New World Same Humans #26
Twitter, modernity, and an old argument about what humans are worth. Also, the formula that governs life inside a consumer society.
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Revolution in the head
The original culture war, or Kulturkampf, was a late 19th-century dispute between Chancellor Bismarck and the Catholic Church over the role of religion in German society. Today, it’s become commonplace to say we’re living inside another culture war. But the battlefield looks rather different.
In our 2020 culture war Twitter is the digital frontline, and lately it can feel like one never-ending round of hostilities. World-famous authors and ordinary citizens alike are scrutinised and condemned; Harry Potter author JK Rowling is among those to have recently felt the wrath of the crowd. Two weeks ago 150 eminent authors, scientists and journalists signed an already-infamous open letter to Harper’s Magazine that argued that all this amounts to a ‘cancel culture’ that threatens free speech. Their opponents say that any cancellations are the product only of a refusal to tolerate prejudice. Their message: yes, a reckoning is here, and it’s long overdue.
Meanwhile, back in May the racist killing of George Floyd sparked global Black Lives Matter protests. They morphed into something broader: a mass upsurge of anger against racial oppression and structural unfairnesses embedded deep in our societies, and against the legacy of our colonial past.
These tensions are nothing new. So it’s impossible to divorce this new flare up from the pandemic.
The economic consequences of the crisis are only now becoming tangible; the social and political consequences remain as yet almost entirely unrevealed. But they will surely be many. Those prosecuting this culture war are often young, and often graduates; the pandemic has severely diminished their life chances. Here in the UK, around 50% of young people attend university. But even before the crisis, the exciting, affluent, metropolitan lifestyles that these graduates expect were increasingly unavailable to them. Now that expectation gap will become a chasm. There’s going to be a lot more anger.
That’s the immediate context. But New World Same Humans is, of course, also interested in the long view. So here’s one thought about all this that’s been much on my mind recently. Modernity is a revolution that sweeps all before it. And the central idea of that revolution is equality.
We all used to talking about revolutions inside modernity; the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and so on. But draw back the camera lens far enough and it seems to me that modernity itself is the revolution; one that unceasingly severs the bonds that tie us to a shared history, dismantles traditional social structures, and remakes the world anew. And at the heart of that project is equality. The radical, explosive, transforming idea that all humans are of equal value.
For almost all of human history, it was considered self-evident that this was not the case. Every human society before our own built itself around a set of hierarchies: masters and slaves, aristocrats and commoners, men and women, and so on. Only we moderns insist on the equality of all people. But the truth is that we’re still a long way from having realised that idea in practice. The implications of a world in which everyone is truly seen as equal are yet to become clear to us.
I think one implication, though, is emerging into view. We tend to associate equality with the liberal democratic system. Freedom, democracy, equality: they all go together, right? In fact, it’s becoming clear there are deep tensions between the liberal democratic system as we practise it and the idea that all humans are of equal value. Our democracies are representative democracies, built on the idea that we choose some of the best among us to represent us in the business of government. Historically, judgements about who to choose were informed by a set of beliefs that, in reality, some people – people who are men, or of a certain social class, or of a certain race – are better than others. When we start to believe, really believe, that all humans are of equal value, the representative system starts to break down. Who is the ‘best among us’? Why should we think that any one person’s judgement is better than any other? There are ways to answer those questions, but they start to become highly contentious. Over time, the very idea of representation can start to seem arcane, even offensive; ‘why should anyone be able to tell me what to do?’
It seems to me that what we face now isn’t only a problem concerning our current politicians and structures of power and authority. But with the very idea of those things.
Seen from that distance, the current culture wars – and all the past ones – are only one tiny fragment of a single, coherent, and centuries-long story. Modernity is a revolution that is still playing out. Equality is an idea inexorable in its logic. There is much more to come.
