Sunday 8 February 2015
Depression, suicide and the fragility of the strong, silent male
Yvonne Roberts in The Guardian
On Thursday, the bruised and tearful face of former footballer and chairman of the Professional Footballers’ Association, Clarke Carlisle, 35, appeared on the front page of the Sun. He was released from psychiatric hospital two weeks ago. In a clip on the paper’s website, he appears so raw and vulnerable that to watch it provokes thoughts of a modern-day version of Bedlam with us as Hogarthian gawpers treating the mentally fragile as entertainment.
The paper’s headline read: “I leapt in front of a lorry hoping to die.” Carlisle, a father of three, has suffered from depression for 18 months. He explained that the end of his career, the curtailment of his contract as a TV sports pundit and a struggle with alcohol led to financial problems. He felt the lack of “a sense of worth and value in life”.
He said strangers would comment: “Didn’t you used to be Clarke Carlisle?”, as if, once off the television screen and football pitch, he had passed into no-man’s-land. Throwing himself in front of a lorry became the “perfect answer”. Carlisle survived, unlike 12 men who will kill themselves today, as 12 do every day, in England and Wales.
Just before his death, the psychiatrist Anthony Clare wrote a thoughtful book, On Men: Masculinity in Crisis. He concluded with a plea to men to place “a greater value on love, family and personal relationships and less on power, possessions and achievement… to find meaning and fulfilment”.
Except that redefining what it means to be a man in contemporary society isn’t a job for men alone. It’s a dynamic process of cultural and social change that repeatedly judders to a halt. And it will continue to be impeded for a variety of reasons (better the stereotype you know) and as long as some women hold fast to a hierarchy of need.
This is the kind of thinking that says: if male fragility is addressed, women’s requirements are marginalised. Men can hog resources, but the two requirements are interlocked. Until male violence can be defused, for instance, the refugees will continue to overflow.
In the main, support for Carlisle’s honesty has been strong, as it has been for Nick Baber, 48, chief operating officer at KPMG, who last week said he would pretend he had flu during severe depression. He has called for more senior executives to speak out. But then what? As Dr Margaret McCartney explains in The Patient Paradox, the severely depressed are too ill to make plans to end their life. When a patient is beginning to recover, suicide becomes an option, particularly if they are male. Thoreau wrote: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Talk to parents from Papyrus, the charity that campaigns to prevent young suicide, and again and again they say they had no idea that their sons were depressed, let alone suicidal. Their sons, they felt, had so much to live for.
According to the charity, Campaign Against Living Miserably (Calm), men account for more than three-quarters of all suicides in England and Wales, 4,590 deaths – the single biggest cause of death among males under 50. Three out of four had no contact with mental health professionals. As the Men’s Health Forum constantly points out, men are reluctant to go their GP and fail to identify their own symptoms of depression. When Carlisle’s wife, Gemma, was diagnosed with postnatal depression, he advised her to “get a grip”; then he took Goldberg’s depression test and recognised his own symptoms. They include lack of energy, sadness, negativity and self-destructiveness. A survey by Calm revealed that 69% of men said they preferred to deal with problems themselves, 56% didn’t want to burden others. “The traditional strong silent response to adversity is increasingly failing to protect men from themselves,” said Jane Powell, Calm’s chief executive.
Last year, the charity issued a much-needed four-point charter to encourage change for the better. It includes a shift in thinking about the needs of males in schools, work and public services and a fuller range of expression of masculinity in the media and advertising. Too often, still, while depression in women is wrongly viewed as an inevitable part of being female, it’s precisely this alleged association with female fragility that underscores the notion that the male sufferer is less of a man; he has a weakness, not an illness best kept secret. So, as the suicide rate has risen, the taboos and social “norms” stay in place.
Change, however, is possible. Last month, a new policy on suicide prevention was launched, the Stop Suicide pledge. It is based on the work of Dr Ed Coffey in Detroit that enrols as many members of the public as possible with the aim of ending the stigma and the secrecy. In four years, the suicide rate dropped 75%.
The UK “zero suicide” pilots ask the whole community to look out for each other, recognise warning signs and offer help, not exclusion. The pledge, with a badge, is, “I’d ask”. (Although what you ask is trickier. “Is everything OK?” is bound to get a positive response in a well-trained man.)
The New Economics Foundation says the five foundation stones of wellbeing are: connect, be active, take notice, keep learning and give. The female sphere, even when it involves working 10 hours a day as well as mothering and acting as a carer, has all those aspects woven into it (and paradoxically at extremes can be the cause of female depression and breakdown). The male stereotypes of protector, provider, toughie and top dog shoves wellbeing well down the list.
Kurt Cobain, desperately in need of help for years, in his poignant suicide note to Boddah, his imaginary childhood friend, quoted a Neil Young song: “… better to burn out than fade away…” The tragedy for too many men is that society doesn’t yet allow them to let down their guard so they can value and enjoy the infinity of choices that lie between those two extremes.
