The age of loneliness is killing us

For the most social of creatures, the mammalian bee, there’s no such thing now as society. This will be our downfall

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 14 October 2014 19.49 BST

‘Social isolation is as potent a cause of early death as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Loneliness is twice as deadly as obesity.’ Photograph: Feri Lukas/Rex

What do we call this time? It’s not the information age: the collapse of popular education movements left a void filled by marketing and conspiracy theories. Like the stone age, iron age and space age, the digital age says plenty about our artefacts but little about society. The anthropocene, in which humans exert a major impact on the biosphere, fails to distinguish this century from the previous 20. What clear social change marks out our time from those that precede it? To me it’s obvious. This is the Age of Loneliness.

When Thomas Hobbes claimed that in the state of nature, before authority arose to keep us in check, we were engaged in a war “of every man against every man”, he could not have been more wrong. We were social creatures from the start, mammalian bees, who depended entirely on each other. The hominins of east Africa could not have survived one night alone. We are shaped, to a greater extent than almost any other species, by contact with others. The age we are entering, in which we exist apart, is unlike any that has gone before.

Three months ago we read that loneliness has become an epidemic among young adults. Now we learn that it is just as great an affliction of older people. A study by Independent Age shows that severe loneliness in England blights the lives of 700,000 men and 1.1m women over 50, and is rising with astonishing speed.

Ebola is unlikely ever to kill as many people as this disease strikes down. Social isolation is as potent a cause of early death as smoking 15 cigarettes a day; loneliness, research suggests, is twice as deadly as obesity. Dementia, high blood pressure, alcoholism and accidents – all these, like depression, paranoia, anxiety and suicide, become more prevalent when connections are cut. We cannot cope alone.

Yes, factories have closed, people travel by car instead of buses, use YouTube rather than the cinema. But these shifts alone fail to explain the speed of our social collapse. These structural changes have been accompanied by a life-denying ideology, which enforces and celebrates our social isolation. The war of every man against every man – competition and individualism, in other words – is the religion of our time, justified by a mythology of lone rangers, sole traders, self-starters, self-made men and women, going it alone. For the most social of creatures, who cannot prosper without love, there is no such thing as society, only heroic individualism. What counts is to win. The rest is collateral damage.

British children no longer aspire to be train drivers or nurses – more than a fifth say they “just want to be rich”: wealth and fame are the sole ambitions of 40% of those surveyed. A government study in June revealed that Britain is the loneliness capital of Europe. We are less likely than other Europeans to have close friends or to know our neighbours. Who can be surprised, when everywhere we are urged to fight like stray dogs over a dustbin?

We have changed our language to reflect this shift. Our most cutting insult is loser. We no longer talk about people. Now we call them individuals. So pervasive has this alienating, atomising term become that even the charities fighting loneliness use it to describe the bipedal entities formerly known as human beings. We can scarcely complete a sentence without getting personal. Personally speaking (to distinguish myself from a ventriloquist’s dummy), I prefer personal friends to the impersonal variety and personal belongings to the kind that don’t belong to me. Though that’s just my personal preference, otherwise known as my preference.

One of the tragic outcomes of loneliness is that people turn to their televisions for consolation: two-fifths of older people report that the one-eyed god is their principal company. This self-medication aggravates the disease. Research by economists at the University of Milan suggests that television helps to drive competitive aspiration. It strongly reinforces the income-happiness paradox: the fact that, as national incomes rise, happiness does not rise with them.

Aspiration, which increases with income, ensures that the point of arrival, of sustained satisfaction, retreats before us. The researchers found that those who watch a lot of TV derive less satisfaction from a given level of income than those who watch only a little. TV speeds up the hedonic treadmill, forcing us to strive even harder to sustain the same level of satisfaction. You have only to think of the wall-to-wall auctions on daytime TV, Dragon’s Den, the Apprentice and the myriad forms of career-making competition the medium celebrates, the generalised obsession with fame and wealth, the pervasive sense, in watching it, that life is somewhere other than where you are, to see why this might be.

