Protection

I noticed in the Economist's coverage of the latest European agreement over the sovereign debt crisis that the countries agreeing the terms would prefer the 50% write down of Greek debt by the private sector to be voluntary, as any actual default might trigger payments from Credit Default Swaps, and these are 'untested'. Just so we're all clear here, Credit Default Swaps are insurance against a company or country not paying back the money it has borrowed in the form of a bond. Let's just check that again: this is insurance against a country defaulting and the politicians don't want countries to default because it might mean the insurers would have to pay out on the policies. Am I the only person who struggles with this concept? Isn't this a bit like someone telling me I can't have a crash in my car in case my insurance company has to pay for it? Surely the the clue is in the word 'insurance', perhaps that is why that word is not included in 'Credit Default Swap'.
But seriously, do we need to go back to basics? Capitalism 101: a company will exchange goods and services with a customer in return for payment. Capitalism 101b: if those goods or services are shit the customer will stop paying for them. For many years now the insurance industry has been charging healthy sums of money to insure against the possibility of countries defaulting, indeed the rising price of this insurance was one of the causes of the sovereign debt crisis in the first place. However, now there is the threat that they might have to pay back some of the money that they have been accumulating rather than keep all of it as profit, they seem a little unsure of the whole process. Let's be clear, I'm not saying 'the evil insurers should pay their debt to society', I am simply saying maybe its time they honoured some of the contracts they've made with their customers.
So whilst we're all busy bashing banks, maybe we should be asking ourselves who is really profiting from this crisis and why our leaders are happy to let them quietly get on with it.

Pied Piper

It turns out that it is harder to photograph other people's feet than I thought. However I will persist because this is a point* that requires illustration. Think yourself into the mind of the wearer of these shoes for a moment. Presumably you are looking down at your feet and thinking 'damn, my feet look so good dressed up as the Pied Piper of Hamelin; these shoes really add a much needed medieval touch to my otherwise entirely 21st century outfit.' Why would you be thinking anything else? This presumably is the thought of countless men up and down the country who, apparently voluntarily, choose to wear pantomime footware.
Consider this the start of the backlash.

*geddit?

Priorities

There is a lady on my tube who has an iPad and is using it to read the Metro. It's a free paper, there's one behind her on the seat. Am I missing something? Is this like when people wait for a rush-hour tube at Bank, squeeze themselves on it and then get off at Liverpool Street? It's five minutes walk away, you could have actually saved yourself time as well as the unpleasant sensation of being crammed into a train at rush-hour!
To me this typifies our relationship with technology: we will use it at every opportunity, regardless of whether it is to our benefit.
The recent demise of Steve Jobs led to a plethora of articles detailing how he changed the way we use technology, and I would tend to agree, although I am not sure he was by any means alone in this; he was merely one of the more visible and successful practitioners. I am talking of course of technology for which a need is invented rather than technology that is invented to fulfill a pre-existing need. The personal computer was perhaps not the first such technology, but the tablet computer is definitely the latest. Many will argue that the tablet computer will come to fill many roles just as the personal computer has done in the last ten years, and that is undoubtedly true. This can be said about much Jobs-related technology: I wouldn't have time to write this blog if I didn't do it on my smartphone. However, if we look at the services the computer began to provide, they were mainly those that were already provided by other technologies: to become useful, the personal computer had to borrow uses from elsewhere. Is that necessarily a bad thing? If the computer replaces several other devices, surely that is a rationalisation of technology, which is an efficiency and therefore good. However, if to reach the point at which the computer is actually useful in this way, millions, possibly billions of useless computers had to be made and thrown away, how efficient actually is the final product? I understand the need for continual improvement, but is there a difference between developing a product and doggedly plugging away at it until it becomes useful?
The printing press did not do anything new, it just did it in a different way, but the use for it was discovered at the same time as the thing itself, not 20 years later.
Even the car had a clear purpose from its inception, it was just that it took 20 years of improvement to stop it being woefully inefficient and lethal (obviously neither issue has ever been fully resolved). It is the bloody-mindedness of the pioneers of motoring that has become almost a blueprint for the inventors and developers of all subsequent technologies, indeed it is seen as an essential quality of such people. This is fine when it applies to one or two lone practitioners, but when it becomes the attitude of a whole industry the fallout in terms of waste products can be huge. Indeed the legacy of these bloody-minded pioneers is a bloated, blinkered and uni-directional industry that has shunned radical innovation in favour of idiosyncratic aesthetics and masculine fashion. Granted, much of the 'development' in the car industry in the last 30 years has clearly been driven by the single interest of the oil companies, but even without this powerful lobby it is likely that the internal combustion engine would still be at the heart of most cars.
All industry is subject to outside interest and the desire of shareholders to make money - that is the nature of capitalism - but we have arrived at age where the commercial interests of a company are sold to consumers as desirable regardless of the usefulness of the products that are inherent in this transaction. As consumers, we buy into the idea of a product or its lifestyle associations, or even the lifestyle associated with the company that produced it, and it appears that we are increasingly willing to buy the image wholesale. How else can we explain Apple retaining its counter-cultural identity even after becoming the highest valued company listed on Wall Street? So are we as consumers responsible for the products that we end up with, or are we being tricked by a future lifestyle myth? Can the Man exploit the fact that our desires and hopes and dreams are still hopelessly Modern? Is this possibly a failing attributable to the linear nature of our lives? Are we naturally predisposed towards a concept of development as a process of relentless accumulation arrested only by death?
Maybe we are unable to resist the pull of desirable future filled with objects we don't yet have a use for. Maybe we are destined to spend our time finding out whether our iPads are better at opening tins than tin openers.
Of course, my argument can be seen as a little facetious, in that the use of tablet devices to read newspapers and books will reduce the environmental impact of the publication of these tomes in hard copy. But this can only be the case if enough books or newspapers are read to offset the environmental impact of producing the device in the first place before a newer, faster, more desirable version is sold to us and we chuck it on the fadget* graveyard.
It is clear that there is no simple answer to the wastefulness of our production and consumption of technology. Obviously it will help if obsolescence is not built into our technology as standard - and that will require many manufacturers to rethink their business models. However only we as consumers have the power to make them think about these things much more seriously, and that requires us to see beyond the rather childish notion that fagets somehow make us cool. Seriously, I'm over 25, nothing is ever going to make me cool. Indeed, why should it?