Saturday 7 February 2015
The white man who pretended to be black
John Howard Griffin, author of Black Like Me Photo: Don Rutledge
By Tim Stanley in The Telegraph
6:58PM GMT 05 Feb 2015
With the release of the movie Selma, a lot of Americans are asking how far race relations have really come in the United States. On the one hand, the movie depicts the success of the Sixties civil rights crusade – its victory confirmed by Barack Obama’s election in 2008.
On the other hand, the recent deaths of young black men at the hands of white cops and vigilantes, and the resulting race riots, suggest that a lot of things haven’t changed at all. Whites may ask, “Why are working-class blacks angry? They have the right to vote and an African-American president – everything Martin Luther King Jr fought for.”
But some of the apparent triumph of black civil rights is a veneer. Racism isn’t just about law but about attitudes. Attitudes that are hard to change because of the gulf of understanding between different communities.
Can a white person ever really understand how a black person sees the world? Back in 1959, six years before Martin Luther King marched for civil rights in Selma, one man tried. A white Texan writer called John Howard Griffin walked into a doctor’s office in New Orleans and asked him to turn his skin colour black. Griffin took oral medication and was bombarded with ultraviolet rays; he cut off his hair to hide an absence of curls and shaved the back of his hands. Then he went on a tour of the Deep South.
The result was a bestselling book called Black Like Me, which is still regarded as an American classic. Griffin wanted to test the claim that although the southern United States was segregated it was essentially peaceful and just – that the two races were separate but equal.
What he discovered tells us a lot about the subtleties of racism. In 1959, unlike today, it was legally instituted. But, like today, it also flourished at the personal level – in hostility, suspicion, fear and even self-loathing.
Griffin was an extraordinary man. Born in Dallas in 1920, he went to school in France and joined the French Resistance after Hitler invaded. Griffin helped Jewish children escape to England before fleeing to America. While serving in the US army, he was blinded by shrapnel.
Griffin took it all in his stride – he married, had children and converted to Catholicism. Griffin’s strong personal faith reminds us that much of the civil rights movement was in fact a Christian mission – made possible, in this instance, by what seemed like a miracle.
The orginal cover of Black Like Me
Walking around his yard one afternoon, Griffin suddenly saw red swirls where hitherto there was only darkness. Within months his sight had returned. And it was a man determined to make the most of his second chance who hit upon the novel idea of crossing the colour line.
Those reading the book today might regard Griffin’s attempt to change his colour as akin to blacking up. Certainly, the transformation was awkward. Griffin may well have had dark skin but he retained his classically Caucasian features, and one suspects that the awkwardness of his encounters with some black people was down to them wondering if he was one of them or just horribly sunburnt.
Griffin did not become black per se but – more accurately – a white man suddenly disassociated from himself and his society. Looking into a mirror for the first time, he wrote, “The transformation was total and shocking. I had expected to see myself disguised, but this was something else. I was imprisoned in the flesh of an utter stranger, an unsympathetic one with whom I felt no kinship ... The Griffin that was had become invisible.”
But by very dint of not being white – even if he wasn’t exactly black – Griffin experienced genuine alienation. He was chased down a street by a bored white thug shouting racial epithets. He was told that he was sitting in the “wrong” waiting room and had to move to the “blacks only” one. On buses Griffin boarded via the backdoor, and when he chivalrously tried to offer his seat to a white woman was accused of being “sassy”. Many whites were polite; a few were aggressively rude.
Often it was suggested that black people were dumb or up to no good; Griffin often got what he called “the hate stare”. Some of his encounters with Caucasians were heartbreaking. Griffin sat on a park bench and a white man on a seat opposite got up, walked over and politely advised him that he should leave. Griffin went away saying, “thank you” because he assumed that the park was segregated and the man was being helpful. Later he discovered that it wasn’t segregated at all. The fellow was a well-mannered bigot.
There was a great deal of eroticisation of African-Americans. When hitchhiking, Griffin found that white male drivers ignored him in the daylight yet picked him up in the dark. They asked questions that disturbed him greatly: “all show a morbid curiosity about the sexual life of the Negro, and all had, at base, the same stereotyped image of the Negro as an inexhaustible sex-machine with oversized genitals and a vast store of experiences, immensely varied.”
When working as a shoeshine boy, Griffin noticed that the friendlier a white customer was then the more likely he was to ask if there are any prostitutes working in the area. Every black man was seen as a potential source of sexual transgression.
And Griffin discovered that the victims of abuse can start to regard themselves as deserving of abuse. Riding on a bus, he encountered a young man who, because he was comparatively light skinned, thought he was superior to his darker kin: “He walked towards the rear, giving whites a fawning, almost tender look.