So what’s the point? What do we gain from this war of all against all? Competition drives growth, but growth no longer makes us wealthier. Figures published this week show that, while the income of company directors has risen by more than a fifth, wages for the workforce as a whole have fallen in real terms over the past year. The bosses earn – sorry, I mean take – 120 times more than the average full-time worker. (In 2000, it was 47 times). And even if competition did make us richer, it would make us no happier, as the satisfaction derived from a rise in income would be undermined by the aspirational impacts of competition.

The top 1% own 48% of global wealth, but even they aren’t happy. A survey by Boston College of people with an average net worth of $78m found that they too were assailed by anxiety, dissatisfaction and loneliness. Many of them reported feeling financially insecure: to reach safe ground, they believed, they would need, on average, about 25% more money. (And if they got it? They’d doubtless need another 25%). One respondent said he wouldn’t get there until he had $1bn in the bank.

For this, we have ripped the natural world apart, degraded our conditions of life, surrendered our freedoms and prospects of contentment to a compulsive, atomising, joyless hedonism, in which, having consumed all else, we start to prey upon ourselves. For this, we have destroyed the essence of humanity: our connectedness.

Yes, there are palliatives, clever and delightful schemes like Men in Sheds and Walking Football developed by charities for isolated older people. But if we are to break this cycle and come together once more, we must confront the world-eating, flesh-eating system into which we have been forced.

Hobbes’s pre-social condition was a myth. But we are entering a post-social condition our ancestors would have believed impossible. Our lives are becoming nasty, brutish and long.

Evo Morales has proved that socialism doesn’t damage economies

Bolivia’s re-elected president has dumbfounded critics in Washington, the World Bank and the IMF. There are lessons for Britain’s left here

• 
• • Ellie Mae O'Hagan
  • theguardian.com, Tuesday 14 October 2014 14.00 BST

Evo Morales in the runup for the vote at the inauguration of a thermo-electric plant in Yacuiba in September 2014. Photograph: Aizar Raldes/AFP/Getty

The socialist Evo Morales, who yesterday was re-elected to serve a third term as president of Bolivia, has long been cast as a figure of fun by the media in the global north. Much like the now deceased Hugo Chávez, Morales is often depicted as a buffoonish populist whose flamboyant denouncements of the United States belie his incompetence. And so, reports of his landslide win inevitably focused on his announcement that it was “a victory for anti-imperialism”, as though anti-US sentiment is the only thing Morales has given to Bolivia in his eight years in government.

More likely, Morales’s enduring popularity is a result of his extraordinary socio-economic reforms, which – according to the New York Times – have transformed Bolivia from an “economic basket case” into a country that receives praise from such unlikely contenders as the World Bank and the IMF – an irony considering the country’s success is the result of the socialist administration casting off the recommendations of the IMF in the first place.

According to a report by the Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) in Washington, “Bolivia has grown much faster over the last eight years than in any period over the past three and a half decades.” The benefits of such growth have been felt by the Bolivian people: under Morales, poverty has declined by 25% and extreme poverty has declined by 43%; social spending has increased by more than 45%; the real minimum wage has increased by 87.7%; and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean has praised Bolivia for being “one of the few countries that has reduced inequality”. In this respect, the re-election of Morales is really very simple: people like to be economically secure – so if you reduce poverty, they’ll probably vote for you.

It’s true that Morales has made enemies in the White House, but this is probably less to do with rhetoric than the fact that he consistently calls for the international legalisation of the coca leaf, which is chewed as part of Bolivian culture but can also be refined into cocaine (via a truly disgusting chemical process). Before Morales was first elected, the Telegraph reported: “Decriminalisation would probably increase supply of the leaf, which is processed into cocaine, providing drug traffickers with more of the profitable illicit substance.” In fact the opposite has happened – in the past two years, coca cultivation has been falling in Bolivia. This inconvenient fact is a source of great consternation to the US government, which has poured billions of dollars into its totally ineffective and highly militaristic war on drugs in Latin America. Morales has – accurately in my view – previously implied that the war on drugs is used by the US as an excuse to meddle in the region’s politics.

