Beauty Week 5: Imagine!

[imomus]

"The beautiful life" is a kind of utopia, a personal utopia you picture from time to time. It's set in the future, of course. The near future when you're in an optimistic frame of mind, the far future when you're gloomy, and, when you're suicidal, never. It's a series of hopes both personal and political, a series of glimpses of better ways of living, for you and for the world. It makes moot any division between politics and aesthetics.

In your daydream of "the beautiful life" you're living with a beautiful woman in an ultramodern city where cars are a thing of the past. Or you're living with a man, or in a commune! The thing about your city, though, is that it's full of lakes and forests and can barely be distinguished from the countryside. There's lots of cultural activity, the military has been eradicated, people have embraced collectivity, there are benign circles of trust spiralling upwards, everybody is "rich", but money no longer matters. There's no longer any metonymic representation: parts do not stand for wholes. The "designated particular" no longer asserts its universality. There is no God, so everything is sacred. Nature and culture are no longer opposites, and neither are communism and capitalism. Nobody locks their front door. In fact, there are no front doors any more, just an endless series of interconnected rooms.

Although lots of things (like the Post Office) are collectively owned, capitalism co-exists with those public goods. But it has refined and reformed itself. It no longer sells toxic stuff like weapons. The company is still called "Coca Cola" but instead of selling Coke, which shortens your life, it sells green tea, which lengthens it. Capitalism now wears the loose flowing robe of a Greek sculpture, wears a serene, contemplative expression. Imagine! And no religion too!

Although it contains moral and ethical elements, the beautiful life as it appears in your mind (perhaps in the moments before you fall asleep after sex, with your lover scratching your back gently and the sound of pigeons cooing in the background) is predominantly visual. It's beautiful because it looks beautiful. This is a world where you can judge a book by the cover, and where "only the shallow do not judge by appearances". But you're never misled, because the ethical goodness in things is encoded visually in them, and what you know to be ethically bad cannot look good to you.

You wake up the following day and decide to become a design writer.

Comments

[mcgazz.livejournal.com]

> but instead of selling Coke, which shortens your life, it sells green tea
And puts additives in it, lies about the health benfits/dangers, rips off the workers involved in the production and destroys the environment.

Capitalism disappears pretty early on in my dream.

But hey, that's the nature of dreams - everyone has a different one :)

[mskapol.livejournal.com]

"We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions"

Agree to the above statement Mr?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The problem with both communism and capitalism is not inherent in the systems themselves, it's in the people who control them and the people who use them. Ethical production, investment, consumption and disposal can make capitalism an ethical system. Similarly, a communist or anarchist system run by unethical people (Stalin, Pol Pot) can only be an ethical nightmare.

The problem with "destroying under all conditions" is that you're left with a vacuum into which something much worse might rush. But sure, make salaries more fair, stop evaluating human beings according to wealth and property, and all the rest of it.

[mcgazz.livejournal.com]

> a communist or anarchist system run by unethical people
Surely the idea of an anarchist system is that it avoids these problems by not being run by anyone?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Surely the idea of an anarchist system is that it avoids these problems by not being run by anyone?

No. Think of pirate ships in the Malaccan Straits as a typical anarchist system. It's run by the pirates who act most mercilessly and evade the police the most successfully.

I once read a left wing pamphlet called "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" which made the very good point that when you remove structure, what tends to replace it is a situation dominated by the strong. Chaos is not necessarily on the side of the weak, you know, and it isn't a way to foster equality either.

[mcgazz.livejournal.com]

> It's run by the pirates who act most mercilessly and evade the police the most successfully.
That's surely an anarcho-capitalist system, as it's profit-driven? Okay, I'm splitting hairs now ;-P

You're probably right. I'm no anarchist myself and the anarchist response to your point does seem a bit weak (http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/1931/secI5.html#seci513).

[seanthesean.livejournal.com]

Anarchism is all a bit, "what is the sound of one government not run by anyone that is not a government." It works as a word game but has no application in reality.

[jimyojimbo.livejournal.com]

Ok, I know practically nothing about Marx et al, so I'd be grateful if someone can correct me if needed, but: I'm sure I caught something on a recent In Our Time (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/), the onw discussing a vote result making Marx Britain's favourite philosopher, which said that Marx in fact was a fan of capitalism in many ways. That is, capitalism was a driving force for progress in terms of industry and quality of life, in order to destroy the old feudalism / serfdom. The problem, obviously, is with the distribution of the spoils, advances, and advantages amongst the population.

In fact, I've just repeated what Nick said - but I'm kind of interested in what the exact Marxist / whatever view on this is. And yes obviously I need to sit down and read the tsuff, don't I?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

In fact I'd recommend a listen to J.K. Galbraith's 1966 Reith Lecture (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith/historic_audio/reith_historic.shtml). Galbraith sees capitalism as a kind of planned economy, but is quite clear about its limits and the need for real planning, ie politics.

[jimyojimbo.livejournal.com]

Excellent, thanks.