His expression twisted to a sneer when he reached the back and surveyed the Negroes. He sat sideways in an empty seat across the aisle from me and began to harangue two brothers behind him. ‘This place stinks …. Look at all of them – bunch of dirty punks – don’t know how to dress. You don’t deserve anything better.’” Later, this man said to Griffin of his race: “I hate us.”
The story indicates that one of the successes of segregation was to make black Americans feel inferior, to encourage them to think that all they deserved was a seat at the back of the bus. If there is a single reason why the incidence of crime or illegitimacy is unusually high among African-Americans today, it might be that racism can be so pervasive and oppressive that it eventually makes its prejudices come true.
That, at least, offers one explanation for the behaviour of the young black men killed apparently resisting arrest in 2014. Another is anger at constantly being the source of suspicion. Of course, it also doesn’t help that American cops are over-militarised and trained to regard every mild confrontation as another conflagration at the OK Corral.
Griffin published his findings in book format in 1961 and became an overnight sensation. The New York Times hailed the text as an “essential document of contemporary American life”, and in 1964 it was made into a somewhat cringeworthy film starring James Whitmore.
But the residents of Griffin’s hometown in Texas were not impressed; they hanged him in effigy. Black Like Me helped to raise awareness of the evils of segregation and with the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Right acts in the mid-Sixties, it seemed for a while as if America was ready to confront that evil.
Griffin died in 1980 after suffering complications from diabetes - not, as rumour had it, as a result of the treatments he'd used to prepare for Black Like Me. In the years leading up to his death, Griffin’s writing had taken on a despairing tone. He had recognised the falseness of his own experiment.
A white man disguised as black could not understand the insecurities and resentments that came with hundreds of years of inherited slavery – nor did he have the right to lecture black people on the need for love and reconciliation. White people had a role to play in civil rights, but it had to be as allies rather than leaders. The movement needed to be for black people, by black people.
This issue is at the heart of a debate about the movie Selma, too. Some critics have complained that it fails to depict white civil rights activists prominently and that it inaccurately suggests that President Lyndon Johnson, a progressive Democrat, wanted Martin Luther King Jr to shrink his ambitions.
The struggle continues: Oprah Winfrey in Selma
Both criticisms miss the point of the movie, which is to tell a black story from the perspective of its subject. It is typical and natural for middle-class white liberals to want to see uplifting the oppressed as a common endeavour.
But the truth is that discrimination is too ingrained in society to imagine that the benign efforts of white leaders can eradicate it entirely, while it is only by establishing their dignity through independent political action that black Americans could ever hope to assert themselves in a society that regarded them as the lowest of the low. For those reasons, Black Like Me is a well-intentioned book but also a hopelessly anachronistic one.
History has shown that the only people who can liberate African-Americans are African-Americans. And that in the course of their efforts, they should expect resentment among their white enemies and some bruised feelings among their white allies.
But by very dint of not being white – even if he wasn’t exactly black – Griffin experienced genuine alienation. He was chased down a street by a bored white thug shouting racial epithets. He was told that he was sitting in the “wrong” waiting room and had to move to the “blacks only” one. On buses Griffin boarded via the backdoor, and when he chivalrously tried to offer his seat to a white woman was accused of being “sassy”. Many whites were polite; a few were aggressively rude.
Often it was suggested that black people were dumb or up to no good; Griffin often got what he called “the hate stare”. Some of his encounters with Caucasians were heartbreaking. Griffin sat on a park bench and a white man on a seat opposite got up, walked over and politely advised him that he should leave. Griffin went away saying, “thank you” because he assumed that the park was segregated and the man was being helpful. Later he discovered that it wasn’t segregated at all. The fellow was a well-mannered bigot.
There was a great deal of eroticisation of African-Americans. When hitchhiking, Griffin found that white male drivers ignored him in the daylight yet picked him up in the dark. They asked questions that disturbed him greatly: “all show a morbid curiosity about the sexual life of the Negro, and all had, at base, the same stereotyped image of the Negro as an inexhaustible sex-machine with oversized genitals and a vast store of experiences, immensely varied.”
When working as a shoeshine boy, Griffin noticed that the friendlier a white customer was then the more likely he was to ask if there are any prostitutes working in the area. Every black man was seen as a potential source of sexual transgression.
And Griffin discovered that the victims of abuse can start to regard themselves as deserving of abuse. Riding on a bus, he encountered a young man who, because he was comparatively light skinned, thought he was superior to his darker kin: “He walked towards the rear, giving whites a fawning, almost tender look.
His expression twisted to a sneer when he reached the back and surveyed the Negroes. He sat sideways in an empty seat across the aisle from me and began to harangue two brothers behind him. ‘This place stinks …. Look at all of them – bunch of dirty punks – don’t know how to dress. You don’t deserve anything better.’” Later, this man said to Griffin of his race: “I hate us.”
The story indicates that one of the successes of segregation was to make black Americans feel inferior, to encourage them to think that all they deserved was a seat at the back of the bus. If there is a single reason why the incidence of crime or illegitimacy is unusually high among African-Americans today, it might be that racism can be so pervasive and oppressive that it eventually makes its prejudices come true.
