homelessness and civilisation

"Homelessness inspires not only the intellectual
realization that the machinery of the system has
failed somehow to produce the basic shelter everyone
needs, but even more the social realization that
the system has come up against some limits it
cannot exceed, has created a world it can no longer
control."
- Peter Marcuse (1988). "Neutralizing Homelessness", in Socialist Review, 18:69-96.

I am buzzing at the thrill of new ideas lately. Or at least, 'newish' to me. I’d never, until the last year or so for example, fully investigated Quinn’s ‘New Tribalism’; John Zerzan’s somewhat unrealistically radical critiques of symbolism and civilisation, and the anti-Malthus thesis of the ‘food race’. These ideas had, despite seven years of university study, remained completely outside my awareness. That is, until I was first introduced to the strange little book known as "Ishmael". It was brought to my attention a few years back, through the gift of an invitation by a friend. It was a simple call: to read a book that someone else recognised might speak to my own nameless sense of there being something kind of ‘wrong’ with the world (but not knowing exactly how this 'wrongness' might be understood or recovered from).


There truly are, as Michel Foucault wrote:

"More ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than "politicians" think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas...not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas...that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think."*

Revelations

Since really getting into 'the thick' of my doctoral research into youth homelessness, and reflecting on the interviews I had with young couch surfers in Adelaide, I've been learning so many profound lessons about the nature of our culture and civilisation. The couch surfing experiences I’ve been looking at are situations where young men and women move frequently from one person’s place to another. This is usually through temporary living arrangements in spaces such as couches, floors, mattresses and spare bedrooms. The people with whom young couch surfers stay can range from friends, friends’ parents and some extended family members, to the barest of acquaintances or strangers. Young people who couch surf out of housing crisis rely on their own social networks to survive.

For most of the young people I interviewed, couch surfing began after finding themselves outside their parental homes at a young age (during the school years). This was usually after leaving or being evicted from ‘home’ as a result of fraught family relationships. Without supportive parental or family relationships at this time in their lives, many young people find themselves facing a great deal of social and economic barriers. Youth homelessness has been tied since the 1980s to the market recession of the time, and the collapse of the labour and housing markets for young people, and a subsequent emphasis on the ‘warehousing’ of youth in education, training and low-paid casual jobs. These structural changes have had the effect of delaying young people’s financial independence from caregivers, with longer periods of time needing to be spent subsisting within the parental ‘home’. Ever since, there's been a social expectation in Australia that families must ‘hold on to’ their young people for longer than in previous generations (increasingly up to the early twenties). Achieving this, however, means having adequate long-term resources. That means stable and well-paying parental employment, and supportive relationships between young people, caregivers and significant kin (often including step-parent figures).

It’s difficult for parental households to ‘hold on’ to their young people for prolonged periods of time if they're struggling with economic pressure, marginalised, or coming to terms with uncertainties (for example, around step-parent responsibilities and conflicts). Many of these situations of disadvantage or uncertainty can switch psychological stress into overdrive. This can impact on family relationships through issues such as conflict between family members, situations of violence and abuse, mental illness and self-harm, or drug and alcohol misuse by caregivers and/or youth. In the case of young people whose parental homes don’t hold them for as long as expected, the barriers to establishing independence outside of ‘home’ have strongly contributed to the risk of becoming homeless.

Barriers 

Without a living wage and basic (at least entry-level) education or training, there is very little practical opportunity for a young person (aged, in my interview experience, anywhere from ten to nineteen years old, and for whom the 'family home' is no longer viable or open to them) to be able to afford or access most housing markets, let alone possess the 'maturity', skills or requisite 'adult status' for living completely independently. Other than foster care for minors, many young people in these situations are 'on their own' until they find a way to access particular services, or rely on others informally for support. The fifteen to nineteen year old is ostensibly regarded as economically independent  (able to leave school and gain employment) here in Australia, despite the fact that there are very few jobs in this age bracket that provide a living wage these days. At the same time, young people still cannot claim an 'independent' welfare income support separate from their parent's income until they are twenty five, unless they are able to prove their parental relationship 'unfit' and go through the grief of this drawn-out process.

