The Cedar Lounge Revolution

I hadn’t really intended to reference an article last week in the Irish Times. Written by Angela Long (a journalist and “media consultant”) it starts innocuously enough by arguing that: “being forced to cut back on spending is no bad thing” and that ‘Consumerism has become a cult of things people don’t need - to an absurd degree’. I think it’s fair to say many of us would agree.

Yet it somehow manages to turn a not entirely unreasonable point into something approaching an offensive one

I can’t agree more with the proposition at the end of the following paragraph:

Dundrum Town Centre is a wonderful place, a mecca for millions. Fifty million, at the latest count. And no doubt it boasts a community theatre, cinemas, adult education centre, restaurants, public square, offices and apartments, among other features. It also has about 14 places to buy accessories, 20 to buy shoes, and more than 30 for ladies’ fashions, with just a few less for the increasingly looks-conscious Irish male.

But if you want basic stuff - widgets, grommets, doorknobs - you can forget it.

And she continues in a similar vein. And yet as she does so something slightly different creeps in.

Quoting one “storage expert”, it noted that nobody designing bedroom storage a decade ago realised that people would own 30 white shirts and 30 pairs of black trousers. And that’s on top of their dozen grey trousers, six red shirts, and shoe collections to rival Filipina fetishist Imelda Marcos.

Shopping addiction has become an everyday feature rather than a problem. Surveys in countries like ours show shopping is the number-one leisure activity for droves of people. Go into store, look at things, hand over money for things, walk out with bags. Some leisure activity. But it’s all in pursuit of happiness, that sense of completeness that flashes by when the latest bags are handed over.

Who, precisely, is it that has 30 white shirts and 30 pairs of trousers? Or shoe ‘collections’? Or rather, who is this article directed at? And what of her parting words

Take comfort: that hair shirt might itch, but it will be easier to store than 25 silk ones you didn’t need.

I don’t have 25 silk shirts. Actually I have no silk shirts. I don’t have that many shirts full stop. And those I have are a bit utilitarian in terms of colour. Which makes her words irrelevant to me. But clearly there is an audience she feels it necessary to address, one which has dissipated its rapidly accrued wealth in frivolous purchases.

Now, to a certain extent, who cares? If she feels it necessary to berate people about such things well and good. But, it is the implicit assumption that every boat has risen in this tide which is so irritating. Which isn’t to say that crass expenditure hasn’t been seen across all social groups, and in various different forms, but that it’s not quite as simple as she makes out in her faux-puritan call for ‘hair’ shirts. For example, consumption isn’t merely a factor of pull - from the consumer. As a ‘media consultant’ she might - you think - be aware of the ‘push’ from industries eager to sell product. And industries that tend in many sectors to be near-indifferent to the ability of those who they project their wares to to pay. So we see orgies of consumerism at Christmas, fuelled largely by said media and industries. Most reprehensible are those who sell toys, but they’re not alone.

And thinking about puritanism, faux or otherwise, I can’t help feeling a little irked by the further assumption that our ‘toys’ should be taken away from us now. That in some sense we’ve had all we deserve. Plenty haven’t had anywhere near that, and have seen the boom fade as fast as it arrived while barely touching them.

Anyhow, despite all this, I wasn’t going to mention it until reading yesterday’s Irish Times I came across a piece in the opinion section by Dr Stephen Kinsella of the department of economics in the Kemmy business school, University of Limerick. Entitled What life will be like in 2050 for a middle-class Irish family it seems to dovetail neatly with the above.

It starts, after noting his own circumstances ‘I have a middle class job and a middle class lifestyle’ (although curiously the aspects which position this within this putative ‘middle class lifestyle’ are not precisely spelt out - and by the by, most academics who I know while very much regarding themselves as middle class are in reality stuck within contractual situations not much dissimilar to a less exalted social hinterland), by asking:

…what will life be like for an educated, middle-class family in the mid-21st century in Ireland? What trends can be reasonably relied upon to hold their magnitudes and directions this far forward into the future?

It’s the assumptions which underpin this question which are both fascinating and revealing. Note the term ‘educated’. But then the analysis swerves away into generalisations which are far from class-specific.

For example…

…they won’t have an oil problem the way we have one. By 2040, there is general agreement we won’t have enough oil to power the world’s needs. Something else will have taken its place, most likely a combination of nuclear power and cleaner, greener energy sources.

In fact, I would place a bet that the world economy will still be largely in a transition from oil-dependent energy generation technologies by the time of my first grandchild’s birth.

Nothing terribly startling there… or indeed here:

My grandchildren will have access to more information than all previous generations of mankind combined. In previous generations, mere volume of information was a strong predictor of success in warfare, industry or any other sphere of life. Now the quantity of information will not be a problem.

Or the following.

Irish society will, I suspect, be largely the same as our generation: the traditions and customs which matter will persevere. I am writing about just two generations forward, remember. What is certain is that my grandchildren will not be as influenced by religious culture as I was through my childhood, as the influence of the Catholic Church wanes further.