That, at least, offers one explanation for the behaviour of the young black men killed apparently resisting arrest in 2014. Another is anger at constantly being the source of suspicion. Of course, it also doesn’t help that American cops are over-militarised and trained to regard every mild confrontation as another conflagration at the OK Corral.
Griffin published his findings in book format in 1961 and became an overnight sensation. The New York Times hailed the text as an “essential document of contemporary American life”, and in 1964 it was made into a somewhat cringeworthy film starring James Whitmore.
But the residents of Griffin’s hometown in Texas were not impressed; they hanged him in effigy. Black Like Me helped to raise awareness of the evils of segregation and with the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Right acts in the mid-Sixties, it seemed for a while as if America was ready to confront that evil.
Griffin died in 1980 after suffering complications from diabetes - not, as rumour had it, as a result of the treatments he'd used to prepare for Black Like Me. In the years leading up to his death, Griffin’s writing had taken on a despairing tone. He had recognised the falseness of his own experiment.
A white man disguised as black could not understand the insecurities and resentments that came with hundreds of years of inherited slavery – nor did he have the right to lecture black people on the need for love and reconciliation. White people had a role to play in civil rights, but it had to be as allies rather than leaders. The movement needed to be for black people, by black people.
This issue is at the heart of a debate about the movie Selma, too. Some critics have complained that it fails to depict white civil rights activists prominently and that it inaccurately suggests that President Lyndon Johnson, a progressive Democrat, wanted Martin Luther King Jr to shrink his ambitions.
The struggle continues: Oprah Winfrey in Selma
Both criticisms miss the point of the movie, which is to tell a black story from the perspective of its subject. It is typical and natural for middle-class white liberals to want to see uplifting the oppressed as a common endeavour.
But the truth is that discrimination is too ingrained in society to imagine that the benign efforts of white leaders can eradicate it entirely, while it is only by establishing their dignity through independent political action that black Americans could ever hope to assert themselves in a society that regarded them as the lowest of the low. For those reasons, Black Like Me is a well-intentioned book but also a hopelessly anachronistic one.
History has shown that the only people who can liberate African-Americans are African-Americans. And that in the course of their efforts, they should expect resentment among their white enemies and some bruised feelings among their white allies.
Tuesday 3 February 2015
Britain’s epidemic of private despair makes this an economic crisis like no other
Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian
Looking back, you can boil down the story of the financial crash to a sentence: the bankers ran off with the profits, we got stuck with their losses. Short and snappy, and also true. Summing up what happened next, though, has so far proved trickier. But at the halfway point in Britain’s angry lost decade, enough evidence is now in to say this: after socialising the bankers’ debts, we privatised despair.
The past five years have not been about the big public calamities that usually make up economic crisis. No industries have gone bust nor, thankfully, have millions been slung on the dole. Instead, it is becoming clear that the teens of this century will be marked by tens of millions of instances of private financial misery, all borne behind closed doors.
This will be the decade of workers on wages so low they are priced out of the lifestyle they once thought was safely theirs; of tenants struggling with soaring rents and crappy landlords; of severely disabled people kept awake by the prospect of their benefits being cut, while others on jobseeker’s allowance jump though hoop after hoop to avoid being sanctioned.
None of this everyday wretchedness fits what we have come to think of as a slump; yet this is the shape of the one we are grinding our way through. Defying the spectacular predictions that were made after 2008, this crisis is private, unequal and internalised.
I have been tracking these issues for years – but what they look like added together came into painful clarity a couple of weeks ago in Liverpool. Norris Green falls among the most deprived places in England but, with greenery, wide roads and new houses going up, it doesn’t look bad at all. Gazing out of his windscreen, Barry Kushner, a local councillor, set me straight: around half these households were now in temporary work, he reckoned; the launch of the bedroom tax had caused mayhem for residents; there was a two-month wait for appointments at the local Citizens Advice bureau. Along this neat terraced street was a row of front rooms where parents were fretting over how to pay off the Christmas they’d just given their kids.
Norris Green doesn’t fit the traditional narrative arc of economic crisis. As in much of Britain, there’s no rerun of the Great Depression; it’s more a whole string of mini-depressions. You see it in the growth of foodbanks, or in last autumn’s warning from Citizens Advice of a surge of people in trouble over their rented homes – a 15% rise in reports of harassment by landlords, a 20% spike in evictions. More prosaically, you see it when the poverty researchers Stewart Lansley and Joanna Mack report in their book Breadline Britain that over one in four households can’t afford to repair or replace broken electrical goods – a proportion that has more than doubled since 1999.
Apart from the odd high-street name such as Woolies or Comet, there have been no great business bankruptcies – partly because Britain has so few big industrial employers left after the Thatcher and Major recessions. Another reason is the hundreds of billions the state has pumped into the financial system, keeping afloat households and businesses that would otherwise sink.
