Book Review by Joe Mancini
Published March 2024
The main message of Astra Taylor’s The Age of Insecurity is How Can We Come Together.
When CBC IDEAS asked Astra Taylor to give the Massey Lecture, they were inviting a Canadian who has been acting on the insecurity that has provoked the Occupy generation. Since her Occupy days, Taylor’s projects include the Debt Collective, a US based operation which supports those who have taken on overwhelming debt to pay for education, rent or bail. Taylor is very familiar with the causes of the insecurity she writes about.
Her underlying message is one of hope. Taylor focuses on Insecurity, Inequality, the Commons and the Environment, analyzing the reasons behind insecurities while searching for positive alternatives. She concludes by describing how our culture can integrate a deeper meaning for the word Care.
Insecurity
Insecurity is at the root of our discontent in this decade. There is so much work to do to lessen insecurities on all levels through choices for better housing, fair incomes and a healthy environment.
Yet, the real insecurity is that our society generates tremendous wealth and rarely distributes it fairly or rationally.
This becomes a deeper and more personal issue as insecurity arrives at each individual’s doorstep. We carry that insecurity when we seek to gain the advantage of more wealth, more power, more security for ourselves to the detriment of others. Taylor reminds us that Adam Smith, in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, said exactly that, “Money and things cannot buy happiness.”
Our insecurity grows when we witness the startling contrast between one group of workers who are chasing more wealth for goals like bidding up the price of housing, buying more expensive cars and working longer hours to pay for it all, while other workers are left working longer hours just to pay for rental housing that takes up most of their income.
Robert Frank addressed these issues in a 2007 book, Falling Behind, where he makes the point that a society that encourages “keeping up with the Jones”, will in the long run lead to losses like reduced leisure, increased stress on families, dislocation and fewer dollars to support the environment we live in. Rather than investing in green infrastructure like heat pumps, solar panels and batteries, society’s efforts are wasted on the treadmill of keeping up or trying to get ahead. The option of rationally reducing insecurity is hardly considered.
Inequality
Over the last four decades, housing in Canada has gone from being attainable by all to the costs of even the most basic housing being out of reach to anyone earning in the bottom third of the labour market. For example, presently the average price for a one bedroom rental in Waterloo Region is $1927, which is 100% of a worker’s after tax $18/hour, 40 hour/week monthly income.
Housing was historically built so that the majority working class could afford to purchase and own. This system served Canadians well, resulting in minimal homelessness and all could afford some kind of housing even at minimum wages. This is clearly no longer possible, and Canadians feel the sting of inequality when so many are left out.
While it may seem obvious that the solution to this obvious issue of inequality is to build more housing, this is only possible if the housing built is affordable and accessible to all.
Taylor points out that countries such as Finland or Austria have a long history of investing in public housing built as a community asset that is beautiful, durable, and affordable. It is not a second rate option, it is the means for many to attain long term affordable housing. She laments the lack of imagination that North American’s have for understanding housing as a basic human right. It should not be a primary investment vehicle but the means for building a stable society where all can share the benefits of a place to call home.
The Commons
Taylor captures the contradictory nature of political options:
“Ours is a strange and scrambled political moment, at once prosperous and precarious, encouragingly open-minded and dangerously reactive.”
She does not fear the hard work of culture building, the sacrifices necessary to work and create opportunities, but she is cognizant that there are forces that move in a negative direction. They are not about expanding the welfare commons, but about stroking competition against one another, promoting an individualism that is increasingly separate from the common good. She summarizes this feeling concisely as, “the resulting insecurity has left us feeling like we are never enough, have enough, or know enough.”
Taylor’s fear and her strongest insight is that we are caught between two conflicting pathways as to how humans are motivated in our society. One posits that “material security is the basis for social and personal growth” and the other is the need to manufacture “insecurity to keep people anxious compliant and striving.” She emphasizes the interrelatedness of these complicated paths, as seen through her description of the insecurity of the Great Depression that resulted in hard won social policy gains in the following decades.
Taylor wants us to visualize a new kind of commons, a wider political space where inclusive supports are integral. She wants us to envision the strength of the underground root systems that hold up massive trees, allowing then to stand firm and sway at the same time.
“Sometimes their roots intertwine with other trees’ for mutual reinforcement, and as Canadian scientist Suzanne Simard discovered, they also share nutrients through underground networks. This is not the competitive capitalist freedom of the “self-made” individual, but the kind of freedom enabled by community. It is the security that helps us pursue what Albert Maslow called higher needs: beauty, self-expression and creativity.”
The Environment
When it comes to the Environment, Taylor does not spend time describing the potential disruptions of ongoing climate change. Her focus is on the wider lens of how humans can cooperate to make the environment better. The Occupy generation knows that human security at the expense of nature is an illusion. There is no turning back, ecology is complex and all the actors have to be taken into account. This includes finding ways to avoid incinerating the planet, keeping fossil fuels in the ground rather than continuing our 100-year quest to unearth and burn 100’s of millions of barrels of fossil fuels each week.
Taylor spends her energy describing the underlying changes humans must make to our relationship with the natural world. It is now time to lose old conceptions. Less than 50 years ago it was gospel in western societies to place “man” at the top of the chain of beings, now we slowly see that the human being is integral, one of, in the inclusive circle of the natural world. This significant change gives new reverence to the waters, mountains, forests, wetlands and all that inhabit these spaces and places. When the rivers have rights, they cannot be polluted. Taylor describes how society must develop rules to safeguard the whole natural environment in ways that will change our economy and the way we live.
Conclusion
Taylor completes the lecture by helping the reader re-imagine the meaning of Care.
“To be vulnerable and dependent on others is not a burden to escape but the essence of human existence, as well as the basis of an ethic of insecurity – a potentially powerful source of connection, solidarity and transformation.”
Taylor calls on Canadians to think about the meaning of Care. How do we interpret care for the environment and care for those most vulnerable? What kind of society relaxes environmental protection for the sake of greater economic development? What kind of society leaves its homeless out in the cold in the winter? Taylor describes ideas towards reducing insecurities, especially through a commitment to develop a wider meaning of Care. Taylor offers a path towards building a society for the common good.
Astra Taylor is a filmmaker, writer, and political organizer, born in Winnipeg. Her other books include The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age and Remake the World: Essays, Reflections, Rebellions.
Taylor’s CBC Massey Lectures are available online at: https://www.cbc.ca/radiointeractives/ideas/2023-cbc-massey-lectures-astra-taylor
