RICH IS BEAUTIFUL: A Very Personal Defence of Mass Affluence
by Richard D NorthThe Social Affairs Unit £20 pp311BORN TO BUY: The Commercialised Child and the New Consumer Culture
by Juliet B Schor
Scribner £17.99 pp276
On the face of it, the belief that it is better to be rich than poor requires no defence. Rich means more goods and more opportunity and less concern for the basics of survival. Most importantly, it means more choice. The rich can even, if they don't like the trappings of wealth, choose to be poor, a luxury denied to the poor.
It is, of course, not that simple, mainly because the rich are stricken with guilt and uncertainty about their wealth. Is it destroying the environment? Is it destroying us all? Is it shrivelling our souls? Is it disconnecting us from nature? The guilty rich seek out peasant food and clothes and holiday in peasant bliss. They don't actually give up their money, but they do spend it on things with poor overtones — jeans, distressed linen and polenta rather than jewels, Ferraris and caviar. They find it distasteful to talk enthusiastically about how wonderful it is to be rich. And this is exactly where Richard D North gets right up their noses.
North has evidently been to too many leftish dinner parties and listened to too much whining and posturing. For him, greed and capitalism are almost unalloyed forces for good and he plainly delights in pointing this out to his soppy liberal, baby-boomer acquaintances. "We live," he writes, "in the best of times." He has, he admits, something of Voltaire's Dr Pangloss about him; but if all really is for the best and this is the best of all possible worlds, what choice does he have? This book is an entertaining and informative Panglossian manifesto. It has, however, certain oddities that need to be noted. First, it is abominably produced. The cover is awful, the page design is abysmal and the editing is non-existent. On page 167, two sentences are simply repeated. This is nothing to do with North, but, if he is going to stay with the Social Affairs Unit, he has some sorting out to do.
Second, — and this is to do with North — the "very personal" in the subtitle is accurate. The book is idiosyncratic in the extreme. It is a polemic but a rambling one. He makes the same points many times and can be distinctly sloppy in his insights. His offhand summary of the thought of John Gray, for example, is laughable. Furthermore, he often seems to be writing for a minuscule audience, perhaps a dinner party. For example, like me, most people will know neither what the following sentence means, nor the purpose of its syntactical inversion: "And very funny are Crosse & Blackwell when they remind us that Pot Noodle really is not the height of civilisation."
Third, the book has a two-dimensional quality that, at first, is hard to define. After a while, however, I realised it was because art simply does not come into North's equation. When he does evoke art, he does so unenthusiastically. He seems to like Tracey Emin, but because of what she is rather than what she does. He also twice mentions Byron and Dylan as typical emblems of revolt. Since the latter, after the first couple of years of fame, became deeply conservative in every way, it is hard to believe that North really cares.
The point is, of course, that, if we are to argue that "rich is beautiful", then we had better know what beauty means. One thing it means, or at least involves, is transcendence. There are, indeed, some fairly sane pages on spirituality (North even has a website on the subject), but they do not really feed back into the substance of his case. Broadly, he just says that being rich need not make you unspiritual, which is true but no more than a preliminary statement. It leaves out the dynamics of art, arguably the single most important human activity, and the conflicting meanings attached to things of the spirit. It is precisely these conflicts, after all, which now threaten the complacent wealth of the West.
But, all that aside, this is, as I say, an entertaining work. North has read widely and he has an eye for the good example. He can be amusingly bitchy — "Jill Tweedie and Bel Mooney were never my idea of clever and interesting" — and his overall case is definitely one that needs to be heard. He is, without question, on to one of the big issues. The world is doing fantastically well. Many are becoming richer and freeing themselves from poverty. Innovations such as the internet are providing us with powers undreamt of even a decade ago. And, in most developed countries, many people can acquire substantial wealth. The small percentage that remains abjectly poor, North believes, probably does so because of laziness or stupidity.
What, then, is our problem? For North it seems to be mainly his contemporaries. He is in his late fifties and, having wallowed in the 1960s, he has now concluded that the decade was a big mistake. "So the problem is clear: the 1960s enshrined personal and political doctrines that have infantilised people and politics. We will need to reassert adulthood before we can expect to see the institutions of politics regain their former respect and value."
We need, in short, to grow up, a sentiment that brings me neatly to Juliet B Schor's Born to Buy. This is everything that North's book is not — tightly written, well produced and worried about rather than delighted with the way things are. Schor is alarmed by the way children have been drawn into the nexus of consumption. Companies such as Nickelodeon and, in America, Channel One now spend billions seeking them out and selling them things, frequently by deliberately undermining the authority of their parents and schools. Some of the scams described in this book — usually involving the blackmailing of schools — are horrific. The corporate defence is that commercialism helps the education process and inducts children into the real world. This is, of course, nonsense, as a surprising number of Schor's interviewees admit to her off the record.
The difficulty is proving harm. Schor seems to do this with her own survey of children in and around Boston. Her conclusions are bleak. "The children who are more involved in consumer culture are more depressed, more anxious, have lower self-esteem, and suffer from psychosomatic complaints."
These two books make diametrically opposed points, but they have one interesting thing in common. Their authors are both babyboomers and both deploy this fact as an autobiographical underpinning for their case. Schor deprives her own children of television and is plainly writing about a concern for their future. North, characteristically, provides a long autobiographical appendix to demonstrate, basically, that whatever it is, he's been there and done it. Schor says McDonald's makes children obese and denies them the deeper pleasures of food; North says it teaches them cleanliness and discipline.
The boomers of the West, the most privileged generation in human history, are, therefore, interestingly divided. Is the glass of affluence half full or half empty? It's a good question but the wrong one. The right one is: how much more can we drink?
READ ON...
websites:
www.richarddnorth.com
North’s provocative official site
Born to Buy is available at the Books First price of Ï14.39 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585
