The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears “natural” today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor. And above all, the rhetoric that accompanies these: uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector, the delusion of endless growth.
Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land is the perfect companion, and foil, to Chris Hedges’ Empire of Illusion. Where Hedges’ essay is a Jeremiad against the specific ills of contemporary culture, Judt’s is a cerebral assessment of where we took the wrong turn and how we might start to move back onto a path that was started in the years after the Second World War. They are both incensed by the same thing–a political culture dominated by corporate interests and an uncritical belief in the efficacy and naturalness of “free” markets–but Judt’s cooler analysis suggests possibilities where Hedges’ leaves the reader in despair.
Judt tells the history of Anglo-American political economy from the Great Depression to the present, as the story of the rise and fall of Keynesianism and social democracy. In his version, social democracy–in which a regulated market is guided by broad political consensus to provide material comfort for the majority of citizens, while also subsidizing culture (he devotes quite a bit of space to entities like the BBC, PBS, and public-private initiatives to support the arts)–was done in by its success. Over-confident planning created a drab and fettered world for too many–the council flats and public housing of the working class, the conformist suburbs of the middle class–and in the rebellion against conformity, the baby of the public good was tossed out with the dreary bathwater. The ideology of individualism, with the radical economics of the Austrian and Chicago theorists, threw the whole social democratic project into question; and with the fall of Communism, of which social democrats were far too uncritical, it became almost impossible to make a convincing case for the government’s role in building a just society.
Though clearly rooted in the Left, Judt’s analysis owes quite a bit to a particular brand of English conservatism. Echoes of Burke, Oakeshott, and Carlyle run through the book; Judt’s case is that it is the contemporary free-marketeers, not the New Deal and welfare state up to the early 1960s, who should be considered truly radical. The most radical effect of the 1980s turn to free market ideology has been to define the terms of debate such that social democracy has become unthinkable: as he quotes Margaret Thatcher, “there is no alternative” to unregulated markets.
The last two years (really, the last twenty, during which the living standards of the working and middle classes have failed to keep pace with the rise in GDP, and the lot of the poor has actually declined) should suggest that there are alternatives. Judt’s social democratic solution is based not on a bold vision of the future, but on a chastened fear of further economic catastrophe. It’s a very cautious program, focused on preventing future calamity rather than building a Great Society: social democracy ought to be as chastened by its history of failure as the free market ideology.
Judt’s clear, level-headed arguments, with a solid foundation in the conservative (rightly understood) ethical sense undergirding civil society, ought to win adherents looking for a way out of the corporatist dead end. I worry, though, that it is a bit too level-headed, and too lacking in vision. He’s right that the collapse of Communism makes bold visions look suspiciously totalitarian; note how the decidedly center-right Obama administration is tarred as “socialist” for even suggesting a minimal public role in health care, finance, and energy policy. Real Communists (there must be a dozen or so left someplace, perhaps in Cuba; clearly there are none in China anymore) must be scratching their heads at the rhetoric of the Right. Level-headed arguments may convince the academic class, but they don’t mobilize voters.
Some marriage of Hedges’ passion and Judt’s temperance is needed. There was a moment in the 2008 Presidential campaign–perhaps in Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, when he described the failures of the Bush administration and declared that “[w]e are a better country than this”–when it seemed as if a vision of a different future was forming. Alas, that moment seems to have passed; and despite Rahm Emanuel’s exhortations, a good many crises have been wasted without resurrecting a vision. The technocratic solution that Judt offers would certainly be preferable to what has passed for policy in the wake of the latest (but surely not the last) financial meltdown, but without some vigor, and maybe just a touch of brimstone, it is likely to remain a highly reasonable road not taken.
