I finished the previous post by saying that the cost of the old idea of adulthood, plus the use of effective contraception, the changing role of women in the workforce, and the far greater opportunities for finding interest in work, culture, travel and sports, mean that many people simply don't want, and now don't need, to fake it anymore. The 1950's were a pretty dull time, and pace the Sennetts of this world, there is no virtue in the fact or toleration of dullness. Whatever synonyms they use for it. So now I'll explain that and carry on.
Parenthood usually just happened: one night of spontaneous sex would do it. It was about as inevitable as taxes. Now it's a choice - or a consequence of incontinence. As for the role of women, by the 1970's newly-graduated women wanted to have some fun independence before they settled down, and by luck Late Capital needed a larger but non-lifetime workforce, so in the way that Capital has of making the conditions to fulfil its needs, it hi-jacked feminism, consumerised it and presto! Having a job, delaying marriage and a place of her own suddenly became chic and sexy. By the mid-1980's women could get mortgages as easily as men. A working wife was a competitive advantage in the housing market, not a sign you couldn't earn enough to let her stay at home. By the mid-1990's white-collar women realised they were going to be working until at least the first child, and by the 2000's they had realised that, married or not, they were going to be working for the rest of their lives. A husband might make things easier or he might make things worse: only if he was being paid more that £70,000 a year was he likely to be a life-changing asset. A single woman could live as well on her own - without the need to manage a man as well. And most paid work will always be preferable to housework - unless the boss is a total jerk. Many women looked at their friends with children and decided that they would keep taking the Pill: given a choice between a long-haul holiday and a new kitchen on the one hand and ten years of school fees on the other, parenting no longer looked as attractive. It hadn't got worse, it was that the non-parental life was a lot better than it was in the 1950's. It's a real alternative. In Spain, where many people choose furniture over a second or even a first child, it's preferable. But then life in the 1950's in Spain was even poorer and more desperate than it was in England - if you can imagine such a possibility - so no wonder they want a little luxury.
Which means people don't look look like Normals anymore. What do they look like? It goes something like this: there are the Rich; those with Jobs, Debt and Insecurity; and the Underclass. Within each of those are various castes, and the dividing lines are broad and many shades of gray, but it's roughly like this.
Rich is when you have enough money or assets to live on for the rest of your life without working any more: you may choose to continue working, but you don't have to. Guy Hands is rich, so is Eric Clapton. The guy you know with a City job probably isn't rich, even if they are paid £200,000 a year, because they don't have the assets generating an income stream. Underclass is criminal or chaotic: drug addicts with no matter how much or little money, welfare mothers and the fathers who ran out on them, kids who can't wake up in time to get to Court for their hearing. In the middle is everyone else: they have or are temporarily between Jobs, they have Debt (mortgages count as debt) and they are Insecure on a monthly basis because that's what their contract of employment says their notice period is and because the odds are less than one in three that they will find another job within a month if they are made redundant.
Within the Jobs, Debt and Insecurity class are a number of subgroups: the Smug, the Cool, the Normal, the Neurotic and the Ghastly Others. Smugs usually have parents with money, are married, have children (who are well-behaved and even throw tantrums quietly) and do triathlons. If they read books, they would agree with everything Richard Sennett ever said, though they might say that of course the world wasn't like that for a lot of other people and that was a shame. The Cool don't seem to settle down, aren't mortgaging and marrying, take breaks from work to travel, skip from one flat to another, have a lot culture-related tech toys, and are usually paid quite well for what they do, which is often something to do with the Internet. Often they are five years older than you think they are. Look more closely and you'll see the flaws: there's a lack of confidence in the men and a massive sense of entitlement in the women. Normals are all those people who are making the best attempt they can at living that 1950's parent-life. Neurotics are bad at relationships, commitment, noise, any kind of politics, fools and anything much to do with ordinary life: often quite clever and attractive, these are the people whose failure to lead a successful life is a puzzle to you. Now they have the chance not to have to get into something they won't be good at. The Ghastly Others do one or more of the following: drive SUV's, drag their crying children round the shops or art galleries, stink the railway carriage out with their hot smelly food, talk too loud in public, wear tracksuits when they aren't exercising, park so as to take up two spaces, are overweight, badly-dressed, clear their throats all the time, talk too loud on their mobile phones, eat crunchy food in quiet movies, laugh raucously, are undignified drunks... and generally spread a spiritual stink anywhere they are.
