Post Retirement Working

Kathryn Ryan’s interview with Brunel University’s Dr Alexandra Farrow on Radio New Zealand’s National Radio’s Nine to Noon programme on 7 October 2014, concerning well-being and safety of post-retirement employees, was perfectly adequate in terms of Dr Farrow’s study and its conclusions, but raises issues that go beyond the subject which Radio New Zealand seems to ignore.

Every job held by a superannuitant means that there is one less job available for a younger person.

The world of work is entering a new era.  Jobs are deteriorating in quality (unpaid interns in an expanding list of employment sectors, zero-hour contracts with exclusionary clauses, ‘Mac’ jobs, enforced ‘flexible’ working conditions, and incomes below a ‘living wage’ standard requiring secondary employment to meet costs) which will result in the disenfranchisement of middle and working classes from normative expectations of prosperity. 

The Economist (18/1/14) notes that 47 percent of jobs are at risk of becoming automated in the next two decades, affected by the zero marginal cost society (Prospect Magazine 15/5/14), robotics, computerisation as in the case of university lecturers by massive open on-line courses, and social networks as in the case of prostitutes and taxi-drivers.  The digital revolution has altered retailing in ways unimaginable just twenty years ago yet we live in a society which hasn’t changed its structure to accommodate these changes.

Ms Ryan’s interview follows the discourse of the contrived necessity of post-retirement employment and its concomitant, postponed superannuation.  In so doing it contributes to New Zealand media’s unquestioned reinforcement of these concepts at the expense of the wider picture, one which includes job quality, availability and remuneration; superannuation costs, structure, affordability, and tax base remodelling to adapt to this new era; and issues of male employment and identity coupled with societal cohesion and well-being.  Considering current government policies, along with Nine to Noon’s gratuitous endorsement, this country is creating a ‘precariat’ generation that will reach a nominal retirement age sans work, sans super, sans housing, sans savings, sans anything.

Dr Farrow no doubt could have contributed a worthwhile opinion to the wider picture, but the impression left by the interviewer was that there wasn’t one.  Why is that?

The West and Narrative Deprivation

It’s enlightening to consider G K Chesterton’s well-worn quotation, “When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing - they believe in anything" in the manner of the course of the Western world’s cultural narrative.  The Welfare State removed the need for religion by substituting secular compensations for religion’s core offerings; the progress of science removed the need for spiritual explanation; the anarchist Left methodically dismantled cultural identity; political correctness steadily removed racial identity; and globalisation, the European Union, and American cultural dominance and hegemony diminished national identity. 

This leaves denizens without a narrative focus, so any group with a long and strong narrative tradition, however shallow, primitive or prescriptive, is seen as being somehow more spiritual, deep and worthy.  Given the West’s loss of narrative and its ability to defend what remains, criticism of these out-groups is considered off limits.

A typical example of this unconscious and uncritical acceptance of an alien and antagonistic culture, with an implicit ‘swallow it, it’s good for you’ doctrine, was broadcast on Radio New Zealand’s Nine to Noon, on the 9^th of October 2014, under the title of ‘An Australian Muslim woman defends her right to wear the niqab.’ Kathryn Ryan interviewed Semaa Abdulwali, an Australian medical science student who had an opinion piece published in The Guardian three days earlier.

I could try to make excuses for this interview.  Perhaps Semaa Abdulwali fed Kathryn Ryan the questions she wanted asked.  The interviewee was just 20 years of age and it could be that Ms Ryan wanted to spare her immature sensibilities.  Maybe Ms Ryan was so scared of repercussions that shallow and uncritical questioning was her only option.  It’s possible that Ms Ryan was so keen on Islam that she only asked supportive questions. Deep questioning must be left solely to Kim Hill, so it’s outside Ms Ryan’s ambit.  It was an off-the-cuff interview requiring no research.   Or perhaps there’s a line which cannot be crossed when interviewing ‘people of faith’, especially Muslims. 

The end result of this anodyne, unchallenging interview was to discredit Nine to Noon and demonstrate contempt for its listeners, even though we know Ms Ryan can do better.

Why did Ms Ryan not query her statement, “I don’t want to be controlled and told what I can and cannot wear: that is oppression”?  Did the irony not occur to Ms Ryan that Islam, more than any other religion, dictates what women should wear?  One lives by societal control to a greater or lesser degree (e.g. wearing seatbelts, wearing clothes in public, removing crash helmets in banks, etc.) and one does in Rome what Romans do, so why is she the exception?  If a Western woman tries walking alone wearing a summer dress in in any Middle Eastern country, Israel excepted, she would find herself in trouble in no time at all, so why does Ms Abdulwali not show a bit more respect for Australian mores?  She can remove her niqab in public at will, but if she tried that in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan or Pakistan, she would be lucky if ostracism was her worst punishment.  She might have been killed in Canada, Iraq or Somalia.

Ms Ryan could have asked her about the role of Islam in the highly circumscribed lives women live in countries subjected to that religion.  WikiIslam can give excellent pointers. 

There are questions that could have been asked encouraging insight and introspection into the issues Ms Abdulwali raised but none was asked.  A third-party query would have been helpful, such as, “Some would say that this is grand-standing, ‘Look at me and my outward display of piety,’ ‘I’m insecure and the niqab covers it wonderfully,’ ‘it draws attention to you; attention which it seems you crave.’  What would you say to that?”

How about communication, Ms Ryan’s stock-in-trade?  What could be more inhibitory than a head covering to face-to-face communication? Muffling the voice will not help mutual understanding either.  Covering the face in this manner is a deliberately confrontational, self-indulgent affectation.

Ms Abdulwali’s juvenile foible could have been exposed not only for its shallow moral underpinnings but as a deliberate and offensive display of Islamic supremacism. 

Is it fear of Islam that Radio New Zealand won’t ask hard questions?