NOVEMBER 15 2015
THE FUTURE OF WORK
The late Sheikh Rashid Bin Saed Al Maktoum, longtime Emir of Dubai and Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates, once said:
“My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel.”
When I apply that to my own situation, then I can truthfully say that both my grandfathers rode bikes, my father drove a Ford, I drive a Jetta, my sons (and daughters) all have fancy cars, so do their children, but in the end they all will go back to a bike.
When I look at the farming situation, I see a similarity there as well: my grandfathers worked with horses, my father moved to the city and, while living there still kept a country connection. His children, my generation, all acquired a city-bred mentality, but some of my grandchildren will (be forced to?) move back to the country where they will adopt the life similar to my grandparents, in some ways the same, but also totally different. Yes, much the same but also totally different, because Climate Change will change everything, including the future and nature of work, and especially it will change us.
Famous psychiatrist, Carl Gustav Jung – 1875 to 1961 – said somewhere that there is a basic difference between a city person and a country personality. That was true in his lifetime, but is no longer the case now: we all are urbanized, all have become technophiles, all depend on nuclear and lots of carbon energy to exist. Sad to say, everything and everybody will have to change.
The coming conference in Paris, starting November 30, will bring a new message to the world: the age of carbon fuels is coming to an end. The immense trouble is that our energy slaves have made it possible – for a few decades – to live far beyond our natural means, far beyond what is possible on a sustainable basis. That has to change. Is that still possible?
Last week I read a quote by famous French novelist Anatole France, so famous that when I studied French he was required reading. He wrote, “All changes, even the most longed for, are melancholy. For what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves. We must die to one life before we can enter another.” We must die to our ‘un-creating’ life before we can enter into the ‘creation-friendly’ life. Actually that is a complete religious statement.
When I was born in 1928, I lived in two worlds: part urban, part rural. My grandparents were truly rural: no or little electricity, horse and buggy for commerce, bikes and walking for mobility. As a privileged kid we always had an automobile, but we were the exception. Our children and grandchildren have never experienced anything else: we all must die to one life before we can enter another. That will prove the greatest challenge ever faced humanity, much greater than fighting terrorism. And creation-loving Christians have to be the example!!
This year officially, the world temperature will have increased by 1 (one) degree Celsius. Not a big deal, some will say, and that is true if that would be the last of it, but that is only the beginning. Today we are guaranteed to experience at least 2 degrees and most likely more. And that spells disaster on a grand scale.
One obvious fact is that the world-wide use of carbon products in the form of natural gas, which made fertilizer and plastic possible, and liquid fuels, such as gasoline and diesel, has changed the face of farming and has, in my life time more than a tripled the world population. In the year 1900, when there were 1.5 billion people to feed in the world, close to 40 percent of the working population were engaged in agriculture. Thanks to huge machines, lots of carbon expenditure, and megatons of fertilizer, today less than 1 percent of the working population is engaged in farming and successfully feeding 7.3 billion people.
I have a book by Juliet B. Schor, a professor of sociology at Boston College. She is known worldwide for her research on the interrelated issues of work, leisure, and consumption. Her books on these themes include The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, The Overspent American: Upscaling, Downshifting, and the New Consumer, and Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth (retitled True Wealth for its paperback edition).
She writes that, “during the last year or two I’ve noticed that conversations about the future of work are now mostly about machines—how smart ones will do fantastic things to make our lives better, or how they’ll make human labor redundant and create a jobless dystopia.”
True, ever since the Industrial Revolution extraordinary labor-saving technological change had both good (cheaper products) and bad (pollution) effects. We no longer work to eat, we now work to consume. That will change: all our work habits will change in the future!
She continues, “Today, that context must include consideration of climate change, which has been almost totally missing from discussions about the future of work. The most obvious reason Climate Change matters is that it promises to be extremely disruptive. Even if the global community can pull off the equivalent of a Hail Mary pass and limit warming to two degrees Celsius, plenty of climate chaos is still in store. At this point, a future of four degrees of warming is more likely, given current national pledges for emissions reductions and considerable uncertainty about them.”
How true. Today all signs point to catastrophic sea level rise, drought, plummeting agricultural yields, frequent extreme weather, and human migrations on a large scale. The current march of the millions to Western Europe and Canada is only a small beginning. It has an immediate effect on the employment picture. Already a totally new kind of work is popping up: helping refugees, re-educating them, requiring greater need for first responders, health professionals, and aid workers, among other occupations. Climate chaos will also have large macroeconomic effects, reducing investment, consumption, and, yes, employment. It might well cost you your job.