* fadget - a faddish gadget - see most modern technology.

Privileges

It is a common complaint that 'being green' is a privilege that only the wealthy can afford, but I want to understand the basis of this claim. It is entirely possible that the environmental movement has historically been driven by people from a relatively privileged background, but then the same can be said about many movements, largely due to the amount of free time that relative financial security affords such people to start thinking about such things. It is perhaps no surprise that progress of the labour movement accelerated as workers gained access to more free time. But in the 21st century we all have access to a reasonable amount of free time, so cannot claim time poverty. Even most of those who do claim time poverty have opted to do the additional work that deprives them of their free time. I don't doubt for a second that there are people in this country who can only keep their heads above water by working every waking hour, but these people are at the extreme end of the spectrum and are precisely the people the welfare state should be helping. The rest of us have free time, so it cannot be that which is the privilege required to care about the long term future of our planet.
In terms of monetary poverty, again I fail to see the argument. With the notable exception of those in extreme poverty, who I have already mentioned, we are all capable of affording to take the options that would result in lesser environmental damage. The fact that these options may in many cases deprive us of some luxuries is, I suspect, the greater reason for the reluctance. Indeed, why should we give up the luxuries for which we have worked so hard? Surely we are entitled to our foreign holidays, our abundant cheap clothes and food, and the freedom to travel wherever we want by car. Certainly the language used when discussing these things is the language of entitlement, but entitlement on what basis? Are we entitled to something just because someone else has it and it exists? Surely there is no other basis for our sense of entitlement than natural human greed.
I am beginning to sound like a member of the hair shirt brigade. I'm not. I believe life should be enjoyed, I just think that maybe we need to consider what actually gives us enjoyment and what its real cost is. That said, I've no idea how we quantify that cost. This to me seems to one of the biggest problems of the 'green' movement: the fact that it is a nebulous catch all for so many things means that the creation any kind quantifiable moral scale with reference to it is impossible. In the resulting maelstrom of righteousness, all sorts of ideas, concepts and lifestyles are given credence; some of them totally crackpot, some of questionable environmental benefit and some of them probably essential to the future of our planet. Unfortunately they get lumped together in random batches by people whose egos allow them to know what's best for you. So we end up with people telling us all our food should be organic and biodynamic, when one is a laudable aim and the other is a quirky approach to farming with no proven benefits of any sort. However, there are many who would argue that organically farmed food cannot be a solution, as it cannot provide sufficient quantities of food for the world's population. How this fact is worked out I don't know - half of my brain thinks it's a simple calculation, the other half thinks the data required for such a calculation must be considerable and ultimately unknowable - but assuming its veracity, does that mean we should give up on organic food production as an ideal? Politics used to be about taking ideals and making them pragmatic, but since the political class did away with ideals in favour of focus groups, all ideas must apparently be pragmatic before they can be considered at all. This disallowal of pure ideology is in many senses a diminishing of the horizons of ambition.
The question in terms of organic farming has to be whether its practice by those who can is detrimental to those who can't. Certainly, many would say that a less 'efficient' method of farming wastes the land available as it could have yielded greater amounts of food through more intensive farming methods. However, this is an extremely short-termist viewpoint if the intensive farming methods are unsustainable.
The question of privilege comes into the debate here because organic food is more expensive than 'conventionally' grown food. This is because it is more labour intensive, not because it's part of some middle class conspiracy. Food should at least be as expensive as the cost of its production, and it is only the artificial price manipulation of the supermarkets that has given us the idea that we are entitled to exceptionally cheap food. Buying food at its actual (i.e. more expensive) price would require us to be more frugal and therefore more thoughtful about how we use our food. But there is no impetus for this: as long as cheap food is available, people will continue to waste it. The real problem is that even if cheap food isn't available, those who can afford to will still waste it. Being wasteful is the way people have always demonstrated their wealth, even when they have none; overcoming the impulse for waste would be one of the hardest undertakings for anyone, especially as it can easily turn you into a bore. However, if we even have a vaguely altruistic inclination we need to consider it.
So what am I saying about privilege and the environment? I think all I can say is that wealth allows people to appear more environmentally friendly without actually being so, and it is this conspicuous greensumption that gives the impression that being green is a luxury of the wealthy. This becomes the perfect excuse for those who do not wish to change any aspect of their lifestyles: that they cannot afford it. In short, the lazy plead poverty.
However, possibly more reprehensible are those who create this impression: the privileged. Not only do they generate the impression that the environmental movement is a club exclusive to them, but they are simply hiding their wastefulness behind a plethora of 'green' fashions.
Finally I guess I have to ask 'who am I to judge?' Really I am in no position, like many people I often plead poverty when expense would preclude the 'green' option (such as taking the train to Europe) and convince myself that I am not part of the problem the rest of the time using my few 'green' actions as self-justification. Must try harder.

