Attitude or Gratitude?
by Theodore Dalrymple (April 2009)
A recent Dutch visitor to my house in France was observant enough to notice that I disliked wasting food. He told me that he was very much of the same mind.
It occurred to me then to try to find the cause and justification of our dislike of such waste. Where did it, this dislike, come from? What reason could we give for it? (These are not the same questions, of course.)
The Dutch are famously parsimonious, but parsimony is neither one of my vices nor one of my virtues – and I leave it to others to decide which of them it would be if I had it. And I also knew from experience that my visitor did not partake of this national characteristic, if it is one, so that we might safely leave Calvinism to one side. As it happens, we were both children of the post-war era, when material life in Europe was much less abundant than it is now. I remember the days when butter was treated as a luxury rather than as an item produced, thanks to a combination of subsidy and technical advance, in such mountainous quantities that it could, if melted, replace the seas.
Chicken was still a luxury food during my early childhood, even in middle-class households, and our parents referred constantly to the real shortages of the war years. They knew (or so they claimed) how to make a vast omelette from a single egg, suitably expanded by various contrivances. We were led to suppose, therefore, that we were fortunate indeed to have been born in an age without privations.
We were not aware of any actual shortage because we had no standard of comparison, and we always had more than enough to eat. The abundance – one might even call it the superabundance - that was to arrive in the near future was necessarily unknown to us and therefore could not serve as a comparator. If being of the immediate post-war generation had any effect upon us at all, it was to give us a faint and subliminal awareness that it was possible, in certain unlikely circumstances, for material goods to become less rather than more abundant, and that material scarcity was a possibility, if only a remote one.
Still, I should like to think that our aversion to waste, particularly of food, goes a little deeper. It is not only that we disliked wasting food ourselves; we did not like to see others waste it either. It was not therefore a matter of mere personal economy, or fear for the future. I read somewhere that we – that is to say, members of western societies - throw away a third of the food that we buy, and this appalled me.
My dislike of waste does not arise from any appreciation of the ecological need to preserve, heal or (worse still) save the planet. I wish the planet, as I wish humanity, no harm, but find it too large and nebulous an entity to have any genuine feelings towards it: Gaia means nothing to me. And even if it could be proved that wastage was exceedingly good for the planet, I still should not like it.
Nor does my dislike arise room the fact that there are still people in the world with not enough to eat. Occasionally in my childhood, an adult would tell me to eat up (when I was already full) because there were children in Africa who were hungry. This, in those days, did not seem to me logical, since I could not see how eating more than I wanted was any more likely to help the hungry African children than throwing food away. As every child knows, mere logic does not persuade adults: the time I tried the argument out on my mother, she only told me to do as I was told.
After a little reflection, I came to the conclusion that my dislike of waste arises from a whole approach to life that seems to me crude and wretched. For unthinking waste – and waste on our scale must be unthinking – implies a taking-for-granted, a failure to appreciate: not so much a disenchantment with the world as a failure to be enchanted by it in the first place. To consume without appreciation (which is what waste means) is analogous to the fault of which Sherlock Holmes accused Doctor Watson, in A Scandal in Bohemia: You see, but you do not observe.
It is strange that I had not really thought about why I disliked waste, and of its destructive its effect on the human personality, before my Dutch visitor made his observation. But then I can hardly claim to have been an exemplar throughout my life in the matter of waste. I most certainly cannot claim never to have wasted anything, quite the contrary. Paradoxically, perhaps, it is only as I came to be in relatively easy circumstances that waste came to seem so objectionable to me.
This happened at roughly the same time as still life came to be among my favourite artistic genres. Early in my life, I could hardly see the point of them; only comparatively late in my life did I see them as a call to contemplate what exists without taking it for granted, thereby increasing one’s appreciation and enjoyment of the world.
Once you become aware of a phenomenon such as waste that you overlooked or considered unimportant, you begin to see – or rather, observe - it everywhere. For example, yesterday I was walking in a street in England and I saw a box of cakes thrown on the ground. One had been half-eaten, but the rest were strewn around, so it was not merely that the box had been dropped by accident. The person who had dropped it had eaten a little and decided that the rest was surplus to his requirements.