In Canada we just elected a new government, its platform based on continued economic growth. It is true that the faces of a new generation of politicians are refreshing, and there is again hope in the air. But the raw reality is that in Canada the carbon bubble has popped. The Oil Sand oil extraction enterprise – Tar Sand in the USA – cannot be continued: it simply is too polluting. That means an entire arm of the economy is dying. And that is only the beginning. The terrible truth is that our entire existence built on fossil fuels – as today all of our enterprises are – belongs to a former age, the 20th Century, because Climate mayhem leads to economic mayhem which will force a new mindset whether we like it or not. We have to start thinking differently, and must die to carbon rich life before we can enter another based on renewables. The stark choice is: change or die.
Will that happen?
The USA is the world’s largest economy. There the mindset is closed to change if the Republican Presidential debates are any indication. With such an anti-intellectual attitude no turnaround is possible, assuring that catastrophe is guaranteed.
The needed turnaround is immense. Look at transportation. The faster one wants to travel, the more energy one must use. The further we live from where we work, the more energy we use. No longer are suburbs the only problem: it’s the exurbs that necessitate the longest commutes. True, telecommuting is an option for some, but, judging by the crowded highways, that does not seem to make any difference. Granted, cities in Canada, Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Ottawa, all have elaborate plans for mass transit, but, as the economy declines, the billions needed to build these systems, will not be available. What if all these rapid rail systems are ready and the jobs have gone? That is a terrible possibility.
Today there are two opposing trends at work: a slowing economy means less tax revenue. To combat Climate Change, more tax dollars are needed. To look after the old-age segment for pensions and medical care, more tax dollars are needed, while disappearing jobs also cry for more unemployment assistance.
There also is another adjustment needed, perhaps the major one. In the last century machines have replaced muscle power but they are severely polluting, which means that a totally new approach to life must be learned or re-learned, replacing mechanical power with muscle power. My grandparents had multiple skills. We only know how to push buttons: we lack real life-skills. Climate Change will force us, by the grace of God, to re-learn creation-loving abilities, such as growing food, living more simply, do more walking and biking, greater appreciation for real leisure, not just TV watching or computer games, but reading, conversation, and communal games.
Be assured that Climate Change will play havoc with employment: oil extraction will diminish or disappear; trucking will suffer; flying will be curtailed with ‘going south’ becoming a thing of the past. With jobs disappearing, the government will probably establish a minimum income for all people, and with tax receipts decreasing, this will lead to governments creating money out of nothing, the way they did to rescue the banks by giving them trillions of dollars.
That is a recipe for hyperinflation, driving up the cost of living, and, while making cash savings disappear, will make it easier to pay off debts on all levels. I remember from the war years 1940-45 how our church quickly paid off its huge mortgage when money lost much of its value.
All this indicates that we are speeding towards the end of human life as we know it, because the end of oil will mean the end of billions of carbon-dependent lives. The bad thing is that many will not be able to adapt. The good thing is that it will prepare people for the Kingdom to come.
Today very few people have a clear understanding what “The Kingdom of Heaven” really entails. By and large the churches have not been a leader here, even though Jesus often told us to “First seek the Kingdom”. It bears repeating that the Kingdom of Heaven – as described by J. H. Bavinck in his Between the Beginning and the End: A radical Kingdom Vision – page 32- is: made up of all plants, all animals, all people, all angels —-all things. The kingdom includes the sea and the land, the mountains and the valleys, all that was and is and is to come— all of it incorporated into a grand and mighty whole. The kingdom is the place where all things are in the right place and where everything can fulfill its function and work toward its potential in complete harmony with all that surrounds it. The kingdom is synonymous with light, peace, joy, service to God – all in harmonious veneration.
I need not emphasize that we have done the opposite. A bit earlier on that same page Bavinck describes our situation: “It is impossible to visualize the immense difference between the majestic, harmonious unity of creation as it emerged from God’s hand and the frantic, demon-dominated planet in which we, cursed humanity dwell after the fall into sin…..God has surrendered his own creation to Satan and his followers, whose only purpose is to abuse and destroy it.”
Oil, all carbon-based fuels, has speeded up this process, and it is our, almost impossible task, to go back to a life that is dominated by the Divine Kingdom concept.
The future of work lies in that direction.
Anatole France – 1844 to 1924- may not have had a clear idea what it really meant when he wrote, “All changes, even the most longed for, are melancholy. For what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves. We must die to one life before we can enter another,” but then poets and writers often are prophetic. For us to gain entry to the Kingdom to come we must die to our present life before we can enter the Life to come, “while forgiving those who trespass against us.” There’s only room for humility here.
There’s where the Future of work is headed: we must live the Kingdom life.