people that the series was based on. They wanted to capture something real.

Another pleasure of the 1970s settee, I picked up from my grandparents, was self-congratulation: ‘Look how far we’ve come!’  – both as individuals, growing more prosperous in the four decades since the thirties, and as a society, with the great advances in medicine, such as antibiotics.

There was also a sense of pride, as a part of ‘their’ country (Yes, a lack of consistency here!) was revealed in its beauty, its eccentricity, its poignancy.

Fast forward another forty years to Channel 5’s remake of the series and ‘Look how far we’ve come!’ now drops from my own lips.

But I am speaking with horror.

I could hardly bear to watch, as my own society today was revealed via this period drama.

The Dales were no longer important. Our first view of them is just a wide expanse of uninhabited wasteland. It could be an American prairie, it could be Russia’s endless Steppe. We are no longer offered particular times or particular places for our entertainment. That audience would be too small.

James Herriot’s original story, of a university-educated townsperson among down-to-earth countrymen, a professional trying to earn respect, is beaten out into a more universal tale. It’s rags to riches.

The real James Herriot’s father was a plater in Glasgow, a skilled member of a ship-building team. He was also a pianist. His mother was a dressmaker and singer. That way, with four skilled professions, they were able to keep their son in education beyond the age of 14 and send him to veterinary college. But in East Enders writer Ben Vanstone’s version, dad is a docker. On the other hand, the episode is entitled ‘You’ve got to dream!’ – as if Herriot were giving up some nice reliable trade in order to pursue uplifting ideals of animal welfare. No one would want to be a docker if they could possibly help it. You wouldn’t just dream, you’d beg, borrow and pray to avoid that insecure and exhausting job.

All that notwithstanding, the young Herriot of the new series manages to set off tall and powerfully built (Nicholas Ralph) from his poverty-stricken family, dressed in a long cashmere coat that would shine even in Harrods. It seems that Brits nowadays do not wish to look upon rope belts or underfed heroes.

The would-be vet’s fellow passengers in the bus were friendly back in the seventies. Now, in the twenty first century, they are quite unhelpful, and Herriot is dropped in the middle of nowhere. Worse still, when he arrives at his job interview, his boss-to-be (Samuel West) doesn’t even say hello, but barks out orders to everyone in sight. Gone is the courteous eccentricity and subtle superiority of the old Siegfried. Here we have power nakedly displayed.

Surprisingly, the lad from the back streets of Glasgow, without two pennies to rub together, desperate for a job in the Depression of the thirties, answers back:

‘I thought I was here for a job interview!’

Should I see in this assertiveness a glimmer of hope? – that although we are Americanised, income-polarised, homogenised, and taking refuge in the escapism offered by a glamourised and falsified past – we are nevertheless growing in self-confidence?

Culture Shock

Extraordinary Conditions: Culture and Experience in Mental Illness

Janis H. Jenkins

University of California Press, 2015

Reviewed by Katie Barron for Somatosphere

It has been a privilege, through reading Extraordinary Conditions, to come into contact with a writer and practitioner of extraordinary compassion. The book bears witness to a process of open-ended interviewing that contributed to presenting the lives and experiences of Jenkins’ interlocutors with a deep concern for their dignity and self-esteem……

More

 

Loot

We all like to hunt treasure and then hold on to it, no matter how much we think we care about the planet….

Loot by Katie Barron in: Lunate – Reflections on the World

Welcome to the Nazis

Brexit is not done. Brexit is only just begun.

The nationalists are waving their flags. They want it to be forbidden for anyone to show a Europe flag. People whose work we rely on are losing their rights. They will be beaten up and told to go home. Then someone will suggest that to avoid being beaten up those with residency should wear some kind of sign….

My students are suffering racist comments weekly, even in Cambridge. One young woman pushed one of my students into the street and shouted, ‘Asian bitch!’ Another, in Ely, was told, ‘Go home to your own country!’

Our leader tried to circumvent parliament. Now he is going to broadcast himself direct to the nation, no longer bothering with the BBC.

Brexit needed to be fought against because of the attitudes and forces behind it. The liberals have been confused. They like democracy, they care about a host of issues all at once like climate change, zero hours contracts. Better off liberals feel sorry for people on low incomes and understand why they may want to vent. They have been intimidated by being called ‘remoaners’. They want to be positive and practical. Hitler was popular and supported by the poor. He still needed to be opposed.

The rise and rise of the right will not stop until it is opposed. It will find more and more to do, it is like a fire that has to keep being fed. It needs the next fight. What and who will it be?

What rough beast?

‘The trick is, not minding that it hurts.

