The Machine
by Theodore Dalrymple (June 2010)
Now that the world’s economic centre of gravity has moved decisively towards the east, and eastward the course of empire takes its way, some western economists have discovered that economic growth is not all that it was once cracked up to be. They have discovered what the moralists of all ages have known, that happiness is not proportional to levels of material consumption, at any rate once absolute poverty has been surpassed.
For example, Robert Skidelsky, the biographer of John Maynard Keynes, says so. As literary theorists might put it, ‘the subtext’ of this is that the declines in per capita GDP experienced in European countries as a result of the economic crisis are nothing much to worry about, since those countries have long since reached the level of consumption at which increases add nothing to happiness. A decrease of ten per cent, say, takes us back to the levels of about four, five or six years ago, when nobody was remarking on the terrible suffering caused by the poverty of the mass of the population.
On all this I am, as on many subjects, in two minds. Moreover, my practice does not always perfectly reflect my thoughts of the moment.
On the one hand, I am fully aware that my own personal happiness has had very little to do with my economic circumstances (I speak as one who has never had to worry much about where his next meal was coming from). If I look back on my life, some of the happiest times I have known have been when I had least, not most, consumer choice. To eat what there is rather than what you choose is to be relieved of a distracting dilemma. In a street of restaurants, and hungry, I have often been like Buridan’s ass, unable to make a decision between them, and fearing to make a mistake: a mistake which, if made, would not be so very terrible.
One has only to observe a streetful of shoppers on a Saturday afternoon to understand the futility of consumption as a path to happiness. What, exactly, are they looking for? It is rarely that one sees among them a look of ecstatic happiness that tells you that they have at last found what they wanted all their life to find. I think if I found a Vermeer in a junk shop (my fantasy from an early age) I should be genuinely happy; more recently, I would make do with a mere Thomas Jones.
As it happens, I did once find a Thomas Jones, but unhappily it was not in a junk shop. It was in a fine art gallery and cost $400,000, which I did not have. In case you are wondering who this Thomas Jones is, or rather was, he was a Welsh painter of rather ordinary landscapes, active in the second half of the Eighteenth Century, who, however, suddenly painted a few pictures of transcendent beauty and genius: exquisite depictions of Neapolitan roofs and walls, pictures of such serenity that they gladden not just the eye but the soul. It is the very ordinariness of what is shown to be of transcendent beauty that is so inspiriting; and it starts you on the search for all the beauty, previously unnoticed because taken for granted, around you. Never again will you look on a wall with the same dull inattention.
Suffice it to say, however, that most Saturday shopping is not for a Vermeer or even a Thomas Jones; it is for objects the pleasure of whose possession will mostly last no longer than the bloom on a grape and, being passed, will be immediately succeeded by another futile search for another joyless possession. The good consumer never learns.
On the other hand (what was on the one hand having being stated four paragraphs ago), I must confess to not being an economic ascetic. I rarely turn down offers of work for money, and am pleased if I am paid more rather than less. My taste in food, when I have the choice, runs to the expensive rather than to the cheap. I still covet antiquarian books, though biology ensures that I can no longer enjoy them for many years (and, despite the general decline in our civilisation, level of education, advance of the internet etc., antiquarian books are still very expensive, suggesting that there is a market for them). Though by no means rich, I am several orders of magnitude away from mere subsistence. Where my standard of living is concerned, I cannot claim to be a child of nature, a Gandhian who weaves his own cloth and grows his own lentils. (Of course, it was said to have cost a fortune to keep Gandhi poor.)
Like most people, also, I am depressed by bad economic news. For example, when the number of new cars bought last month is reported to have declined I feel gloomy, even though I think there are far too many cars already, that they have had a baleful aesthetic effect on much of the world, and that – in large cities – they are as often a source of frustration as a means of quick transportation. (It is said that traffic in central London moves no faster than in Victorian times.)
When I see the price of gold rise, I regret that I did not follow my instinct and buy it when it was much cheaper (I get no equal and opposite pleasure when its price falls.) A rise in the price of gold means a loss of confidence in the preservation in value of everything else: the everything else of which I own some. Poverty and hunger are staring me in the face! What a reward for having lived within – no, below – my means for many years!
Moreover, I am a consumer just like everyone else, no worse, perhaps, but certainly not much better.