This explains the lack of public spectacle. But our privatised despair is shaped by three main factors: huge inequality that leaves the poorest stranded; the mushrooming of precarious jobs; and George Osborne’s habit of picking off sections of the population to pay the biggest bills for the bankers’ losses.
The first factor is most thoroughly itemised by my Guardian colleague Tom Clark. In his book Hard Times, he catalogues how this meltdown has slapped the poorest in ways that don’t make it into public discussion. Clark turns up YouGov polls showing how Britons hit by the recession are more than twice as likely as their slump-proof compatriots to report that they row more. Citizenship surveys indicate that the sharpest fall in volunteering in 2010 took place in precisely those worst-off areas that most desperately needed them. David Cameron’s “big society” was always a luxury item for those with money, time and assertiveness to spare.
If privatised despair reaches into your home, it does not let up at the workplace. While employment has hit records under the coalition, the new work is more insecure and lonelier than we usually imagine. The characteristic jobs of this slump are the Uber driver, or the outsourced care worker going from door to door for 15 minutes a time. The new work is in perma-temping, shuttling from workplace to workplace, or in enforced freelance or fake self-employment. Forget about collective organisation or trade unions: these are often low-paid areas of work where regular contact with a roster of people who know your name cannot be guaranteed.
Inequality and insecure jobs aren’t new; they have simply been heightened since Cameron and Osborne moved into Downing Street. The chancellor who promised we were all in it together has specialised in fiscal divide and rule; the Conservative who hates picking winners in industrial strategy has been expert at picking losers in his budgetary strategy. So it is that the Institute for Fiscal Studies reports that “lower-income groups will fare considerably worse over the post-recession period”. Or that Simon Duffy at the Centre for Welfare Reform calculates that people with disabilities have been hit nine times harder than the rest of the population by austerity; those with severe disabilities 19 times harder.
Add these three factors together, and add in: the almost complete erosion of social institutions; the growing redundancy of the church in a secular country; the toothlessness of trade unions; and the way in which social security has gone from being a helping hand at times of need to being an instrument of surveillance and punishment. What you end up with is working poor turning on those without jobs; and those right at the bottom cut adrift entirely. I call it privatised despair, but writing about interwar Europe, Hannah Arendt talked of “radical isolation”, in which men and women were turned against each other.
And sometimes turned against themselves. In his book, Clark writes about a couple in Luton: the wife is severely disabled, the husband is extremely ill. “Stephanie” lives in fear of her disability living allowance being stopped and thus losing the car in which she ferries “Martin” to his oncologist. They mention how they dread the postman delivering a “brown letter” containing bad news from the Department for Work and Pensions. I can think of no better metaphor for privatised despair: living in fear of the daily post. Then Stephanie says something no blameless person in a civilised society should ever say: “I feel that I am scum, really.”
Looking back, you can boil down the story of the financial crash to a sentence: the bankers ran off with the profits, we got stuck with their losses. Short and snappy, and also true. Summing up what happened next, though, has so far proved trickier. But at the halfway point in Britain’s angry lost decade, enough evidence is now in to say this: after socialising the bankers’ debts, we privatised despair.
The past five years have not been about the big public calamities that usually make up economic crisis. No industries have gone bust nor, thankfully, have millions been slung on the dole. Instead, it is becoming clear that the teens of this century will be marked by tens of millions of instances of private financial misery, all borne behind closed doors.
This will be the decade of workers on wages so low they are priced out of the lifestyle they once thought was safely theirs; of tenants struggling with soaring rents and crappy landlords; of severely disabled people kept awake by the prospect of their benefits being cut, while others on jobseeker’s allowance jump though hoop after hoop to avoid being sanctioned.
None of this everyday wretchedness fits what we have come to think of as a slump; yet this is the shape of the one we are grinding our way through. Defying the spectacular predictions that were made after 2008, this crisis is private, unequal and internalised.
I have been tracking these issues for years – but what they look like added together came into painful clarity a couple of weeks ago in Liverpool. Norris Green falls among the most deprived places in England but, with greenery, wide roads and new houses going up, it doesn’t look bad at all. Gazing out of his windscreen, Barry Kushner, a local councillor, set me straight: around half these households were now in temporary work, he reckoned; the launch of the bedroom tax had caused mayhem for residents; there was a two-month wait for appointments at the local Citizens Advice bureau. Along this neat terraced street was a row of front rooms where parents were fretting over how to pay off the Christmas they’d just given their kids.
Norris Green doesn’t fit the traditional narrative arc of economic crisis. As in much of Britain, there’s no rerun of the Great Depression; it’s more a whole string of mini-depressions. You see it in the growth of foodbanks, or in last autumn’s warning from Citizens Advice of a surge of people in trouble over their rented homes – a 15% rise in reports of harassment by landlords, a 20% spike in evictions. More prosaically, you see it when the poverty researchers Stewart Lansley and Joanna Mack report in their book Breadline Britain that over one in four households can’t afford to repair or replace broken electrical goods – a proportion that has more than doubled since 1999.
