Tuesday 28 June 2011

Poverty, precariousness and livelihoods

Okay, I'm on shaky ground here, but I've been thinking about those three concepts for a while... Some forms of poverty are not at all precarious, while some form of intense precariousness do not (yet) amount to poverty.

So for example a monk or a retiree on a meagre state pension can live in objective "poverty" but their situation does not lack stability or security. If they are prepared to be frugal, they can be fine forever and still be very generous towards others.

Precariousness on the other hand implies that all could be lost at the drop of a hat with little prospects for support. To various extents, precariousness can force individuals into increasingly selfish behaviour patterns. Therefore, I wonder if precariousness is among the great social evils of our time.

There was a bit of thinking done about this in Italy at the end of the last decade. It was a fascinating movement really. Individuals who found themselves living in precariousness availed themselves of a made-up patron saint, San Precario.

San Precario informally became the patron saint of precarious workers, the unemployed, the underemployed, people made redundant, the uninsured, illegal immigrants, the physically and financially dependent and those isolated from formal and informal circuits of solidarity. He is invoked against neoliberalism, evil goverment decisions and the precariousness that ensues. That's a pretty cool idea.

People began to print holy cards (seriously!) and to give them out at demonstrations. They look like this:





I like using the concept of precariousness because I wonder if people need a modicum of security in order to feel empowered to be generous. Or whether security itself is a false god that should be relinquished entirely. Big debate here...

I've seen lots of fairly secure (though by no means wealthy) people launch into great ventures. On the other hand, my generation is often accused of not being very generous. But then they are saddled with student debt, have no job security, no savings, no retirement plan, and no prospect of being able to buy their own homes.

Should Christians aim to design forms of moderate material security that do not depend on the functionning of the capitalist system, like most pension funds do, like the church too often does?

I feel for the people of Greece because I sense that it is precariousness, not necessarily enforced frugality, that is killing them.

I often dream of a green and hilly land where people and households are simply able to have a somewhat ethical livelihood that enables them to feed their family and enjoy creation. Is that a crazy dream to have? To work towards?

Thursday 23 June 2011

Must be time for a Blaise Pascal quote...

"Earnestness is enthusiasm tempered by reason"
Blaise Pascal

Friday 10 June 2011

What might distract the author of this blog from thinking of nothing except her unborn baby's little kicks

An intervention by Rowan Williams on our government and its "Big Society", that's what!

I must admit that I do enjoy reading the man's thoughts on mostly everything, even if I'm not particularly fond of him sitting on the fence for nearly a decade in the evil fundamentalists vs. cuddly liberals stalemate. In particular, I was massively impressed with his thoughts on 9/11 which are still incredibly relevant today and well worth a read.

So now let's hear the key points from his New Stateman's piece (read the full text by clicking on my first link above):

  • 'An idea whose roots are firmly in a particular strand of associational socialism has been adopted enthusiastically by the Conservatives'.

  • 'Managerial politics [is] attempting with shrinking success to negotiate life in the shadow of big finance.'

  • 'With remarkable speed, we are being committed to radical, long-term policies for which no one voted.'

  • 'While grass-roots initiatives and local mutualism are to be found flourishing in a great many places, they have been weakened by several decades of cultural fragmentation. The old syndicalist and co-operative traditions cannot be reinvented overnight and, in some areas, they have to be invented for the first time.'

  • '[There is] a quiet resurgence of the seductive language of "deserving" and "undeserving" poor, nor by the steady pressure to increase what look like punitive responses to alleged abuses of the system.'

  • 'There is [a] theological strand to be retrieved that is not about "the poor" as objects of kindness but about the nature of sustainable community, seeing it as one in which what circulates - like the flow of blood - is the mutual creation of capacity, building the ability of the other person or group to become, in turn, a giver of life and responsibility. Perhaps surprisingly, this is what is at the heart of St Paul's ideas about community at its fullest; community, in his terms, as God wants to see it.'
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