The Age of Insecurity

Keir Starmer with British Troops, Stefan Rousseau/PA

Members of the new Government have told us several times over the last few months that we have entered an “age of insecurity”. Keir Starmer used the phrase in June, as he was declaring his willingness to kill millions in nuclear strikes under unspecified circumstances, and his commitment to a huge increase in British military spending, to 2.5% of GDP. Rachel Reeves has used the phrase several times by way of diagnosing an illness for which her “securonomics” is the cure. The illness consists in political instability resulting in a lack of long-term investment; the cure consists in the creation of a new National Wealth Fund, which will invest £7.3 billion of public money into private businesses over the next five years, and in a refusal to substantially raise taxes or public spending, carrying on in all but name the policy of austerity which has caused so much needless suffering. And on the same theme, Labour’s manifesto proclaims an “age of insecurity” which necessitates “a return to the foundations of good government: national security, secure borders, and economic stability”, and an “enduring partnership” of the state with private business. As I write this the new Government seems intent on following these promises through – Keir Starmer is telling the leaders of NATO about the urgency of increasing military spending, while his ministers insist there is no prospect of increasing public spending even to the minimal degree of ending the eugenicist two-child benefit cap.

Of course, many people in the UK are living in insecurity, and have been for many years: a third of households with people of working-age have less than £1000 in savings; several thousand people sleep rough each night; around a million undocumented immigrants live and work in this country with no employment protections, no ability to legally rent, and no access to public funds. And, of course, we all live with global insecurity, with a dozen or so competing nuclear-armed states expressing their willingness to slaughter each other’s populations given sufficient provocation; with ongoing wars fuelled by the arms industry which Labour continues to champion; with climate change which Labour promises to do far too little to address; with around 120 million displaced people in the world whom Labour is committed to keeping out of our wealthy nation. Obviously, this is not the sort of insecurity which Starmer and Reeves are talking about. Labour has proposed – and the country has largely accepted – security for those who matter from the point of view of the British state. Labour’s “national security” will be achieved by subsidising a war of attrition in Ukraine, fought by conscripts and reducing still greater sections of the country to rubble, to end in a settlement almost certain to be no better for Ukrainians than that which could have been negotiated before the war began; and by a strengthened policy of nuclear deterrence which makes manifest a belief in the ultimate non-existence of the value of human life. Labour’s “economic stability” will involve propping up with public funds the conditions in which private capital can continue to flourish, even at the expense of those in genuine economic insecurity.

Labour have said very little about what the commitment to “border security” will involve in practice, but what they have said is deserving of scrutiny. In their manifesto they praise the Homes for Ukraine scheme, the Hong Kong humanitarian visas, and the tiny, strictly limited, and now defunct Syrian resettlement program, while committing to the prevention of arrivals by small boat. Presumably in Labour’s ideal world they would allow in only carefully selected, relatively affluent refugees and only those conveniently fleeing from a geopolitical rival, while preventing anyone else from reaching Britain by some means yet to be determined. We know that, in the real world, no such thing will happen. The people most desperately in need of refuge will rarely be those to whom it is most convenient to give it, and apart from that economic desperation is already enough of a driver by itself to make men, women and children make lethally dangerous crossings of the Sahara and the Mediterranean to get here. Yvette Cooper’s vaunted Border Security Command will not be able to fulfil its much-repeated mandate to “Smash the Gangs”, because it will do nothing that British and French security forces are not already doing with little success. But the focus on traffickers as drivers of irregular migration is intended to obfuscate the reality that people come to Britain in small boats because of political, economic and climactic problems in their home countries to which Labour has no solution. The question is not whether or not we want people to come here, because they are going to keep coming regardless. The question is whether we treat them as human beings once they’re here.

There is no compelling reason to be optimistic about the new Government’s answer. They have refused to commit to the opening of any safe, legal routes to asylum, despite this being the only means of claiming asylum they would theoretically be willing to accept. Nothing has been said about restoring to asylum seekers the right to work which the last Labour government took from them; nothing has been said about reporting conditions. The Rwanda plan has been abandoned, not on grounds of its inhumanity but because it would not deport people quickly or efficiently enough. Nothing has been said suggestive of anything except a continuation of the hostile environment. The obsessive focus on “smashing” traffickers is particularly concerning given that, in the face of the extreme difficulty of actually catching traffickers, the last Government tended to scapegoat refugees themselves, charging anyone who happened to have their hand on the tiller at any point in crossing with “facilitating illegal arrival”, providing minimal legal representation, and imposing custodial sentences long enough to preclude their ever being granted asylum. The plan to invest the new force with “counter-terrorism style powers” is hardly suggestive of any greater commitment to due process or to justice.

