Turning royalty into royalties impoverishes us all

What if we could create a marketplace for relationships, so that – just as we can rent our homes on Airbnb – we had an app that allowed us to sell at the market rate dinner with our husbands or bedtime with the kids?

Marriage is a legally recognised agreement after all, one that has been shown to confer many benefits for health and wellbeing. Why should I not be able to rent my place as wife and mother in my particular family to others who wish to enjoy some of those benefits?

Ryan Bourne of the Cato Institute recently argued that the technology exists to enable us to trade citizenship rights. Calling the right of British nationals to work in the UK’s high-wage economy “an effective property right we own but can’t currently trade”, he suggests we could ease immigration pressures by implementing an Airbnb-style secondary market in working rights.

If we frame citizenship, or marriage, as something owned by an individual, it is simply a set of bureaucratic permissions. Like the right to live in a house, surely this could be traded in a marketplace? And if the technology exists to create a citizenship market, surely we could do the same for marriage? I could sublet my wifedom and nip off for a weekend on the tiles with the proceeds. Why not?

The problem is obvious — my husband and daughter would, not unreasonably, object. She would no more want her bedtime story read by a stranger than my husband would want to share a bed with that stranger.

My marriage is not a good I own but a relationship, created by mutual consent. In a marriage, I give up some of my autonomy, privacy and private property rights by declaring my commitment to the relationship. What I gain is of immeasurable value: a sphere of belonging, the foundation of my existence as a social creature.

Likewise, citizenship implies relations of belonging, both of me to a community but also a community to me. It also implies commitments on behalf of the community of which I am a citizen. And in exchange it requires commitments of me, as a citizen: to uphold the law, to behave according to its customs and so on. As the late Roger Scruton put it in a 2017 speech:

The citizen participates in government and does not just submit to it. Although citizens recognise natural law as a moral limit, they accept that they make laws for themselves. They are not just subjects: they appoint the sovereign power and are in a sense parts of that sovereign power, bound to it by a quasi-contract which is also an existential tie. The arrangement is not necessarily democratic, but is rather founded on a relation of mutual accountability.
Roger Scruton

Just as my husband and daughter have a stake in who is entitled to be called “wife” or “Mummy” in our particular context, so other citizens of a nation have a stake in who is entitled to the rights conferred by citizenship.

In this light we can better understand the revulsion that greeted the actions of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex in trademarking “Sussex Royal” for personal commercial gain. Royalty, after all, does not exist in a vacuum. It is not an intrinsic property of a person, like blue eyes or long legs, but something conferred both by the monarchy and also by the subjects of that monarchy.

As Charles I discovered in 1649, ultimately no king can govern save by the consent of his subjects. Royalty is not a private property, but a relationship. The popular disgust and anger engendered by the Sussexes’ move to transfer their stock of royalty from the relational public sphere to that of private property is in truth anger at their privatising something which does not belong to them but to the whole nation.

In The Question Concerning Technology, writes Josh Pauling, Heidegger argues that technology uncouples humans from what is real, paving the way for a mindset that treats everything as “standing-reserve”, or in other words “resources to be consumed”. For Heidegger, seeing the world thus is dangerous because it flattens all other perspectives:

Commodifying nature and humanity leads us to discard other understandings of being-in-the-world and the practices, beliefs and ideas that accompany them: all aspects of reality are incorporated into the ordering of standing-reserve.
Josh Pauling

My husband’s goodwill would rapidly wear thin were I to Airbnb my role in our family. Similarly, Bourne’s citizenship marketplace fails to consider how the general population would react to seeing fellow citizens renting their right to work to non-citizens and swanning about spending the unearned proceeds. And the goodwill enjoyed by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex while discharging their royal duties has already evaporated, now it transpires they wish to enjoy the privileges of their elevated station without embracing its obligations.

Treated as objects to be exploited, relational meanings wither and die. Treated as dynamic relationships, they are infinitely renewable. In this sense, they are more akin to ecologies in the natural world. In Expecting the Earth, Wendy Wheeler argues that in fact ecologies are systems of meaning: whether at the level of DNA or megafauna, she says, living things deal not in information but in meanings that change dynamically depending on context.

