Clone Truths: A Response to Never Let Me Go

I recently watched the DVD of a 2010 British film, Never Let Me Go. It left a deep impression on me, the whole meaning of the film encapsulated in one scene so devastating in its low-key horror that it stayed with me for weeks. The following isn’t a review of the film, but a philosophical meditation that was inspired by it. Be warned that it contains a few blatant plot spoilers.

Never Let Me Go is based on the novel of the same name by Kazuo Ishiguro. I haven’t read the novel, so my observations were sparked purely by the film.

In an alternative, dystopian Britain, Kathy, Ruth and Tommy are students at Hailsham, an old-fashioned, authoritarian English boarding school, in the late seventies. In class one day a kindly teacher tells them that they are clones, created and raised to be organ donors to extend the lives and health of the population. They can expect to ‘complete’ their lives after their third or fourth donation. 

The three become friends and as young adults are moved to country cottages to await their first donation. Ruth commences a domineering relationship with Tommy although he and Kathy are true soulmates. Devastated by her exclusion, Kathy chooses to become a ‘carer’ of fellow ‘donors’, and is therefore granted a few extra years of life.

Only when it’s almost too late are Kathy and Tommy able to realise their love, come to terms with their unhappy fate and spend some precious time together before Tommy’s last donation. Ultimately Tommy and Ruth reach ‘completion’, and by the end of the film Kathy is anticipating the imminent commencement of the donating process that will lead to her own premature death.

While the film has received near-universal praise, it has been criticised for its low-key approach, the confusing fifties props and quaint English feel. These criticisms miss the point completely. Never Let Me Go may or may not be allegory, strictly speaking, but it’s certainly possible to apply it to actual situations. Of course it’s about living in the moment, making the most of life and so on, but I don’t think this is its main message.

I read this film as a devastating warning of the dangers of a tendency that is more or less universal in the human world and in fact is an inherent part of nature, but that has reached a nadir of almost unimaginable cruelty in the modern world – instrumentalism. I define this widely, as simply using a human or a non-human for one’s own purposes. Seen in this light, the fifties props become vital to the film’s message.

One criticism of the film is that its alternative history isn’t very believable. A reason given for this criticism – that the widespread acceptance by the free humans in the film of the clones’ subordinate status strains credibility – doesn’t really hold. Rather, this criticism reveals a lack of understanding of the extent of instrumentalism operating in the modern world, and the way in which it allows us certain moral blind spots. We are all walking around quite calmly while horrors of instrumentalism take place under our noses every day, and using products that owe their creation to highly organised cruelty. Lobby groups may protest loudly about some of the crueller kinds of instrumentalism, but the bulk of the population cares little about them.

Kindly instrumentalism?

The film’s fifties welfare state atmosphere (despite the fact that the early part of the film is set in the seventies) has a number of paradoxical functions in relation to instrumentalism.

While strict and circumscribed, Hailsham treats its students with a modicum of decency, their tenebrous dormitories brightened with many homely touches. I think that the film uses the mood of postwar austerity to suggest that the incentive to treat the clones decently lies deep in the spirit of cooperation generated during the darkest days of the Second World War, a spirit that saw its apogee in the creation of the National Health Service in 1948, only a few years after the war. The film gradually reveals that the teachers of Hailsham encourage the pupils to create art that they then display in a gallery; we discover much later that this is to prove that the cloned children do in fact have souls and deserve to have some quality of life. And they are granted this, allowed to play and interact at Hailsham, and, when they start donating, convalescing in pleasant hospitals where they are assigned carers to provide moral support.

It is a strength of the film that it can use this austerity in such a multi-layered way. For paradoxically, this very same austerity also illustrates the fact that the clones are second-class citizens. It is the seventies after all, and they are stuck in fifties dourness. They eagerly await the regular deliveries to the school of secondhand goods that we suppose have been put together by charitable organisations.

And in yet another paradox, we might assume that it is this very same notion of a united society, with the goal of a better life for all – a notion perhaps strengthened by the unifying force of the war effort during the darkest days of the Blitz – and the advanced capitalist, technocratic state that was and is its concomitant that has allowed the idea of cloning to take hold.

In other words, all that dour fifties discipline is working extremely hard in the film.