Apart from the odd high-street name such as Woolies or Comet, there have been no great business bankruptcies – partly because Britain has so few big industrial employers left after the Thatcher and Major recessions. Another reason is the hundreds of billions the state has pumped into the financial system, keeping afloat households and businesses that would otherwise sink.
This explains the lack of public spectacle. But our privatised despair is shaped by three main factors: huge inequality that leaves the poorest stranded; the mushrooming of precarious jobs; and George Osborne’s habit of picking off sections of the population to pay the biggest bills for the bankers’ losses.
The first factor is most thoroughly itemised by my Guardian colleague Tom Clark. In his book Hard Times, he catalogues how this meltdown has slapped the poorest in ways that don’t make it into public discussion. Clark turns up YouGov polls showing how Britons hit by the recession are more than twice as likely as their slump-proof compatriots to report that they row more. Citizenship surveys indicate that the sharpest fall in volunteering in 2010 took place in precisely those worst-off areas that most desperately needed them. David Cameron’s “big society” was always a luxury item for those with money, time and assertiveness to spare.
If privatised despair reaches into your home, it does not let up at the workplace. While employment has hit records under the coalition, the new work is more insecure and lonelier than we usually imagine. The characteristic jobs of this slump are the Uber driver, or the outsourced care worker going from door to door for 15 minutes a time. The new work is in perma-temping, shuttling from workplace to workplace, or in enforced freelance or fake self-employment. Forget about collective organisation or trade unions: these are often low-paid areas of work where regular contact with a roster of people who know your name cannot be guaranteed.
Inequality and insecure jobs aren’t new; they have simply been heightened since Cameron and Osborne moved into Downing Street. The chancellor who promised we were all in it together has specialised in fiscal divide and rule; the Conservative who hates picking winners in industrial strategy has been expert at picking losers in his budgetary strategy. So it is that the Institute for Fiscal Studies reports that “lower-income groups will fare considerably worse over the post-recession period”. Or that Simon Duffy at the Centre for Welfare Reform calculates that people with disabilities have been hit nine times harder than the rest of the population by austerity; those with severe disabilities 19 times harder.
Add these three factors together, and add in: the almost complete erosion of social institutions; the growing redundancy of the church in a secular country; the toothlessness of trade unions; and the way in which social security has gone from being a helping hand at times of need to being an instrument of surveillance and punishment. What you end up with is working poor turning on those without jobs; and those right at the bottom cut adrift entirely. I call it privatised despair, but writing about interwar Europe, Hannah Arendt talked of “radical isolation”, in which men and women were turned against each other.
And sometimes turned against themselves. In his book, Clark writes about a couple in Luton: the wife is severely disabled, the husband is extremely ill. “Stephanie” lives in fear of her disability living allowance being stopped and thus losing the car in which she ferries “Martin” to his oncologist. They mention how they dread the postman delivering a “brown letter” containing bad news from the Department for Work and Pensions. I can think of no better metaphor for privatised despair: living in fear of the daily post. Then Stephanie says something no blameless person in a civilised society should ever say: “I feel that I am scum, really.”
Can Sufism save Sind?
Suleman Akhtar in The Dawn
Sindh is under attack. The land of Shah Latif bleeds again. The seven queens of Shah Latif’s Shah Jo Risalo – Marui, Sassui, Noori, Sorath, Lilan, Sohni, and Momal – have put on black cloaks and they mourn. The troubles and tribulations are not new for the queens.
After the sack of Delhi, Nadir Shah (Shah of Iran), invaded Sindh and imprisoned the then Sindhi ruler Noor Mohammad Kalhoro in Umarkot fort. Shah Latif captured it in the yearning of Marui for her beloved land when she was locked up in the same Umarkot fort.
If looking to my native land
with longing I expire;
My body carry home, that I
may rest in desert-stand;
My bones if Malir reach, at end,
though dead, I'll live again.
(Sur Marui, XXVIII, Shah Jo Risalo)
The attack on the central Imambargah in Shikarpur is as ominous in many ways as it is horrendous and tragic.
The Sufi ethos of Sindh has long been cherished as the panacea for burgeoning extremism in Pakistan. Sufism has been projected lately as an effective alternative to rising fundamentalism in Muslim societies not only by the Pakistani liberal intelligentsia but also by some Western think-tanks and NGOs.
But the question is, how effective as an ideology can Sufism be in its role in contemporary societies?
To begin with, Sufism is not a monolithic ideology.
There are several strains within Sufism that are in total opposition to each other, thus culminating into totally opposite worldviews. The most important of them is chasm between Wahdat al-Wajud (unity of existence) and Wahdat al-Shahud (unity of phenomenon).