Why does any of this matter? “Modernity is a surprisingly simple deal,” writes Yuval Noah Harari in Homo Deus. “The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.” The impressive achievements of modernity might make the loss of meaning seem, to some, a fair exchange.

But if Wheeler is right, meaning is more than an optional seasoning on the mechanistic business of living. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl observes of his time in Nazi concentration camps that those who felt they had a goal or purpose were also those most likely to survive.

Indeed, the growing phenomenon of “deaths of despair” is driven, some argue, by deterioration in community bonds, good-quality jobs, dignity and social connection — in a word, the relational goods that confer meaning and purpose on life. As Frankl observed, humans need meaning as much as we need air, food and water: “Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost.”

An order of commerce that treats relational ecologies as objects that can be exploited will exhaust those objects. That is, in the course of its commercial activities it actively destroys one of the basic preconditions for human flourishing: meaning.

The Estonian thinker Ivar Puura has called the destruction of meaning “semiocide”. As concern mounts about the effects of pollution and emissions on the earth, campaigners have called for new laws to criminalise the destruction of ecologies, which they call “ecocide”. Perhaps we should take semiocide more seriously as well.

This piece was originally published at Unherd

John Clare, poet of the Somewheres

Can someone be so much of a Somewhere — so rooted in a place — that the loss of that home could drive them mad? The tragic story of the poet John Clare (1793-1864) would suggest so. A contemporary of the Romantics, Clare was neither an aristocrat like Byron nor a grammar school boy like Wordsworth and Keats, but a farm labourer. And when the Enclosure Acts transformed his birthplace, he was so devastated by the loss of his familiar landscape and way of life that he fell gradually into depression, panic attacks, alcohol abuse and finally psychosis.

Born in 1793 in Helpston, a rural hamlet north of Peterborough, to a barely literate farm labourer father and an illiterate mother, Clare spent most of his working life as a labourer, despite at one point during his lifetime outselling John Keats. Only haphazardly educated, he fell wildly in love with the written word after encountering James Thomson’s The Seasons. He began writing his own verse — at first mainly about the natural world — on whatever scraps of paper he could find, or on his hat when he had no paper.

Clare first sought a publisher in the hope of raising money to stop his parents being evicted from their tenement. When a lucky contact brought him to Taylor & Hessey, his first collection, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, was published in 1820 to wild acclaim.

Clare stands out among the poets of the Romantic era for his understanding of and communion with the natural world he describes. Contemporaries treated the natural world more as emotional stimulus: in Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey“, for example, landscape is observed, but with little knowledge. Wordsworth’s “plots of cottage-grounds” are “clad in one green hue”, and this is chiefly an anchor for moral reflection, a means of “hearing oftentimes/The still sad music of humanity”.

Clare, on the other hand, was critical of this mix of ignorance and sentimentality, saying of Keats that “his descriptions of scenery are often very fine but as it is the case with other inhabitants of great cities he often described nature as she appeared to his fancies, and not as he would have described her had he witnessed the things he described”.

Landscape, to Clare, was not a source of high emotion but home, livelihood, work, family and the richness of plant and animal life. His vistas brim with too much knowledge to seem painterly, or to be turned easily into moral metaphor. Colour is shorthand for a natural and farmed landscape intimately known, as these fields in “A Sunday With Shepherds and Herdboys”:

Square plats of clover red and white
Scented wi’ summer’s warm delight
And sinkfoil of a fresher stain
And different greens of varied grain

In Keats’s famous “Ode to a Nightingale” the bird herself is not even described, serving instead as the focus for reflections on death, history and emotional rapture by a poet “half in love with easeful death”; Clare’s hushed, intimate “The Nightingale’s Nest” is both more prosaic and, in a sense, more faithful to the bird. For Keats, she is a “light-winged Dryad of the trees”. In contrast, Clare describes the materials used to build her nest and, with hushed empathy, the terrified bird:

How subtle is the bird she started out
And raised a plaintive note of danger nigh
Ere we were past the brambles and now near
Her nest she sudden stops — as choaking fear
That might betray her home

There is no need for a moral. For Clare it is enough to observe, then tiptoe away leaving the bird to find her voice again:

We’ll leave it as we found it — safety’s guard
Of pathless solitudes shall keep it still
See there she’s sitting on the old oak bough
Mute in her fears – our presence doth retard
Her joys and doubt turns every rapture chill
Sing on sweet bird may no worse hap befall
Thy visions then the fear that now deceives
We will not plunder music of its dower
Nor turn this spot of happiness to thrall
For melody seems hid in every flower
That blossoms near thy home

Yet Clare’s lack of moralising does not strip his work of emotion. He is as unflinching in his descriptions of the brutality of his world as of its beauty. “The Badger” begins with a description of the animal’s habitat “A great hugh burrow in the ferns and brakes” and ends with its death at the hands of a village crowd:

He turns agen and drives the noisey crowd
And beats the many dogs in noises loud
He drives away and beats them every one
And then they loose them all and set them on
He falls as dead and kicked by boys and men
Then starts and grins and drives the crowd again
Till kicked and torn and beaten out he lies
And leaves his hold and cackles groans and dies

His ever-present empathy is with the birds and beasts besieged by humanity, as in “Summer Evening” when he curses the boys who creep into lofts to catch and kill sparrows. He calls on the birds to nest in his house where they will be safe:

My heart yearns for fates like thine
A sparrow’s life’s as sweet as mine

If Clare rises to moralise from his observation of the natural world, it is done without ornament. The last two verses of “To The Snipe” give a reflection at once uplifting and humble:

Isee the sky
Smile on the meanest spot
Giving to all that creep or walk or flye
A calm and cordial lot
Thine teaches me
Right feeling to employ
That in the dreariest places peace will be
A dweller and a joy

Clare’s modesty was out-of-step with the mood of the times: Keats wrote of Clare’s poetry that “Images from Nature are too much introduced without being called for by a particular Sentiment”. Romantic poetry often seems as indifferent to the minutiae of the natural world as it is enthralled by the poet’s ability to overlay it with “Sentiment”. This aesthetic was well suited to the political and technological shifts of that age. Whether in poetry or landscape, the movement was away from coexistence with the natural world toward subordinating it to human desires.

In the Middle Ages, much of the arable land in central England was “commons”, which was farmed on a communal basis for a subsistence livelihood. This was the landscape of John Clare’s childhood. But between the 13^th and 19^th centuries, and accelerating from the Georgian era onward, the land was ‘“enclosed” — that is, turned from common to private property — either by buying the land rights or else forcing enclosure through an Act of Parliament.

Between 1809 and 1820 Enclosure Acts transformed the landscape around John Clare’s birthplace, draining ditches, felling ancient trees and displacing subsistence farmers from once common land. Clare’s 1830s poem “The Lament of Swordy Well” expresses his horror at the process, in the voice of the land itself:

The silver springs grown naked dykes
Scarce own a bunch of rushes
When grain got high the tasteless tykes
Grubbed up trees, banks, and bushes
And me, they turned me inside out
For sand and grit and stones
And turned my old green hills about
And pickt my very bones.

The natural world, that seemed so numinous and eternal in Clare’s early work, is depicted homeless and starving as a consequence of this exploitation:

The bees flye round in feeble rings
And find no blossom bye
Then thrum their almost weary wings
Upon the moss and die
Rabbits that find my hills turned o’er
Forsake my poor abode
They dread a workhouse like the poor
And nibble on the road

By the age of 30, Clare had six children to feed and his brief fame had dissipated. Displaced from his way of life by enclosures and disturbed by the changing landscape, Clare fell into depression and alcohol abuse. Friends and admirers clubbed together to buy him a cottage three miles from Helpston, with a smallholding, but even this slight move from his birthplace only increased his distress. The Flitting captures his desolation. Even the sun, he says, seems lost:

Alone and in a stranger scene
Far far from spots my heart esteems
The closen with their ancient green
Heaths woods and pastures’ sunny streams
The awthorns here were hung with may
But still they seem in deader green
The sun e’en seems to loose its way
Nor knows the quarter it is in

Not long after moving he began to experience hallucinations and was sent to an asylum near London. So desperate was he to return home that four years later he escaped and walked the 70 miles back to his cottage. But he found no solace there, and shortly afterwards he was sent to the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, where he lived the last 24 years of his life. He died aged 71 in 1864.

