The
other day I attended a zoom meeting of the Chicago Ethical Humanist Circle,
where the guest speaker was a man who specialized in sustainable investments
for a very large asset manager from the U.K.
The company for which he worked went out of its way to invest in
companies that took moral stands on climate change, racism, sexism and other
salient moral issues of modern life. I
asked him what was his and the company’s position on automation and the
resulting loss of jobs and he sort of waffled and said, in effect, there were
people on both sides of the issue.
However, he also said he did understand my concern. Then someone else in the meeting said
automation was inevitable, and that the United States should focus on giving
every one of its citizens a basic salary of $30,000 a year. This reminded me of Spain’s recent decision
to give its citizens a guaranteed monthly salary of the equivalent of
$1,145. It speaks to the idea that has
been floated of a universal basic income.
On
one level, it sounds great, doesn’t it?
No more hunger and homelessness just because a person is unable to find
work. But contrary to what some
conservative Republicans think, not everyone, when given the opportunity, would
want to stop working altogether. And
this is because work satisfies other needs besides money. Most important, it allows people to make and
preserve organic imprints on the surfaces of the fields of experience that
surround them. By acting as a vehicle
for making imprints, work helps people to feel alive, to feel engaged with the
external world. By acting as a vehicle
for preserving imprints, work acts as a means for creating a surrogate
immortality and thus prepare for death.
Work may not always be pleasurable, but in the exchange of human effort
for payment, it provides satisfaction. A
certain sense of accomplishment. Of
relevance in the cosmos. Many people who
don’t have avocations or hobbies and who don’t enjoy spending a lot of time
just having fun, won’t know what to do with themselves if work is eliminated. They will feel disconnected from the external
world in a big way. In their minds, they
will be floating in an experiential vacuum.
They will sink deeper and deeper into numbness. They will feel themselves in a living
death. Some will literally die from
boredom.
Yes,
some people will be able to survive without work. Some people will be able to immerse
themselves in avocations. Avocations
combine some of the elements of work – doing linear projects – with some of the
elements of pleasure or, more precisely, fun.
Pleasure is what moves avocation projects forward. The joy of moving a project forward as a
personal organic imprint totally free of considerations of payment. Payment, of course, is a dominant goal of
work. With avocations, pleasure
represents the imprints that are received from an avocation experience. Work is measured more in terms of a series of
imprints made for accomplishment events.
Although an avocation has some of these events, it also includes some pleasure
experiences. An avocation is based on
serious projects done out of love. There
are meaningful goals involved in an avocation.
Unfortunately, most people, when they retire, do not get involved with
avocations.
However,
many people, upon retirement, will get involved with hobbies. Hobbies are activities in some ways similar
to avocations, but less serious and less meaningful. Hobbies do not usually involve making and
preserving organic imprints on other people.
For instance, with a hobby, one does not concern oneself quite so much
with making craft objects that can evoke pleasure and admiration from other
people. One gets involved, in such
circumstances, in making craft objects for the pleasure they give oneself. For the imprints that an artist receives from
what he is doing.
The
last major category of human activity is fun.
In fun, there are no projects to finish.
There are no formal external goals.
Fun is all about receiving pleasurable imprints. About enjoying oneself more passively and not
worrying about accomplishing anything. A
social gathering, a fine meal, a walk by the beach, a street fair, a resort
vacation, good sex (when not for procreation).
As we
can see, the four basic categories of human activity go from an almost
exclusive focus on making imprints to an exclusive focus on receiving imprints. From a person being primarily a producer to
being primarily a consumer.
Returning
to the original theme, it is one thing if a person can’t work for health or
other reasons. Or if a person is in the arts and his work doesn’t draw decent
money. But most other people are going
to be floating in an experiential vacuum, if they don’t have some solid work to
do. They’ll go out of their minds from
boredom. And they won’t feel like they
are accomplishing anything. They won’t
be able to leave meaningful organic imprints and prepare for death. And most people simply aren’t self-starters
who are capable of creating long-term linear activities that can become the
foundations of avocations. Now most
people are capable of generating hobbies where the organic imprints received
from the experience of participation are greater than the organic imprints
generated by the person in making and preserving accomplishments. But for most people, hobbies are not going to
be enough to lead a meaningful life narrative.
Unfortunately, for those people, there will probably develop a tendency
to try and feel alive through different forms of destructive behavior, both
towards themselves and towards others.
The
situation is complex. So I have nothing intrinsically
against a universal basic income in human work economies. This will be particularly helpful for people
who have health problems, as a supplement for people who can’t find enough
decent-paying work in certain fields, or for people in the arts. But as a means to allow all people to survive
because there is no work available at all, that is a cause for concern. The vast automation of work activities is not
going to be a good thing for the human race.
© 2020 Laurence Mesirow
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