But the relative kindness of the instrumentalism is about to change. In one of the later scenes when the trio are adults, Ruth casually mentions that Hailsham has closed down due to lack of funds and donors are now raised in factory farms. This is a passing reference: we’re not invited, particularly, to imagine these farms. I think the film wants us to focus on the humanity of the main characters rather than to be swamped in visceral horror at the likely squalor and dehumanisation of their successors.

Nevertheless, we can conclude that what happens to the protagonists also makes the factory farms possible; by its very nature, relatively kind instrumentalism, if not recognised for what it is, can lead to a crueller version. Given the neoliberal extremes of the eighties and the ever-deepening reach of this ideology in the decades following it isn’t a stretch to believe that if ‘kindly’ cloning had been introduced in the fifties, by the mid-nineties, when Ruth makes this remark, an attitude of spending money on the wellbeing of clones would be in flight, and that instrumentalism would become more ruthless in the light of spending cuts.

Yet even the earlier, kinder instrumentalism is steeped in horror, and not to be excused. It shows its true heart, or rather lack of heart, most dramatically and disturbingly in one short, low-key scene towards the end of the film. Ruth lies on the operating table during the operation in which she is to make her final donation. The doctors turn off the machines, Ruth flatlines, then what looks like a liver is removed quietly, quickly and cooperatively by medical professionals. After that they pack up with the same calm efficiency, leaving Ruth’s prone body lying on the operating table, eyes open and staring.

There is no sadistic cruelty here, just the beyond-murderous callousness of treating a fellow creature this way. Yet we also have the all-together-now British cooperation in the practised teamwork of the medical staff lifting the liver out of Ruth’s body. Ishiguro seems to be warning British viewers not to be naive about the civilising effects of their culture – it is capable of fostering a great callousness if the end result is considered to be in the service of a greater good.

Earlier, Ruth has told Kathy of rumours that after the third donation donors are made to keep donating. It seems to be one of the myths that the naive, poorly educated clones are prey to, but Ruth’s death and the treatment of her body suggest that keeping clones alive as brain-dead organ factories would not be beyond the conscience of this technocratic state. We’ll come back to the quasi-allegorical possibilities of this scene in a minute.

Despite the contrasts in mood and landscapes, the film made me think of The Road, a novel that imagined an almost uninhabitable America after an unnamed environmental catastrophe. With a father and son trudging through a blighted post-industrial landscape in which nothing grows, the most shocking scene in the book and film depicts a group of people being kept alive in a cellar so they can be slowly cannibalised. With a total lack of compassion, their morally dead captors hack off the limbs of these unfortunate victims bit by bit, needless to say with no anaesthetic.

But what The Road does is present this extremely cruel version of instrumentalism as a consequence of food and resource scarcity and the breakdown of social structures. In this sense Never Let Me Go is far more disturbing because it points to a coldly unfeeling instrumentalism that is occurring on an industrial scale in a supposedly civilised world, and is presented as a positive development to improve the population’s health and longevity.

So, where might the applicability of Never Let Me Go find itself in the real world? You could more accurately ask, where not?

Instrumentalism and animals

As good a place to start as any is the use of animals in medical and product-safety experiments. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals argues that animal experimentation is not only cruel but also money wasting and potentially dangerous to humans, but even if that were not the case there have been thousands of unnecessary experiments, and hundreds of thousands of unnecessarily cruel ones. Egregious horrors abound: monkeys having their vocal cords removed so they can’t scream, and the forced ingesting by animals of toxic substances, causing extreme pain and suffering, in order to satisfy regulatory requirements are just two examples.

Moreover, apart from the actual experiments themselves, cruelty is built into the very structure of animal experimentation; you only have to look at the cages these unfortunate animals are kept in, whose smallness and barrenness seem to confirm a pathological dissociation worthy of the most extreme examples of the mad professor stereotype, the most chilling real-life representation of whom is Harry Harlow, who tortured baby rhesus monkeys while researching the nature of love.

Then we have xenotransplantation, the harvesting of animal organs for transplantation into humans. Pigs, who are sensitive and intelligent, have been chosen as the most suitable donor animal and experiments are ongoing, but they’re not trying it out on humans yet; unfortunate primates are having their healthy organs removed and transplanted with the organs of pigs.

I heard a radio discussion on this topic recently; the interviewee, while making a token reference to humanitarian concerns, said that it might be necessary for pigs created for this purpose to be raised in sterile conditions and therefore they couldn’t be allowed to be outside. It’s not difficult to imagine the widespread sensory deprivation and sheer loneliness these creatures will endure, but the experimental work on this scientific ‘breakthrough’ is already causing great suffering.
 