Time slips away
Four snippets to arm yourself with this week:
🙋 Democracy is due an internet-age update, according to this intriguing article in Noema Magazine. The trouble, say the authors, is that we’re using 19th-cetury voting mechanisms in a 21st-century world; we should instead experiment with ‘quadratic voting’, a weighted system that allows minority voices to be properly heard.
💳 Google has been working to ‘decode how consumers decide what to buy’. Their new report, Decoding Decisions, says people often make online purchasing decisions via a set of cognitive biases that are embedded deep in the human psyche.
✈️ BA have retired their fleet of Boeing 747s. The move comes earlier than planned, amid a cataclysmic year for the aviation industry. The key message for long-haul travellers: expect fewer flights and far less choice.
⏰ The Atlantic magazine have translated an essay by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei on how time has lost all meaning during the pandemic. Read to get his take on living through an age when ‘time can restart and begin anew, or it can hide entirely, get cut off, disappear.’
New patented formula
The current culture war, and its foundation partly in economic distress, reminds me of a formula I first wrote about a few years ago.
That formula says that consumer societies are founded on a promise that they make to their inhabitants:
Work hard —> Get paid —> Buy stuff —> Feel good —> Repeat.
That chain models the way life inside a consumer society is supposed to work. Get a job, work hard, earn money, and spend. Crucially, the chain is intended to work for each of us individually and for the collective as a whole. Individuals can hope over time to increase the value they bring to the economy, earn more, and so be able to access better objects and experiences. And collectively, via all this economic activity, we’ll build a prosperous society that promises even more for our children.
Back in 2018 I wrote that every link in that chain was breaking down. Halfway through 2020, that breakdown feels exponentially worse.
Work hard —> Get paid: Even before the pandemic, US and European wages were stagnant. Now, we’re facing an unemployment crisis of historic proportions. Here in the UK unemployment stands at 1.3 million; the independent Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts that as furlough schemes are withdrawn it could hit 4 million. The sacred promise that a consumer society makes to its inhabitants – that hard work is the route to prosperity – is breaking down.
Get paid —> Buy stuff: When work doesn’t pay, and when millions don’t have work, then incomes collapse. The result is a chronic lack of demand. One analysis of the underlying sluggishness of western economics: rising automation combined with low wages mean that the productive capacity of our economies is outstripping the ability of consumers to buy. A consumer society can’t function properly when people can’t or won’t consume enough.
Buy stuff —> Feel good: Consumption increasingly does not make people feel good. Instead, millions are increasingly aware of the negative impacts of much of their consumption on the planet, other people, and themselves.
Work hard —> Get paid —> Buy stuff —> Feel good —> Repeat is a simple model of the good life in a consumer society. In 2020, every relationship in the chain is breaking down. Work no longer pays the way it used to, and many don’t have it. Consumers can’t spend fast enough to support growth. And consumption increasingly makes us feel not good, but guilty.
It’s the severing of these relationships, I think, that informs our sense of living into a kind of aftermath – a time after the Imperial Phase of the old consumer system, but before the emergence of whatever comes next. And that feeling, surely, will be intensified by the long economic winter that lies ahead.
So what does come next? The outlines of a new model can be found in the exploration of the fundamental relationship that underlies the formula I’ve laid out here. That is, the relationship between labour and value. Or, to put it in more practical terms, between work and pay.
New technologies are eroding this relationship. Via automation and other advances we are starting to build economies that can be immensely productive without the need for much human input. So we need to acknowledge that the link between work and value is breaking, and look to definitions of ‘work’ – new ways for people to spend their lives in meaningful action – and new ways to grant people economic power that have nothing to do with their economic input in any traditional sense. And yes, that could mean some variant of a Universal Basic Income: money that you don’t have to work for. That means selling the idea that people deserve economic power simply by dint of being human beings, and not because they worked for it.
We’ve talked in recent months about the chance we have for a Great Reset. A lot hinges, I think, on our ability to find a new orientation towards the twin gods that rule over so much of our lives: work and money.
Fix up look sharp
Thanks for reading this week.
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I’ll be back next Sunday; until then, be well.
David.
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