1381

1381. Remember this year. Mark it on your calendar, for we shall see it again.

Wat Tyler and the king

In 1381 the peasants revolted, and under the leadership of Wat Tyler 20,000 of them almost succeeded in taking Richard II’s crown from his head and his head from his shoulders. They failed of course.

If I remember correctly, it was Laurence Eldridge, my professor of medieval English literature some 30 years ago, who first pointed out to me the significance of this event. Though professional historians might consider his explanation a bit of an over-simplification, it illustrates my point well.

In the fourteenth century the plague killed off a good portion of the English population. With labour in short supply, those serfs who had survived were able to demand better terms from their feudal lords, whose wealth was directly dependent on the serfs who worked the land. But people being people, those who survived the plague made children, and in a couple of generations, labour was no longer in short supply. The new generation of peasants could not demand the favourable terms their fathers had obtained in their day. They saw their standard of living decline.

15 year olds and their parents

My point is not about supply and demand for labour and its effect on wages. It is that the peasants revolted when they saw their lives becoming worse than their parents’ lives had been. This is why, more than 700 years later, 1381 is a year to remember.

Look around. Name me one country where a 15 year old can reasonably expect his life to be better than were his parents. If this 15 year old is a girl, her prospects are likely even worse.

The happy few and the hopeful

There might be individual exceptions, of course. The very rich are getting even richer, so their children just might be even better off, assuming that life is good in gated compounds. And there are many countries where hope is not dead.
 
The Arab Spring, for one, has only just begun. Burma alias Myanmar seems to be changing. South Sudan, just a year past independence and still not out of war, is understandably looking to the future.

In Europe

But where else? In the countries once known as “Eastern” Europe, the euphoria after the fall of the old regimes succumbed quickly to economic expedience. If you are curious for details, read Geert Mak’s In Europe. In the rest of the Europe—the rich part for the latter half of the last century—the young see a future of unemployment and idleness.

South Africa, the U.S. and China

In South Africa, the end of apartheid has not meant the end of poverty and inequality; nor did it end the violence, as the recent killing of striking miners showed. In the U.S., Obama, who inherited two wars, an exploding deficit and an imploding economy from his predecessor, has been unable to answer the dreams of those who voted for him. The speculation is on that in China the collapse has already begun.

Even in Happy Canada

Even in Canada, with its tiny population and enormous resources, the young are unemployed or underemployed. They look back at the fabled times of their parents and grandparents, when a job was a living and—if you wanted it to—lasted until you retired.

As Stéphane Hessel has written, addressing the young in Time for Outrage!, there is no lack of reasons to be outraged. All you need to do is look around. Hence the indignados, hence the Occupy movement, hence the 99%, the student strikes in Québec.

Action and reaction

So what of 1381? It’s simple, and it’s been repeated innumerable times, with innumerable variations. When the young lose hope in the future, they call for change. Be it a feudal monarchy, a creaking empire, a modern klepocracy, or a technocracy and its markets—yes, Eisenhower warned us—the military-industrial complex, the ancien régime has a tradition of answering these calls with the same foresight and wisdom that brought on the mess in the first place: with bludgeon and noose.

Things are going to get nasty. But they don’t have to. Next, we’ll look at FDR.

Hysteria: Koran Burning and Hockey Games

It doesn’t seem to take much to touch off a firestorm in the Muslim world these days. Someone slaps together a nasty little movie insulting Islam, and the “Muslim mob” rears its ugly head.

In Benghazi, as everyone knows, this mob attacked the American consulate and killed Christopher Stevens, a man who, according to Robert Fisk, “really knew the Arabs as many of his colleagues did not” and was apparently a decent sort. He certainly didn’t deserve to be killed by a mob. He wasn’t the only victim, and there will likely be more.

The nastiness continues, from the Maghreb across South Asia to the shores of the Pacific. Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine publishes some cartoons insulting Muslims—and, incidentally, Jews—and France increases security at its embassies,  shutting some temporarily as a precautionary measure. Probably a good move. Charlie Hebdo insults everyone, and is hardly worth dying for.

We are rightly shocked and appalled. Methinks, though, that in our righteousness and indignation we might also do well to try to understand what this is all about.

I suggest that we try two things. First, we might do as the Quakers suggest: try to put ourselves in the other’s shoes and express his (for they are mostly men in this mob) point of view, as best we can understand it. Second, we might look at ourselves and how we react to provocation.

The other’s shoes

I am 23 years old. I am poor. The “elite” in my country live in luxury and shop in fancy boutiques in London and New York. They fly in and out, while I trudge across the city in broken shoes to save the bus fare.

This elite sends its children to schools in Switzerland and universities in England and America. I studied hard and earned good marks—until I dropped out to try to bring a little more money into the household, as my parents can’t make ends meet on their own.

My parents, God bless them, learned to keep their heads down and their mouths shut. They learned the hard way. My uncle was imprisoned and tortured. We’ll never know what happened to him. He wasn’t the only one. I’ve been beaten up by the police, just because they could.

I am unemployed, in a world in which even those with jobs can’t make ends meet. My tomorrow promises only odd jobs and idleness. Without work I have no hope of getting married, of having children.

The Arab Spring, if it came here (and mostly it didn’t), has not brought me any material benefits—not yet, though I still sometimes hope. In the meantime, I look at my parents still scraping out an existence. I can’t even do that.

