Art for art's sake, money for God's sake!

Why Universal Basic Income for artists is a really bad idea

I hear tell that the Irish ‘government’ has tabled a proposal to give a ‘Universal Basic Income” (UBI) to artists, who, we are reminded, have been having a hard time during the panicdemic, what with venues being closed and what not. 

There was an innocent time when I might have cheered such a proposal. Back in the faraway 1990s, when I started writing a weekly column for the Irish Times, ‘basic income’ was one of my earliest themes. I wrote frequently on the subject when almost no one else in the media — in the world, actually — was talking about it. I first came across the idea when I became friendly with Fr Sean Healy and Sr Brigid Reynolds of the Conference of Major Religious Superiors (CRMS), who conducted seminars in Dublin to address poverty and related issues and issued very informative booklets on such themes. I don’t  know if Fr Sean and Sr Brigid are still going. They were among the many of my friends and acquaintances who fell off the choo-choo train after the world changed and I continued speaking my mind and heart even though all around me was losing sense and reason. 

Fr Sean and Sr Brigid were good people who did a lot of very important and inspiring work. At the time I used to describe them as ‘the permanent opposition’ (a role nowadays fulfilled by Gemma O’Doherty and, bizarrely, myself). Maybe they’re still out there, poised to take a lap of honour now the idea that politicians used to scoff at is back on the table. I think they and their work suffered collateral damage from the eruption into plain sight of clerical abuse and such like in the late 1990s — just one of the many bad consequences for good people of the infiltration of the Church by lowlifes and the spinelessness of its leadership, generally speaking. 

The CMRS later became CORI (Conference of Religious Superiors) and as far as I know is still on the rails, though I’m unsure whether it is still concerned with poverty among non-religious people. I think the name-change came about after the ever mordant Vincent Browne suggested that, what with the way things were going, an organisation with the words ‘religious’, ‘major’ and ‘superior’ in its title was probably not such a great idea. 

At that time I was coming out of my leftie phase, but basic income still seemed like a good idea. The concept was that the tax and social welfare systems would be absorbed into one, with the elimination of much of the bureaucracy attaching to each. Every member of society in need of state assistance would receive a regular financial transfer, and all others would receive the same amount by way of, in effect, tax relief. It was a little more complicated than that, but not very. The beauty was that those receiving a state subvention would be encouraged to pursue other economic activity, rather than prevented from doing so as under the prevailing social welfare system. This would eliminate the army of bureaucrats, snoopers and snitches employed to ensure that social welfare dependency remained as humiliating as possible. The idea of giving similar transfers to people who already had an income was both a hurried nod towards something resembling equality, but also a way of smoothing the way for occasional migration between the two categories. 

A quarter of a century go, I wrote about the launch of one of Fr Sean and Sr Brigid’s publications on the subject as follows:

‘Out of the turmoil of a church which is increasingly criticised and denigrated, there emerges the kind of thinking that in a more healthy society would be done by politicians. If implemented, the CORI proposal would guarantee a weekly income, to lift every citizen, as a minimum entitlement, beyond the poverty threshold, with minimal adverse implications for the currently contented sector of this society.

‘The basic income proposal, like all of this body's previous work, is radical and prophetic. It addresses some of the most fundamental issues confronting this society, including structural inequality, dependency, poverty traps, disincentives, tax evasion, social welfare fraud and, more fundamentally, the lack of social solidarity. It is also a solidly rational proposal, tested and costed against prevailing objections and emerging intact. A left-of-centre government should grab this proposal with both hands. But I wouldn't hold my breath about the present lot. And if a government which includes all of the main left wing elements in Irish politics does not see fit to implement such thinking, who on earth is ever going to?’

Different times, to be sure. Rarely are we provided with a more graphic illustration of societal and social-thinking shifting through time as with the topic of Universals Basic Income. 

The idea has come into its own now with the sudden unleashing of talk about the ‘Great Reset’. Until the day before yesterday, this was a ‘conspiracy theory’, which is to say that it was spoken about only by people who were still prepared to think for themselves. I gather that even RTÉ, who are to news what Boris Johnson is to conservatism, recently ran a documentary on the subject, which tells us that Herr Schwab’s memo has just dropped on Dee Forbes’ desk. Klaus Schwab is that charming, nattily dressed socialitist with the manner of a James Bond villain who speaks without irony of ‘reinventing the ver-ald’ in his own image, a prospect unlikely to prove pleasing on the eye. If you want to know more, look at one of Dave Cullen’s (Computing Forever) excellent YouTube videos on the subject. Suffice to say that the Great Reset is the fit-out for the New Normal — the Brave New World which will follow the destruction in the Time of Covid of everything decent, fulfilling and worthwhile. 

It won’t work, of course. One look at Uncle Klaus tells you this man knows nothing about human beings, and doesn’t seem very much to enjoy being one — if he is. It won’t work because human beings are not cows in a rotary milking parlour, and because the point of economic activity is to serve human life, not the other way around. 

The Great Reset will not work, most of all, because it is Communism by the back door. Those over 40, old enough to remember where they were when they heard the Berlin Wall had been toppled, surely know this as a primary fact of reality. And yet, here we are, poised to embark on the same path the Slavic peoples were herded down 103 years ago, and are still waking up in cold sweats about. 