Having said this, it would be dishonest to argue that Morales’s tenure has been perfect. Earlier this year the Bolivian government drew criticism from human rights groups for reducing the legal working age to 10. But what most news outlets neglected to mention is that the government was responding to a campaign from the children’s trade union, Unatsbo, which sees the change in legislation as a first step to protecting Bolivia’s 850,000 working children from the exploitation that comes with clandestine employment. Although Bolivia has made massive strides in reducing poverty, more than a million of its citizens still live on 75p a day – a legacy of the excruciating poverty of Bolivia before Morales took office.

Nevertheless, Morales must make reducing the number of child workers a priority during his third term. Not doing so will be a serious failure of his progressive project. In terms of social reforms, Morales should heed recent calls from the public advocate of Bolivia, Rolando Villena, to legalise same-sex civil unions and pave the way for equal marriage. He should also follow the lead of Uruguay’s president, José Mujica, and completely liberalise abortion, which would be a good first step to tackling the country’s high rates of maternal mortality. And Morales must also address the criticism of indigenous leaders who accuse him of failing to honour his commitments to protect indigenous people and the environment.

But however Morales uses his third term, it’s clear that what he’s done already has been remarkable. He has defied the conventional wisdom that says leftwing policies damage economic growth, that working-class people can’t run successful economies, and that politics can’t be transformative – and he’s done all of this in the face of enormous political pressure from the IMF, the international business community and the US government. In the success of Morales, important political lessons can be found – and perhaps we could all do with learning them.

At yacht parties in Cannes, councils have been selling our homes from under us

Property developers wining and dining town hall executives - it’s a jaunt so lavish as to be almost comic

• 
• • Aditya Chakrabortty
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 14 October 2014

The Mpim conference in Cannes has been wining and dining town hall executives for 25 years with intentions on the national silver. Photograph: Jean-Paul Pelissier/Reuters

Starting this Wednesday, 4,000 men (and, yes, they’ll mainly be men) will gather in a giant hall in London. Among them will be major property developers, billionaire investors and officials of your local council or one nearby. And what they’ll discuss will be the sale of public real estate, prime land already owned by you and me, to the private sector. The marketing people brand this a property trade show, but let’s drop the euphemisms and call it the sales fair to flog off Britain.

For the past 25 years, this conference – Mipim for short – has been held in Cannes. It’s a jaunt so lavish as to be almost comic – where big money developers invite town hall executives for secret discussions aboard private yachts, and whose regulars boast that they get through more champagne than all the liggers at the film festival.

Suitably oiled-up, local officials open talks with multinational developers to sell council housing estates and other sites. All this networking is so lucrative for the builders that they even fly over council staff. Last year, Australia’s Lend Lease paid for Southwark’s boss, Peter John, to attend Cannes. This is the same Lend Lease to which Southwark sold the giant Heygate estate at a knockdown price: 1,100 council flats in inner London to be demolished and replaced with 2,500 units, of which only 79 will be for “social rent”.

Events such as Mipim raise the flag on the land grab that eventually leads to thousands of people being kicked out of their homes – and in many cases out of London. It is a forum that relies on invitation-only lunches, secret talks and the public being kept well away. In a shamefully undemocratic development system, this is one of the most untransparent forums of the lot.

You might think that seven years after the collapse of an economic system built on property speculation and amid a historic housing crisis, Mipim would have no place in the UK. You’d be wrong. When it opens this week it will be to a welcome address from that loveable friend of big money, Boris Johnson. Even with 344,000 households in London awaiting a council home, the mayor is cheering on their flogging off and replacement with unaffordable luxury flats. Joining him will be Conservative ministers, senior civil servants and council delegations from Glasgow through Leeds and Liverpool and down to Croydon.

