I was
using a Barclays Bank cash machine, my card was ejected, and as I waited
for the money a strap line flashed up on the screen: ‘Open the door
to your dreams’. My money rolled out and then it was gone,
replaced by the image of an open door. It reminded me of a
recent Lloyds Bank leaflet that asked: ‘How can we help you
live your life?’ Capitalism offers us more than material goods. It
promises us the good life - dreams, hope, love, a secure future. It has
provided majorities in the industrialised countries with historically
unprecedented levels of affluence and individual choice. In
the last thirty years, Gross Domestic Product has almost doubled
in the UK. But its profit-seeking activities are a colonising
force which threatens the substantiality and continuity of social
relations. The market reconstitutes connections between people as
economic relations between individuals and things. It has created
a tantalising world of commodity consumption that makes people
feel lonely, dissatisfied and insecure.
Standards
of living are increasingly defined by the purchasing of status giving,
positional goods. Their value diminishes as more people acquire them,
creating a spiralling of consumption as people strive to maintain
their social standing. To fuel this dynamic and boost demand,
finance capitalism has disconnected consumer desire from individual
available earnings by aggressively selling consumer credit.
In July 2004, consumer debt exceeded £1 trillion in Britain,
of which £183.6 billion was unsecured debt on personal loans, credit
and store cards. 1 In recent years, personal loans have expanded
into the sub prime
and home loan markets, charging exorbitant interest rates to the poor
who no longer have access to welfare benefits. With its relentless
pursuit of profit, capitalism is a revolutionary force without
morality. As Joseph Schumpeter warned us, we should fear its
success as much as its failure. Capitalism’s ‚’creative destruction’,
and the spiralling of status seeking consumption amongst a
small minority of the global population, is shattering the
ecological fabric of the earth. It is unsustainable.
What
about the failure of capitalism? As manufacturing industry continues its
decline and retail sales and house prices begin to fall, the affluent
amongst us can be reminded of the havoc it wreaks. Between
1980 and 1999, the richest 1 per cent of the UK population
increased its share of national income from around 6 per cent
to 13 per cent. 2 In 2002, this 1
per cent owned approximately 25 per cent of the UK’s marketable
wealth. In contrast, 50 per cent of the population shared only
6 per cent of total wealth. 3 Exclude
housing from these estimates, and inequality increases even
further. In 2000, 50 per cent of families had £600 or less
in savings, and 25 per cent were £200 or more in debt. 4 Large
sections of the working class, particularly in the post industrial
towns of the north, and ethnic minorities, have been condemned
to generations of gruelling poverty, crime and hopelessness.
And even for the relatively affluent, debt is reducing many
to a state of indentured consumption and a future tied to unremitting
work. However much we accumulate in the way of worldly goods, there
remains a fear without an object. An anxiety about ‘something which is
nothing’. What is left that is durable and trustworthy?
The
penetration of market relations into the social fabric of people’s
lives has generated a set of ‘post-material’ social problems - widespread
mental ill health, systemic loneliness, growing numbers of
psychologically damaged children, eating disorders, obesity, alcoholism,
drug addiction, compulsions to shop, spend and accumulate things,
the breakdown of relationships and marriages. Thus, for example,
the cost of mental health problems in the UK is estimated at
£93 billion a year, in lost productivity, health care spending
and reductions in quality of life. 5 Stress,
anxiety and depression account for a third of all working days
lost. A survey of 17,000 people by the charity Mind found that
20 per cent of respondents found work ‘very’ or ‘extremely’
stressful. 6 A conservative estimate of the cost to
the NHS of alcohol related
conditions is as much as £1.7 billion per annum. 7 ‘Mental
disorders’ are now among the leading causes of world disease
and disability. The World Health Organisation predicts that
by 2020 depression will rank second behind heart disease as
a ‘leading cause of the global disease burden’. A survey on sleep
undertaken by the Future Foundation reveals that one in four people in
the UK are finding it difficult to sleep well. The biggest cause
of sleep disorders is anxiety. Women coping with paid work,
housework and childcare suffer more than men. The survey’s
project manager, Brian Garvey, in an attempt to explain the
findings, said: ‘Fear has become a powerful tool in society. A nervousness
permeates our current lives’ (Observer, 13.3.05).