Each one of these, and others I may have missed or that you want to invent, are responses to the Late Capitalist economy. The Cool don't want to be be Normals, and the Neurotics can't cut it. The Smug have always been with us. The Ghastly Others have expanded in size, not because people are getting worse, but because there are many more ways for them to express their inner lout. That needs a little explaining.
Greater choice rarely means more opportunities to do it right: it usually means more chances to get it wrong. When there was no tasty junk food, you couldn't substitute MacDonald's for real food: now you can. When there were no track suits for street wear, you couldn't make yourself look cheap and tatty by wearing one: now you can. When there were no mobile phones, you couldn't demonstrate your lack of manners by talking at the top of your voice on a train: now you can. When there were no SUV's, you couldn't express your inner chav by driving one, now thousands of allegedly middle-class women show their true status every day. A modern consumer needs a will of iron not to screw up at least once a day - which is why we all do, because we don't have wills of iron. All of us have a little Ghastly Other behaviour from time to time - but the Ghastly Others do it all the time and don't realise that they are behaving badly, tastelessly, crassly, thoughtlessly and just plain stinkily. I call it Popcorn, because I am badly distracted by the sound of people eating, rustling and shaking popcorn in the movies: but unless the cinema stops selling the stuff, somebody having a permanent or temporary case of the jerks will be there to make noise with the stuff. If there wasn't any popcorn, they wouldn't find something else to be noisy with, they would be quiet. It's the popcorn that sets them off.
That's the real reason why England looks like it does today: more money, more choices, more Popcorn, more ways of having adult fun, and the high cost and perceived low benefits of being Normal. If being Normal was that much fun, the Sennetts of this world would not need to hype the virtues of boredom, duty and dullness and rubbish the alternatives. Also, lower salaries, less security, fewer opportunities for advancement and more competition from one hundred million foreigners who can speak functional English coming from countries where they speak a language even they admit is tough to learn. It has nothing to do with politics, morality or personal attitudes, and everything to do with changes to employment and trade legislation that allows representatives from job agencies to send people over to Eastern Europe to cherry-pick workers for jobs that aren't actually advertised in the UK at all.
Which doesn't mean that housing in the UK isn't priced at ridiculous levels, that interning is exploitation and if you had to live on the Minimum Wage you would be homeless and starving in a week. It doesn't mean that companies aren't outsourcing jobs, refusing to train their staff and paying salaries that don't keep pace with inflation. Only a handful of degrees from a handful of (Russell Group) universities have, by now, a substantial net present value. Some may even have a negative net present value, and not be any use as an education either. Howker and Malik make these points, but their understanding of the causes and solutions is way, way off. The problem, at the risk of sounding like a Marxist, lies in the internal contradictions of Late Capitalism - that the ways of making the largest short-term profits are not the ways of making sustainable profits, so they contribute to the very decline of the economies out of which they are trying to extract profit.
As I am not in the rescuing business, I'm not going to prescribe a cure. There are many ways this goes, not in my lifetime but maybe in the lifetime of the Jilted. The first is that wages and costs in India and China rise to the point where there are no more savings to be made in outsourcing, at which point the process stabilises. Similarly, as the economies of Eastern Europe improve, the Poles, Estonians and others go home, as will the Southern Hemisphere Colonials when their economies improve. The second is that the corporations milk the UK and US dry and then follow the money to India and China. That is how the West got rich in the first place. The third is that the West pulls the largest sovereign default since Philip II of Spain screwed the Fuggers (who were back lending to him with a decade or so as he was the only game in town). The fourth is that neither you nor I can see the emerging new Western economy under the dying old one, but it will continue to dominate the world. Especially when three different research groups in three different Western countries discover a cheap alternative to oil (hint: it ain't fusion and it ain't wind farms and solar). The fifth is that while the rest of the world is with few exceptions run by corrupt dictators and populated by poor peasants, the rich are going to keep spending and banking their money in the West, so what goes out, comes right back again. And that bit will never change.
What I do not see happening is concerted political action by anyone who speaks English as a first language. They believe as I do, that if the aircraft has lost power and is in a nose-dive, jump if you have a parachute and if you don't, kiss the prettiest girl on the plane before you never get the chance to kiss a girl again.
No comments:
Post a Comment