Robert Rowland Smith’s blog: On consumerism

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 11:22:36 +0100

We’ve grown accustomed to the notion of consumerism as a secular sin, a shameful practice of self-indulgence. But although consuming, especially in the form of shopping, is a guilty pleasure that we may rebuke ourselves for in private, it’s something for which we can be globally proud. After all, consumerism wouldn’t exist if there weren’t an excess of assets, and an excess of money to buy them. It is a dream come true, something which our medieval forebears, say, would have found awesome.

However, this capitalist reverie soon meets its nemesis. For if consumerism depends not on a classic supply-demand equation, but on a supply-supply, it has merely created the illusion of infinite resources, while ignoring the huge disparity between the affluent and the destitute. The reality is that resources are finite and that credit, which for so long fuelled (this is the right metaphor) the growth of consumerism, has shrunk. If anything, the supply-supply model has been replaced by a demand-demand structure whereby so-called emerging economies - China and India - will want their turn at the trough, just as that trough is being taken away. This out-does any crisis in supply, for we can no longer remedy it through productivity, which was the twentieth century response. No matter how productive we become, there’s a zero sum game in town that declares we’re on an inexorable path to exhausting the resources of the planet once and for all.

So we have two stories. There’s the late-capitalist story that consumerism can still bounce back, and the post-capitalist story that it never will, a battle between the infinite and the finite. Where does this leave the consumer? With an expanded conscience. Where previously you would spend too much on yourself and feel just a slight bruising of your moral body, now when you shop for less-than-necessary items, your conscience extends well beyond your individual morality to the destiny of the world. Shopping is no longer a private activity, but a public statement. Willy-nilly, all shoppers are becoming ‘ethical’: feelings of guilt are the internal barometer of the degree to which we’ve betrayed humankind. But is the only ethical position therefore to stop shopping?

The classic answer is to buy only what you need, and not reach for what you want. As King Lear says, ‘our basest beggars are in the poorest things superfluous’. Nearly everything we have is extra, so we can scale back a great deal; we can even redistribute the wealth we have, and thus turn capitalism of whatever ilk into communism. But Lear prefaces his remark by saying ‘Reason not the need’. In other words, the distinction between need and want is crude, if not false. It is the very fusion of wanting and needing that makes us human, and that might distinguish us from animals, who arguably just need. Besides, to consume is to participate in exchange: you don’t simply get a new pair of shoes, you also give up the money required to pay for them; consumerism involves as much give as take. And where there’s exchange, there’s relationship. Perhaps the lesson is that you can spend as much as you can afford on yourself, as long as you know whose pockets you’re lining. It’s less what you’re taking than what you’re giving and to whom.

Robert Rowland Smith’s blog: The world’s first trillionaire

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 20:47:53 +0100

No, he doesn’t exist. Is it just a matter of time?

You’d have to answer no. Of course. Being a billionaire already suggests wealth of such scale that the concept of the trillionaire must surely make the head spin. It’s a whole order of magnitude greater, an earning power unachievable within anyone’s lifetime. That’s not just because of the extra noughts, it’s also that where billions can be related back to an albeit élite cadre of individuals, ‘trillion’ gets cited only in relation to nations. We refer to the trillion when we’re talking about total US GDP, for example, which racks up to about fifteen of them, give or take.

It’s a staggering amount of money, but seen from this latter perspective, one trillion dollars stacks up to not much more than 5% of national output. And once you see it in these percentage terms, the optics begin to alter. Think of the leaders of banana republics and corrupt regimes who’ve embezzled a country’s fortune. In such cases, the personal wealth of the potentate must often have exceeded a meagre 5% take from the nation’s coffers.

You can break it down further. Say Slim or Gates or Buffet are worth, what, about $50b each: well, fifty marks a not-bad start towards the one thousand lots of one billion required to get to a trillion. With $50b you’ve already got the first unit of the twenty you would need - just nineteen to go. A trillionaire would be only twenty times richer than any of those grands fromages, and twenty is a figure you can look at.

Once you begin to break it down like this, the otherwise unthinkable and astronomical and absurd concept of the trillionaire starts, like the first grains of sand coming loose in a coastal erosion, to shed some of its impossibility. They thought you could never land a man on the moon, but once the idea was born, the reality began to twitch, however embryonically, into life. To conceive the inconceivable is to start to make it possible.

Besides, capitalism does not by nature incline to limiting itself. A capitalist economy that imposed a cap on earnings could no longer claim to be a capitalist economy, and in this sense it has infinity built into it. It espouses growth not (just) out of greed, but because growth is definitive of capitalism. The very principle of ‘capital’ is that it provides a base load of assets from which more assets may be generated; capital that just sits there doesn’t count as capital but dead money that’s gradually losing its value. There may be no trillionaires yet, but the card-carrying capitalist will believe that yes, it is indeed only a matter of time.