The former professes that there is only One real being not separated from His creation, and thus God runs through everything. While Wahdat al-Shahud holds that God is separated from His creation.
While the distinction between the two might seem purely polemical, it actually leads to two entirely opposite logical conclusions.
Wahdat al-Wajud sees God running through everything. Thus apparent differences between different religions and school of thoughts vanish at once. In diversity, there lies a unity thus paving way to acceptance of any creed, irrespective of its religious foundations.
Ibn al-Arbi was the first to lay the theoretical foundations of Wahdat al-Wajud and introduce it to the Muslim world.
On the other hand, the Wahdat al-Shahud school of thought was developed and propagated by Sheikh Ahmad Sirhindi, who rose to counter the secular excesses of Akbar. He pronounced Ibn al-Arbi as Kafir and went on deconstructing what he deemed as heresies.
Wahdat al-Shahud in its sociopolitical context leads to separation and confrontation. The staunch anti-Hindu and anti-Shia views of Ahmed Sirhindi are just a logical consequence of this school of thought. Ahmed Sirhindi is one of the few Sufis mentioned in Pakistani textbooks.
Historically, Sufis in today’s Pakistan have belonged to four Sufi orders: Qadriah, Chishtiah, Suharwardiah, and Naqshbandiah.
It is also interesting to note that not all of these Sufi orders have been historically anti-establishment.
While Sufis who belonged to the Chishtiah and Qadriah orders always kept a distance from emperors in Delhi and kept voicing for the people, the Suharwardia order has always been close to the power centres. Bahauddin Zikria of the Suharwardiah order enjoyed close relations with the Darbar and after that leaders of this order have always sided with the ruler (either Mughals or British) against the will of the people.
Sufism in the subcontinent in general and Sindh in particular, emerged and evolved as a formidable opposition to the King and Mullah/Pundit nexus. Not only did it give voice to the voiceless victims of religious fanaticism, but also challenged the established political order.
To quote Marx it was ‘the soul of soulless conditions’.
A case-in-point is Shah Inayat of Jhok Sharif, who led a popular peasant revolt in Sindh and was executed afterwards. Shah Latif wrote a nameless eulogy of Shah Inayat in Shah Jo Risalo.
However, the socio-political conditions that gave rise to Sufism in the subcontinent are not present anymore. The resurrection of Sufism as a potent resistance ideology is difficult if not impossible. Sufis emerged from ashes of civilizational mysticism, independent of organised religion and political powers.
Today, however, the so-called centres of Sufism known as Khanqahs are an integral part of both the contemporary political elite and the all-powerful clergy. On intellectual front self-proclaimed proponents of contemporary Sufism – Qudratullah Shahab, Ashfaq Ahmad, Mumtaz Mufti, et al – have been a part of state apparatus and ideology in one form or another.
Sufism is necessarily a humanist and universal ideology. It is next to impossible to confine it to the boundaries of modern nation states and ideological states in particular, which thrive on an exclusivist ideology.
Mansoor al-Hallaj travelled extensively throughout Sindh. His famous proclamation Ana ‘al Haq (I am the truth) is an echo of Aham Brahmasmi (I am the infinite reality) of the Upanishads. There are striking similarities between the Hindu Advaita and Muslim Wahdat al-Wajud. These ideologies complement each other and lose their essence in isolation.
Punjab has been a centre of The Bhakti Movement – one of the most humanist spiritual movements that ever happened on this side of Suez – but all the humanist teachings of the movement could not avert the genocide of millions of Punjabis during the tragic events of the Partition.
The most time-tested peace ideology of Buddhism could not keep the Buddhists from killing Muslims in Burma.
Such are the cruel realities of modern times that can overshadow the viability of any spiritual movement.
Sufism in Sindh exists today as a way of life and not an ideology.
It is an inseparable part of how people live their daily lives. In Pakistan, however, to live a daily life has come to be an act of resistance itself.
Sindh bleeds today and mourns for its people and culture that are under attack. Bhit Shah reverberates with an aggrieved but helpless voice:
O brother dyer! Dye my clothes black,
I mourn for those who never did return.
(Sur Kedaro, III, Shah Jo Risalo)
Sindh is under attack. The land of Shah Latif bleeds again. The seven queens of Shah Latif’s Shah Jo Risalo – Marui, Sassui, Noori, Sorath, Lilan, Sohni, and Momal – have put on black cloaks and they mourn. The troubles and tribulations are not new for the queens.
After the sack of Delhi, Nadir Shah (Shah of Iran), invaded Sindh and imprisoned the then Sindhi ruler Noor Mohammad Kalhoro in Umarkot fort. Shah Latif captured it in the yearning of Marui for her beloved land when she was locked up in the same Umarkot fort.
If looking to my native land
with longing I expire;
My body carry home, that I
may rest in desert-stand;
My bones if Malir reach, at end,
though dead, I'll live again.