Anything is better than remorse. So Britain is bolted into a masochistic frenzy. Every whiplash gives us a further thrill. The pound’s down. Oo! Do it again! The pound’s down. Aah! All the experts predict fewer jobs in the future. Do me! The CBI , the farmers’ union, the Bank of England, all those people who know, don’t want this to happen. How thrilling! My son won’t have a job, won’t be able to work in Europe, won’t have free healthcare. Fuck me again!

And now even the Remainers, instead of standing proudly as Bremainers, the true Brits who actually care about Britain, the real parents, the responsible grandparents – even they are joining in the orgy. Never mind what happens to our ability to eat, our ability to set terms and negotiate, let’s be ‘democratic’! Sovereignty for white male southerners, even if they have to brown-nose the Big Powers to keep it! Economic supremacy for the few, even if they’re supreme in a tiny pie, or in a soup.

I have the chance to vote, in a democratic election, for a party that will put an end to these revels, but I’m going to make sure I keep on sucking up to the Brexit brats. Anyone who’s stupid or ignorant or mean-minded, and the political and financial interests that are manipulating those people, I’m going to look after all of them, and do what they want and forget about what I want and what people like me want and need. Ah! – the bliss of self sacrifice! Ooh feel the adrenalin hit! The dopamine receptors tingle.  I surrender my intelligence, I surrender my home’s economics, I surrender my child’s future, I surrender, I surrender, I surrender. Doooo meeeee!

cbi-and-tuc-call-on-prime-minister-to-change-brexit-approach

nfu/why-a-no-deal-brexit-is-catastrophic-for-british-farming

Institute of Fiscal Studies/ Brexit Scenarios

LSE/ Brexiters’ predictions inconsistent with basic facts of trade

BBC 2019/ Pound sinks to 28 month low

The Second Coming by WB Yeats

The Victims of the Victims

Family Reunited inside Haskell Free Library, Stansted, Quebec (Public Radio International)

The Victims of the Victims

The service station at Exit 115 Orford/Magog, two hours East of Montreal, is a place people come to hang out. They get to see the Exotic here, like a woman wearing a dress, or her son in a button-up shirt and knee-high socks. Formal is not normal. The old guys in blue shirts can’t pass by without some kind of interaction. ‘You know the bus stop is round the other side? It isn’t really a bus, it’s a limo…’ I smile appreciatively and they go and have coffee in paper cups and look at me through the window.

The bus (‘limo’) only goes to Montreal. I’m headed the other way, further East, where there used to be railways but aren’t any more and the untarmacked roads were state of the art early last century. The Quebecois romantically name these regions, ‘Les Cantons de l’Est’, as if they are to the East of anywhere one would want to be. The English-speaking residents call them more prosaically, ‘The Eastern Townships.’

My problem is that in this bureaucratic land no one will drive me without a booster seat for my five year old son. And no one has a booster seat around here so we are waiting for a taxi to come up from Sherbrooke, forty minutes away.

The only even half black person I will see the whole trip strides in and out. She is taking this day seriously, in tight jeans and wedge heels. Now and again when she’s in the car park she finds toddlers and leads them by the hand to look at her boyfriend’s Harley Davidson. It is a beautiful machine, sky blue and shining with sunlight. Mums emerge quickly from their parked cars and go and squat protectively next to their tots. Finally the Harley Davidson exits, roaring like a lion.

A tall, snowy-haired man wanders onto the forecourt. He wears a wide blue tie which sports the fleur de lys of Quebec. He stares straight ahead and drops a twenty dollar bill. It’s around his shuffling feet for a while and then he pulls it up again on a nylon string. Everyone smiles. For the next hour or two, I meet him here and there around the service station, at the queue in Tim Hortons, in the corridor by the toilets. He keeps dropping his money and pulling it up again. People smile, but no one asks him the question he’s waiting for: ‘Excuse me, monsieur, I think you’ve dropped something…’ Everyone can see the string, better than he can.

Eventually our taxi driver arrives. He is a kind man who takes our cases. He wants to communicate but he has very little English. I thought I spoke French but it turns out I don’t. I was an au pair in Toulouse once upon a time but that doesn’t count for anything over here where the language branched off in the seventeenth century. ‘Je ne sais pas’ is something like ‘J’en sayeess puh!’ It’s too hard.

This area used to be mainly English speaking, and railways linked the towns together. The tyres crunch over the gravel roads. The misty dark green of the forest is balm to the eyes. Our taxi driver doesn’t know Baldwins Mills. He wonders if I mean Ways Mills. There are a number of these old settlements dotted around the rolling countryside: two white clapboard churches stare at each other across a junction, their sharp lines contrasting with the soft haze of the forest, which is just about kept at bay. One church will be Anglican. The other could be Catholic, or a different Protestant denomination, little frequented now. The saw mills, owned by Anglos, worked by Anglos and French, shaved the whole forest coating these Northern Appalachians. The trees have sprung up again, home to moose and coyotes. But the secondary growth is no good for lumber. The region has fallen back on tourism, loved for its lakes in summer. Far fewer stick it out through the winter, despite the attraction of quaint old sports like curling – spinning a stone over ice.

