THE ENGLISH DISEASE

THE ENGLISH DISEASE

The following text fragment is on display at the Museum of Humans. It dates from approximately ten planetary years before the final demise of the human species. In the interest of authenticity the text was reconstructed in the dominant language of the time, namely English. The text, in digital format, was found in an area then known as New Zealand.

“New paragraph… as mentioned before when in 2018 a psycholinguist from the University of Auckland published a paper called The Consequences of Language Obsolescence in an obscure academic journal, there were only a few fellow travelers who nodded wisely. Yes, they had read it many times before, the dire warning of language species extinction, analogous to biological species extinction. Yes, they knew the simple analogy: while it might have been very economical to have just one species of tree for economical exploitation, there is the danger of some unknown disease wiping out the global plantations of Pinus radiata. Ipso facto, no more trees.Apso ficto, no more languages. Full stop.”

Now wait a minute, the uninitiated said. Scaremongering, the anti-climate and anti-language change proponents screamed Trump-like. Not possible. How could a language like English disappear? Languages do not get affected by viruses (well, computer languages might!). Next you crazy lefty greenies telling us that degenerative BUSH English ISIS the cause of all this non-existent climate change. In any case, in Orwellian 2018 it was considered a laughable proposition by new-speak, even by those who thought it quite possible that climate change might affect the earth adversely. Sure, the Maori language had been nearly wiped out, but weren’t there signs of a renaissance? Plus there were all these community languages in New Zealand. And English! English everywhere. The language of globalization. New Zealand was blessed to have native speakers of English, hence providing a sizable pool of teachers of English for those billions of people unlucky enough to have been brought up with a lesser tongue. Teaching English was a major industry. Worth millions if not billions. English as an ass-et.

When in 2019 there was a sudden and dramatic increase in the incidence of a variant of Alzheimer’s Disease in the English speaking world with ageing populations, a noted Chomskyan neuro-linguist from MIT (not the one in Auckland) came up with the thesis that the disease was caused in part by a degeneration of the language capacity (an organ in the brain) which in turn was caused by English mental stresses which in turn were caused by modern life styles, etc, which in turn, etc, etc. Case studies seemed to provide evidence for the proposition. Most worrying of all was the high incidence of variant Alzheimer’s in English speakers in their thirties. For a while the mass media picked up the story and there was a popular debate on whether or not medical science had shot itself in the foot. Do we live longer only to lose our English minds faster? Even the old joke reappeared whereby English-speaking men, young and old, maintain erections with vast supplies of Viagra but cannot remember what for. Soon, of course, the debate was overtaken by other weather news. A gigantic tornado had wiped out large parts of Kansas City. Hundreds of thousands died. The drought in Australia had become so severe that a state of emergency had been declared and vast tracts of land were placed under the command of the military forces that regulated the remaining water supplies on behalf of water corporations. In the UK, a 200-year flood event arrived first with a 10-year frequency and lately as an annual event. In New Zealand a 1,000-year flood covered most of Northland for weeks on end (the commonality of hundred year floods had necessitated upping the ante exponentially). 2019 was a bad year alright. Most people blamed it on the accelerating climate changes. Governments around the world scrambled to halt the decline. The New Zealand Parliament formed a grand government coalition and banned the use of private cars below 1,000 cc, private boats and private jets below 1,000 cc for private use. It became a national past time to define, refine and redefine ‘private use’. The working classes were forced to use scarce public transport, having to get up two hours earlier to go to work, waiting in long queues at bus and train stops. Public air traffic quadrupled. Air taxis became the favoured mode of transport for those with disposable incomes. Drunk flying and carnage in the skies became a bit of a problem. In 2020, however, there were hardly any new natural catastrophes of note, and the world and the transport and knowledge industries sighed a collective sigh of relief. Only the ongoing drought in Australia led to large-scale riots in the major cities which were forced to drastically reduce their water consumption. Civil unrest and civil wars continued at their usual level of intensity. The United States government and its armed forces, as usual, were fighting evil insurgencies in various vassal states and the mimicry of the Roman Empire extended to a Nero-type president incinerating a large part of Washington DC. The president blamed a barbarian group of evil extremists with headquarters in Barbados. All and sundry were nuked out of existence. It was later claimed that the president and his women had confused Barbados with Bavaria (both beginning with B). The whole spectacle was a fantastic opportunity for a start-up interactive Internet service called Inferno. 

As we all now know now, the first signs of the oxygen fluctuations were reported from Christchurch in the same year. A bizarre confluence of cosmic and local events indeed: a spot of extreme ozone depletion coupled with the Christchurch Föhn and an electric storm served as a catalyst for oxygen in the air to form allotropic ozone. This went on long enough for people and animals to suffer respiratory difficulties leading to some 50,000 items of collateral damage in humans. Scientists assured us that this was a one in a billion year event. Ha, in 2027 we knew new now better semi-colon.