The Wikipedia article on this topic gives only a passing reference to the concerns of animal rights groups and gives more space to the effects of religious prohibitions, which is evidence for my point. And this critique, which gives a host of valid objections to xenotransplantation, can’t even manage the most cursory reference to animal suffering, although the environment gets a look-in.

This topic is perilously close to the subject matter of Never Let Me Go. Once xenotransplantation becomes widely available, will most people give a tuppence about the fate of the pigs? It’s extremely unlikely, and that’s the point the film is making. Many people don’t care about the conditions in which human prisoners, many of whom have mental illnesses or learning disabilities, are housed. Are they really going to care about the conditions of a donor pig once the media presents them with stories about those who have benefited from these transplants?

Instrumentalism and humans

Anyone watching Never Let Me Go might say ‘we wouldn’t do that sort of thing to humans’. Yet for millennia humans have enslaved others of their species for profit, leading to a level of dehumanisation that has led to cruelties so shocking that even the most empathic of us find them difficult to imagine. Punishments for African-American slaves in the Americas and the Caribbean included lashings, castration, iron collars, boiling fat dripped onto the skin, hanging, stocks, being forced to bear a heavy weight for a year. Rape was common, and some slaves were boiled alive. One of the infractions that attracted punishment was eating sugar cane; the reason the slaves did this was they were starving.  Punishments were meted out by sometimes sadistic overseers so the plantation owners could take an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ attitude if they so chose.

Like our Old World ancestors, we also outsource the slavery so we don’t have to worry about it. Many of the consumer products we buy are produced in unsafe factories in developing countries where unions are banned and workers face shocking conditions, excessive working hours and receive wages so low they can hardly afford to feed themselves. Yet out level of concern doesn’t stretch much further than the length between our eyes and the nearest iPad.

There was outrage in May 2010 when the behaviour of Foxconn, one of the companies assembling iPads, was brought to light after the number of suicides of employees for that year alone reached ten. Yet the outrage was shortlived. How much noise has there been lately about the slavery conditions of the makers of our iPads? Far less than the worldwide response to Steve Jobs’s unfortunate demise and the launching of the latest version of the iPad. I did some Google searches of updates on factory conditions since the original media report in 2010 and could find next to nothing. We care far less for the welfare of those making our iPads than we do about the details of the new edition.

And that’s just gadgets – unless we make the effort to buy ethically, there’s a fair chance that our clothes are being made in horrific conditions either here or in Asia, and there’s a strong chance that child labour was involved, perhaps in the construction but also possibly in the harvesting of the cotton. We may care about this, but our caring isn’t adequate right now – there’s not the public will to stop this type of economic slavery.

Good and bad instrumentalism

Given that instrumentalism is endemic, it seems more realistic to try to control the form it takes rather than eradicate it altogether. For example, employment of others is a kind of instrumentalism, but it’s something most people wouldn’t want to stop even if they could. I want to make a distinction between good and bad instrumentalism and to advocate that we stick to the former, where both humans and animals are concerned.

Kind instrumentalism and humans

Employment of others for a wage isn’t automatically a noble form of instrumentalism. You could argue that there is a great difference between employing someone who has chosen to sell their labour to you and actually buying someone to carry out forced labour for your economic benefit, or forcing slave reproduction to create a future slave workforce. But even the most cursory examination of the class system indicates that millions of people have been forced by the state into permanent positions of poverty and servitude. And in the past the class system has promulgated the pernicious lie that these people are inferior to the richer ones (hence the term ‘one’s betters’). The idea that the poor have only themselves to blame is experiencing a resurgence in the UK and Australia, cynically fostered by dog-whistling politicians who want to cut unemployment benefits, but it never really went away in the US.

The question of employment can help us to make the distinction between good instrumentalism and bad instrumentalism. Let’s say good instrumentalism takes place when the instrumentalised have some power in the transaction, and where they are able to use the arrangement for their own ends. Any arrangement that is sufficiently flexible for the instrumentalised to make the outcome unpredictable is also good.

Applying this to employment, the more power workers have the better – and this is why the role of unions is so important. Allowing workers to innovate and consulting with them also makes for an enlightened instrumentalism that has unpredictable and possibly profitable results. Training – so that the employee has opportunities to advance – is also key. Google, with all its faults, understands this. It gives its workers huge flexibility to structure their own working day, and creates a playful atmosphere to foster collaboration and fresh ideas. Fantastic amenities and work benefits are also part of the mix.