[mskapol.livejournal.com]

Actually, I was refering to Mcgazz above who wrote 'rips off the workers involved in the production and destroys the environment.' To me it seems a sort of fanatic point of view. Religious even.

I find the same problem in your claim that "...instead of selling Coke, which shortens your life, it sells green tea, which lengthens it". While a nice slogan (for green tea sellers, naturally) it is a bit extreme. 'Coke, which shortens your life, IF YOU DRINK TOO MUCH OF IT' is a lot more accurate IMHO (ask that guy who made 'Supersize Me').

However, you (Momus) obviously recognize that capitalism is not *all* 'evil' provided that certain conditions are met.

That's why I'd like to ask you kindly to define 'ethical'. I ask because you seem to suggest that capitalism is currently *not* an ethical system while cummunism *is* ethical.

(You say
1: "The problem with *both* communism and capitalism is *not* inherent in the systems themselves, it's in the *people* who control them and the *people* who use them."

2: "Ethical production, investment, consumption and disposal *can make capitalism an ethical system*. Similarly, a *communist or anarchist system run by unethical people* (Stalin, Pol Pot) can only be an ethical nightmare.

Thus, you say that capitalism is an unethical system that can become ethical by the behaviour of people and communism is just fine, it's the behaviour of people that make it unethical.)

PS. Show me a communist or anarchist system run by ethical people. (Castro? Kim Il?..)

PS2. You are very observant when you see a problem in "destroying under all conditions" and the vacuum into which something much worse might rush. As it happens, the man quoted is no other than adolf hitler in a May 1, 1927 speech.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0385420536/ref=ase_germanbookshop/104-8458663-5795135?v=glance&s=books

[mcgazz.livejournal.com]

Well, Hitler patently didn't, despite saying it. Better to judge people on their actions than their rhetoric.

Also, it's possible to agree with someone about economics, but disagree about social politics. Gandhi and Stalin were both anti-capitalist; fascists and Libertarians both believe in the free market.

[mskapol.livejournal.com]

Not trying to compare anyone with hitler, Marx forbid.
It's just interesting to note similarities between this kind of fanatical rhetoric past and present.

"Better to judge people on their actions than their rhetoric."

I'm not gonna judge you on finding that that quote is by hitler by using the exploitative capitalist system known as 'Google'.

[mcgazz.livejournal.com]

> Marx forbid
I've never read any Marx, so I wouldn't know ;-P

But you're suggesting that any ideas Hitler had about economics are automatically invalid because the views he had about race and nationality. Isn't that an ad hominem argument? If someone says "I want to eradicate poverty and kill Jews", does that mean eradicating poverty is also bad?

Using your own logic, Pinochet was hardly a great advert for free market capitalism, was he?

[(Anonymous)]

coca cola are actually selling green tea which has no additives. in beloved japan

[(Anonymous)]

http://www.cocacola.co.jp/products/lineup/index.html"

[imomus.livejournal.com]

And this was a really important point for me when I discovered it. Where there's a demand for green tea, a big corporation like Coca Cola will be forced to sell it. I think Japan has been a great lesson to me that toxicity and capitalism are not inextricably linked.

Then again, there's a conflict I haven't resolved in my mind about the nature of capitalism. On the one hand, there's Larry McCaffery saying (http://www.altx.com/int2/larry.mccaffery.html):

"One of the good things about capitalism is that it's blind to what it sells. It's willing to sell anything, even that which is damaging to it--bombs, guns, whatever you need. I'll go back to Elvis Presley, who had the biggest single influence on American culture of anybody, period. It was a profound, disruptive, dangerous change. When Elvis came out in the '50's and became huge, it opened up a new world for people, and it wasn't something the system wanted. They hated Elvis--he was white trash, and what he represented was sex and freedom... I don't agree with the basic premise that the mainstream system takes you in, markets you, and then you've sold out, you've been co-opted. It's that either/or thinking again. The system isn't really the enemy. It's blind, all it wants is to replicate and do more things. So you have Elvis, who became very popular and got marketed, but he stands for everything the system doesn't want."

And on the other side is economist J.K.Galbraith, saying (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith/historic_audio/reith_historic.shtml):

"I have undertaken to show in these lectures that the modern industrial society, or that part of it which is composed of the large corporations, is in all essentials a planned economy. By that I mean that production decisions are taken not in response to consumer demand as expressed in the market, rather, they are taken by producers. These decisions are reflected in the prices that are set in the market, and in the further steps taken to ensure that people will buy what is produced and sold at those prices. The ultimate influence is authority."