I pass over – but not because I haven’t noticed it – the unsocial and egotistical way in which the person disposed of what he no longer wanted. Rather, I refer to the fact that whoever disposed of the cakes in that way took them entirely for granted, gave no thought to the effort or ingenuity required to produce them, assumed that there would always be more when and where he wanted them, and in general evinced no respect for anything except his whim of the moment.
I do not have a consistent philosophy of waste and its avoidance to offer, however. I have no desire to be a desert anchorite, living on as little as possible. I like, though I do not crave, luxury. I do not eat only to keep body and soul together, and like expensive foods, though also delight to eat well for little money. I buy books that I could just as well take from the library, and the catalogues of antiquarian booksellers delight me.
I am aware that our whole economic system depends to a large extent upon us consuming vastly beyond our needs, biologically considered, and that if we were all as parsimonious as possible and never threw anything away that was remotely usable or re-usable, the wheels of commerce would soon grind to a halt. I am aware that our prosperity and comfort depends upon those wheels continuing to turn, more or less ceaselessly, and without any higher purpose; but I have no vocation for discomfort or poverty, and suspect that concern for the environment, in so far as it really exists, would melt away faster than the glaciers or the polar ice cap at the first prolonged power cut. When one considers how much fuss people are now inclined to make when something in a hotel (for example) does not come up to the standards of comfort they have come to expect, I do not think a mass conversion to asceticism is on the cards.
Like many social phenomena, abundance is both good and bad. When I was a child, my mother used to darn our socks. I still remember the wooden mushroom that she would insinuate into a sock with a hole, the better to expose the latter for her to close up with wool or cotton thread.
This is now as unthinkable a ceremony as touching for the King’s evil (scrofula) would be. Now if we have a hole in a sock we throw it away at once; and if we are short of socks, we go and buy ten pairs for what it takes us two minutes to earn.
I have no real vocation for darning socks; I think I have better things to do with my time (though, truth to tell, I am not entirely sure if this applies to everyone). Attention to and gratitude for socks is not a commonly expressed attitude. And yet I cannot help but think that this habit of throwing things away the moment they become defective leads to an unpleasantly disabused attitude to life. Computers, washing machines, televisions, refrigerators, clothes, out they all go the moment they break down or require repair. I know it is a tribute to our immense productivity that it is far cheaper to obtain a new machine than to repair the old, but in a world where everything is so instantly replaceable, what affection or gratitude develops for anything? What do we notice and appreciate is everything is instantly replaceable?
Not long ago, my wife had a slight car accident - entirely her fault, but I did not reproach her, as secretly I wanted to, since my own driving is not always completely above reproach. The car was eminently repairable, and indeed still functioned perfectly well. But the insurance company insisted on scrapping it, because the repairs would cost more than the car was worth. (I should perhaps mention that I was not entirely convinced of the honesty either of the car repairer’s estimate of costs to repair the car or of the insurance assessment of the car’s value; I suspected, but could not prove, collusion and skulduggery. Here, if anywhere, a man is completely the victim of forces beyond his control.)
If the car really was scrapped, it offends my sense of waste, though not of economic rationality. The high cost of labour to repair it means, presumably, that the people who repair cars can live at a decent standard of living. Countries in which old cars never die tend to be poor ones.
I suppose that what I would like is an abundance that everyone appreciated and did not take for granted. This would require that everyone was aware that things could be different from how they actually are, an awareness that it is increasingly difficult to achieve. I myself can hardly remember what it was like to live without personal computers and the internet, though I have lived the majority of my life without them. I now take them sufficiently for granted that if, for any reason, I am out of range of the internet, I regard this as something of an outrage.
I still have vestiges of the requisite awareness, however. In my long distant childhood, I had an uncle who was a prisoner-of-war of the Japanese, and I remember how impressed I was when I was told (sotto voce) that he still woke up in the night with nightmares of his captivity. He had gone without food, of course, and suffered beri-beri; and to this day I cannot look at rice on my plate without thinking of him. It helps me to look on each single grain as something not to be despised.
In general, a life of assumed abundance is one of ingratitude; one is not grateful for anything that could be no different from how it is. So perhaps when my mother told me that I should think of the children in Africa who did not have enough to eat, and eat up what was on my plate, she was not so much trying to benefit the children in Africa, as to benefit me: to make me grateful, and not to take for granted what, in fact, would almost certainly always be there, namely an ample sufficiency. Without gratitude, there is no happiness.
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