Social mobility is also key to good instrumentalism. If cities cannot get rid of disadvantaged areas, the point is to have sufficient social mobility so people aren’t stuck there. An essential aspect of this is providing excellent services in these areas (education, health, family support, community development). Similarly, having a whole population available to do menial work can be a social disaster. But it may not be such a terrible thing if there’s something in it for the population and – this is key – if their role is temporary. 

Thus, employing students to do menial tasks while they study for a profession benefits both the student and the business as long as the students are paid a decent wage and have decent conditions.

When looked at in this light, unemployment benefits that allow for a dignified life with the ability to buy necessities and a few treats become crucial, because without them we build a population of economic slaves, clearly a bad form of instrumentalism.

Patriarchal religions are notorious for their instrumentalisation of women by mandating reproduction and banning contraception. Women become producers of the religion’s adherents, and the individuals who are the products of that process are not seen as creative humans who must be brought up to fulfil themselves, but cult followers to be dictated to and manipulated by the religious hierarchy (including financially).

Kind instrumentalism and animals

How then to think about the instrumentalism of animals, which is most insidious because sanctioned by large swathes of society? How does someone who continues to eat free range chicken for health reasons reconcile this with her horror at the scene in Never Let Me Go in which the liver is lifted from Ruth’s prone body? We know Ruth is a human and an individual, but we also know that animals are individuals with their own personalities.

Vegans reject outright the instrumentalism of animals, and who can blame them?

I eat free range chicken and eggs  reluctantly because I have allergies. The industrial production of my meat horrifies me, yet I’m way too squeamish to do my own humane killing.

We can talk to human beings and ask them what they want. We can’t do that with animals. So we have to imagine what they might say if we asked them about how they felt about being instrumentalised for food, as self-centred as our imaginings might be.

There is something undignified – I don’t use that word facetiously – in being slaughtered in a processing facility. In the industrialised setting, killing seems to be an act of extreme bad manners, an act of violation totally out of keeping with the setting. ‘So this is what you bastards were planning all along’, the animal might think. However much you abhor hunting, if it is done for food and not sport it gives the hunted animal a shred of dignity.

But hunting is impractical for most people, and has its own cruelties. What exactly might we ask the animals we wanted to farm for food? We could say to them: look, we’re going to breed you for food. Do you want the option of being alive, experiencing life on this earth, if you know this will be your end?

And some beings might – just might – say yes. But I guarantee they would only say yes if we offered them not just humane conditions but exemplary ones. If we allowed them to explore and enjoy piggishness, chicken-ness, being a cow for a set time, and offered them pain-free, stress-free deaths. And I imagine they would agree only on condition that the ‘waste’ products of the industry were given great lives – roosters, bobby calves – even if they could not be instrumentalised – a part of the industrial agreement if you like.

This is not an argument for or against eating meat. Rather it is saying that at the very least we should offer exemplary conditions if we are to continue practising it. Coming to terms with our own instrumentalism gives us, philosophically speaking, no choice but to do this.

But perhaps we would also need to add something else to the mix – an element of the open-ended. Perhaps we could look at innovative ways that humans might interact with these very well treated animals, and arrangements that might allow for the unexpected.

One situation would be that everyone farmed their own animals for meat, offering exemplary conditions, heavily regulated, and if not treating the animals like pets, giving them care and attention and not being able to depersonalise them, despite the risk of being traumatised by their deaths. When the time came for them to die for food, it could be done by a neighbour, but we would have to be willing to kill the animals of others.

The openendedness of this could lie in humans being open to what these animals would offer and what caring for them humanely would teach us about being in the world, and the bonds we might build with them. There would need to be plenty of traffic between these tiny farms and the outside world, a community visitors system perhaps, to ensure that the animals were well treated.

It sounds hopelessly idealistic but the situation right now is simply untenable.

The unexpected outcome might be such a fierce love of these animals that the pressure to develop alternatives – eg meat grown from stem cells, free of the suffering of living animals – would grow enough to ensure that research to this end was adequately funded and meat created in this way became commercially available.

