Michael Sandel has recently published a book entitled ‘What
Money Can’t Buy’ that has had some extracts printed in various newspapers and
which was reviewed by Rowan Williams in ‘Prospect’ magazine.
The thoughts that seem to lie behind the book (having read
the review and an extract) are critical of the monetising of much of life and
it being treated as subject to market principles. This was in my mind when I wrote my post on 9
May on Austerity or Growth and the anxiety I had that the power of the markets
is beginning to govern people’s lives.
We can’t buck the market, as was famously said, but there is a balance to
be found between economic reality and the importance of non-economic
factors. There are also dangers if we go
too far down the road of allowing ourselves to be dominated by market
imperatives.
This reminded me of a part of a
chapter I wrote some time back for a book entitled ‘Entering the New Theological Space’ that was
trying to tease out some of the issues of consumerism, where everything has a
price, and some of the consequences of that as compared with previous times
when we defined ourselves by the jobs we did or what we produced:
If consuming drives our living then
the price of whatever we consume begins to drive our perceptions. Bosshart[1],
the Director of the Swiss retail think tank GDI, says that today we compare
everything with everything else, for economy and society are moving towards
real time with the spread and power of IT. We are able to compare in an instant
the price of many articles for sale so that price becomes the controlling
factor and something which suppliers must control in order to operate
profitably and survive. The corollary of this is that all fixed values become fluid
values. The ultimate parameter for evaluations, for ratings, for appreciation,
for categorization, but also for motivation, is money, or in a real-time world,
price. In many sectors fixed prices are on the way out – it is expected that a
discount can be negotiated and this is taken further particularly in the travel
sector in hotels, airlines and so on with yield management and dynamic pricing,
where the price varies in real time according to the demand. (I recently
travelled on Eurostar and during the afternoon that I was researching times and
prices on line the cost of the fares changed as other people were booking
tickets). This, of course cuts two ways: the consumer can search for the best
price, but the goal for the supplier is to encourage customers to consume more,
to make it more difficult to swap to other suppliers and to reduce
comparability of prices. As there are
fewer fixed prices (even supermarkets juggle prices of essentials to stay ahead
of competitors) we lose sight of the relationship between the cost of producing
products and their selling price. Thus, Bosshart contends, ‘individualization’,
‘flexibilization’, and ‘economization’ have permeated our consciousness and
each of the three reinforces the other two.
Individualization, he says means
that there are no wishes that cannot be expressed legitimately and satisfied in
the form of a product or service. Taken to its extreme he suggests that
hyper-individualization can lead to what he calls ‘hyper-democracy’ which means
that there is no value that does not have a legitimate claim to political realization
and in the process distorting the agendas of parliaments and executives. If
there are no limits to individualization then flexibilization means that the volatility
of values becomes unlimited and pragmatism takes over. ‘No one wants a return
to the old ideologies’ he says. ‘But we have lost the ability to think deeply
about ideas or the direction we want to take.’[2] This leads to economization where it is
difficult to determine what anything is worth but prices remain the most
important parameter and anchor. To advance the argument in each of these
categories he assumes each is taken to the ‘hyper’ level but even if the
argument is not taken that far, the implications can still be seen in the
direction of our society.
This whole argument is quite
complex and multilayered. Not everyone has bought the consumerist way of life,
and some will actively resist it. Those who remember determining their purpose
in life through their work may particularly resist, but the direction of travel
seems to be clear and the forces that shape and drive that travel are very
powerful, if difficult to define exactly.
What is clear though is that it
will be no more fixed that any previous outlook on life may have been, however,
significant it may have seemed at the time. Vanstone in his analysis of the Western
world’s need for people to be productive and the sense of importance that went
with it commented: ‘…the public attitudes to the present have their roots in
the quite recent past… our tendency to identify the unique dignity of man with
his manifold capacity to work and achieve has much to do with the need of an
expanding capitalist system for a multitude of human producers.’[3] None the less he identifies in the Protestant
work ethic something that was implicit in the religious inheritance of medieval
Europe which reaches into the deep and fundamental deposit of Christian
doctrine which was the inheritance of the Middle Ages. Writing in the early
1980s, he sees the change from people being needed as producers to consumers
but still feels that the ethical principles implanted in an earlier age will still
persist as the presuppositions of a new phase.
Whether we would now think that to be the case and if not what ethical
or philosophical principles might underlie consumerism merits continued
examination.
The inclination to now find value
in the act of consuming rather than in work does not mean that work is of no
value, particularly if we do not ‘make’ anything physical. Many people still
get satisfaction and derive interest from their work even if in a sense they
are making ‘virtual’ products. There is
satisfaction in problem solving and providing a service even if it may be done
through IT instead of with the tools of old. And many service jobs involve face
to face contact with other people, which can be difficult if the ‘customer’ is
not happy but equally can give considerable satisfaction if someone has been
helped or sold a worthwhile service or product.
Our view on all of this may be
related to our age, though not just chronological age but through other
influences that affect our outlook. This is brought out in a recent study ‘Making
Sense of Generation Y: The world view of 15-25-year-olds’,[4] which
shows that this age group has a world-view that finds this world and all of
life meaningful as it is. However, we are not all quite the same, and it quotes
the American pastoral theologian Tex Sample, who says:
Our senses, our
feelings, our bodies, and our ways of engaging life are culturally and
historically structured. We do not have
some singular human nature that is the same in all time and all places, but
rather we are in great part made up of the practices, the relations, the form
of life and the times of which we are a part.
I really am ‘wired differently’ from my children and my
grandchildren. What speaks to me does
not speak to them.[5]
It goes on to comment that: ‘Sample
is not denying that all human beings are made in the image of God and thus have
a common core, which unites them as human. He is pointing out the power of
culture to shape how we live in the world.’[6]
[1] David
Bosshart, Cheap? The Real Cost of Living
in a Low Price, Low Wage World (London
[2]
Bosshart, Cheap? The Real Cost of Living
in a Low Price, Low Wage World, p. 172
[3] W H
Vanstone, The Stature of Waiting (London
[4] Graham
Cray, Sylvia Collins-Mayo, Bob Mayo and Sara Savage, Making Sense of Generation Y, (London
[5] Cray,
Collins-Mayo, Mayo and Savage, Making
Sense of Generation Y, p.141
[6] Cray,
Collins-Mayo, Mayo and Savage, Making
Sense of Generation Y, p.141
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