It’s hard when you cannot breathe. Like an asthma attack of asthma. You suck air into the lungs but you cannot expel it. You feel like exploding. Sure, just about everyone was running around with inhalers and a bottle of oxygen and stuff. Like, like way back when people, like, ran, like, around with bottles of water. In the beginning it was status symbol. Oxygen bottles in many fashion colours. Like, a cool accessory. Clean green oxygen from New Zealand sold well all over the world. Cynics like you and me pointed out that oxygen is oxygen all around the world makes the world go around. A severe oxygen fluctuation in 2029 around and around Shanghai killed 10 million people. There was not enough oxygen to go around go around. Even mild oxygen depletion affects the brain. Or is it the mind, English or otherwise? It affects your language exclamation mark. You become incoherent. You tend to babble like Bertrand Russell who became my English mantra:

After ages during which the earth produced harmless trilobites and butterflies, evolution progressed to the point at which it generated Neros, Genghis Khans and Hitlers. This, however, I believe is a passing nightmare; in time the earth will again become incapable of supporting life, and peace will return. 

                                                                                    [1950, Unpopular Essays]

In moments of doubt and sufficient oxygen I caught snippets of Wittgenstein. What did he say?Quardle ardle wardle doodle? No, know, now not that one! It’s on the tongue of my tip. It’s all a game. I never felt so happy as never before. It’s a game. It’s really funny. Shame on the trilobites. What a word. In the beginning was the word. You see. English words like word. Crazy Germans have a funny word for that: sich totlachen. I can hardly breathe.

Today looks like a good oxygen day. Our Coromandel commune is waking up to the latest news that Auckland now looks like a scene from Quiet Earth. One of our scouts had tramped there and returned to tell the tall tale. I remember this from my English lessons. No, no, nothing to do with Smith’s Dreamor Bruno. There’s a name for it. A row of words all beginning with the same consonant. I know it but I cannot remember it. I know a lot of things. Lucky I don’t remember. But Auckland, how could I forget. I lived there all these years ago. Taught English. Brought up a family. Had a mortgage. I can still recite the poem ‘the farm’s still there, mortgage corporations couldn’t give it away, and quardle ardle wardle doodlethe magpies say’. See ‘say’ I say to my students, bloody brilliant, present tense, you see. They don’t, never learnt no English grammar. They think I’m mad. So does the management and I lose my job, never to get another one. Yes, how could I forget when the bubble burst, as foretold by my father-in-law. We had signed an unconditional agreement to buy this lovely 10 acre persimmon and olive lifestyle block in Katikati to get away from it all. We borrowed and paid the ten percent $740,900.00 deposit. It all depended on us selling our super-duper she-sells-sea-shells-on-the-sea-side home in Gulf Harbour and the up-market apartment in the city. It was just a matter of weeks, said our nice real estate man, especially if we meet the market, he said with a twinkle in his eye. It would sell, but it didn’t because it was a leaky home and then the global financial bubble burst and it was too late to meet the market. Deposit gone. Noah’s Ark flooded. Timber not treated. No job, no income. Market collapsed. Yes, I remember. Bloody disaster alright. Great, really great depression followed. I shall – future is not a tense – now not now remember now what happened now next. I cannot remember. Member. Me. 

Today smells like a bad oxygen day. There is a fly around in my brain. I try. Breathe, baby breathe. Tihei mauriora. Kia kaha. Excuse my relapse, te reo pakeha, the language of darkness. 

Pen-ultimate paragraph(sic, sick). The sun did not rise today. I rage against the darkness. The journey north. Soulless souls. Unable to even speak in tongues. Ethereal English. Devoid of all alliteration, allusion, antonym and anality. Blank. Blank. Spacebar. Battery very low. Close down. Computer speaks English for the last time.

We have reached Cape Reinga. Hip-i-ti-hop hop-it-i-hip, oh what fun, we all jump.

AN ORANGE REVIEW OF BULLSHIT JOBS BY DAVID GRAEBER (2018)

AN ORANGE REVIEW OF BULLSHIT JOBS BY DAVID GRAEBER (2018)

