How capitalism is stealing our sleep

In an online story in Hyperallergic magazine about a Festival of Sleep exhibition at London's Museum of the Home, we read that it is capitalism that has been stealing our sleep.

"Aha!" insomniacs everywhere (they include this weary, five-hours-a-night-if-I'm-lucky columnist) gasp at this illuminating, atrocity-explaining truth.

"Today, the average adult gets around six-and-a-half hours a night, far less than our preindustrial ancestors," Hyperallergic diagnoses.

"If art historian Jonathan Crary is to be believed, late-stage capitalism is to blame for our insomniac tendencies. In his 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, he argues that the ever-increasing demands of a globalised economy - the 24-hour news cycle, the endless scroll of a Twitter feed, the ability to work anywhere, at any time - have taken their toll on our ability to disengage.

"When we manage to close our eyes and slip away, we access the last remnant of our lives that is untouched by capitalism. 'Sleep is a ubiquitous but unseen reminder of a premodernity ... which began vanishing 400 years ago,' Crary writes."

As well as being contained in a deserved criticism of evil capitalism, Crary's idea that sleep temporarily liberates us from the hell of capitalism and enables us to time-travel back to premodern times is really rather beautiful.

Whenever, now, I at last feel myself dropping off after midnight (outside my window the Boobook owls hooting plaintively to one another about the meaninglessness of life) I will murmur, gratefully, "Goodbye cruel, modern, late capitalist world, I'm off to a better time and place."

"Unorthodox". "Bizarre". "Weird". "Why on earth did he do it?"

I find myself collecting seasoned commentators' expressions of bewilderment as they try to fathom former prime minister Scott Morrison's now-revealed secret collecting of ministries.

Everyone with half a brain knows that the tabloidy description of what he did as his "portfolio power grab" doesn't wield the matter, that it is all far more mysterious, more complex, more interesting, even more intriguing than that.

Perhaps former High Court justice Virginia Bell, appointed by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to probe the imbroglio, will solve the mystery. And yet, for I am a spiritual person and love the metaphysical and the ineffable (and think what Morrison has done will be a brilliant basis for the plot of the inevitable opera about these dramatic times), I find myself half-hoping an explanation will elude her.

And elude her it may. She is highly trained to make sense of plain facts when perhaps this imbroglio has elements of karma and of mystique.

I am as baffled as the expert commentators gasping "Why did he do it?" but, to put in my two penn'orth, wonder, fancifully, if perhaps there is a religious element to it.

These are very secular, post-Christian times, and agnostic and SBNR (spiritual but not religious) Australians are increasingly out of touch with what goes on in the minds of their deeply Christian brothers and sisters.

Scott Morrison is, famously, a devout pentecostalist, a chapter-and-verse-quoting Bible enthusiast. We know that he believes in the Devil (Morrison calls him "the evil one") so that should Morrison ever concede that his secret collecting of ministries was wrong, he may tell the nation "The Devil made me do it".

When we wonder if something biblical may be behind the imbroglio, we note that Morrison took five ministries (why not two, or 11 or 26?) and that the number five looms very large in the Bible.

At authoritative Christian websites such as biblestudy.com and numerologynation.com we learn that the number five receives an incredible and mystically significant 318 mentions in the Good Book.

They include mentions in the described miracles (and we know that Morrison believes in miracles) of Jesus feeding the 5000 with five loaves and two fishes, and of little David slaying the brute Goliath with his slingshot with one of the five stones he took from the brook.

Whether all this thickens or thins the plot of The Case of the Secret Ministries, I am not sure.

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