Instead of an economy that satisfies needs, ours is an economy that inflames desires.
— Abdullah Öcalan
What generates homelessness? Our economy does.
That is so, at least, at one level of analysis: our current economy is the “proximate cause,” the nearest or closest factor that generates homelessness. At a deeper level of analysis, however, the “ultimate cause,” the most deeply rooted factor that generates homelessness, is the entire technological system to which the present global economy belongs, along with all modern social forms as well as all of what passes for politics within that same underlying system.
Especially through its economic component, the global technological system not only sows and cultivates homelessness, but also effectively masks that it is doing so. The dominant means of such masking is the generation of a segment of the population that is reduced to homelessness in a more glaring way than is the rest of the same population.
Such a mechanism for hiding the homelessness that the system visits upon all human beings without exception, hiding it by making the homelessness of a relative few egregious, is of the same sort as that operative in racism as the mechanism that distracts the majority of those oppressed within the global system by propelling that majority to consider itself superior to one minority or another, which is thrust even lower down the social-economic-political scale. In the case of the United States, that most-despised minority in relation to which the larger mass of the oppressed are systematically encouraged to feel superior consists of African Americans. Elsewhere, that role is played by other minorities — or even by majorities, in places where the system has granted a minority of the population dominance over the majority, as is quite common in places that fall prey to plunder by the various forms of imperialism.
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Should that be so, then would not human homelessness consist in this, that the genuine need for a dwelling is not yet experienced as the need? But what if humanity was already aware of such homelessness? In that case it would already no longer be a misery. It is, rightly considered, the only sustainable demand that calls mortals along the way into dwelling.
— Martin Heidegger
Perhaps what Heidegger suggests in the lines above is the final, underlying meaning that arises from all human homelessness: the call to humanity to awaken to the one and only truly, definitely human need, the need for home.
If so, then what is most needful for that very need itself to be acknowledged is the radicalization of homelessness itself, until it becomes no longer possible not to recognize the homelessness, everywhere and at all times, into which we have all been cast.
The exponential growth of migrant masses circling the globe in flight from destruction, whether those masses flow north from the southern hemisphere, or west from Asia, most especially Asia’s southwestern part (what we call “the Middle East”), or merely accumulate as consumer capitalism produces ever greater numbers of those without shelter in “advanced industrial countries” such as the United States, would then be no more and no less than a shatteringly loud wake-up call to all humans, calling them all without exception — even Elon Musk on Mars, should he ever make it there — to awaken to their humanity.
Mentioning Elon Musk, he and others of his ilk, such as Bill Gates and many more among the super-rich, often make much of doling out some of their riches to those “less fortunate” than they. That is, they make much of all their contributions to “charity.”
However, that word charity (from Latin caritas) originally just meant “love,” as when Christianity’s Saint Paul writes in one of his letters that “faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13:13 NRSV). In that passage, Paul is not recommending that followers of Jesus go out and make great monetary fortunes for themselves, like Musk and Gates, so that they can then turn around and throw cash donations, however large, back down to those they have climbed above in the competition to accumulate the financial capital that passes for wealth in our society today. Rather, Paul is enjoining us all to love one another. That’s all.
In order to help us heed that Pauline call, we would do well to listen to the words of another early Christian text where we are told, “We love, because He first loved us” (1 John 4:19 NRSV). Nor does it matter in the least just who or what, if anything, we take that “He” to be — including a She (transgendered or not), an It, William Blake’s Great Nobodaddy, or the yawning gap (chaos in the etymologically original sense) that, in opening, makes room for whatever comes forth to come forth. All that matters is to experience being loved — an experience, indeed, the only one, that first frees us to travel along the road of loving others as we are loved. Love just spreads itself that way.
It is only by going along that way of loving because we have been loved, that, in the very going, we can build together a common human dwelling place, a common home. What is more, it is only by going along that way together that we can truly be awakened to our bottomless need for just such a home.
Nobody special, just another homeless person to go along with all the rest of us
ENDNOTES
This is the first in what I expect to be a series of interrelated posts addressing various aspects of the issue of homelessness in modern global civilization.
The epigraph with which I begin this post is from Öcalan’s Capitalism: The Age of Unmasked Gods and Naked Kings — Manifesto for a Democratic Civilization, Volume II (Cologne, Germany: International Initiative Edition, 2017), p. 39 (with one slight modification: for clarity of reference, I substituted “ours” for “it” in the phrase “. . . it is an economy . . .”).
The epigraph at the start of the second and final section of this post is my translation of a paragraph from the first version (delivered in August 1951) of Heidegger’s lecture “Bauen Wohnen Denken,” in Vorträge. Teil 2—Gesamtausgabe 80.2 (Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Vittorio Klostermann, 2020), p. 1089.