Last week, for example, we bought a large new refrigerator. Why? Our old one still worked perfectly well. It was small, but we didn’t need anything larger; it was perfectly adequate to our needs, from the preservation of food point of view. We bought a large new fridge because we had to bend down to get anything out of the old one, and we decided that we didn’t want to do that any more. We wanted an eye-level refrigerator; and in order to have one, we had to buy something much larger than we needed. We rationalised our purchase by telling ourselves that we were growing older, that soon we might not be able to bend, it was better to be prepared in advance for the difficulties of old age than face them as an emergency, etc., but really our purchase, quite unnecessary, was merely whimsical, at best to overcome a very minor inconvenience.
What did we do with our fridge? These days you cannot give away what would have made Louis XIV green with envy. You could, for example, go down the road shouting ‘Free fridge! Free fridge!’ and find no takers. Indeed, you might end up in an asylum. So we took it to the municipal wasteground of such things, where people dispose of what they no longer want.
Although our town is small, there was enough there to equip scores of households. The attendant told us that they did try to give these things away, after having tested them for safety, but it was not easy: there were more discarded goods than people to need them. I am no environmentalist, but still I could not help but feel that there was something amiss in all this.
I like grapefruit juice in the morning (I detest orange) and am too lazy to squeeze it for myself. I think, no doubt from vanity, I have better things to do with my time. If I buy three large cartons of freshly-squeezed grapefruit juice it is 20 per cent, per cubic centimetre, cheaper than buying one. Like the vast majority of human beings, I can’t resist a lower price, even when the lower price will make a saving that itself will make no difference to my life. So I buy three cartons of grapefruit juice instead of one.
The problem is that the grapefruit juice won’t keep long enough if I drink it at the rate that I normally would; so, in order to save between $1 and $1.40 over a period of, say, two weeks, I drink every day more grapefruit juice than I otherwise would or, truth to tell, than I really want.
No wonder that people these days are so fat.
Whenever I think about these things, my mind returns to the title of a short story by E M Forster, unusually for him in the genre of science fiction: The Machine Stops. Set in the long-distant future, the story tells of people living underground who are utterly dependent on a vast machine for ventilation, distribution of food and sustenance etc., a machine that no single person controls or even understands. The story imagines what it will be like for these people when the machine grinds to a halt and no one can repair it. Divorced for ages from any form of primary production, they will die, and die horribly.
Our consumer society is like the machine in the story. My wife and I (principally my wife) have grown a little produce, it is true, but it took ages, cost a fortune and wouldn’t have kept a hamster alive for a week. Autarchy is not really for us, or even primitive exchange and barter with our neighbours. And so, to ensure that the machine does not stop, we have to do our duty as consumers. In other words, we (humanity) are the creatures of what we ourselves have created.
This is not as much of a criticism of the consumer society or economy as might be thought. All judgment, said Dr Johnson, is comparative, and the correct standard of comparison in this instance is not the perfect but impossible, but the imperfect but possible. Our choice is always between evils, more or less partial as they may be.
I do not believe that it is possible to devise a system in which we all live well, to a standard that will satisfy us, and in which there is stable equilibrium: that is to say a state in which we all have exactly what we want, but no more than we want, and in which no one tries to persuade us to want more than we currently want. The machine needs expansion, not stability.
The real alternative is not perfect equilibrium, therefore, but real, and in the end absolute, poverty. This practically none of us is willing to countenance; none of us wishes to return to a back-breaking subsistence. Our bargain is a Promethean one.
That is why western economists who now say that happiness is not proportional to consumption once a certain level has been reached are saying something that is true but beside the point, except for those few individuals who are willing to limit their desires. Though they are admirable as people, those self-contained people, and indeed generally more interesting than those who see the meaning of life in the consumption of quickly-discarded goods, we must hope that, in the long-term, there are not too many of them: for if there were, the machine would stop.
On the other hand, having lived beyond our means for many years, in essence on money borrowed from the people who have produced all the things that we don’t need and that haven’t made us any happier, it is to be hoped that there are many among us those who will be able to reduce their sumptuary expenditures temporarily, until things come back into proper economic balance. Once that balance is achieved, of course, they will need to expand their desires again. From what I know of my fellow-beings, I think there will be no real difficulty in this. As for me, I shall continue to do my duty, and drink more grapefruit juice than I want.
To comment on this article, please click here.
To help New English Review continue to publish original and thought provoking essays like this one, please click here
If you have enjoyed this article and want to read more by Theodore Dalrymple, please click here.
|