And so, if there is one idea I had in my past life that I must now solemnly disown, it is Universal Basic Income. You might expect this article to be me saying, ‘I told you so!’ But no. Henrik Ibsen’s words, sometimes dubious-sounding, were never more true: ‘Any idea more than twenty years old is already false.’ 

That was then and this is now. UBI in the present circumstances, whatever its ostensible benefits, would be a disaster beyond imagining, rendering its ‘beneficiaries’ permanent captives of the state. When I first wrote about it in the early 1990s, the political class was coming up with all kinds of spurious reasons why it could not work, including the perennial, ‘Where is the money going to come from?’ I answered all these questions at the time, while knowing full well that the politicians did not want UBI because it would liberate people from control by the state. That was why they opposed it, hammer and tongs.

Now it will almost certainly have the opposite effect, which is why it is suddenly in favour. This is because, combined with the social credit systems which have recently been road-tested in Chine-ah by the interesting newly-minted partnership of Big Tech and the Chinese Communist Party, UBI will function to enslave whole swathes of the population in a panopticon that would have had even Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin waking in cold sweats. This is a bit much for the present article, but I wrote in detail about the matter a years ago in First Things, and you can read the article here: https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/10/our-panopticon-future

There are particular reasons for being concerned about the rolling out of UBI as, in the first instance, a stipend for artists. A cursory perusal of the proposal might lead one to think that the government is deeply concerned about the loss of income suffered by artists during the panicdemic, but since the government clearly doesn’t care about anyone else’s loss of income, I think we can safely rule that out. In reality, it is clear, the politicians have hit upon a way of ensuring the continued silence of artists in the face of the radical encroachments on human freedom currently being pushed down the pipe. 

I am all in favour of artists continuing to eat, but only if they continue — or, more accurately, resume —  fulfilling the functions carried out by artists through the ages: to evince and mimic the cry of the human soul on the erratic voyage through this valley of tears and laughter.

It's undeniable: Irish artists, in the main, like Irish journalists in their entirety, have abandoned their posts in the service of their sacred calling. This tendency has been visible for some time: artists jumping aboard the nearest PC wagon, writers falling silent when the cause was less than optically optimal, pop stars even queuing up to bayonet the wounded if the cloud formations looked auspicious. These tendencies have become visible in spades during the panicdemic. Were it not already clear that we have no Václav Havel, no Czeslaw Milosz, no Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, it is now. As human freedoms came under unprecedented threat in this ostensibly still free Ireland, only one man on the island has emerged from the alleged ranks of the successors to Yeats to clothe himself again in glory, and that man was Van the Man, perhaps not coincidentally the artist who stands head-and-torso above his fellows in the creative firmament of ‘modern’ Ireland, the greatest poet and soul singer since Patrick Kavanagh. 

In general — actually, pretty much entirely — Irish artists have been evasive and disengaged concerning the drifts and turns of human society in Ireland and the world, and have covered their cowardly tails with a professional ideology of art-for-art’s-sake: ‘We do not grub around in political matters.’ I do not say that it is the role of artists to be making public statements, but I can't help noticing that they have no problem making statements they anticipate will cast them in a gracing light with liberal media, but have rather less to say about matters that, while radically encroaching on the human, have not yet been announced as fashionable causes. 

It seems to me that an ‘artist’ who remains silent when the tanks of unfreedom are rolling down the high street is unworthy of being deemed a successor to Pearse and Yeats. 

In my years as a journalist, writer and sometime playwright, I rubbed elbows, though not for ‘health’ reasons, with many artists and artistic types — poets, musicians, novelists, dramatists, dramaturges, bards, actors, versifiers, singers, essayists, intellectuals, pseudo-intellectuals and others. In more than a few instances, I did what I could to help and promote these people and their work. And yet, over the past eight months of Ireland’s undeclared agony of evil and stupidity, only one of these has troubled to get in touch after I decided I had to stand up against the obscene madness of it all. And that individual,  an actor who once played a bit-part in a play of mine — someone I had not heard from for the decade or more since he last needed a favour —  texted to express his ‘concern’ about the ‘rhetoric’ he was hearing from me. 

It is for these reasons, while now declaring my mature opposition to the very concept of Universal Basic Income, I wish to add my absolute horror that it be used to subvent an artistic class that has largely ceased to be fit for purpose.

Is art now merely a meal ticket? A day job? A sinecure? We have already seen the damage done to the conscience of Irish art and writing by Aosdana and its infamous cnuas — the annual stipend paid to eminent artists who have passed the mediocrity exam set by their already elevated fellows — one of Charles Haughey’s lesser ideas. In large part the cnuas — money as an instrument of censorship — explains the absence from the Irish firmament of Havels, Miloszes and Solzhenitsyns: there’s nothing quite like a regular cheque from the state for keeping your tongue tied to the trivial, irrelevant and fashionable. 

I do not suggest that artists be left to starve. That is the fate reserved for journalists who refuse to convert to become journaliars. But I do think that, with the clouds of totalitarianism gathering overhead, it is time for artists to cease their nonsense about ‘art-for-art’s-sake’ and give us a taste of what the great, great, great Solzehenitsyn called ‘art for man’s sake’.