John Clare speaks to us from the other side of an unimaginable gulf. He was so profoundly Somewhere that even David Goodhart’s Somewheres would, to him, seem like Anywheres. His voice, almost modern-sounding, nonetheless hails from an ancient England where the normal livelihood was subsistence farming on land held in common, culture and history were mainly oral and the natural world held a richness of allusion Wordsworth and Keats found in classical mythology.

Yet his politics feel fresh and increasingly urgent, while his empathy for the living world making him a compelling advocate for change in how we relate to the land that nourishes us — whether via conservation, sustainable farming or land reform.

Clare is both protester and casualty of the Enclosure Acts, as well as a meticulous recorder of what was lost in that founding act of modernity. Enclosure spurred the phenomenal productivity gains of the agricultural revolution, created a labour force for industry — and devastated a whole way of life. His grief and anger at the costs of enclosure, an event largely seen from the perspective of its beneficiaries, reminds us that the growing power of individual property rights in the modern era displaced premodern subsistence lifestyles in the United Kingdom as well as in the colonies founded by English explorers overseas.

Clare’s descent into depression and alcoholism is echoed in the shockingly high prevalence of mental health issues and substance abuse in indigenous populations across the world who have been dislocated from their ways of living by modern property-owning relations to the landscape.

UK land ownership today is ever more carefully obfuscated and ever more critical to social and — perhaps — ecological renewal. The industrial capitalist economic model that took root in Clare’s lifetime is now cracking in earnest, along with the ecologies “grubbed up” (like Swordy Well) for “gain”. The “peasant poet” of Northamptonshire has lessons for us today.

This piece was originally published at Unherd

Growth is destroying our prosperity

e started the 2010s reeling from the Great Crash of 2008, and ended the decade with angry populism widespread in the Western world. Today, the global economy limps on more or less as usual, while resentment grows among the “little people” at an economic consensus many feel is rigged without really knowing who is to blame. Over the same period, climate change activism has gone from being a minority pursuit to mainstream debate, occasioning worldwide “school strikes” and, since the beginning of the year, the high-profile and colourful Extinction Rebellion movement.

What these dissatisfactions share is a sense of being trapped in an economic logic whose priorities no longer benefit society as a whole, but that — we are told — cannot be challenged without making things even worse. The foundational premise of that system is continual growth, as measured by GDP (gross domestic product) per capita. Economies must grow; if they do not, then recession sinks jobs, lives, entire industries. Tax receipts fall, welfare systems fail, everything staggers.

But what happens when growth harms societies? And what happens when growth comes at the cost of irreparable harm to the environment?

As Sir David Attenborough put it in 2013, “We have a finite environment – the planet. Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist.”

This is the argument of Tim Jackson’s Prosperity Without Growth. The challenge the book sets out is at once simple and staggering. In a finite world, with limited natural resources, how do we deliver prosperity into the future for a human population that keeps on growing?

Jackson, who today is Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey, and Director of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP), argues that we need to start by scrapping GDP as the core metric of prosperity. As the book puts it: “Rising prosperity isn’t self-evidently the same thing as economic growth.”

The pursuit of growth is also undermining social bonds and overall wellbeing. In 2018, a commission reported on the ‘loneliness epidemic’ that is blighting lives and worsening health across the UK, driven in part by greater mobility of individuals away from family connections. (Mobility of labour, of course, is essential to drive economic growth.)