Dorothy Day asked long ago: “what right has any one of us to have security when God’s poor are suffering?” If you have any money, if you are white, if you are a British citizen, the new Government intends to give you a false sense of security at the expense of the poor, of migrants, and of anyone else it can get away with robbing. We have to reject such security as the Government is offering us. Those of us who are Christians know where we are obliged to place our loyalties – in those who are hungry, thirsty, unclothed, unhoused, or strangers in a strange land. If we can take him at his word, to follow Jesus is to give up your cloak, your house, your food, your time, all your possessions, and your social standing. He certainly expects us to give up our nuclear deterrent and our border. In an age of insecurity, we try to follow him as best as we are able.

Pacifism

A repost of Dorothy Day’s 1936 Catholic Worker editorial on pacifism

'Christ breaks the rifle', Otto Pankok, 1950

The Catholic Worker is sincerely a pacifist paper.

We oppose class war and class hatred, even while we stand opposed to injustice and greed. Our fight is not “with flesh and blood but principalities and powers.”

We oppose also imperialist war.

We oppose, moreover, preparedness for war, a preparedness which is going on now on an unprecedented scale and which will undoubtedly lead to war. The Holy Father Pope Pius XI said, in a pastoral letter in 1929:

“And since the unbridled race for armaments is on the one hand the effect of the rivalry among nations and on the other cause of the withdrawal of enormous sums from the public wealth and hence not the smallest of contributors to the current extraordinary crisis. We cannot refrain from renewing on this subject the wise admonitions of our predecessors which thus far have not been heard.

“We exhort you all, Venerable Brethren, that by all the means at your disposal, both by preaching and by the press, you seek to illumine minds and open hearts on this matter, according to the solid dictates of right reason and of the Christian law.”

“Why not prepare for peace?”

1. Let us think now what it means to be neutral in fact as well as in name.

2. American bankers must not lend money to nations at war.

3. We must renounce neutral rights at sea.

   
   

These three points are made by Herbert Agar in “Land of the Free.” Neutrality “in fact,” he says, could be practiced on by either saint or cynic.

In fact, it would mean that either we must not pass judgments (upholding a positive stand for peace instead) or else in condemning Italy, also to condemn Ethiopia for resisting. To do this one would indeed have to be either saint or cynic.

The cynic would say, “It is none of my business.”

The Saint would say, and perhaps he would be a very wise man in saying it, “The conquered conquers in the end. Christ was overcome and He overcame. There was His ostensible failure on the Cross, yet He rose triumphant and Christianity spread over the world. The Christian thing to do would be not to resist, but when anyone asked for one’s coat, to give up one’s cloak besides. As Peter Maurin pointed out in the last instance, Australia could be given up to Japanese expansion for instance, if England objected on”noble” grounds for Japan’s aggression in Manchuria. But recognizing that the majority of people are not Saints; that they are swift to wrath, to resist aggression (when they are not the aggressors), then we can only insist ceaselessly that even when the people are taking sides mentally they must keep out, they must not participate in “a War to end War.”

In the last war we helped to impose an unjust peace, even if we grant that we sincerely thought we were engaged in a noble crusade and were throwing our support on the right side in the conflict. We were influenced to this way of thinking not only by deliberate propaganda, but also by the muddle-headedness of pacifists who were not truly “peace-lovers.”

Example Again

If we are calling upon nations to disarm, we must be brave enough and courageous enough to set the example.

Nations can live at home. That is the title of a recent book, and many surveys are being made at present to find out how many nations can do without trade and “live at home.”

If we abandoned our neutral rights at sea, we would still have a surplus of food and material goods with which to help feed nations which had been made gaunt by war. We are not suggesting this as a business note but as a reminder of Christian Charity.

Do we believe we help any country by participating in an evil in which they are engaged? We rather help them by maintaining our own peace. It takes a man of heroic stature to be a pacifist and we urge our readers to consider and study pacifism and disarmament in this light. A pacifist who is willing to endure the scorn of the unthinking mob, the ignominy of jail, the pain of stripes and the threat of death, cannot be lightly dismissed as a coward afraid of physical pain.

A pacifist even now must be prepared for the opposition of the next mob who thinks violence is bravery. The pacifist in the next war must be ready for martyrdom.

We call upon youth to prepare!

Fare Forward, Voyagers!

In this book, David Craig, real life poetry professor, becomes James, self-styled beatnik and narrator, in order to tell the story of his young adulthood. The book opens with the narrator walking out of his job and driving through the night, his girlfriend barely conscious in the back of the truck, across Ohio to Cleveland, where they plan to set up new lives. The ensuing tale reads as a life of drifting, of spontaneously taken journeys, by pick up, greyhound bus and hitch hiking.

