Posits

The annual Long Layer talk this year between Brian Eno and David Graeber was a sporadically interesting affair. If Eno had spent a little less time auditioning for 'Grumpy Old Men' it might have been more consistently interesting. David Graeber on the other hand was that rarest of modern personages: someone trying to posit solutions. It is a workplace cliché to say "I don't want problems I want solutions", but actual solutions are fairly thin on the ground. Since the financial crisis of 2008, I have heard lots of blame apportioned and lots of assertions that it cannot be allowed to happen again, but no concrete ideas about how we might fix a clearly very dysfunctional system. There has been endless tinkering around the edges: introducing watered down laws to reduce bankers' bonuses or marginally change lending criteria. There has been plenty of blame ascribed to governments and institutions and of course bankers. At the height of the crisis some people even tried to blame Robert Peston for drawing our attention to the black hole in our financial system in the first place. Blame is great because it is always someone else's fault and therefore always someone else's problem. So the fundamental flaws in our system have been 'addressed' by assigning blame to certain groups of people and then almost arbitrarily restricting some aspect of their financial interactions. 

Perhaps I am being too cynical or too quick to judge, perhaps it is inevitable that in the immediate aftermath of a financial crisis of such magnitude there is bound to be a protracted period of hand wringing and mud slinging before people finally calm down enough to look properly at the problem, its causes and potential solutions. On Analysis on Radio 4 last week, Robert Peston presented a program about the ideas of two American economists concerning the causes of the 2008 crisis and the structural changes required to prevent them happening again. Refreshingly, they pointed out that everyone was to blame: irresponsible mortgage lenders, the banks who bought packaged debt from them and the individuals who borrowed amounts of money they couldn't afford to repay. More interestingly, they posited a change in the current system that could ensure that this couldn't just happen again. Largely this was to be achieved by switching the risk of default away from the borrower by allowing mortgage payments to decrease if the value of the mortgaged property falls. In return for the lender taking on more debt, they are guaranteed 5% of any increase in value of the property when it is sold. This is not necessarily a complete solution to all our problems, but on analysis it was heralded as radical and potentially controversial. To me this only seems to highlight the very limited set of parameters within which we consider sensible or even possible to operate our economy. An almost all pervasive conservatism has left us with little else to do but moan about a situation we daren't consider actually attempting to change. 

Because of this pervasive conservative orthodoxy, people like Graeber are considered so outlandish as to barely be considered at all. One of the interesting points Graeber made at the talk was the fact that as soon as it became apparent that the Occupy movement was not going to form a political party and join the established and manageable political process, the media quickly lost interest and decided that this was too radical to be reported on basically within mainstream media. Which speaks volumes the kind of commercial media we have now: concerned with appealing to as broader base of their 'constituents' as possible, scared that unorthodox ideas might scare them off. 

In the postwar period, the media presented the unorthodox to us as something we might want to consider, something we might want to discuss, even something we might get very upset about, but fundamentally something that was worth consideration. At some point around the end of the century, the media (along with the rest of us) were convinced that unorthodoxy was the preserve of the mentally unsound (or the poor, who are basically the same thing in this orthodoxy). So why would anyone, much less journalists who could otherwise get genuine access to the corridors of power be interested in such ephemera?

We are, as a society these days, entirely defined by our relationship to the epicentre of the mainstream. Teenagers are no longer able to have tribes that exist entirely apart from their peers or their guardians, and so are unable to experience the taste of truly independent thought. Everything we do is in relation to an ill defined but entirely conservative epicentre (and yes I do mean that I terms of the dictionary definition - Google it). 100 years ago, your average intellectual would have many friends with whom s/he disagreed entirely, yet they were able to form a friendship based largely on debate. These days, we form our wider social networks solely out of people we agree with entirely, and we wonder why our society gets steadily more crap. If we are not prepared to even countenance the (few) voices of genuine change in our world, then we deserve entirely the future that even the prophets of the orthodoxy have predicted for us.