“Schooldays over” is a lovely song written by Ewan MacColl in 1961. A British miner is cheerfully singing to his son:
Schooldays over, come on then John, time to be getting your pit boots on,
On with your sark and moleskin trousers, time you were on your way,
Time you were learning the pit man’s job, and earning the pit man’s pay.
Real adult life is starting, in other words; time to “be a man”.
You can catch a great recent version of the song, by Damien Dempsey, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6O0QOcSd8Dg . The song is full of joy, excitement and hope for the future, celebrating the virtues of the traditional coal-mining lifestyle.
But then we recoil in horror. All we ever usually think of traditional coal-mining is of the terrible hardship, danger and exploitation, of horrific mining accidents and old men dying young of “black lung”. We might have watched How green was my valley or read Zola’s Germinal, or maybe we have recent ancestors who went “down pit”. So, we know what it was really like – nothing to be cheerful about, in fact.
When we see a homeless person curled up in a sleeping bag in a doorway in an Adelaide street, or a group of people drinking and camping in the parklands, how do we feel? Well, initially we might feel disgust, or fear, but mainly we just feel so sorry for them. They seem to be victims of a cruel fate – victims, we assume, of “the system”, which is discriminatory, racist or just plain neglectful.
I’m going to say something outrageous now. Get ready for your blood to boil. Seeing British miners of yesteryear, or present-day homeless people, solely as victims, is patronizing, paternalistic, discriminatory, not to say racist, snobbish, unkind and, when it comes down to it, just plain false.
The emphasis is on the word “solely” here. Someone whose situation is solely one of victimhood has no agency. No agency that contributed to getting themselves into this pickle in the first place, and, perhaps more importantly, no agency to now get themselves out of the pickle.
To see someone as having no agency is actually the cruellest, falsest thing you can do. This is because when you do so you are denying the very core of their existence as human beings. The first thing we are is active agents in the world, living things which are a will to survive and to pursue happiness, love and freedom. If you don’t have agency, you are just a rock or a puff of air.
Conversely, the kindest, best thing you can do for a person is to see their agency. This is what, for example, teachers do. All pedagogy is some variation or other on the theme of stimulating children’s agency. Teachers are always looking for the right button to press to set a child free to fly.
In fact, the miner-father of Ewan McColl’s song really had plenty to be cheerful about. By today’s standards the mine work was hard, dangerous and poorly paid, but it was how the working people of the time chose to live and to support their families and communities. It was meaningful work, a real and rewarding challenge to their creativity and courage – the way they found to express and live out their personal agency, in other words. Who are we, today, with our middle-class prejudices and ideologies, to look down on their lives and see them merely as pawns in someone else’s game?
Yes, ideologies. It was Marx, among others, who blew the whistle on the dehumanization of work in the early stages of the industrial revolution. His insights were profound and shocking, and he delivered them with withering prose. But he made the fatal mistake of seeing only that, and you know what happened next. It was a classic, and tragic, case of elevating a partial truth to a total one, with totalitarianism the inevitable consequence.
Marx, one track mind that he absolutely had, was incapable of seeing that the very thing he blamed for the problem of dehumanized work, namely, bourgeois democracy, contained within it the seeds of the solution. No revolution was needed, no violent seizing of the means of production by an intellectual and criminal elite on behalf of the downtrodden proletariat. Rather, the workers joined together democratically in unions, and the beautiful spirit of democracy gradually seeped its way even into the consciousness of the greedy capitalists. As a result, under bourgeois capitalism, conditions gradually changed for the better, whereas the socialist revolution, everywhere its vile contagion spread, brought nothing but misery to millions.
We chose real personal agency and freedom, in other words, rather than enforced equality and actual slavery. In contemporary democratic Australia, and even America, adults make choices, live out their lives, even if we think they’re pretty pathetic and not up to our standards. Who do we think we are to judge them? Such disrespect; so patronizing.
We see a homeless person on the street. Our first impulse is to look away and cross the street. Then we assuage our guilt by feeling sorry for them and blaming someone else – “the system”. What we fail to see is a real person, with real agency, who has made choices that have led them to the situation they are in now. Life may have dealt them some harsh blows, but, mainly, they are doing what they want to do.
Has your blood boiled right over yet? Or perhaps you’ve already stopped reading this article. I’m talking about adults, by the way, not children. Children are always in danger of being victims of their parents and other adults around them. And some adults struggle with mental illness or disability, which diminish their agency, but don’t whatever you do treat them as having no agency at all.
The dynamic, the vicious circle, works like this. The person mightn’t be thinking it themselves, but you decide they are a victim, and start treating them accordingly. Pretty soon they get the message and start fulfilling your prophecy. The poison might start in childhood – the earlier the better to be most effective. It’s a variation on the Ignatian theme: turn a person into a victim in their childhood and you’ll get a whole lifetime of victimhood out of them.
Yes, the system can be clumsy, inaccurate, slow to respond to changing needs. But in beautiful, democratic Australia right now, it is completely false to say that the system is intrinsically discriminatory or racist. On the contrary, there is a constant and strong impetus for real improvement. The actual, ever-present systemic problem is something quite different, almost the reverse: too much welfare, or, at least, the wrong type.
I’m talking, as I’m sure you’ll realize, about “passive welfare” – welfare measures which diminish the recipient’s agency. A great test for any welfare measure or innovation could be: does it target the real agency of the recipient? If the answer is “no”, then a hand-up becomes a hold-down, and disadvantage is entrenched for the short or long term. It would have been better to have left them entirely alone – left them to their own agency. Love without accountability is no love at all.
I’m harsh and cruel, I know, but if you want to be even harsher and crueller than me, merely feel sorry for people who appear to be struggling in life, and treat them as victims. It will ensure that you are incapable of really helping them. Better for them, in fact, if you had crossed to the other side of the road.
Come on then Dai, it’s nearly light, time you were off to the anthracite.
The morning mist is on the valley, it’s time you were on your way.
Time you were learning the miner’s job, and earning a miner’s pay.
June 2020