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think that when I weigh in against "moronic cynicism" and "guilty pleasures", it's because I'm basically agreeing with McCaffery and assuming that without such self-destructiveness and negativity in the consumer base, capitalism would be a much kinder and more wholesome beast. (In other words, if capitalism is toxic, it's our fault, and our responsibility to change our ways.) But on my Galbraith-leaning days I'd see "moronic cynicism" (http://www.livejournal.com/users/imomus/121980.html) and "guilty pleasures" (http://www.livejournal.com/users/imomus/2005/02/19/) as something the system is actually selling us, endorsing, planning into its products. We only feel those self-destructive feelings because there's some advantage for the "planners" in the corporations to make us feel them. What might that be? Well, they want our consumption to be habitual. If we're hooked on smoking, sugar, heroin, oil, malicious newspaper gossip etc, we keep coming back for more. If they're "planning", as Galbraith says, they want us to be predictable in our consumption trends, and who's more predictable than a junky?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Galbraith's idea that the so-called "consumer economy" is actually a planned and imposed one is borne out by something David Byrne wrote in his journal recently concerning payola (http://www.davidbyrne.com/journal/current.php). Byrne points out that this is not just an economic question but an existential one. If our desires are being dictated by corporate "planners", who are we?

"My own experience with payola is limited and of course subjective. I’d heard of payola as I entered the music business professionally in the mid seventies, but naïvely thought it would never apply to me. I figured that it was a practice that was dying out and existed mainly around the disco, country music and R'nB worlds — which seemed not to be mainstream in those days.

Soon enough I began to hear stories, but still these didn’t apply to the circle of musicians I moved in. We could pretend that we were immune.

By the mid eighties, when Talking Heads had had some hit singles, the biggest of which was “Burning Down the House”, I got the news. “Burning Down The House” had some serious “indie” promotion money behind it. It got played on some college and other stations without financial prompting, but the jump to “commercial FM”, as I think it is called, was helped by cash and whatever else was used at the time — probably coke and women.

The band was in the midst of a tour, the one that was eventually filmed as Stop Making Sense. As we crisscrossed the continent (due to technical miscalculations this tour never really went to Europe) I could see that audiences were reacting more and more vociferously and positively to this relatively new song. How exciting! But as I began to hear rumors about the promo money being spent to help the song on radio all sorts of thoughts ran through my head.

I wondered if every pop song that had moved me on the radio, from when I was in my teens, had been paid for. Oh jeez! Therefore, other than a few free-form stations around at that time I was being treated like a Pavlovian dog — what I had believed were my subjective passions and discoveries were actually the result of a concerted program to pound certain tunes into my innocent brain. I had been totally manipulated! What I thought were decisions and loves that were mine and mine alone had been planted in my head by sleazy characters I could barely imagine. Free will? Hah! My entire past was called into question. Who am I? Am I not partly what I like? And if those things I like were not completely of my own choosing, then what am I?"

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

The phrase "moronic cynicism" reminds me of something I read in a Michael Stipe interview years back. It was really just an incidental remark early on in the interview that stayed with me. Apparently he and the interviewer passed a car with a 'Life is a bitch and then you die' sticker on the bumper, and he remarked that he hated that kind of "shop-bought cynicism".

Interestingly, perhaps, in another interview, I believe he told a story similar to David Byrne's above. He said that some time in his teenage years (not sure), he split up with his girlfriend, and, about to drive home, turned on the radio in the car and there was a love song playing and he thought, "Wow, this song is about me, about how I'm feeling now." And another song came on, and he had the same response. He changed the channel, and found other songs that also gave him the same response. And so on. And he vowed thereafter that he would never write a love song, because they were all manipulating people's emotions.

I'm not enough of a REM fan to know if he kept his vow.

The Beautiful City reminds me somewhat of Lovecraft's City of Aira (http://www.obscure.org/~vlad/lit/prose/iranon.html).

[butterflyrobert.livejournal.com]

Heh. I was going to post something similar. Capitalism, if read dryly, seems to be something that could be beneficial - perhaps even ideal - if we were evolved enough in our culture to handle it (and humanity as a whole most certainly are not). But again, capitalism by its own design encourages unethical hoarding of resources and doping/duping of the populace.

You could easily make the same kind of point about communism.

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

Or any other system that relies on ethics to keep itself within the lines. You always reach a point of reduction where people have to be trusted to make decisions.

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

What makes speculating on these things tricky in today's world is that, at least since the 1960s, governments have been trying to map mass trends using algorithms, crunching the numbers on computers. It's all very fuzzy, but adaptive algorithms can provide astonishing accuracy in predicting future states of complex systems.

[nicepimmelkarl.livejournal.com]

centuries are for plumbers.

[nicepimmelkarl.livejournal.com]

currently witnessing the removal of victorian water pipes here in north london in my street. the down-sized cats are all sneaking round the man-holes as if they always knew about plutopia and wire magazine. and here we go, another helicopter with a quantas banner and nationwide and ultra light. don't say no to the dandy and the plumber.

[cityramica.livejournal.com]

i also noticed 3 billboards in 20 minutes for starbucks' new green tea frappuccino in a rare car ride yesterday.

it actually looked good in the photos. i was tempted. [but i was also starving, strapped into the back of a rental suv, and being subjected to best-of-the-90s top 40 radio at the time.]

[nicepimmelkarl.livejournal.com]

whistles...

green tea frappuccino

[(Anonymous)]

You missed nothing - It's like drinking hair conditioner.

[morning-jacket.livejournal.com]

it's gross; nothing at all like the matcha cream frappuccinos in japan.
it's way too sweet and tastes mostly like melon - you can barely taste the green tea