At this time of year, it is customary
to look back, laugh,
and finally remark that not
much has changed. Considering
that this happens every
year, we may be led to think that nothing
ever changes – but that can hardly be
true.
Change, according to such profound
insights on the nature of Man such as
Who Moved My Cheese, is a brutish concept.
Why should we change when the
status quo is so comfortable and familiar
or, as the Dutch would poignantly put it,
gezellig? The fallacy we should avoid falling
into is thinking that someting which
seems to have no solution cannot be
defined as a problem.
Modern life is very different from
what we would have expected fifty years
ago. Where are our spaceships, robots,
quantum computers, clean reactors, meal
pills? The role of technology in changing
our lives has been the object of much
contention. Marx, for instance, would
argue that improvements in technology
allow capitalists to extract ever larger
profits from production, without having
to pay higher wages. Later, especially in
the West, such ideas lost favour: technology,
we argued, makes life easier. The
improvements in production technology
translate into both higher consumption
and leisure. After all, what sort of
leisure did people have before the vacuum
cleaner, the computer and the electric
whisk (to name just a few of my favourite
household examples) drastically cut back
the number of hours spent in performing
necessary tasks? What sort of life was
possible before we had the disposable
income to buy such products?
We are taught that consumption
does not bring happiness. However, had
you tried to separate me from a newlyobtained
Lego set at Christmas about 10
years ago, we would see that it is not quite
so simple. Life is littered with small objects
and pleasures that can be purchased
and that serve, in individual-specific
ways, to make us happy. The feelings
they evoke at specific times cannot be
replicated by a different set of objects in
an earlier age.
Thinking about earlier ages is interesting.
By questioning someone who has
lived in them (e.g. grandparents), we find
that it is easy to overestimate the effects
of technology. Is it really true that people
had less leisure 50 years ago?
Considering the leisure time of the average,
stereotypical LSE student now, and
that which he will have for the rest of his
life if he pursues the career paths with the
average, stereotypical LSE student likes to
pursue, I am tempted to wonder whether
the technological character of the modern
economy really does provide us with the
leisure of our predecessors. You may
argue that LSE students are famous for
deformed preferences in what economists
call the ‘consumption-leisure decision’
- they value consumption inordinately
highly. So we spend our lives working
ourselves out of strength, sanity, and
righteousness, only to discover that the
fundamental hormonal pleasure derive d
from our new Ferrari is the same that our
great-great-grandfathers would have obtained
from an Arabian horse. With five
generations between us, one would have
thought things would have changed.
You may accuse me of comparing apples
with pears – clearly, life now is quite
different from life 100 years ago. The very
fact that nearly all of us can reasonably
expect to survive our childhood would not
have been taken for granted back then.
Furthermore I will cautiously agree
with the claim that the pursuit of progress
for the sole purpose of allowing more
leisure can be dangerous. ‘Observe,’ we
are ordered, ‘how the decline and fall of
Rome was brought about by the complacency
and moral corruption of the Roman
people, who, after years of crafting the
world’s most powerful state around their
originally peripheral and swamp-infested
city, decided that it had had enough of
work and warfare and gave itself up to
its own vices and vainglory.’ So if the
increase in productive capacity brought
about by technology did not go into
increasing leisure (as in the Roman experience),
then they must go into increasing
our consumption.
It can hardly be argued, however, that
more consumption corrupts us any less
than more leisure. Here we are, the inhabitants
of the West, living in houses we
cannot afford, ridden with debt, obsessed
with spending, and without time for ourselves,
our children or for introspective
thought. Crime still exists and is painfully
obvious, freedom and democracy are far
from universal, and war is endemic, even
while we know that these are things we
would all be better off without. Is this
really what 5000 years of civilisation were
meant to achieve?
Clearly, changing the status quo is not
easy. After all, a situation in which all
people consume the very same products,
year after year throughout the centuries,
is not one that any of us can easily
imagine. Nor, with the exception of a few
particularly dedicated environmentalists,
is it one that we particularly desire. Yet
it is tempting to put forward an equally
environmentalist argument: if we are
living in more or less the same form (with
the same happiness) as our ancestors,
but our inexplicably increased consumption
puts an overwhelming strain on our
planet’s resources and thereby threatens
our own existence, then the status quo
hardly seems so attractive.
What is the relevance of all this to us,
and why on earth is this in the Beaver
in the first place? Well, because LSE is
part of our own lives, which are in turn
inseparable from society in general. The
problem is not the fact that we can see
ourselves as enshrining society’s tendency
towards unsustainable consumerism.
We do like to be ahead of everyone
else, if we can. The problem is that we do
not question the origins of this tendency
that is thrust upon us.
Debate, thought and discussion are
the key words here. Universities, after all,
were never designed as repositories of
tacit acceptance of the status quo, but as
the places of origin of the questions that
lead to the examination of our persons
and our societies. Until we are able to do
that, until we are able to say that what
we intend for ourselves is justifiable, we
can hardly talk about changes (or lack
thereof) that we never bothered to think
about – myself included.