Adding to this is the problematic nature of housing affordability. Even in a small, affordable Australian capital city like Adelaide, the per-week rent on the most basic single bedroom unit in a low-cost suburb is priced at about AUD$150 presently. With at best a casual low-paying job, this is unaffordable for most young people from low income families, much less young people who have been forced to leave home at the age of fourteen or fifteen. The simple fact is, the private rental market - even at its lowest, marginal level - has been designed and intended mostly for adults, and more so for skilled workers earning average adult wages. Without a fixed address (i.e. a 'house') in this society, it's also close to impossible to gain access to a job, to continue your education, or even to claim emergency relief funds from this country's federal social welfare agency, 'Centrelink'. Throw into all this the psychological and emotional fallout of being evicted or running away from a negative family life; the grief of losing a sense of belonging or stability, and struggling with adult issues without a sufficient level of emotional maturity or experience, and the barriers to housing are amplified beyond the grasp of many young people in such situations.

Underlying these barriers to survival for early 'home leavers' is the basic fact that our society (our 'culture') is not  designed to produce young people who are fully able to make a living and survive, without at first reaching an ever-increasing standard of entry-level qualifications. That is, to be 'independent', you must first have the 'stuff' that qualifies you for taking even the most basic place in the 'pyramid' (i.e. a place to labour within the hierarchy). This is the pyramid to which - as Daniel Quinn likes to say - we all must drag our stones in a 'Taker' civilisation.** But only if, these days, we have the requisite skills, education and experience. All of which your average, delayed-adulthood young person lacks until they have at least finished twelve years of schooling and a couple years of low status work. Youth homelessness is not a case of failing as an individual, or being 'poorly adapted'. It's complex economics, bureaucracy and social inequity, placing a young person who has 'nowhere else to go' and who is not expected to have financial or emotional independence into an unforgiving adult context that requires the crossing of nigh-impossible barriers in order just to survive.

Programs never turn the river aside

This PhD journey I've been on over the past three years reaffirms everything I knew about the causes of inequality, and grassroots ways it might be addressed (other just than through the 'usual suspects' of socialism and 'The Left'). But it has also helped me gain a new understanding of homelessness as one example of people being put 'beyond civilisation', as Daniel Quinn attempts to argue in his book of the same title. And most profoundly for me, 'doing' this doctoral research has demonstrated (in my opinion at least) that social programs tend to be ineffectual without addressing root causes; without changing the way people think through problems. As Quinn has eloquently highlighted, programs amount to "sticks planted in the mud of a river to impede its flow. The sticks do impede the flow. A little. But they never stop the flow, and they never turn the river aside..." . Programs, whether policies; government white papers, green papers, family reconciliation programs; social work and of course homeless shelters, do nothing to 'solve' homelessness as a phenomenon or social ‘problem’, as long as it is the society itself which is the root issue; homelessness is, in this sense, just one flow-on effect or 'symptom'. Of course, homelessness programs might and do help some young people to make it back to that 'mainstream' of fixed housing, waged living, and educational attainment. And that is great, and I am a big supporter of these programs in this sense particularly. That being said however, if we want homelessness itself - the structures it involves and the social assumptions wrapped up in our ideas of homelessness - to stop happening and being treated punitively, ad infinitum, we will need to fundamentally re-think how our civilisation works. We will need to embrace the notion that, so goes Quinn’s refrain, there is no one right way to live.