Post

At the Postmodernism exhibition at the V&A, Jenny Holzer's 1985 piece in which the words 'protect me from what I want' were displayed on advertising hoardings is seen as an attempt to make us question how we feel about the voice of authority in advertising. This work illustrates what is for me one of the enduring strengths of Postmodernism, as it is only through a postmodern critical framework that we begin to question the linear inevitability of capitalism that is the backbone Modern thought and confidence. Of course much has already changed since Holzer's piece was created: most notably we are much more aware of the consequences of our consumption. This knowledge doesn't stop us from consuming at an accelerated rate even though reason would dictate that it should. We are irrational consumers and we are encouraged to be.
I recently heard a Labour politician complaining that the high cost of fuel was endangering business and therefore jobs in his constituency. This seems like a perfectly reasonable point until one asks what he wanted to achieve by it. I think the simple answer is he wanted some sort of government assistance in the lowering of the fuel price. But the price of oil is never going to go down, not in real terms, so any subsidy (in whatever form) the government applied would only be a short term solution. Moreover, it would simply be saving the problem for later when it would be worse. The answer to the problem is that the businesses in question should have built the increase in the oil price into their business plans, otherwise they are badly run businesses and they will ultimately fail. Leaving these companies to the ravages of the market would be a harsh solution, but if they failed because of their inability to adapt to economic realities the resulting reduction in greenhouse gases would be good for the environment. This is a solution to both the economic and environmental problems; it is actually the purely capitalist solution, but of course in our society it is viewed as an unacceptable solution because a vocal minority lose out. I am not by any means advocating pure capitalism as the solution to our planet's problems, I am simply illustrating the lengths to which people go to stop it appearing as nasty as it is, even when they're supposed to be socialists. This is because they have no concept of an alternative. Not that I'm saying I do; I don't.
All of the 19th and 20th century 'alternatives' to capitalism retained one essential component of that system: the requirement for continual growth. It is this requirement that we cannot ween ourselves off: even as our population growth stagnates, growth is driven by our accelerating consumption. In the Modern world (and still to an extent in the 'developing' world) this growth was driven by production, but in the postmodern world that emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century people had to find new ways of generating the growth that was required. Ultimately what we are left with is a bizarre fantsay ecomics that swirls around funny ideas and obsessions, and would be amusing if it didn't have such a dreadful impact on people's lives. This is not just the fault of the bankers, we are all complicit in denying the realities of our economic situations. Why? Because we are addicted to consumption. We can't help ourselves. Like severe drug addicts we are willing to deny the consequences of our actions because we are consumed by the actions themselves.
So what is the solution? I don't know, I'm as caught up in the whole thing as you. But I think it's time to start asking some questions, the sorts of questions that that politician should have been asking. Questions that will have answers many people don't like.
Hopefully they won't all be serious questions. Hopefully not everything I write will be this pretentious. I'm promising nothing.