<<<	articles
The cost of contentment Samuel Brittan The Financial Times 14/05/05 Review of Rich is Beautiful: A Very Personal Defence of Mass Affluence by Richard D. North Social Affairs Unit £20, 311 pages Capitalism has usually had a bad press. Left and right have combined to denounce mass affluence and the Church has been hostile from the beginning. Even one of the quotations printed on the back cover of Rich is Beautiful says it is “the indefensible argued with vigour”. Business leaders have mostly been unsure of their own case and all too ready to take at face value the critiques of the anti-globalisers, the “stakeholders” and all the rest. One sees it, too, in tycoons on the boards of opera houses who are afraid to say “boo” to sub-Marxist producers for fear of being thought Philistine or rightwing or both. North talks about “cultural cringe”. The defence has been left to a handful of economic intellectuals despised as having their heads in the clouds by “practical businessmen” and written off as soulless apologists by the typical arts page editor. There is a further irony. Many of the defenders of capitalism have not been particularly enamoured of commercial culture or even very familiar with it - one of the most vigorous ministerial exponents of Thatcherite capitalism hated shopping. They have defended capitalism as the road to prosperity, the product of social evolution or as a necessary but not sufficient condition for personal freedom, which is where my own emphasis lies. The novelty of Richard North’s book is that he embraces affluent mass society, knows what he is talking about and is highly entertaining to boot. The book has on its cover a photograph taken by the author entitled “Woman and Poodle at Motorway Services, France 2003”. He celebrates the modern shopping mall and remarks that more people are better off and “working out how to respect each other” than at any time in history. He notes that “people do not seek happiness. If they have any sense... they seek drama, risks, inner peace, success, applause, wealth, power, goodness”. To oppose this “seems curiously life-denying”. North knows the protest movement from the inside. His own gurus were not Friedman and Hayek but Teilhard de Chardin, the metaphysical biologist, and Ivan Illich, the radical deschooler. Although he no longer preaches their messages, he has retained some of their insights. We are left with the question: why, if the modern world is so good, is there such tension and discontent in the air? North starts off his attempted explanation by ridiculing Tony Blair as the “first chav prime minister”, who, in pursuit of perpetual youth, dresses on holiday like a working-class teenager. None of this would worry me in the least if Blair understood the rule of law, due process and civil liberties. North goes on to talk about the decline in respect for authority but then - perhaps realising that he is in danger of echoing the social conservatives whom he criticises earlier in the book - switches to the “suddenness of affluence”. My own attempt at explanation would focus on the omnipresence of management consultants and similar advisers. It is from such sources that governments absorb the swarm of targets that are undermining public services. Typical of such people is the renaming of the old-fashioned personnel manager as the “human resources director”, who is even more inclined to seek solutions by sacking and short-term cost-cutting, not much redeemed by the semi-velvet glove. One finds the evidence of these “consultants” everywhere. In the past few weeks I have suffered from hotel rooms with cardboard keys that fail to open the door and which also control the lighting inside the bedroom that is all too inclined to plunge into darkness. Their lunacies include the attempt to save a few farthings on extremely awkward thief-proof hangers. Earlier on they decreed that all walls must have flat surfaces, thus banishing useful coat hooks and condemning us to inadequate light from table lamps. And in department stores, certain sections are moved from one floor to another - then back to where they started. North himself tends to waver between the belief that “the unfolding of challenges makes life worth living” and the more libertarian insight that we do not all have to compete frantically and can be lotus eaters if we choose. After all, most people can enjoy the peace and tranquility of a country walk if they take a short bus or train ride. It is the beauty of a market society that it leaves room for people who want to work shorter hours, or in more congenial conditions, in return for less take-home pay. The question is why so few executives and professionals take advantage of this or insist that their employers make them available. Maybe there is an explanation in evolutionary biology for the phenomena of unnecessarily long working hours and hyper-activity which modern executives complain makes them feel “stressed out”. Just as their avian ancestors competed for the favour of females by otherwise unnecessary lavish feather displays, and their early human ancestors competed through hunting prowess or skills in warfare, their modern successors display their machismo by coming into the office at 7am to catch up with the Tokyo markets or by being the last to leave their desks in the evening. Perhaps we can console ourselves with the thought that these are only tendencies and that as new generations come into affluence, more of them will insist on opting out.
<<<	articles
Site designed and managed by Andrew Heavens - andrewheavens@ftnetwork.com