Note though how suddenly the middle classes have been replaced by ‘Irish society’.

Concomitant with this secular trend, the rise of a more isolated, fractured society will result in more failed marriages and divorce, and less formal living arrangements for the raising of children.

So, really an extension of the present and its trends into the future. It’s sort of like the predictions Wired magazine serve up, but without the glossy accompanying images.

The manufacturing sector will see a sharp decline over the next 20 years, as more and more basic assembly-type jobs succumb to the forces of globalisation and move to lower-waged countries. Wealth generation therefore, year to year, must come from services.

He does acknowledge that…

This is a very hard area in which to predict growth or decay. There is very little good data on service level productivity in Ireland, so we’re not quite sure how good we are relative to our neighbours and competitors internationally.

Or perhaps we don’t have a bogs notion as to what specifics might influence the overall picture… I’m far from confident that we are in a position to make any hard and fast assumptions about the 2050s, because looking back 40 odd years to the 1960s it is easy to see how much has changed since then. Indeed I’m reminded of Andre Gorz’s “Farewell to the Working Class” written in the late 1970s/early 1980s which had a brief concluding chapter on what a ’socialist’ society might look forward to. I recall being mighty impressed when I read it way back when by the idea of bus and cycle lanes. Small, surely, but indicative of how societies leap-frog forward in unexpected ways. And talking of change let’s not ignore the remarkable social changes that have affected classes in that time period. So if anything these stabs at divining the future seem somewhat conservative.

Still, it’s not all about the middle class or Irish ’society”. No indeed, it’s a bit more personal than that:

What policies can the Government enact to make sure the economic possibilities my grandchildren face are as favourable as possible?

No mention here about a broader social or societal solidarity. The only class linkage is explicit, if infuriatingly ill-defined. And it is taken as read that this is - per se - a ‘good’ thing.

Well, first, they need to help me save. The more the middle class saves, long term, the more their children and their children’s children will benefit. Second, they need to make sure my children survive, by providing a health service which will make the chances of this more likely. Third, the Government must ensure the natural environment my grandchildren inhabit is as conducive to their happiness as possible, while allowing service sectoral growth and general economic development to maximise the economic possibilities for my grandchildren.

Note the way in which the state is called upon to buttress the middle class, through a ‘health service’ that will ‘make sure his children survive’. But health outcomes are explicitly rooted in class, and generally speaking the middle classes see usually positive outcomes whereas the working class (and again I’m using these terms broadly myself and for a more precise read of how I regard these terms I’d direct you to Conor’s thoughts in this piece (and preceding ones) at Dublin Opinion.) see much less positive outcomes. Something that isn’t addressed at all in the piece.

And this is a bloodless vision, for example, how precisely is government to ‘allow’ service sectoral growth and general economic development to ‘maximise’ economic possibilities? I can think of a few answers, but I wonder if he’s thinking of the same ones?

Now, one might wonder what Jim Kemmy, were he alive today (incidentally a man whose views on the North I might not share, but clearly a socialist of some substance) might make of such writings.

Perhaps he might suggest that this is the conceptual eschaton (or words to that effect ) of a politics entirely divorced from class, despite its seeming linkage to a class. What does the writer mean when he uses the term ‘middle-class’? What definition does he use, and how does he see that carrying over into lifestyle? He provides no answers to those questions. I note that much appears predicated on consumption rather than production - so in a sense we see a connection to the article referenced at the top of this post. There is no effort to describe what pressures may exist within a potentially resource starved society with sharp disparities of wealth and influence. Health is mentioned in passing, but nothing about education that other great pillar of privilege or opportunity. Nor are broader social support structures addressed. There is nothing at all to contextualise this in international terms. What we are left with instead are, frankly rather optimistic, generalities which will apply to all within the society in varying measures - although those measures and their variability are crucial to what life will be like to Irish people born on this island (and note no reference to this being an island with all that that implies either).

But with no sense of what class means today it is near impossible to project what class will mean in four decades or so. I think - from my careful and forensic reading of the IT on a regular basis(!) - that I know what he means when he uses the term, but whether it is even appropriate in this context is a central point (incidentally, this isn’t meant from a class warrior point of view - one of the great mistakes of the left has been to ignore the congruence of interests across classes, and one of the other great mistakes has been to attempt to use that congruence in the way Blair et al did in the UK). Education, or the reification of education, is not the preserve of the self-appointed ‘middle class’. Health isn’t just their concern alone. The broader state of the economy concerns almost all.

So let’s start again. “What life is like for middle class and working class Irish families in 2008″ might well be a good base. And then we can - maybe - make some small assessment as to the future.

Some weeks ago these posts I write were critiqued, with some validity I have to add, as regards attacking the absurdities of the “liberal” stance of the Irish Times (or words to that effect). But, really. It’s moving into something that whatever way one cuts it seems to have a near-hermetically sealed worldview not merely ignorant of but actually indifferent to the broader society within which it sits.

I guess it’s a niche.