Stress,
depression, breakdown, bullying, violence might appear to have their
source in dysfunctional individuals, but they are dysfunctions that
belong to the wider social network. Social life is not external
to inner psychological reality; its matrix of conscious and
unconscious communications form the innermost being of individual
personality. Shame, failure, feelings of worthlessness, hopelessness
and meaninglessness are our modern dreads, and they arise in
the class, family and social relations that we grow up in. After
three decades of the neo-liberal economic order, we are a society
that is beset by loss; loss of belonging, loss of political
purchase on the world, loss of hope. We live in a paradox.
We are collectively, politically inert, yet we exist in a state
of continuous activity, whipped on by the exhortation to be 'hard working
families'. Companies are re-engineered, institutions re-configured,
departments re-organised, working practices reviewed, schools
repeatedly inspected, employees monitored and appraised. Goals,
visions and mission statements are invented and re-defined. Politicians
urge us to join the enterprise culture, become more business-like, embrace
change. But in reality, this dynamic of permanent change simply
reproduces the status quo. Nothing actually, meaningfully,
changes. We are living in a social recession. There is no politics to
give voice to our protest. There is no alternative which offers a better
future that is more equal, more just, more tolerant, and more kind.
Living
well
The
future of the democratic left depends on our being able to offer this
alternative. How are we to live? The idea of ‘living well’
originates with Aristotle. Happiness is not defined by a transient
moment, but is the good that we pursue ‚in a complete life’.
For the Stoic philosopher Seneca (circa.4BC-AD65), living was an art:
‘But learning how to live takes a whole life, and, which may
surprise you more, it takes a whole life to learn how to die’.
8 For Michel De Montaigne,
writing in the sixteenth century, the act of self creation
was integral to his humanity and his relationship with others;
a process of coming to know himself which embraced uncertainty as
the primary fact of being alive. The chief aim in life is pleasure:
‘Even in virtue our ultimate aim – is pleasure’. 9 Virtue is not to be found in an external
law or deity. It grows
out of the pleasure we discover in being with ourselves, and with those
we love and befriend. Ethics is the endeavour to go on being.
Who
speaks in public of such things today? The left once cultivated this
language, but it is now bereft of a vision of a better life. The
concern with living well is not simply a valorisation of private
individualism, but indicative of the difficulty individuals have
at certain historical moments in finding meaning and purpose
in life. There is a need for a politics of social transformation
which takes seriously the importance of living well. We can
find precursors in the traditions of ethical socialism, anarchism,
the New Life, Quakerism, but these tended to reproduce an idea of
the good life that was singular and too prescriptive for our
plural society. John Stuart Mill provides a good example of
the liberal attempt to avoid this dilemma. In On Liberty, he asserts that the cultivation of individuality is
central to well being.
Society must preserve the freedom 'of pursuing our own good in our
way'. The ultimate appeal of all ethics cannot be to an absolute
morality. It must be to utility, to structure the conditions
which optimise individual well being. But today the principle
of utility has been discredited by the market based reforms
and audit cultures in health and education. The market disables individual
agency, destroys the ethic of care and service, and depoliticises the
relationship of the individual to society. We need a new story about
individual freedom and self-fulfilment that is about human
interdependency and the ethic of reciprocity, not the calculative
logic of the market and utility.
Stories
of renewal are not conjured out of thin air; they are made on the basis
of what we learn from the traditions we inherit. There are three principles
we have inherited which have defined the politics of modernity: liberty,
equality and fraternity. The Right laid claim to liberty, the Left made
claim to equality. Each was embedded in its class and polarised as mutually
exclusive to the other. Fraternity never achieved the same ideological
significance as the other two principles. It was the virtue of the political
activist, and the ethos of the society promised by a utopian future. But
it is the tradition of fraternity which has the potential to give shape
to a new narrative of individual freedom. Fraternity, in its recognition
of human interdependence, is the catalyst which brings together
liberty and equality. In its advocacy of the social and relational
nature of human beings, the self-fulfilment of each is indivisible
from the equal worth of all. We need a new ideal of fraternity - a
commonwealth of difference upheld by mutual recognition.
The
philosopher Paul Ricoeur (who died in May 2005) offers a way of thinking
about interdependence and its relationship to the ethic of living
well. In his book Oneself
as Another, he defines an ‘ethical intention’ that must be central
to a democratic
left politics. It is: ‘the desire to live well with and for others in
just institutions’. 10 He examines each of the three points of this definition.