Come to think of it, perhaps I was wrong about one of the film's main messages being the importance of making the most of the time we have. For we are all here for a limited time, subject as we are to the amoral instrumentalism of nature. Perhaps one way of making the most of our own time is to choose the way our own instrumentalism operates during our time on Earth.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Reform

Bernard Keane recently wrote an article for Crikey posing the question: Who killed economic reform?  While he doesn’t define reform, Keane acknowledges that in the minds of many Australians it simply means the grabbing of more money from the poor by the rich, for example the nasty IR deregulation that WorkChoices represented; and that this kind of money grab is exactly what the international Occupy movement is protesting against.

However, Keane’s attempts to broaden the term beyond its remit among this country's incipient plutocrats are uninspiring. He seems to want it to mean technocratic innovation that keeps up with actual changes in the effects of particular fiscal and other economic arrangements. He does quite rightly point to the recent Henry review as an example of a genuine reform agenda that was largely ignored by the government, and he admits that the greedy classes see reform as an increase in their own bottom line; but he isn't able to acknowledge the extent to which they have co-opted the word.

Reform once meant progressive social change – the civil rights struggle, women’s liberation, the fight for gay rights. Among radicals it also meant the provision of greater resources to the poor by a process of gradual social change, a process that was disavowed as soft and ineffective by certain breeds of Marxists who favoured revolution, and too bad if blood was spilt in the streets.

There is no doubt that the Right has a very clear notion of the kinds of reforms it favours. The Coalition has made it very clear it plans to carry out IR ‘reform’ if it gets into power. Aware of the unpopularity of WorkChoices, the party and its corporate supporters have been carrying out a softening-up process of the electorate on this issue for months.

When former minister Peter Reith lost the Liberal presidency in June this year, he used the soapbox he received to talk about the need for urgent IR reform – traditionally code for reductions in pay and conditions. In August, a downturn in retail spending growth – not actual retail spending – led the Australian Retailers Association to call for cuts in the wages and conditions of retail workers, who are already among the most poorly paid in Australia (forget the fact that the real culprits are their own greed, the rise in internet shopping and excessive store rents). In the same month, Liberal MP John Alexander backed cuts to the penalty rates of hospitality workers. When it was reported recently that the Future Fund had lost $2 billion, its chairman, David Murray, said: ‘There's an urgent need to act on productivity, there's an urgent need to calm the IR system down, and there's an urgent need to reduce spending at the public level’. Fascinatingly, this piece of wisdom was originally reported in the Australian and then mindlessly regurgitated (as is the pattern these days) on the ABC’s hourly radio news bulletin.

A conspiracy theorist might imagine a cabal of Coalition members and supporters working together to advance their quaint version of ‘reform’ and what the unions call a race to the bottom when it comes to wages and conditions. Such a conspiracy theory isn’t necessary to see a coalescence of forces working for the same ends, but if it were an actuality it wouldn’t be the first time various pro-corporate forces had worked together on a public relations agenda. In the UK, retail workers are paid so badly that there's a charity dedicated to providing them with financial assistance. Do we really want a similar situation here?

Some elements of Bernard Keane’s version of reform aren't by definition evil. But even so, too often so-called reform ends up taking from the poor and giving to the rich even if that’s not its apparent purpose. Take the GST, which Keane cites without irony as an example of genuine reform. A GST is by its nature regressive, because it taxes rich and poor at the same rate, and because it is a tax on necessities, which affects the poor disproportionately. The introduction of the GST was accompanied by a reduction in income taxes, which are by nature progressive, that is, they seek to tax more highly those who can afford to pay.

Admittedly the push for the GST was wide and came from a variety of sources. Even parts of the welfare sector (including the Brotherhood of St Laurence) believed some form of it would be necessary at some point, although naturally they would have advocated for compensation for the poor.

Yet there was a certain naivety in the support of the GST by economists and the welfare sector: the assumption that the government would actually spend the largesse on delivering services to the community and improving the lot of the disadvantaged. Where, I would ask Keane, are our wonderful schools and hospitals, our model aged care homes, our shining services enabling the physically disabled to fully participate in work and leisure, the psychiatric hospitals that are examples to the rest of the world? Where is the social rainbow that the GST pot was supposed to deliver? And if the GST is not regressive, as some argue, why is the Right pushing for the rate to be increased and for its base to be broadened?

