It is very easy when appalled by one’s fellow human beings to want impose virtue (or taste) upon them, but this is a temptation that should be resisted
by
Theodore Dalrymple
It is
not difficult both to dislike and to criticize consumerism. It is often as
vacuous as it is unattractive. Last week, for example, my wife took me to
something called an ‘outlet village,’ an expanse of shops built in faux Eighteenth Century style that sold
designer products at allegedly low prices (though, wanting nothing in particular,
they seemed high enough to me). There was actually a queue to obtain entry into
Prada whose products are hardly those of first or primary necessity. However
deep our economic crisis, this was no queue for rations in wartime; and though
I am far from an egalitarian I felt uneasy that there were so many people
wanting and even eager to pay hundreds or perhaps thousands for what seemed to
me to be aesthetically cheap and vulgar gewgaws while so many people await
their heating bill with extreme anxiety and trepidation.
If I am
honest, however, what really appalled me about the ‘outlet village,’ which,
incidentally, proclaimed itself a ‘community,’ was the appalling taste of the
moneyed masses. Though they shopped all day for clothes – you couldn’t buy so
much as a newspaper, let alone a book, in the ‘community’ – I didn’t see a
single smartly dressed person among them, let alone an elegantly dressed one.
On the contrary, they were to a man and woman attired in expensive slum- casual
garments whose brands alone distinguished them from what the poor would wear.
As consumers, then, they weren’t even very good at what they did, namely
consume. They wore brand names as if they were medals awarded in the war to
distinguish themselves as individuals from others in some way. If the
justification for disparities in wealth is that the wealthy beautify the world,
these people failed utterly to justify their prosperity. Purchasing power
without power of discrimination is (at any rate for me) dispiriting to behold; but
I am under no illusion that if income and assets were more equally distributed
in society things would be any better from the aesthetic point of view,
irrespective of the economic or social effects of redistribution.
Appalled
or even disgusted as I was by what I thought was this vast outdoor exhibition
of mass vacuity and spiritual emptiness, to say nothing of absence of taste, I
kept enough control of my gut reaction not to suppose that it would be a very
good guide to or motive for economic or social policy. It is very easy when
appalled by one’s fellow human beings to want impose virtue (or taste) upon
them, but this is a temptation that should be resisted. Deeper reflection is
necessary; intemperance and impatience usually end in something worse than they
were designed to amend.
I was
therefore not completely out of sympathy with some of the premises of the
Pope’s latest apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, the Joy of the Gospel; but it seems to
me that he has yielded in it to the temptation to mistake an initial
apprehension of what is wrong as an understanding of economics.
His
apprehension of certain trends in modern societies was one which many people
share, so many in fact that it was almost banal or at any rate commonplace
(precisely as was my reaction to the ‘outlet village’ and those who shopped
there). We – by ‘we’ I mean all who are likely to read this – are aware that a
life of consumption of ever more material goods is profoundly unsatisfying and
in the end self-defeating. We all know that an egotistical individualism is
deeply unattractive and not even satisfying to the many millions of whom it is
the leading characteristic. Even the improved means of communication that the
Pope extols in his exhortation may not only conduce to self-preoccupation but
serve to isolate people further. A million monologues is not a conversation.
So far, so
good – that is to say so far, so banal. But the Pope, alas, then indulges in a
little Peronist economics. I hesitate to call his theorizing mediaeval because
scholars will inform me that, in fact,some of the scholastics were
far more sophisticated in their economic understanding than
we usually credit them with, getting well beyond denunciations of usury. I am
not sure the Pope has got much further.
He writes, inter alia, that ‘Today
everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest,
where the powerful feed on the powerless.’ This is demagoguery of the purest
kind, the kind that ruined the Pope’s native Argentina seventy years ago and
from whose effects it still has not fully recovered.
‘As a
consequence,’ continues the pope, ‘masses of people find themselves excluded
and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of
escape.’
If we put
the two sentences together, a certain conclusion is inescapable: if only the
powerful stopped cannibalizing the powerless, the latter would have work,
possibility and the means of escape. To change slightly the framework of
reference, four legs good, two legs bad.
The Pope
is loose and inaccurate in his thinking. The trickle-down theory of wealth may
or may not be correct, but those who hold it do not express, and never have
expressed, ‘a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic
power…’ On the contrary, according to the theory it is not the rich whose
goodness benefits the poor, but the system that allowed them to become rich,
even if the rich should turn out to be hard-hearted skinflints. A system of
redistribution, by contrast, really does require the goodness of at least
the superior echelons of the system, faith in which is genuinely rather crude
and naïve.
Most
egregiously, the Pope quotes from St John Chrysostom:
Not to share one’s wealth with the poor is to steal from them and take away their livelihood. It is not our own goods that we hold, but theirs.
This could
only be true if an economy were a zero-sum game, if my wealth were your poverty
and vice versa. But if the
world has learnt anything since the death of St John Chrysostom one thousand
six hundred years ago, it is that an economy such as ours is and ought to be
dynamic rather than static. I am not poor because Bill Gates is rich; as it
happens in enriching himself he enriched me, though the ratio of his wealth to
mine is probably greater than the ratio of my wealth to the poorest person in
my society. I do not care; it does no harm to me unless I let it do me harm by
dwelling upon it. In the meantime, I have enough to eat and much else besides.
This is
not to say that all is for the best in this the best of all possible worlds,
far from it. The world is full of dishonesty, corruption, cruelty, indifference
and injustice. But Peronist demagoguery dressed up as apostolic exhortation
will not improve matters, quite the reverse.
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