Many of these councils are coming because they have no other means of raising serious cash: three decades after Thatcher’s rate caps, and four years into the most painful cuts faced by local government, they are flat broke. Some council leaders will admit as much privately. But in all cases, the strong scent of neediness comes off their planned Mipim session titles (“Croydon: the economic powerhouse of the south-east”) – and forces them into the kind of rotten deals that jeopardise the livelihoods of their residents.

On Sunday afternoon, a group of about 40 Londoners convened in a Pimlico community centre. A greater contrast with the hangars of Mipim can hardly be imagined: no lavish buffet, just a kettle and some instant coffee; no PowerPoint slides but a dungareed bloke scribbling on a flipchart. But the people here knew about the property fest: they live on the council estates about to be demolished to make way for private developers. They reeled off where they were from: Chelsea, Elephant and Castle, Haringey, Barnet. Some had already been handed their court orders and were unsure if they’d even be in London next month. One woman, who had bought her Southwark council flat as Thatcher and Blair encouraged her to, had been offered a risible sum to get out. As the group planned meetings and demonstrations before Christmas, she kept repeating: “I might be homeless by then.” The first couple of times, she even managed to smile.

These people live in public housing built with public money on public land. And soon, their homes will be someone else’s speculative asset. The British Property Federation (BPF) published a report last year which showed that of London’s newly built homes, only 39% were bought to live in. The vast majority – 61% – were taken by investors. After the meeting broke up, a resident of Churchill Gardens in Pimlico walked me around her estate and pointed out the old people’s home and lovely modernist low-rise block that was earmarked for the wrecking ball. It faced out on to the Thames; on the other side was Battersea power station, being turned by Malaysian investors into luxury flats. In this part of London, that same BPF report found, 49% of new-build homes were bought by overseas investors.

Against that backdrop even the smallest victory looks historic. Up on the northwestern perimeter of London, in West Hendon, other council residents are fighting the borough of Barnet over the redevelopment of their estate on terms that suit the developer, Barratt Developments, not locals. Just under 700 homes are to be smashed up to make way for 2,000 new units. Just under 1,500 will be sold privately: the rest will be “affordable”, which in the doublespeak of housing means unaffordable.

The council cannot say how many social-rental homes will be provided, but it is clear that whatever provision there is will be grudging. With a quick Google you’ll find a video of the chair of Barnet’s housing committee, Tom Davey, claiming that his council is providing affordable housing because people are buying them. An objector points out that only the wealthy can afford them and the young Conservative thumps the desk and says: “Those are the people we want.”

Whatever the propaganda, when I turn up at West Hendon, I meet a telecoms worker and a full-time carer. I also meet a woman in her 60s who hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in years, and a man facing homelessness and suffering depression.

About a third of the estate’s residents have already been bounced from regeneration to regeneration. They have no idea where they’ll go when they’re moved out. Others are leaseholders who can’t afford to buy anywhere in London on the £165,000 offered by the council. The majority of the tenants will be moved to what was formerly a car park, surrounded by busy roads.

“A giant traffic island” is how it is described by Jasmin Parsons, who’s lived on the estate for over 30 years. From there, she and her neighbours can look at their old homes, which are now off-limits to them and their children. Their faces won’t fit the area, you see, and their bank balances certainly don’t go far enough. They’ll be barely tolerated trespassers on yet another private development.

Maybe there’s a metaphor in there for all of us.

The backpacking cricket addict and a cricket widow

Leaving behind a cushy life to go on a whirlwind world cricket tour has so far been a journey of self-discovery and learning. And we are only halfway through

Subash Jayaraman in Cricinfo

October 11, 2014

 

With wife Kathleen and Colin Croft in Trinidad © Subash Jayaraman

It has been nearly three months since my wife Kathleen and I boarded a flight out of Newark International Airport in New Jersey headed for Port-of-Spain, Trinidad & Tobago - the first leg of a cricket journey around the world that is to culminate at the final of the 2015 World Cup in Melbourne, Australia. The objective: 255 days on the road through 12 countries, following as much cricket as we can.

This was a dream trip many years in the making for me as a cricket fan. As such, the decision to leave our cushy lives of comfort and guaranteed salaries to explore the cricket world and come back to start anew wasn't that hard to make. After all, it is cricket we are talking about.