An unbalanced equation

"Homelessness is slightly more than a euphemism for poverty, since it draws attention to the special form poverty takes in hypermodern cities, which might be defined as cities in which space is so valuable that none of it can be spared for the poor." - D. Quinn

Drawing upon social scientists such as Peter Marcuse, Quinn devotes some time within his book 'Beyond Civilisation' to questioning why our societies are generally uncomfortable and frightened by homelessness. He wonders, with a bit of an informal nod to much pre-existing theory, whether the settled society's aversion to homelessness might simply arise because it represents an abject state produced by the settled society. It is, in this sense, an uncontrollable product of our civilisational inequities. These are inequities which, at any one time (and over and over again), will exclude some members from the civilisational ‘community’: those who cannot afford, are denied access to, cannot cope with, or have rejected the increasingly high premiums of civilisational space and membership. From a social point of view, the presence of homelessness is uncanny and out-of-place because, as anthropologist Mary Douglas famously argued in her book 'Purity and Danger', it is a 'liminal' or in-between state which does not 'fit' easily into preconceived social categories (in this case, of 'home'). Anomalous social categories - such as homelessness in the context of a settled society - are seen as suspicious, unclean, between worlds, or strange. Homelessness is in this sense the unbalancing of a social equation; the evidence of the failure of a social structure that is thought to be all-encompassing and 'the only right way'.

Which is why, as Quinn and many others before him have highlighted, homelessness is so often 'tackled' in a negative mode; why homelessness is considered 'vagrancy' and a 'problem'. Instead of reconsidering our notion of home; of enabling spaces beyond 'civilisation' to offer safety, belonging and the chance of a good way to make a living, we go on constructing the state of being 'outside' of settled housing as abject, anomalous. And we make this very thing a reality, by not allowing, assisting or enabling spaces to exist 'beyond'. We make it close to impossible for people who were once 'members' of civilisation, but who cannot or will not exist 'within', to have decent ways to make their own living, exist alongside of or under or above civilisational spaces, or 'outside of' civilisation altogether; to build social connections and autonomy amongst other people in similar situations.

Spaces 'beyond-home' are made dangerous; homeless people are preyed upon; denied resources unless they access them 'illegally' or submit to a set of mainstream systems (that is, brought back into the scope of civilisation). Living outside or between civilisational home-space is made to be very uncomfortable, alienating and an ongoing state of misery. It is punished, looked down upon, socially derided. It is in the ‘interest’ of civilisation to make homelessness exactly that: homelessness. To be lesser. To make existence beyond civilisation - whether by circumstance or by choice - as prohibitive and as uncomfortable as possible (and the job of ‘getting back into’ civilisation as we all know it the only desirable and rational thing to do). And so homelessness becomes a state of privation; of exile. Of disconnection. Because of how it is constructed: as being without what is considered 'home'. That is the way in which civilisation  (in the sense of our 'Taker' culture), as the 'normal' state of dwelling, can be justified as the only 'realistic', safe or productive space in which to exist and make a living. 

This is not dissimilar to the ‘war on drugs’. It’s not unlike Australia’s policies of deterrence towards‘illegal asylum seekers’. States, cities and councils focus on programs, employ combative and punitive discourse and policy: to control, normalise, convert and – if all else fails – punish, deprive, confine, persecute and ‘move on’ (but also, in the public imagination, romanticise, fantasise and fetishise) any person or group of people who fall outside our cherished notions of civilisational membership. Homelessness, like being an undocumented ‘illegal’ asylum seeker, is viewed as an abject state of ‘vagrancy’ by most settled societies. It simply does not ‘compute’ within our social machinery. In a social sense, it is seen as carrying a movement and strangeness which transgresses settled notions, invoking the same reactions as in the case of other 'nomadic' subjects - gypsies or carnies or hunter-gatherers or nomadic tribes or madmen on the ‘ship of fools’, all of whom have been habitually misunderstood and mistrusted. A whole swathe of writers and researchers have attested to this, from social scientists and anthropologists, to writers, philosophers and historians.

