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

[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