Earlier this week, I was sitting in the downtown St. Paul Dunn Brothers coffee shop when Jeff Horwich from America Public Media’s Marketplace approached me for a man-on-the-street (or person-in-the-cafe) interview about Starbuck’s new free wi-fi service. Part of the interview aired as a segment of the show that evening, and while I’m glad I didn’t come off sounding like a stuttering idiot (the editors at APM earned their salaries!), I don’t think I managed to say anything terribly profound. In the bit of the interview that aired, I came off mostly as a Starbucks hater without much to say about wireless internet access.
I’ve done a little bit of thinking since, and have come up with what I hope are some more valuable, if not at all original, thoughts.
To get the Starbucks thing out of the way: it’s not that I hate Starbucks, it’s just that I prefer not to spend my money there if I can avoid it. When I’m looking for what a cafe has to offer–not just coffee and wifi, but a little bit of sonic buzz, a chance to watch interesting people, maybe look at a little art on the walls or pick up a free periodical or two–I find that the independents in my neighborhood (the Blue Moon, the Riverview, Fireroast) and the local Dunn Brothers chain are more likely to deliver. Starbucks is not only ubiquitous, it’s perfectly stanardized: the same decor, the same products, the same atmosphere, whether you’re in downtown St. Paul, suburban Chicago, or Outer Mongolia (surely there’s a Starbucks in Mongolia by now). It’s simply not a place to sit and take in the atmosphere; it’s purely a to-go vendor for me.
On the wifi front, I think we’re asking entirely the wrong questions. As wireless connectivity becomes increasingly common, and in many peoples’ lives is shifting from fun and convenient to wholly necessary, it seems strange to me that we continue to rely on businesses like coffee shops and restaurants to provide it. As internet technology expands, making it easier for us not only to communicate with the world but get real work done, the piecemeal, ad hoc nature of our wireless connectivity can only be a brake on our progress.
Starbucks, Dunn Brothers, and the Blue Moon are not in the business of providing internet services; they’re in the coffee and pastry trade. That we’ve let our connectivity services fall to businesses that offer wifi (sometimes good, sometimes spotty; sometimes free, sometimes with strings attached; rarely, if ever, secure) as a sideline convenience is a sign of a failure of imagination and foresight. It’s a bit like the early days of the telephone, when you had to go to the post office or the corner store to place a call, and when service was unreliable and access uncertain. We are applying a late-nineteenth-century model to an early twenty-first-century technology.
I’m not suggesting that a large public project–something along the lines of rural electrification–is the only way to go for wireless internet. But if this is a technology that has positive social and economic potential, and could prove to be as transformative as the telephone, radio, and electricity were over the last hundred years, do we really want to leave it in the hands of the nation’s baristas? (Not to disparage my favorite baristas, who are hard-working, talented, and have great taste in music.)
Some cities are tentatively rolling out public-private partnerships for large area wireless service; Minneapolis is one, and I appreciate the near-ubiquity of its service. And some public institutions, most notably the libraries, also provide wireless service: this seems to be something that fits well within their mission, and I would love to see it expanded, perhaps with remote library wifi stations along the lines of the bookmobiles of old. With network devices becoming increasingly cheap, small, and easy to use, expanding the network seems like an obvious strategy to bridging the digital divide.
So yes, I think it’s lovely that Starbucks is trying to lure people in with free wifi (clearly their stale pastries and preposterously-named drinks weren’t doing it), but that’s possible only because we’ve dropped the ball on building on the technology in a meaningful way. We need to have ideas about our shared technological future that are a little more “venti” than the decidedly “short” approach we’ve had so far in this century.
(I’ve been reading Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land, so I’m sure that I’m influenced by his social democratic critique of the last three decades of privatization. But there are worse influences to be under.)
In honor of Bloomsday, I’m resurrecting a story of mine that plays around with Faulkner, Hemingway, Kerouac, and Joyce: Summer Reading, originally published in the now-defunct Somewhat.org in 2005:
The summer everyone read Faulkner, I read Hemingway. Out of spite.
It’s a slight piece, but kind of fun, and I think within the spirit of Leopold Bloom’s peripatetic journey.