This year, even The Economist acknowledged that rising growth does not guarantee rising happiness.

If that were not enough, the resources available to supply continued growth are dwindling: “If the whole world consumed resources at only half the rate the US does […] copper, tin, silver, chromium, zinc and a number of other ‘strategic minerals’ would be depleted in less than four decades.” (Prosperity Without Growth)

Rare earth minerals, essential for technologies from circuit boards to missile guidance systems, are projected to be exhausted in less than two decades.

Inasmuch as the public debate considers these nested dilemmas, the vague sentiment is that technology will save us. The jargon term for this is ‘decoupling’ — that is, the ability of the economy to grow without using more resources, by becoming more efficient. But will decoupling happen?

The theoretical core of Jackson’s book is a detailed unpacking of models that suggest it will not, or that if absolute decoupling is possible it will happen so far into the future we will already have wrecked the climate and run out of everything. Rather than rely on this fantasy, Jackson argues, we must challenge the dependence on growth.

But how? The global economic system depends on growth and in times of recession it is the poorest who suffer first. It is a policy double bind: on the one hand, we must think of the environment, so governments encourage us to buy less, consume less, recycle more and so on. But on the other, they must deliver a growing economy, which mean encouraging us to buy more, consume more, keep the economy going. Electorates are, understandably, cynical about the sincerity of this flatly self-contradictory position.

What, then, is the alternative? Jackson is an economist, not a revolutionary firebrand, and his book does not call on us to bring down capitalism. In the second part of Prosperity Without Growth, he instead suggests some quietly radical approaches to bringing the global economy back into the service of human flourishing.

He advocates government intervention to drive much of the change he proposes, including encouraging economies to pivot away from manufacturing, finance and the pursuit of novelty at all costs toward less obviously productive but more human services such as slow food cooperatives, repair and maintenance or leisure services.

He also advocates heavy state support for ecologically-oriented investment. When I contacted him to ask about his book ten years on he spoke positively of the contribution that a “Green New Deal” could make on this front: “It shows a commitment to social and environmental investment that is absolutely essential to achieve a net zero carbon world”, he told me. “Simply put, we just can’t achieve that without this scale of investment, and that form of commitment from Government.”

He also told me he is often criticised for being “too interventionist in relation to the state”, as he puts it. But perhaps (though Jackson does not use the term himself) he might be more fairly described as post-liberal. Prosperity Without Growth is a quiet but excoriating critique of the growing human and ecological costs of liberal economics.

Intriguingly, within Jackson’s proposals lurks another challenge to liberalism, that to date has not been greatly associated with the left: the critique of radical liberal individualism as a social doctrine. Along with state intervention to tweak the economy and drive ecological investment, Jackson argues that governments should promote “commitment devices”: that is, “social norms and structures that downplay instant gratification and individual desire and promote long-term thinking”.

Examples of ‘commitment devices’ include savings accounts and the institution of marriage. Governments should implement policies that clearly incentivise commitment devices, for doing so will promote social flourishing and resilience even as such institutions offer alternative forms of meaning-making to the pursuit of shopping-as-identity-formation.

Thus, we cannot save the earth without reviving some social values and structures today thought of as small ‘c’ conservative: stable marriage, savings, settled and cohesive communities with lower levels of labour mobility.

I asked Jackson whether some of the more vociferous socially liberal proponents of environmental change had cottoned on to these potentially quite conservative implications of his theories. He told me “This is an interesting question, for sure, and one that I don’t think has really been picked up – even by me!” (Except at UnHerd – see here and here for example.) But, he says, it is incumbent on us to set aside political tribalism in the search for solutions to our current dilemmas.

“I believe there are elements of a Burkean conservatism which are profoundly relevant to a politics of the environment, even as I am convinced that the progressive instincts of the left are essential in our response to social and environmental inequality. I see it as incumbent on those working for change both to understand the underlying motivations of different political positions and also to adopt a pragmatic politic in which solutions are suited to the challenges of today rather than the dogma of yesterday.”

Indeed.

This essay was originally published at Unherd