Easy blame

During the course of my research, I've gained the impression that one of the major reasons why we have such programs; the reason why we revile and fetishise nomadic, off-the-grid living situations such as homelessness, is that it is much easier to blame, target and romanticise the subjects of civilisational failure (through endless programs, regulation, policing, funding, counting, researching, depiction and caricature). It is far easier to do this, to blame or caricature individuals and maintain the status quo, than it is to turn that focus on the larger causes of these excluded states of being; to seek to question the society from which this unbalanced equation is produced. It is akin to the social ego protecting itself by externalising blame. That is, a basic failure of a social structure to sustainably enable all its members to make diverse and meaningful ways of living, with – as Quinn argues – a ‘minimum of stress’. It is easier simply to think (a la Quinn's critique) that there is only ONE right way to live (at any cost, even if it destroys us). Anyone who falls outside of our way of life should be encouraged to join us or come back to us (and we’ll make damn sure it'll be very hard to live otherwise!).

Civilisation's 'bitch'

"One element of acceding to homelessness is accepting the fact that the poor will consistently choose the least worst alternative available to them. If you find them living under a bridge instead of in a nice, clean municipal shelter just a block away, you can be absolutely sure they haven't made a mistake -- from their point of view. The shelter's admittance procedures may be intolerably invasive, arbitrary, or humiliating, or its rules may be Draconian. Whatever, the discomforts of sheltering under the bridge are more endurable."  - D. Quinn

 

To this I should add another troubling issue (and in doing so, some 'in the know' might notice that I'm drawing upon Foucault's approaches to surveillance and control in his books 'Madness and Civilisation' and 'Discipline and Punish'): It is doubly worrisome that for those whose exile from 'civilisation' was not by any kind of 'choice' or 'lifestyle', and whose desire it is to live successfully within civilisation as we think of it (to have a decent job, a house to live within, social connections beyond exile), there are huge institutional and social barriers to gaining  inclusion. There is often the somewhat counter-intuitive expectation that in entering or going ‘back’ into civilisation, you must first fully become civilisation’s object (i.e. its ‘bitch’).

This is true also for other 'transgressive' states of being vis-a-vis civilisations, whether as an immigrant, a former convict, or an institutional subject 're-entering' society or being 'rehabilitated', that is: to the 'civilised' habitat. And you must do this in order to prove your eligibility and worthiness and 'civility'. You must jump through every hoop; possess every sign and documentation to prove your genuineness; your 'neediness'; your victim status (so that you are suitably 'deserving'). You must give up all private and personal details to scrutiny and evaluation by ‘experts’ (social workers; immigration officers; parole officers; drug enforcement officials) endowed with your ‘management’ (no matter how well-intentioned they may be). You must give up all signs and behaviors that stink of your otherness or transgression or - in previous times - 'barbarity' or 'savageness'. You will be subjected to rigid rules, marked off against checklists; detoxified; quarantined (socially or institutionally); subject to surveillance and regulations, and constantly told that you are not yet ‘one of us’; that you are not ‘on the same level’ as those who manage your passage back into civilisation (those 'gatekeepers' of social inclusion; the social workers, the parole officers, the immigration officials, religious ministers and denominational charity workers, etc.). And even when you have passed all such ‘tests’, your membership within civilisation will continue to be monitored and subject to discrimination. Most ‘existing’ members of a civilisation would be outraged to undergo such rituals of objectification if they were imposed upon them. But because of their 'outsider', transgressive status, it is deemed ‘acceptable’ to apply these procedures and programs to those who are 'entering' civilisation.

‘Citizenship’ is not merely about joining the membership of a nation in a modern sense. I feel there is a much more basic and older element to citizenship, which is this process of being deemed ‘civilised’ – being marked as settled, fixed, and ultimately a ‘pyramid builder’ (to coin a Quinn term). It is the process of submitting to the decree: ‘There is only one right way to live.’ And that way is, in the most basic sense, to take a place in a pyramidal structure that was never organised to benefit all its members. And one that cannot, because of its structure, allow all of its members to extend the job market to successfully include themselves. It is a social structure quick to put up the 'no vacancy' sign, but which nevertheless persists in consuming and converting all other cultures, ways of making a living, and once-diverse tracts of the biosphere. All in the pursuit of one way of life.