The first point
is ‘to live well’, which he describes as ‘the nebulous of ideals and dreams
of achievements with regard to which a life is held to be more
or less fulfilled or unfulfilled’ (p179). Ricoeur’s second
point is ‘with and for others’. He describes living with and
for others as ‘solicitude’. Solicitude is not separate from individual
self esteem; it expresses its social nature. Ricoeur explains this
by using the example of friendship in which ‘each loves the
other as being the man he is’ (p183). To be ‘equal among friends’
is for two friends to render to the other ‘a portion equal to what he
or she receives’ (p184). What follows on from the giving and receiving
of friendship is the idea of equality. Friendship involves the ethic of
reciprocity and this sets friendship on the path to justice: ‘where life
together shared by a few people gives way to the distribution
of shares in a plurality on the scale of a historical, political community’
(p188). Ricoeur is describing ethical life as originating in the sphere
of interpersonal relationships and extending upward into the wider social
realm and into the political community.
The
aim of living necessitates an interdependency with others. The corollary
of this interdependency is equality. Consequently, Ricoeur argues,
the aim of living encompasses a sense of justice. This brings
his inquiry to the third point of the ‘ethical intention’:
‘just institutions’. Justice finds its expression in the idea of ’just
institutions’. By institution Ricoeur means, ’the structure of living
together as this belongs to a historical community’. The structure
is irreducible to interpersonal relations and yet it is ‘bound
up with them in a remarkable sense’ (p194). This is because
institutions require political communities whose function is distributive.
The distributive operations of a political community are more than
the sharing implied by solicitude. Distribution involves the apportioning
of ‘roles, tasks, advantages and disadvantages between the
members of a society’ (p200). Where there is sharing there
may be too much or not enough – ‘the unjust man is the one who takes too
much in terms of advantages or not enough in terms of burdens’ (p201).
Equality is the ethical core of justice. And it is not exclusive to the
discourses of the political community. There is no wall between the
individual and society which prevents the transition of the ethical aim
from interpersonal life to the social and political realm.
Equality for Ricoeur ‘is to life in institutions what solicitude
is to interpersonal relations’ (p202). Justice holds persons
to be irreplaceable and so adds to solicitude, ‘to the extent that the
field of application of equality is all of humanity’ (p202).
In an interview Ricoeur summarises his notion of ethical life
as: ‘the wish for personal accomplishment with and for others,
through the virtue of friendship and, in relation to a third party,
through the virtue of justice’. 11
From
its old incarnation as a limited and gender biased expression of solidarity,
fraternity offers an ethical basis for a politics which takes seriously
the idea of living well. It provides the first step in the
ideological break with neo-liberalism, culturally, politically
and economically. Ricoeur writes: ‘This wishing to live together
is silent, generally unnoticed, buried; one does not remark its existence
until it falls apart’ (Critique, p99). Putting the pieces
back together is the beginning of the story.
1. Credit
Action, ‘Debt Statistics’, March 2005, www.creditaction.org.uk.
2. Institute
of Public Policy Research, The State of the Nation, August 2005.
3. National
Statistics, ‘Share of the Wealth’, www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=2
4. James
Banks, Zoe Smith, Matt Wakefield, The Distribution of Financial Wealth
in the
UK: Evidence
from 2000 BHPS Data, Institute of Fiscal Studies, WP02/21,
2002, p7,
www.ifs.org.uk See also Mike Brewer et al, Poverty
and Inequality in Britain: 2004,
Commentary
96, www.ifs.org.uk
5. Mental
Health Foundation, Time for Public Mental Health: A briefing from the
Mental
Health
Foundation in advance of the White Paper on Public Health, 2004,
www.mentalhealth.org.uk
6. Mind,
Stress and the Workplace, 2005, www.mind.org.uk
7. Institute
of Alcohol Studies, Fact Sheet, Alcohol and Health, 2005, p8, www.ias.org.uk
8. Seneca,
Dialogues and Letters, Penguin 1997, p66.
9. Michel
De Montaigne, The Essays: A Selection, Penguin 1993, p18.
10. Paul
Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey, University
of Chicago Press,
1994,
p180 (see also p172).
11. Paul
Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, Polity Press, London, 1998, p60.