The profile of the trillionaire, imaginary as it might be, thus functions as an important mascot for the free market. It says ‘Not yet, but one day’, and so fits in with capitalism’s speculative nature. ‘Speculative’ in both senses: the capitalist speculates on that free market in order to work his wealth, to leverage his assets, to give his capital the chance to grow that it needs in order to define itself as capital. And ‘speculative’ in that other sense of being imaginary. One of the key drivers for capitalism is the permission it grants people to dream of earning more money. Becoming a trillionaire might be a dream, but capitalism suggests that dreams come true.

Contrast it with socialism and communism, both of which envision an end-state. Where capitalism defies its own obsolescence, left-wing state ideologies imagine not an infinite growth towards trillionairedom, but a point at which the ideologies themselves have done their job and mere management takes over. That point is characterised by a more or less equal distribution of wealth and power. You could have trillionaires, as long as everybody was one.

A trillionaire doesn’t have to exist for his imaginary power to cast its spell over capitalist economies. And as long as those economies survive, the greater becomes his chance of coming into being.

Robert Rowland Smith’s blog: Creationism as a mental illness

Tue, 6 Apr 2010 13:33:54 +0100

In Cockney rhyming slang, the word ‘believe’ is represented by ‘Adam and Eve’. When faced with something baffling, shocking or plain peculiar, you might use the rhetorical expression, ‘Would you Adam and Eve it?’ It’s ironic, then, that one of the great debates of the day is about the literal truth of the bible story; or in other words, the extent to which we should Adam and Eve in Adam and Eve.

It’s a question not just of belief but of denial. The phrase ‘in denial’ has become so commonplace it’s hard to still hear its power. In common with the ostrich which, as danger approaches, buries its head in the sand, those who are ‘in denial’ prefer a false but subjective sense of security to a true but objectively scary reality. Denial brings short term, if illusory, comfort.

Hence creationism, the theory/superstition that, contrary to massive scientific evidence, the world began exactly as described in the Book of Genesis. Instead of deriving from millions of years of patient evolution, Adam and Eve popped out, fully formed, like characters from a Swiss cuckoo clock. Would you Adam and Eve it? Of course not. It’s a myth, but like many myths it serves a psychological purpose which is to provide a storybook sense of simple origins, which allays people’s fears. Those who believe this myth to be the truth are in a state of denial.

Along with denial, two other factors connect creationism with mental illness. The first is psychosis, which is an extension of denial. If psychosis is marked by the discrepancy between one’s personal view of the world and the consensual view, creationism holds onto the personal view at all costs, refusing to accept what is abundantly clear. True, if creationism became the majority view, its psychotic character might be mitigated. Except that this majority view would have no more valence than the belief so widely held about the relationship between the sun and the earth before Copernicus proved how the latter orbits the former, and not vice versa.

Finally, creationism shares with autism a lack of ability for irony. Creationists take the bible story as literally true, unable to recognise that it might be working on those other, mythic levels.

If tests for madness include talking to yourself and looking for hairs on the palm of your hand, then here’s another: do you Adam and Eve in Adam and Eve?

Robert Rowland Smith’s blog: NLP and Nietzsche

Sun, 21 Mar 2010 21:39:00 +0000

NLP or neuro linguistic programme has a kind of spookiness to it that we might associate with brainwashing, electric shock treatment and other interpellations of post-war America. But for all its mystery, it’s about demystification.

Among the many techniques it recommends is that by which, in conversation, we hold only to what’s true for us personally. Instead of saying ‘the world’s gone mad’, for example, you should say something like ‘I fear the lack of rationality that I see around me’. Thus you reduce the theoretical to the empirical - a laudable aim.

What’s this got to do with Nietzsche? For the Nietzsche of ‘The Genealogy of Morals’ at least, morality is a theory of the same ilk. Thus morality, particularly Christian morality, will decree ‘that is bad’ when what it really means is ‘I don’t like it’. Theories are the best disguise we have for personal prejudice.

Robert Rowland Smith’s blog: boycott the general election

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:24:56 +0000

Being an educated, middle-class person, I’ve been encouraged to believe that, when it comes to elections, it’s your duty to vote. At the very least, you help minimise the possibility of the BNP or similar from exploiting voter apathy to their own benefit. At the very most, you feel like an enfranchised citizen whose voice has been heard. And so I’ve dutifully voted in every election I’ve been eligible for since I was 18.

This time it’s different. It’s not just that I feel I can’t cast a positive vote for any of the three major parties; it’s that I’d like to cast an actively negative one. Unfortunately, there’s no space on the ballot paper for ‘none of the above’.

I don’t know how many others feel like me, but being asked to vote in this year’s election means that, whomever you vote for, you are essentially endorsing the current political system, the current set of choices. I think this system is broken.

The first step would be to get enough people not to vote, so that for the election itself becomes effectively illegitimate. I know it’s a fantasy, but were it to happen, the next question would be to create a new system out of the class of malcontents like me.