Of course, I don't know if I'd have much luck pitching Quinn's argument of 'acceding' to homelessness within the 'recommendations for social policy' chapter I will inevitably have to put within my thesis. I can just imagine the kind of horrified response I would get! But I really wish I could. I wish I could fully map out this notion. And that notion, which I have partially argued within my thesis already, is that couch surfing is an extremely resourceful, socially connected, but too often thwarted and fragile practice engaged in by young people after finding themselves 'beyond civilisation'.

 Nowhere to go

Young people who are 'out of home' early and are offered no clear transition into 'independent' living (i.e. 'civilisation'), are faced with two or three basic choices available to them at any time:

1.  Go through the system. Find a way to seek formal help from the 'homeless system' (i.e. emergency housing and outreach) and hopefully transition back into 'civilisation' (house, job, education, mainstream community). This will only be achievable by first sufficiently ‘proving’ your homeless state (unfortunately this is often through having to demonstrate extreme ‘lack’ – of shelter, of social connection, of health etc -- only extreme lack ‘proves’ that you’re in a ‘high priority’ state of need according to many mainstream homeless policies). Once you’re ‘in’, you will then need to submit to the 'system' of shelters and youth workers (and all the varying degrees of privacy invasion; Draconic, restrictive rules and regulations; second-class treatment and intensity of surveillance and control this system involves, once it has decided to take you in as a 'homeless body') ;
   
2. 'Sleep rough'. Find public places and other homeless people with whom to dwell 'outside' this system, and with whom you can form social bonds for mutual protection, support and defence against violence and crime (often from members of ‘civilisation’). This is commonly called 'sleeping rough', or ‘absolute homelessness’. It is a living situation which is actually relatively rare compared to other forms of homelessness and housing insecurity. Many people who ‘sleep rough’ in Australia will only do it for brief periods, and will live in a variety of other situations and circumstances. In the cold of winter, many will couch surf to escape the exposure. Some will stay at people’s places overnight, but dwell ‘on the streets’ by day. But sleeping rough is nevertheless the form of homelessness which is the most ‘visible’ to civilisation; seems the most ‘extreme’ by reference to our own standards of shelter and sedentarism, and so attracts the most attention and regulation. In Australia, a couple of statisticians (MacKenzie and Chamberlain) involved in the census have decided to label those who sleep rough in the 'long-term' and have 'entrenched' homeless social networks and 'subcultures' as the "CHRONIC HOMELESS" or "CAREER HOMELESS" (as though homelessness is a degenerative disease you acquire, or a chosen career path -- like being in the 'business' of living on the streets!)).
3. Couch surf. The third major option open to young people is drawing on their own social networks and connections to stay with people who are willing to put them up for no rent (usually as a gesture of ‘goodwill’, which is often compensated for by young people by putting their Centrelink money into the purchase of groceries, or maybe paying petrol for the host household). This option is, of course, couch surfing. Alternatively, young people could also stay for a while in temporary accommodation like hostels (if they can afford it).

From the interviews I carried out with young couch surfers facing homelessness, it became obvious that many young people had turned to couch surfing (i.e. ‘option number three’) quite simply because they didn’t feel there were any other options open to them at the time. Without a job or a living wage, and not having yet completed educational or training qualifications, qualifying for rental accommodation was beyond their reach. But they did need somewhere to stay; to seek support and connection from others (often after having lost or been denied this within their parental ‘homes). They also needed some desired form of shelter and a space from which (they often hoped) they could begin to cope with their situations and decide where to go ‘from there’. As teenagers with ‘nowhere else to go’, the practice of staying with friends or friends’ parents’ often made the most sense. If no such people were available to them, they would go out and find strangers or acquaintances who were willing to ‘put them up’. Relying on their own social networks and resources was the most immediate action young people felt they could take at that initial point of being ‘out of home’. It was often the only practice they had access to or could take control of in their lives.

