I've written this short piece for the Sunday Herald, my old paper, this week, on the question of child poverty in Scotland. It's framed by this piece from another old colleague, Neil Mackay, on a really-struggling family in a towerblock in Glasgow (Neil, ever resourceful, has also put together this little film of his encounter). I know this doesn't seem like usual Play Ethic territory, but as the piece explains below, I think so much of this social dysfunction is a result of the long-term psychological deformations of industrial identity. And that a positive narrative for productivity and purposefulness - a play ethic to replace a work ethic - might be a solution.
Accept the psychological damage caused by the end of the industrial age, and help its victims move towards a new creative future
PAT KANE
The comfortable middle-class look at 'poverty' situations, and either noisily (or silently) note the contradictions: incapable, wearied parents, badly-maintained domestic spaces, unenlightened eating habits, living on benefits. Yet the same poor families and children have mountain bikes and PSPs, Sky telly and DVDs.
It's time we recognised that these cultural entertainments have poured into the cavity left behind by the end of industrial identity. Let's remember that this identity - which united people as 'communities' - was itself forged out of harshness, a systematic objectification of individuals by the factory system, producing 'hard men' for 'hard times'. Do we really think that generations of the psychological costs of industrial identity can be waved away by some magic wand of "education and training for the service economy"? How easily do we think we can move the bulk of this population towards 'soft men' for 'soft times'?
Drugs also pour into the same cavity, assuaging the same raging psychic need to replace a sense of solid identity, one that was itself a brutal construct. So the ex-working-class in Scotland are suffering a double-whammy, in terms of their subjective and intersubjective lives: damned by what industrialism did to their wiring, and damned for coping miserably with the aftermath. Yes, child poverty is spiritual and cultural as much as it is material and economic. But I don't think we recognise just how damaged many parents are by the legacies of the Scottish 19th and 20th centuries, how emotionally unskilled the industrial age has made them.
And conversely, in terms of engaging with children of these generations right now, we need to accept that they have a 'play ethic' rather than a 'work ethic'. Their cultural conditioning, through all these interactive entertainments, is towards performance, self-expression and exuberant team-work, than dutiful Gordon-Brown-pleasing labour in the retail parks. Rather than constantly demonise this conditioning, could we regard it as a source of potential energy and advance?
Beyond the usual invocations of 'sports' and 'volunteering', we need to think of a new vision for young people's active development - perhaps one that they themselves might be able to be consulted about. What is so wrong with the X-Factor society? Why can't social infrastructure be as supportive of performers, individualists and artists - wherever they declare themselves to be and under whatever conditions - as it is of 'good workers' in the retail or services economy? When will we read the writing on the wall - that we need a positive, creative narrative for productive lives in Scotland, subtle and compassionate and wide-ranging, to begin to really address the destructive effects of our industrial age?