In short, everything about my life tells me that I am worthless. Everything except my religion. My religion gives me dignity and community. It tells me that I am a human being.

Why are you surprised, then, that I react with anger when you insult my religion?

This portrait is surely an over-simplification and perhaps a little sentimental, but I do think that trying to imagine how it is to live inside another person’s life is a useful exercise in understanding.

Perspective and introspection

We of the European tradition had a Renaissance and an Enlightenment. We left the Middle Ages behind long ago. We know that the best thing to do about a third-rate movie or crude cartoons insulting our beliefs is to ignore them. They’ll soon be forgotten.

And we’ve learned tolerance. I’m rather less sure about introspection or perspective.

Perspective would help us remember, before we start on about the intolerance of Islam, that every religion, as every society, has its saints and its monsters, and the most of us in between, and that no one has a patent on righteous hysteria.

Perspective might also help us remember, for instance, that until the middle of the last century Jews were the majority in Salonika (now Thessaloniki in Greece) largely thanks to an influx of Sephardic Jews fleeing the embraces of the Inquisition, and had thrived under the (very Muslim) Ottomans. Perspective might also help us remember how this population was destroyed and by whom. Hint: it wasn’t the Ottomans.

For a bit of introspection, we might ponder how the “West” reacts when provoked. As a proud Canadian, I suggest we start with the 2011 Stanley Cup riots in Vancouver, provoked by a … hockey game!

We could also look at the reaction to 9/11, the terrorist attacks eleven years ago that killed some 3,000 innocents.

There is no question that these were heinous, morally reprehensible acts. But did they warrant the level of violence with which America and its friends lashed out?

We are still at war in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein (a monster of the first order, but formerly our friend) is hanged, and a few trillion dollars and some 650,000 dead later, neither Afghanistan nor Iraq knows any peace. And the great American economy, which only a generation ago had spent the Soviet Union into its grave, is on its knees, bled white by the War on Terror.

The same, I fear, may be the fate of our cherished democracies. Try to imagine the world as it was on 10 September 2001, before there was a terrorist under every bed. We did this to ourselves.

Who’s hysterical?

Who’s hysterical here? The men who burned the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, certainly. The men (and women) who lashed out after 9/11, certainly as well I think. The chief difference I see is that the mobs egged on by the imams are poor and disorderly; they are not governments and businesses with all the apparatus of state and enterprise channelling our anger and our hurt into orderly and methodical destruction for profit.

The Strange Political Psychology of Canadians

If The Toronto Star’s Sarah Barmak is to believed, the Ontario government—usually considered teacher-friendly—has just declared ‘all-out war’ on the province’s teachers. It is a strange move, and one wonders what the McGuinty government hopes to gain from it or, indeed, how Mr. McGuinty sold the idea at home. His wife Terri is, after all, a teacher.

Equally strange is how—in my experience at least—Canadians so often react to confrontations of this sort. These reactions bring to mind two observations.

How we value our children

First, we are usually willing to pay more to someone to clean our house than to look after our children. We pay $15-$20 for a housecleaner without blinking, but balk at paying the neighbour’s kid $10 to baby-sit. I am not suggesting that housecleaners are overpaid. What I am trying to do is point out a rather strange order of values.

Our children are supposed to be our first priority, and yet we pay less to someone we trust with their lives than we do to someone who vacuums up. Now it is possible that, as a friend quipped, a well-looked after child might die of cholera in dirty house, but this is unlikely.

So, why is it we skimp and safe and run ourselves ragged to ensure that our children get the best we can provide, and yet we place so little value on the work of those who look after them, not mention those who teach them?

The rich will always be with us

Second is our attitude to other people who work for a living, and to those we don’t. Perhaps I frequent the wrong people, but I rarely hear anyone complaining about millionaires and billionaires. I hear little about them from our politicians, unlike, for instance, France’s newly-minted president, François Hollande, who proposes to (whisper this) increase their taxes.

We ignore the wealthy, we (wilfully it seems to me) forget how much power they have over our lives, and we do not begrudge them anything. The rich are rich in much the same way that the sky is blue and the grass is green. It’s the way the world is made. The old proverb has been turned on its head: the rich will always be with us.

And yet, when someone who works for a living very much as we do appears to have better working conditions, say, more sick days, longer holidays, some sort of job security, a bit of respect at work, we are resentful. Whenever there is a confrontation between employer and employees the resentment, not against the employer but against the employees rises to the surface.

Never mind that the employer might be a millionaire. Never mind that as now with Ontario’s teachers the employees do exhausting and often thankless work (if you don’t believe me, try standing in front of a Grade 6 class for half a day) without which our society would fall apart.

We begrudge the luck of those who are like us

We resent the employees, blaming them for the disruptions and inconveniences, however minor, the labour dispute brings to our lives. When negotiations fall apart because, say, the employer wants to cut cost of living increases, effectively handing employees a wage cut every year, we are indignant. Not with employer, but with the employees for wanting too much: “I don’t get a cost of living increase. Why should you?”

Instead of saying, “Right, I don’t want to get paid less every year. How do I get a cost of living increase in my job?” we begrudge those who have just a little something we don’t.

Running water

Imagine that we live in a village with 100 households. Twenty households in the village have running water. The rest of us must go to the village well, draw our water there, and carry it home. Should we, who must go to the well for our water, curse the good fortune of these other households, or should we try to get running water into our homes as well?