And isn't that the crux of the problem that needs to be confronted here, and that Keane hedges around in a rather weird way (on the one hand he calls himself an economic rationalist; on the other hand he admits that 'In the world created by economic reform, your only value is as a functioning isolated member of a market economy')? The hard and inescapable facts Keane can only gesture towards are that capitalism is out of control, corporations have too much political power, and much stronger regulation of their activities and remit is needed.

This is what genuine reform must acknowledge and act on if it is to be at all worthwhile. Ironically, it also provides the reason why progressive reforms are rarely legislated in Australia these days; the ALP has hardly done anything progressively reformist since it came to power because it is almost entirely beholden to big business. (To support this contention in detail would take a whole other blog entry: I’ll simply cite appalling levels of dole payments, the continuation of negative gearing and superannuation breaks for the rich, and lack of public transport funding.) The carbon price, a genuine reform, is a Greens initiative, carried out by the ALP only because it had a gun at its head; Gillard clearly said before the election that she wouldn't be pursuing such an initiative. Similarly, strengthening of pokie machine regulation is independent MP Andrew Wilkie's baby.

Admitting the extent of corporate rule is the only way to understand what’s going on in the US right now. During the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, the Republican Party is urging a change in the tax system that would increase the tax burden on the poor while further reducing tax on the rich, who are already obscenely undertaxed. This in a country where income inequality is already outrageously high: between 1979 and 2007 the top 1 per cent’s share of the nation’s income more than doubled, to just over 20 per cent.

What of Australia when it comes to economic inequality? There’s a debate going on at the moment about whether Australia has become more unequal income-wise in recent years, but wealth inequality has certainly increased. In addition, as the ACTU stated in March 2011: ‘The wages share of national income of 52.6% is now at its lowest since September 1964. The profits share is near the record highs it reached in 2008, at 28.2% of national income'. Keane is right to try to distinguish his idea of reform from anything that increases economic inequality, but it’s almost certain that politicians from the mainstream parties don’t make this distinction, and the majority remain relatively unconcerned, publicly at least, about the issue of rising economic inequality.

But I want to do some culture jamming at this point, to deliberately disrupt and derail the discussion and talk about something that flies in the face of the very notion of reform in its current incarnation, although it is an example of its original meaning.

Why do we always want to increase productivity anyway, that is, create things for less money? Who said we had to do this? The slavish grasping at productivity has led to a situation whereby most of our goods are produced by economic slaves, some of them children. Animals that are bred for meat, skins and fur get treated in unspeakable ways because of so-called productivity. Productivity is a dragon that it is time to slay, just as corporations in their current form no longer serve us.

Why can’t both the quality of work and the happiness of those who do it be starting points for human enterprise? Why can’t work be, heaven forbid, holistic?

What I’m proposing is slow work.

We have slow food, slow money, and in the nineteenth century something like slow work was advocated by the Arts and Crafts movement.

Now I know what you’re thinking: pie in the sky stuff. But this is what many people are asking for, the Occupy protesters among them. They don’t want to ditch capitalism, they want to transform it. They want to invest their money in grass roots enterprises that don’t treat the Earth and other people like shit.

I’m not advocating a return to the bad old days of inefficiency. Of course we don’t need seventies hippiedom and the ennui of the old public service. I believe that employees can, if encouraged, find new and efficient ways of doing things, and I certainly believe in innovation. We can combine idealism  with noughties realism and business acumen, not to mention what social media enables.

When I say slow I really mean mindful, meaningful, and something that can take the latest findings of psychology and human flourishing and apply them to work. But I also mean work that takes human flourishing as its central goal.

This is exactly the kind of work that some enterprising individuals are even now fostering in the developing world. These people have created a new type of capitalist entity, the social enterprise.

Social enterprises may be profit making or not for profit. Their point of difference is that their first priority is a social mission – that is, they start from a commitment to human wellbeing. There’s a focus on giving people a living wage (a concept we’re rapidly losing in the West even as we champion it for developing countries) and fair conditions. In some cases, social enterprises teach new skills, but they may also harness existing skills (the opposite of the de-skilling of artisans that factories in the developing world continue to be guilty of). Some social enterprises sell goods that have Fairtrade certification.

If we’re doing it in the developing world, why can’t we do it here? If we can be idealistic over there, why not in Australia?

So what's the reform that would bring this about? Change the rules around corporations so that the increase in human happiness, rather than profit making (at all costs to humans, animals and the environment) is their first priority. Take away corporations' status as people, and prosecute them if they don't make human flourishing their central mission.

Now that's a reform worth considering.