Driving recently through a small French town with a left-wing council, I noticed an official poster with the following slogan:
Let’s globalize solidarity, not poverty.
I felt slightly nauseated, as I did when, in the window of the Oxfam shop in my town in England, I saw a poster with the unctuous words, “Thank you for being humankind.”
No doubt the person who thought up that little slogan was very pleased with himself: How can someone who thinks up a morally impeccable and politically correct pun be other than a good person? It made me want to throw a brick through the window—I who can’t hurt a fly without thinking of the lines from Blake:
Little Fly
Thy summers play
My thoughtless hand
Has brush’d away.
Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?
Bad philosophy this may be, but it has at least genuine and generous feeling in it: it is not merely an exhibition of self-righteousness.
No doubt globalization has had its bad effects. It has hollowed out the industrial base of advanced countries and resulted in strategic as well as domestic problems for them. But the one thing it has not done is increase world poverty. On the contrary, it has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of abject poverty, and if everyone has not benefited equally—well, no economic policy ever devised has benefited everyone equally, without leaving some behind.
What of globalized solidarity? I can’t think of anything more depressing; thank goodness that it’s impossible. You might as well ask the lion to show solidarity with the gazelle or the crocodile with the gnu—simply because they share the same continent, Africa.
Globalized solidarity is an intrinsically totalitarian notion, because it requires that all the people in the world should have identical desires, goals, attitudes to life and interests. It implies that, at heart, all conflict is illusory: if only the people who engaged in it would recognise their own best interest! History demonstrates where that naïve thought leads; and it is obvious that you cannot show solidarity both with the anti-regime demonstrators in Iran and with the Revolutionary Guard who mowed them down by the thousand. Moreover, it is not even easy to know what showing solidarity entails in the case of the demonstrators.
Because I do not believe in global solidarity, it does not follow that I believe that human life is merely a war of each against all and that the best policy is always the utmost ruthlessness and egoistic pursuit of one’s own narrow interests. But universal agreement about what is just or desirable will not soon be reached, and the interests of each are unlikely ever to be the interests of all. A civilized society is not one in which there is no conflict, but one in which conflict does not lead to murder—as the attempt to eliminate conflict altogether always does.
We seem to live in an increasingly sloganeering society, in which the followers of Mr. Pecksniff have triumphed. Mr. Pecksniff, you might remember, is a character in Dickens’s novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, a villainous religious hypocrite who calls his daughters Charity and Mercy and then draws attention to the holiness of the names he has given them.
You can hardly get away from Pecksniffian expressions of virtue these days. I am sitting in my kitchen and I pick up at random three items nearby: a product to degrease saucepans, a bottle of spring water, and the box containing greaseproof paper. The first tells me, via something called its Ecolabel, to be sure to dispose of the container in the right dustbin or trashcan, for the sake of the planet; the second tells me that the bottle top being undetachable from the rest of the bottle, it limits the damage to the environment, and if I want to know more, I can consult a website where it seems that my further questions on the environmental effects of the bottle and its proper disposal will be answered by a character in the form of a giant panda; and the third tells me that the product, or the producers of the product, are “for a responsible forestry.” This statement is accompanied by a picture of two leaves that look to me like leaves of basil. An asterisk takes me to an elaboration, where the wrapping is given a personal identity, for it says “I am made of materials that come from forests that are responsibly managed.”
The constant reiteration of even the most desirable goals results in irrational resistance to, or reaction against them. It is true that few people read very carefully the labels of such products as I have mentioned, but I cannot help thinking here of Vance Packard and his book, The Hidden Persuaders, in which he claimed that subliminal messages nevertheless exerted their effects. One should not lightly draw comparisons with North Korea and its ubiquitous propaganda, but I can’t help feeling sometimes that we are undergoing a slow process of Pyongyangization for both political and commercial ends.
The other day I picked up in the street a squashed can of some disgusting chemical concoction purporting to be a fruit drink, ruthlessly marketed and sold by a giant corporation to the undiscriminating, less prosperous, and less educated members of the younger generation. The list of ingredients, which of course only a lunatic such as I would read, and which I did through a magnifying glass, was like a chemistry textbook, both organic and inorganic. The list alone was enough to make me feel quite ill, even without drinking the terrible stuff.
But what really appalled me was the high-minded sentiment also expressed on the can. Some of the profits were going to be ploughed back into “the community,” it said, such as literacy courses, when it was perfectly obvious that the only decent thing for the company to do was to stop manufacturing the noxious substance.
But the world is a complex place. Halting production of this terrible concoction would harm the livelihoods of many, and no doubt destroying the pleasure that even more take in drinking it. We are more or less doomed to live in a world whose whole economic system, better than any other known to Man, depends completely on the insolvent consuming the unnecessary.
In the meantime, Down with slogans!
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