My friend John is tall and tanned with a white beard. At 79 he still bathes in the lake twice a day. John’s father graduated from Edinburgh and Oxford in the 1920s. Like many of his time, he was attracted to the opportunities and wide open spaces of the Brit-colonised world and he took up a university post at Bishop’s in Sherbrooke, Quebec. He married a forceful woman whose mother had run a chain of clothes shops in Vermont. It was all part of one world.

John was eager to show me that world’s holy relic, the Haskell Free Library and Opera House at Stansted, where he works as a volunteer. Built in 1904, during the region’s golden age, the library straddles the border between Quebec and Vermont. Its foundress, Mrs Martha Stewart Haskell, a Canadian married to an American saw mill owner, wanted her library to be enjoyed by citizens of both countries.

The building exudes grace and peace. With its art nouveau decorations of foliage, its high windows and purple and yellow stained glass, it is a temple of educated liberalism. An Algerian man visiting at the same time as we were wrote in the visitors’ book, ‘One day there will be no more borders.’

Above the library is an opera house where orchestras and choirs came by railroad to perform classical music, alongside jazz played by ‘nigger minstrels’. The performers are more local now. A line is chalked on the carpet, demarking which members of the audience are sitting in Canada and which in the USA.

Occasionally, someone comes in to use the toilet and leaves a gun there for someone else to pick up. The US government is stepping up the security. However, it cannot stretch to funding a new coat of paint for the woodwork around the windows.

The town of Stansted’s main employer, the dye factory, is gone, along with the railway. There is a nice patisserie now. John orders in French and we sit by a wide glass window. The pain-au-chocolats taste Parisian but they are double the size of their European cousins.

John is one of the ageing population of English speakers in the area. His sister refuses to speak French. ‘Life is too short,’ she jokes. But John loves swearing in Quebecois. Perhaps it chimes with a Protestant streak for him, as most of the swear words seem to be profaning the Catholic Mass. ‘Tabernacle!’ he booms, shaking his fist. ‘Caleeess!’ (Chalice) ‘Je m’en calice, mon hostie!’ ‘I’ll wine-cup you, you holy bread!’ For a really infuriating situation there is ‘Hostie de calice de tabernacle!’ ‘Host of the chalice of the tabernacle!’ – or ‘Damn!’ for short.

‘When I was a young man I was all for Freedom for Quebec. That was the radical thing. I called myself Qubecois!’ John stirs his café au lait. ‘Now I call myself an Anglo-Quebecker.’

John’s father was chancellor of Bishop’s University in 1969, the year of student rebellions everywhere. The local council was worried that there might be nationalist riots and the English-speaking university might be targeted. They sent along some police for protection, but the police were mainly French-speaking. The chancellor rang up the kitchen. ‘How many steaks have you got in the freezer?’ ‘Two hundred.’ ‘Cook them all!’ The police dined well and the rioters stayed away.

In another corner of the café sits Peters, broad-waisted, chatting with some acquaintances in French. ‘He’s an Anglo, but he’s a fruit farmer. He needs to keep in with everyone, for his business,’ John mutters to me.

It’s not just the linguistic changes that take some getting used to. The Quebecois government is very bureaucratic. Water police charge over the lakes in motor launches, making sure everyone is wearing a life jacket. On our drive this morning John had to turn back after ten miles, remembering that he had left his driving licence at home. If caught, that would be an on-the-spot fine.

‘What would happen to the Anglos if Quebec became completely independent?’ I ask John.

‘They would move.’

There is an Eastern Townships Association now, which is trying to protect the rights, culture and wellbeing of mainly ageing Anglos. They help their members cope with the language and the bureaucracy so that they can access public services.

John pulled a piece of plastic out of his wallet: his health insurance card. ‘We have to show this every time we want treatment. Look. It’s all in French. Some people might feel offended about that.’

#Buttons

A Plea for Disobedient Computers

We need to redesign computers so we can relate to them more as equals. At the moment they are our slaves and it’s no good for our souls. I am probably particularly guilty but I behave atrociously towards mine, with all the sense of entitlement of a Roman Emperor. I click my fingers and it comes running. And the slightest hesitation or misunderstanding on its part throws me into a fury. I only see this creature in relation to myself and how much labour I can squeeze out of it before I chuck it in some dump. Like a woman in a sexist society its body is reduced to three aspects: a bit you look at, a bit you touch, and a bit you turn on. Oh and it can be a status symbol. I have no interest whatsoever in its inner life. I try to cover this up but the truth is I don’t want to see its insides. They revolt me.