Recommended to me by artist and fellow social activist, Zarahn Southon, this book makes for interesting reading. The central theme of people who work in bullshit jobs – and know this being the case – seems to be somewhat facile in the first instance since the much larger problem are people working in bullshit jobs they themselves value very much. Such as soldiers, policemen and all the true believers in what David calls ‘the sadomasochistic dynamic of hierarchical work arrangements’. The managerial feudalism (I have advocated for the term ‘neo-feudalism’ for many years) so rightly decried by David does exist because it affords sadistic pleasure for the managers. David’s allusions to sexual politics in this context are poignant, delving into what might be called Freudian or Reichian domains. His description of Foucault’s supposedly positive transformation after embracing BDSM is hilarious even though the message is supposed to be serious: BDSM as a work place scenario is Ok because we can call ‘orange’ to terminate the game at any time. In the real work place scenario, the worker detecting ‘bullshit’ cannot call ‘orange’ and is instead forced to submit to utter humiliation if not worse. David as the consummate academic/teacher provides the slogan of ‘mutual manipulation of teacher and student (power-good), versus the tyranny of the authoritarian pedant (domination-bad)’. As a teacher/academic myself I certainly agree with the latter but I am not so sure about the former.  Given David’s support for Universal Basic Income as a possible solution to the perverse problem of bullshit jobs, one wonders if David would call ‘orange’ on his current employer (LSE, where bullying seems less pronounced than in his previous position at Yale) as much as I would do so on mine. As we know, much of the teaching/academic profession is populated by sadistic characters so well portrayed in Pink Floyd’s music video for ‘teacher leave us kids alone’ (a more literary example I would recommend is Alfred Andersch’ Der Vater eines Mörders(1980), The father of a murderer, translated by Leila Vennewitz (1994), which fictionalizes the real story of Himmler’s father as a sadistic high school headmaster). 

On a more anthropological (David is after all an anthropologist) and sociological playing field, David provides many a valuable insight on the nature of work itself (he does subtitle his book with ‘a theory’). I like his assertion that real work is service based – caring for others or even for oneself – rather than production based as conceived in many a theoretical treatise on the value or values of labour. The perverse biblical definition of labour as a punishment from god is traced through to the English Puritan and Protestant obsessions with work as a character-building exercise, down to the diminishing factory worker and the subsequent rise of bullshit jobs (especially in the so-called service industries, like banking and insurance). His critique that the both the Left and the Right of the political spectrum are beholden to work as a right (by the Left) and as a commodity (by the Right) may be a bit misleading, especially as he seems to equate the Left with politicians like Clinton, Obama and Blair. We know that these characters are anything but from the Left (it would be interesting to find out what David now thinks of Jeremy Corbyn). Citing Karl Marx on a few occasions, in mainly positive terms, one cannot deny the premise that labour adds value to products. Nurses as a ‘caring’ profession rely on ‘useful’ health products as much as any other caring profession relies on their version of useful products. On the other hand, a much sharper critique might have focused on the mad proliferation of ‘useless’ bullshit consumer products, a sort of double-whammy of having a bullshit job making bullshit products (like the armaments industry – notwithstanding that quite a few workers in this industry might feel they are doing a sterling job). Instead David focuses on bullshit jobs that often involve doing nothing at all, or not very much, so that the worker feels guilty about it, affecting his/her mental health in the process. Some of the many anecdotes (call them case studies if you must) come from the software programming industry where low level programmers have to fix (with ‘duct tape’) the many bugs left behind by higher-ups, a sort of mindless drudgery played out in the Silicon Valleys of our modern times. Embedded in this theme is David’s thesis that AI, robotics and automation have indeed taken over many of the jobs formerly performed by human workers but the real consequence should have been to free the workforce from the 40-hour working week, reducing it to a 15-hour working week. Instead workers now have to work 70 hours a week to make ends meet, working in bullshit jobs that substituted the ones made redundant by automation. An even more schizophrenic situation is built into another type of bullshit job that involves social welfare workers whose job it is to deny the poor their rightful assistance by making it as difficult as possible to get through the red tape associated with it. It is sad but true that in our Western society anybody who does not work and is therefore poor, must be punished, at least as a character-building exercise. In this context David does make a very good point: the liberal Left (such as the Labour party in NZ, my ed.) attacks this ‘unemployment’ problem by promising full employment and a minimum wage (but not even a ‘living wage’ as demanded by some of the more progressive unions) when the solution is in fact a radical reduction of work (and throwing the ‘work ethic’ into the rubbish bin of history) if not total abolition of it. On the political Right, ‘unemployment’ (between 3% - 8%) is of course most desirable as it allows for sadistic competition in the workplace. Human freedom, as David bravely notes, is not at all predicated on regular work (as forever abused by the Nazis' Arbeit macht frei) but on getting a sustainable livelihood. In historical terms, as he reminds us, this meant working for food and shelter during the growing seasons and taking it easy during the fallow seasons. Quoting Orwell, he also reminds us, the ruling classes cannot conceive of the working classes as having time off lest they get up to all sorts of mischief, like hatching plans to usurp the power of the few, or else engage in fun and games for the sake of a bit of enjoyment if not sexual pleasure. Endless work, meaningful or not (as bullshit jobs), keeps us workers imprisoned in a system that David correctly identifies as ‘perverse’. A terrible indictment, really, but also a call in the wilderness to break free (but see where it got Freddie Mercury if we continue with the 1960’s anti-establishment theme which David considers as evidence that young people then could envisage a life outside working nine to five). To break free from neo-feudalism will require a kind of anarchic revolution never seen before.