Existential Poverty

Existential Poverty In 1901 the Quaker Seebohm Rowntree, heir to the confectionary millions of his father Joseph, wrote a groundbreaking report into poverty, examining the condition of the working classes in York. He discovered that there were two main kinds of poor, those below the bread line who were locked in a daily battle for survival and those living just above it, struggling to keep their heads above water. The Rowntree Report shocked Britain, paved the way for Lloyd George's Liberal Reforms, old age pensions and unemployment relief; it was one of the most influential studies of the 20th Century. What would Seebohm Rowntree's report show today? The foundation established by his father still argues that there is immense material poverty in Britain and the existence of food banks and city centre begging would tend to support that view. There seems, however, to be a kind of poverty that is much more difficult to see until it manifests itself in tragic and sometimes violent ways; it is a poverty of meaning, an existential poverty that grips many lives, where the individual often has little sense of the purpose of living and is dominated by a sense of boredom. The medicine that is currently prescribed for this condition by our culture is alcohol, but increasingly other drugs and harmful behaviours are also used to medicate this spiritual malaise. Recently, feminist blogger and activist Caroline Criado-Perez's campaign to have a female face on at least one British bank note brought down upon her a storm of violent abuse from Twitter users. Much of this hateful misogynistic vitriol went unpunished, but the two individuals who were prosecuted, Isabella Sorley and John Nimmo, were given short custodial sentences for making threats to kill. For both offenders alcohol played a significant factor, with Sorley, by all accounts an educated and intelligent woman, having been arrested 25 times before for drunk and disorderly behaviour. The defence counsel for both individuals cited 'boredom' as an exacerbating factor in their lives, one that seems to have resulted in their mindlessly hateful behaviour. It might be tempting to dismiss this as a feeble excuse, but we must engage with the issue of boredom for a moment. We must ask ourselves why in a society that, even for some of the least well off among us is packed with more opportunities than Seebohm Rowntree could have dreampt of, do some people still feel disinterested in all but the most destructive pursuits? Why do we see internet 'crazes' like neknomination emerge, a phenomenon of such extraordinary stupidity - whereby a participant downs a large quantity of alcohol on video, posts it online and essentially dares the next viewer to consume alcohol in a potentially dangerous scenario, emerge? The internet troll, a lonely, marginalised figure and the neknominator who unwittingly causes the death of another (as has happened recently) are similar in that both are trying in misguided ways to matter. Both are medicating their boredom with alcohol and trying to have some kind of agency in the world, an agency that proves ultimately to be destructive. It might be that the kind of society that we currently have encourages a degree of consumption, in this case of state of the art computer technology and alcohol, and encourages a narcissistic individualism, but little else. These 'pleasures' fail to address the deeper human needs for involvement and connection with others, the nation's widespread existential poverty, boredom and disinterest in contribution is quite possibly linked to the roles that we have created for ourselves as citizens. The guiding logic of our society is that self-interest and self-indulgence eventually yields public benefits, and if this has ever been true, it's certainly not true now. The nation's bored and switched off subsist in an existential and spiritual wilderness with only alcohol, drugs and the internet to engage with and it is down to Britain as a wider society to rethink how we see ourselves as individuals and as a community, and to place deeper humanistic values at the forefront of our priorities.