For me, it reads as an account of poustinia, in the sense of setting out on a journey “with just a loaf of bread and a small sack of salt” to search for a place to settle, a community to serve.

A bit like Thoreau in ‘Walden’, James doesn’t spend much time in the actual poustinia, in this case at Madonna House, a religious community in Canada. All the same his time there, framed before and after by road trips, low paid jobs, spartan accommodation, tentative relationships, weed and mushrooms, carries the weight of the narrative. We anticipate it beforehand and wonder about its legacy afterwards. The process that led him there is shadowy but soon enough we find James alighting a bus in a small town, snow still piled up by the road, without a proper coat or hat, not sure what to do next. Having arrived, he is not sure how to behave. He maintains his diffidence and humour, but his jokes are received with blank stares. There are not many chances to meet girls; male residents are bused out every evening to a house away from the main compound. He wonders why people look so happy with so little on offer in the way of entertainment.

Ekaterina, nicknamed “Bee”, the founder of Madonna House, appears as “a large woman, of peasant stock it looked like in her loose-fitting cream-coloured shift.” Despite his misgivings, he joins the whole community to hear her lectures, “the least he could do” in return for their hospitality. She says, “Become poorer because you are beggars at the door of God.” And “I look around here and all I see are rich people in borrowed clothes”. He feels as if the words are directed at him, “The nerve”.

James spends his days sorting rubbish and donations and chopping wood, “frozen with boredom” until he eventually receives permission to spend a few days in one of the community’s poustinias.

Wanting to understand more, I turned to Catherine de Huek Doherty, the Ekaterina of this account, to read her own words on bringing the Russian concept of poustinia to the West, similar to the ones she visited in Russia with her mother. Poustinia literally means desert, a search for solitude, devotion to the people of a village community, a simple dwelling, with allusions to the desert fathers. A poustinik is someone who has been given permission to live in search of God, usually a man in their 30s or 40s, sometimes an older woman. Some spend a short time, a few weeks or a year, others their whole life in poustinia.

Catherine de Hueck Doherty, 1896-1985

Finding an abandoned farmhouse nearby she sets it up as a poustinia for the Madonna House community, writing a wonderful, inspiring letter of explanation to her supporters. She is very specific: bread and water or tea and coffee for westerners, simple furniture, no books except a bible. The idea turns out to be very popular.

She later responds to some unease within the community and decides to found a poustinia in an urban setting. This poustinia, “not for amateurs” is now in the heart. The modern day poustiniks will go about their business, just as a pregnant woman goes about her duties, with new life growing inside her. “You are pregnant with Christ” she says.

James experiences conversion, then disappointment. Ekaterina says to him, “So you’re ready to change the world now, hey, honeymooner” then prophetically “But now you must climb the cross…”

James leaves Madonna House, and hitches to Denver. On the way he punches a fellow hitch hiker who asks him, “Are you saved?” When work in the construction industry dries up, he becomes a taxi driver. He describes his fares, his boss and his landlord, quoting Ginsberg, “my wagon full of sunflowers”. A strong feature of this book is his devotion to the large cast of assembled all sorts, the “minnows” of the title: workmates, bosses, landlords, friends of friends, fellow hitchhikers, ones who offer hospitality, who appear in chance encounters, who often turn out to be poets. Helping the prose along is the narrator’s education in poetry. Indirect quotations from T.S. Eliot (Fare forward, voyagers!), Johnny Cash, Jack Kerouac, Kavanagh, Berrigan, Thich Nhat Hanh give the story its place within the Beat generation, coupled with deep appreciation for humanity. Thanks to the author’s determination not to be pious or judgemental, I found this a gentle, consoling, easy-going text, despite the tough subject matter, including drug taking and patronising attitudes to women.

In the final chapter, decades have passed. We learn some new things about James, that he still drives a cab, that he is half Choctaw Indian, that both he and his partner have suffered from childhood trauma which has effected their whole family. Although he recounts personal struggles with an evil spirit, a desire for fame for instance, he implies but does not recount the struggles of family, children, marriage, professional disappointment, that follow this tale, instead ending with the single word “Mercy”.

According to de Hueck Doherty, there’s a demand, in the life of the poustinik, to give up his solitary search for God and help the villagers with the haymaking or harvest whenever it’s needed. As Ekaterina tells “James”, “Don’t worry... you’ll find the words.”

Jesus in the Minnows by David Craig, 2023, Angelico Press

Poustinia by Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Fountain 1975, Ave Maria Press

This article was originally published in the Autumn 2023 issue of the London Catholic Worker newsletter.