The human within 'homelessness'

What does this say of our 'civilisation'? Where are the gaps? More often than not, you'll find that those young people dealing with homelessness and displacement were simply in a position where there was 'no place' for them in the broader social structure. No family, no home, no education, no job: all because they lost their crucial social support - their kin, their formative, essential ties - at an age where they could not yet independently engage in the economy; in the job or housing market. They were not 'bums' or 'losers' or failed individuals. They literally 'fell through the cracks' of civilisation, and had nowhere to go. They were figurative exiles.

And yet despite this, my research has shown just how amazing these young people are, despite being 'barred' from civilisation, from social inclusion, at such a crucial point in their lives. From those I've spoken with, most are extremely resourceful, autonomous, socially connected and resilient young men and women. At the same time, many find it very difficult to trust people in authority, because so often they have been let down by systems, or made to feel like a 'number' or as though something was 'wrong' with them because they had been homeless. They must struggle, between the 'cracks' in civilisation, to build their own places to belong; to have support and a sense of identity. And it is so unfortunate that - despite the overwhelmingly good intentions of most of those involved - many of the systems and programs which are supposed to be there to help these young people often ask them to give up that very autonomy, identity, resilience, social (often tribal, highly reciprocal and shared) connection with other homeless youth, and that general resourcefulness which has been so hard-won throughout their struggles to survive. They must, in so many cases of getting emergency accommodation or being 'put up' in denominational charity housing programs (that is, in attempting to 're-enter' civilisation), surrender these strong, independent aspects of themselves. They must 'be helpless', in order to appear to be suitably 'needy' according to the victim schema of these programs. They must, in this sense, 'perform' the subjugated other - be 'broken down' in order to be 'rebuilt' as a member of civilisation.

Beyond civilisation?

This unfortunate aspect of the homelessness services 'system' has raised a great deal of questions for me, which I think point to the most negative elements of civilisation. Ever since these realities became known to me, a skepticism has crept into my thoughts on social policy when it comes to homelessness. So much so, that I question whether any policy, program or service can successfully 'eliminate' homelessness, when it may well be the side-effect of an unbalanced equation. Moreover, homelessness as we tend of to think of it; as a state of privation, exile, and alienation, might well only be so because it is the nature of settled societies to make nomadism an abject, uncomfortable state, and to deny those people living 'beyond civilisation' -- whether by choice or by 'falling through the cracks' of civilisation -- the resources, space and freedom from which to make a comfortable and meaningful existence for themselves, socially and materially. In fact, as anthropologist Catherine Robinson has said, the very wording of homelessness speaks of a bias in what is considered 'home' (the subtext being, home is civilisation; home-less is the lack of  it, and all the aspects of personhood and humanity which are assumed to accompany 'citizenship'). Which makes me wonder more and more whether it is, in some sense, civilisation's ultimate sin to have made it almost universally difficult for people to successfully find a 'home' -- and a way of life -- beyond its orbit. This is a question which is not in any way limited to homelessness, and involves equally the experiences of all Leaver cultures at the hands of Taker civilisations.

Our civilisation likes to tell us: "It's my way or the highway." It is crucial that we question this, if we want to strive for a sustainable future which also works for people.

* As quoted in Michel Foucault (1991) by Didier Eribon, as translated by Betsy Wind, Harvard University Press, p. 282)
** Note that Daniel Quinn, throughout his work, does not believe that civilisation in itself is unsustainable; rather, it is the Taker culture underlying our civilisations which is unsustainable. In 'Beyond Civilisation: Humanity's Next Great Adventure', Quinn does not exclude civilisation as a future path, if civilisations (note, plural!) are grounded in sustainable cultures and draw upon elements such as the tribal approach as a basic social unit, enabling a diversity of ways of making a living -- not just one, totalitarian form of civilisation: 
"Diversity, not uniformiy, is what works. Our problem is not that people are living a *bad* way but rather that they're all living the *same* way. The earth can accommodate many people living in a voraciously wasteful and pollutive way, it just can't accommodate *all* of us living that way."