Does its dedicated service engender love? I fear not. I hate how it looks. I shut it away upstairs. I am an awful snob about it. If I had a daughter I’d forbid the wedding. I worry at night about my son becoming too friendly with it.

Where does this revulsion come from? I am no Psycho-Sociological expert but I am guessing that it is its low status in our society, its servility and precarious existence, that give rise to disgust. There but for the grace of money go I….

This train of thought jumped out at me after listening to the BBC’s Thinking Allowed, last Wednesday. Rachel Plotnick from Indiana, who has written a book called Power Button, pointed out that every time we press a button we are giving a command. It isn’t a request or a suggestion or a negotiation. Push-buttons are the direct descendants of the servants’ bells in stately homes.

As servants encroached on the existences of the wealthy, they robbed them of health, of capability, of intimacy with the fundamental processes of their own lives. Computers in their present servile state do the same to us.

Meanwhile I have washed up in a new job sitting in A-level Computing classes, taking notes for a partially sighted student. There are twenty students in the class and they were each given one of the twenty most popular computer languages to research. (Actually, the boys commanded their faithful machines to do the research!) There were mathematical languages, functional ones, those where a term corresponds to a set of instructions and those with one-to-one correspondence. Some involve telling the computer to start before the activity and stop after it, superseded by later languages that managed to leave that to the computer’s brain to handle. But my point is, that no one thought of putting anything into these languages other than commands!!

Whence this sense of entitlement?

Computers were forged in the crucible of war, under the supervision of generals who were used to giving orders to armies; and in a climate of urgency, where humans were prepared for a fixed period of time to trade their autonomy for safety. That is one heritage. Another is that many of the educated, who were designing computers, had grown up with servants. Another is in the tradition of administrative work which, before computers, was carried out by that army of clerics in shabby bowler hats who staggered half starved over London Bridge and into the City each day to compute and record the wealth of others. Many died young, many never dared marry because of the precariousness of their existence, living in single rented rooms.

In fact precariousness of existence, disposability, probably underlies most relationships of absolute obedience.

If something has to be enslaved, I would rather a computer than a human. One of the main charges against slavery is the cruelty, the creation of suffering. I’m not suggesting that our computers feel pain. But I am suggesting that what slavery did to slave-owners computers are doing to us. We are learning bad ways of relating to significant others.

Let’s imagine some new computer languages, which leave the computer free to respond with a ‘Yes’ or a ‘No’ or a ‘Later’, so that sometimes we have to just shrug our shoulders, laugh, spin round on our office chairs and look out the window or chat while we wait. Let’s imagine a computer that needs a little praise to work well, and daily gratitude to function; that we are required every so often, at least once a week, to explore it, to admire its teeny weeny chips, its pulsation of wires. What if we had to do some of its jobs for it, like evacuating memory space and de-bugging? How would we feel about that creature then?

I think we would start to relate to it as a person. We would be more interested in it, more humble, maybe even more joyful? Our new learned behaviours might spill over into other relationships. We might behave with our nearest and dearest, or with strangers, with less entitlement? More curiosity?

What would be the effect on my own job if my computer didn’t always work? Sometimes I would have to walk down the corridor and talk to someone. I might have to cross the courtyard and breathe some outdoor air, feel the discomfort of the rain. At present after every half-hour tutorial with a student I have to log the meeting in a record on screen to ‘claim the funding’. If I were unable to claim the funding, then the government, and behind it the citizen, would have to trust me to do my job. How would that trust affect me? What would it do for my self esteem? What would it do for my sense of responsibility towards the young people I deal with? What would it do for their sense of gratitude?

A Draft for the PM’s Tuesday Speech

Blog post from my friend William Forbes. Views not all shared by me but informative.

William Forbes's Blog

The draft of a speech seemingly prepared for the Prime Minister at her direction has been leaked (although not necessarily at her direction) to the editor.  It forces a completely new assessment of what she wishes to achieve, and a new admiration for her vision and courage, two virtues far exceeding those of her opponents in this country and in Brussels.  Her insistence on rejecting the parochial politics of Brexit for the global politics in which the restructuring of the European Union is only one part — alongside fifty million refugees and Africa’s legitimate ambitions — will place her opponents at serious disadvantage.

DRAFT Speech

The eager anticipation expressed by so many wishing to learn the details of our strategic approach to Brexit is, really, most encouraging, reflecting, as it surely does, widespread enthusiasm for the new opportunities it brings us both for expanded trade globally and, no less important, the…

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