(Sur Marui, XXVIII, Shah Jo Risalo)
The attack on the central Imambargah in Shikarpur is as ominous in many ways as it is horrendous and tragic.
The Sufi ethos of Sindh has long been cherished as the panacea for burgeoning extremism in Pakistan. Sufism has been projected lately as an effective alternative to rising fundamentalism in Muslim societies not only by the Pakistani liberal intelligentsia but also by some Western think-tanks and NGOs.
But the question is, how effective as an ideology can Sufism be in its role in contemporary societies?
To begin with, Sufism is not a monolithic ideology.
There are several strains within Sufism that are in total opposition to each other, thus culminating into totally opposite worldviews. The most important of them is chasm between Wahdat al-Wajud (unity of existence) and Wahdat al-Shahud (unity of phenomenon).
The former professes that there is only One real being not separated from His creation, and thus God runs through everything. While Wahdat al-Shahud holds that God is separated from His creation.
While the distinction between the two might seem purely polemical, it actually leads to two entirely opposite logical conclusions.
Wahdat al-Wajud sees God running through everything. Thus apparent differences between different religions and school of thoughts vanish at once. In diversity, there lies a unity thus paving way to acceptance of any creed, irrespective of its religious foundations.
Ibn al-Arbi was the first to lay the theoretical foundations of Wahdat al-Wajud and introduce it to the Muslim world.
On the other hand, the Wahdat al-Shahud school of thought was developed and propagated by Sheikh Ahmad Sirhindi, who rose to counter the secular excesses of Akbar. He pronounced Ibn al-Arbi as Kafir and went on deconstructing what he deemed as heresies.
Wahdat al-Shahud in its sociopolitical context leads to separation and confrontation. The staunch anti-Hindu and anti-Shia views of Ahmed Sirhindi are just a logical consequence of this school of thought. Ahmed Sirhindi is one of the few Sufis mentioned in Pakistani textbooks.
Historically, Sufis in today’s Pakistan have belonged to four Sufi orders: Qadriah, Chishtiah, Suharwardiah, and Naqshbandiah.
It is also interesting to note that not all of these Sufi orders have been historically anti-establishment.
While Sufis who belonged to the Chishtiah and Qadriah orders always kept a distance from emperors in Delhi and kept voicing for the people, the Suharwardia order has always been close to the power centres. Bahauddin Zikria of the Suharwardiah order enjoyed close relations with the Darbar and after that leaders of this order have always sided with the ruler (either Mughals or British) against the will of the people.
Sufism in the subcontinent in general and Sindh in particular, emerged and evolved as a formidable opposition to the King and Mullah/Pundit nexus. Not only did it give voice to the voiceless victims of religious fanaticism, but also challenged the established political order.
To quote Marx it was ‘the soul of soulless conditions’.
A case-in-point is Shah Inayat of Jhok Sharif, who led a popular peasant revolt in Sindh and was executed afterwards. Shah Latif wrote a nameless eulogy of Shah Inayat in Shah Jo Risalo.
However, the socio-political conditions that gave rise to Sufism in the subcontinent are not present anymore. The resurrection of Sufism as a potent resistance ideology is difficult if not impossible. Sufis emerged from ashes of civilizational mysticism, independent of organised religion and political powers.
Today, however, the so-called centres of Sufism known as Khanqahs are an integral part of both the contemporary political elite and the all-powerful clergy. On intellectual front self-proclaimed proponents of contemporary Sufism – Qudratullah Shahab, Ashfaq Ahmad, Mumtaz Mufti, et al – have been a part of state apparatus and ideology in one form or another.
Sufism is necessarily a humanist and universal ideology. It is next to impossible to confine it to the boundaries of modern nation states and ideological states in particular, which thrive on an exclusivist ideology.
Mansoor al-Hallaj travelled extensively throughout Sindh. His famous proclamation Ana ‘al Haq (I am the truth) is an echo of Aham Brahmasmi (I am the infinite reality) of the Upanishads. There are striking similarities between the Hindu Advaita and Muslim Wahdat al-Wajud. These ideologies complement each other and lose their essence in isolation.
Punjab has been a centre of The Bhakti Movement – one of the most humanist spiritual movements that ever happened on this side of Suez – but all the humanist teachings of the movement could not avert the genocide of millions of Punjabis during the tragic events of the Partition.
The most time-tested peace ideology of Buddhism could not keep the Buddhists from killing Muslims in Burma.
Such are the cruel realities of modern times that can overshadow the viability of any spiritual movement.
Sufism in Sindh exists today as a way of life and not an ideology.
It is an inseparable part of how people live their daily lives. In Pakistan, however, to live a daily life has come to be an act of resistance itself.
Sindh bleeds today and mourns for its people and culture that are under attack. Bhit Shah reverberates with an aggrieved but helpless voice:
O brother dyer! Dye my clothes black,
I mourn for those who never did return.
(Sur Kedaro, III, Shah Jo Risalo)
Monday 2 February 2015
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