Should we do anything for posterity? The answer is ‘no’ if one’s view of ethics is contractual, since there is ‘no apparent reason to do good to those who are incapable of returning the favour,’ observes Stephen Green in ‘Good Value: Reflections on money, morality and an uncertain world’ (www.landmarkonthenet.com).
Behind such a dismal view he finds our discomfort with the commercialisation of everything. “The discovery in late 2006 that in modern Britain 70 per cent of three-year-olds recognise the McDonald’s symbol but only half of them know their own surname, or that the average ten-year-old is familiar with between 300 and 400 consumer brands but would be unable to name 15 wild birds, was poignant evidence for our fears. What sort of people were we becoming?”
Our fear, says Green, is that the individual has been effectively replaced by the consumer. He frets that it is as if the dominant image of our time has become the shopping mall – each new one bigger, brighter, better than the last – with its myriad shop-fronts, special offers, canned music and permanent artificial light.
Have we all become cynics who know ‘the price of everything and the value of nothing,’ and to whom what matters is a supply of cash rather than shared blood, community, friendship or beliefs, the author wonders?
He dreads that with increased efficiencies, clearer targets and the commercial pressure to do more with less come the inevitable corollaries: “the risk of the waning influence of hard-to-price factors such as professional ethics, dedication beyond the call of duty, and the kindness of strangers; and the often unspoken thought that ‘it’s nothing to do with me.’”
How ironical, the author notes, that in the most connected and networked age by far in the history of humanity, we also have fewer permanent ties and bonds to each other. He wryly adds that communities in every old sense have faded, and in their place have come new and fluid ‘social networks’ populated by restless shoals of seekers brought together by algorithms communicated through server farms in California.
“Is it Simmel’s world: the world in which the urban metropolis drives us to objectify and put a price on everything, and in which the only route to psychological survival is to specialise and take our solitary place in an increasingly fragmented and pattern-less world, like so many misshapen pieces from a giant jigsaw puzzle without a picture on the lid?”
Green postulates that both the urgency of the question ‘Why should I bother?’ and the sharpness of the fear over isolation, privatisation and fragmentation would be in some way soothed if it seemed that access to progress and self-improvement were more equitable, and if it seemed that everyone could have a chance of participating in the fruits of the marketplace. And he believes that the road to poverty eradication should be based on ‘creating the means to economic development, rather than relying on some idealistic grand bargain of redistribution.’
The author sees a panacea in individual social responsibility, as much as its corporate parallel, going well beyond writing cheques. And, in the context of the frenetic lives of the modern affluent, it is perhaps time above all which is the real scarce resource, and the giving of time which is the bigger sacrifice, he concludes.
Compelling read.