Though I swear by cricket, I actually didn't step inside a cricket stadium to watch an international match until 2007. Growing up in India, cricket was always around me, but I never had the means to actually be at a match. I watched it on TV, read about it in newspapers and magazines, played it in the streets, backyards and terraces, on patches of land and in riverbeds, in hostel corridors and in living rooms, but the fan in me wasn't complete till I watched it in the flesh in Antigua during the 2007 World Cup. And then, I caught the bug.

Since then, I have travelled to Jamaica, Trinidad, England, Bangladesh, India and Australia to watch cricket - sometimes as a fan and other times as a media person. As Kathleen and I took more and more one- and two-week long cricket trips, the idea of a long one around the world began to germinate. We took inspiration from an Australian couple who were backpacking through North America for six months while taking in cricket in the Caribbean.

	Fans went out of their way to help us find accommodation, buy us a few pints, help us with travel and food

As soon as we returned to our home in USA after watching a Test in Trinidad in 2012, we looked up the Future Tours Programme and decided that the 2015 World Cup in Australia and New Zealand was an obvious final destination of our trip. We worked backwards to come up with an itinerary that took us through almost every Test-playing nation, and set off on July 15, 2014. Since we derived our inspiration in Trinidad, it was logical to begin our trip there.

We have met former and current Test cricketers, legends, commentators, famous writers and journalists, who have all enriched the trip in more ways than we could have imagined. More than that, it has been the fans - some friends and some strangers - who went out of their way to help us find accommodation, buy us a few pints, help us with travel and food - who have made this trip possible and thoroughly memorable.

We had the privilege of speaking to Colin Croft about his career and the great West Indian side he was part of, while sitting in the stands of the Queen's Park Oval, the venue of his best bowling figures. We have been within touching of Sir Garfield Sobers at the Kensington Oval. We paid our respects at the final resting places of Sir Frank Worrell and Sir Clyde Walcott. We had the joy of bowling in the Wanderers Cricket Club nets, the oldest club in Barbados. We were given a guided tour of a cricket museum by Malcolm Marshall's son. We sat among the who's who of Indian and English cricket journalists covering the Tests in England. We shared a lunch table with Kapil Dev and Wasim Akram. We rode tubes and elevators with some of the best known voices in the game. We were interviewed on the BBC. We had a feature written about us in an Indian newspaper. We ate dinner in a castle in Ireland that was formerly the summer home of Ranjitsinhji during his last years. We walked into the home of one of the great names in Indian cricket and spent hours talking cricket. We got a private tour of the only cricket museum in India. Many of these instances are each worthy of a piece of its own, and I shall revisit some of them in these pages at a later time.

	Bowling at the Wanderers Cricket Club nets in Barbados © Subash Jayaraman  Enlarge

Many people have asked us: Why make this trip at all? What are our plans once the trip is over? What is it all for?

Well, it is part fun, part self-discovery, and part experimentation. We were leading lives of comfort and security, where we seemed to be almost on autopilot. Putting our regular lives on hold for nine months to see whether we - a cricket addict and a "cricket widow" - could come out the other side is certainly one aspect of it. It is also an opportunity for Kathleen to explore the cricket world, its culture, customs and traditions to better understand the sport her husband is so hopelessly addicted to.

We do not know just yet what we will do when the trip is over. We moved out of the apartment we lived in for years and gave away nearly all of our possessions. In effect, we have forced ourselves to start afresh. The future is wide open and filled with limitless possibilities.

We are currently winding down the (southern) Indian leg of the trip and are headed to the UAE to watch the Pakistan-Australia Tests. Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, India (the north), South Africa, Zimbabwe, Australia and New Zealand await. About 160 days of travel and cricket are still ahead of us, and based on our experiences so far, they promise to be one hell of a ride. Most of all, we look forward to meeting the people who are bound to keep making this trip unforgettable. As we have learned in our time on the road so far, the cricket world is full of friends; only, we haven't met them all yet.