If you own a radio you may be surprised to hear that you live in paradise and should ‘cease to strive for further improvements’ in your life.
Unconvinced? If so, it’s probably because you are reading this in 2004 and not 1887. 117 years ago, Edward Bellamy wrote Looking Backward, his vision in which Julian West, a young American, awakes in the year 2000. The country he discovers has left behind the industrial horrors of the 19th century and is now ‘one great business syndicate… employing all citizens, who share equally in its profits.’
At one point on his tour of the future, West is introduced to a device which carries live music into people’s houses by means of telephone cables. He is awestruck. ‘It appears to me,’ he remarks, ‘that if we could have devised an arrangement for providing everybody with music in their homes… we should have considered the limit of human felicity already attained, and ceased to strive for further improvements.’
The wonder with which Bellamy’s narrator greets the device later known as ‘a radio’ should serve to remind us of the distance we have and have not travelled. Bellamy, like many of his contemporaries, had total faith in the capacity of wealth and technology to solve man’s problems. Paradise was just a radio away.
And then just a TV away. Or a video recorder. Or broadband. Or an X-box. Since Bellamy wrote Looking Backwards Western homes have indeed become visions of material paradise. Virtually all have (at least) one television and telephone. Nine in ten have a video recorder, a freezer, a microwave, and a washing machine. Eight in ten have a CD player, half a PC, 40% internet access and the same number cable or satellite. In the last 25 years alone GDP per capita has risen by 60% and since Bellamy wrote his vision of utopia, UK life expectancy has risen by over 30 years. We have come a long way indeed.
Except, of course, that we haven’t. It is precisely Bellamy’s naïve optimism that ‘music-by-telephone’ would remove the need ‘to strive for further improvements’ that powers our economy and society today. We spend money in the faith that the next holiday, house or hair-do will truly deliver us to ‘the limit of human felicity’.
Thankfully we are slowly – very slowly – recognising our naivety. When Richard Layard delivered the Lionel Robbins Memorial Lectures at the LSE last October he used a fascinating graph to demonstrate this point. Using data from over sixty countries, the graph plotted GDP per head on the horizontal axis and happiness as measured by various social surveys on the vertical. The results were highly instructive.
The poorest countries (Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus) were the unhappiest. At that level, however, small increases in income resulted in huge leaps in happiness, with countries like Turkey, Poland and Slovenia only slightly wealthier than Belarus but significantly happier. The result was a column of countries ascending up the left hand side of the graph, as small financial gains saw significant increases in happiness.
And then the graph changed, at around $10,000 per person, when the ascending column curved off into a shapeless plateau, and happiness and income were abruptly decoupled. A cluster of 22 countries registered relatively similar levels of happiness despite having vastly different average incomes. Money, the chart declared, will take you so far and no further.
Such data need to be taken with a pinch of salt. Happiness is notoriously difficult to measure and $10,000 buys you very different things in different countries. Nevertheless, increasing levels of depression, anxiety, crime, and relationship breakdown, not to mention a growing interest in the rather amorphous phenomenon of ‘well-being’, suggest we ignore the implications at our peril.
The nub of the issue is that while we in the UK have long been on the happiness ‘plateau’ (alongside most other Western nations), mentally we remain in the happiness ‘ascendancy’ (alongside Belarus, Slovenia and most other nations on earth). Our lives and society remain structured around the belief that more money (and with it more goods and gadgets) will make us happier. At its worst, we work harder than we should, to earn more than we need, to buy more than we want.
Making the leap from an ‘ascendancy’ mentality to a ‘plateau’ one will be, to put it mildly, challenging. Not only are there huge interests invested in the current system (pretty much every marketing, advertising, retail and media company in the West, for example) but also many wonderful opiates to act as a disincentive to action. Our nagging sense of disaffection is somewhat dulled by 200 TV channels or the prospect of a lottery rollover.
And yet, in spite of the task’s enormity, there remains the nagging question, ‘if not now, when?’ If our society is not open to a new way of thinking as it begins to question the old, is there anything short of a war that will change it? When even the Financial Times can run an article headed, ‘Danger: materialism damages your sense of well-being’ (28 November 2003), can we legitimately ask for a further sign or reply ‘O Lord, please send someone else to do it.’
In fact, many organisations, run by Christians and fellow-travellers, are indeed ‘doing it’, offering critiques of capitalism and globalisation, promoting fair trade and sustainability, working with asylum seekers and other vulnerable members of society. In the spirit of such ventures I would like to offer a perilously brief three point plan which might help us move from the mind of the ‘ascendancy’ to that of the ‘plateau’.
First, we need to have an alternative. There is little point in throwing stones at capitalism and its culture if we have nothing to put in its place. The heart of Christianity, the restitution and strengthening of relationships – between God and mankind, between people, and between humans and the rest of creation –offers a genuine and motivating alternative to a culture built on the accumulation of wealth and possessions.
Pious sentiments about how fulfilling and humanising relationships are will not be enough, however. A cogent, coherent ‘relational’ alternative, visible in economic, transport and foreign policy, as well as in personal interactions, needs to be formulated.
Second, we need to articulate the alternative. This means not only translating our thinking into the vernacular but having convincing data to support the case. The ‘ascendancy’ mentality has one huge advantage in the readiness with which financial success can be measured. Any alternative needs to have equally valid, comprehensible and convincing measurements to show how prioritising relationships really does work.
Finally, we need to live the alternative. Asking people to do as we say and not as we do will doom any project to failure. Any real alternative needs not simply to be intellectually motivating but also practicable and attractive.
In reality, all this will, at least at first, feel like hard work. It will involve being prepared to sacrifice job opportunities for the sake of relatives or neighbourhood roots; to donate precious time to volunteer work; to choose ethical investments over guaranteed high-interest ones; to frequent dearer local retailers rather than cut-price supermarkets, and much else beside.
Yet in the long run it might just make a real difference and help shift our vision of paradise on from the awesome invention that is the radio.
This article first appeared in the Church Times.
