COVER -> DAY ONE
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In Los Angeles they were getting ready for the Oscars. Even KCRW, the most straight-laced public radio after Boston and Minneapolis, couldn't wring anything aesthetic out of the build-up. It was an American beauty contest. Between meetings in the bowels of airport hotels I made my usual strenuous and only partially successful efforts to find reasonable restaurants. Not for the first time I wondered why the United States manages to get so little for its money. Although it is much less rigid than it was when I first went to Harvard in 1973, the American food industry is still split between basic ingredients and flavours, the use of the latter being made necessary by the blandness of the former. At least there is some recognition nowadays of the centrality of bread, wine and even cheese; but the culture of quantity over quality persists.
My solid, liberal, 'worthy' upbringing reacted badly to Mantel and Mendesjust as it recoils from ballpark salaries and lotteries. I was brought up to believe that there is no such thing as "something for nothing" which has nothing, incidentally, to do with the cynicism that there is "No such thing as a free lunch".
There is, of course, either as a ritual of friendship or an expression of benevolence or compassion. At a deeper level it might be as well to recognise that to lack the super erogatory touch, to confine business to the actuarial, is to be a flat-footed speculator.
What distinguishes my grandparents from my grandchildren is that we have moved in this Century from an industrial back to a mercantile age. We might call our age "information or communications" but in terms of how we behave, as opposed to what we use by way of materials, we are back with the manners and outlook of the 18th Century.
In the industrial age people had to deploy huge sums of capital in order to reap hefty profits and although they were no kinder than their predecessors or successors, they understood the importance of stability and of maximising investment over a long period. A mill had to be built and equipped and out of self interest its workers had to be nourished and, later in the 19th Century as more complex processes were developed, educated. There was no point in a mill if the workers were too weak to work or too illiterate to clock in and fulfil their quota.
As .com shares reach absurdly stratospheric levels the South Sea Bubble is recalled. There will be many more losers than winners but until the crash we will all play the game to the limits.
This new society, with its throwback to merchant venturers, is no less intrinsically moral than the age of Queen Victoria; it is simply that we have abandoned the contrivance of hypocrisy which so well matched the painstaking accumulation of wealth. In being more transient and, subconsciously, more frightened, we are more coarse because time is against us. If we do not pitch in now someone else will have thought up the same or a better idea and we will have lost our chance.
This at least in part explains the febrile nature of our society, of the restless greed and almost headlong self-indulgence. It is the goading of the plague, the feverish search for meaning, the conflation of display with good taste.
Better to recognise than wish things otherwise. The mercantile age matched its greed and cruelty, display and coarseness, with a set of high ideals which overthrew what was left of Christendom.
The industrial age, needing more solidity for its purposes, reinvented crypto-Christian morality, developed civic pride and largely eschewed grand moral statements of any sort. It preferred science and engineering to moral or any other kind of philosophy.
I do not think - we have got there at last - that it is sensible to apply grandiose moral tools in our new mercantile age; we will be better off reinterpreting some of the virtues of the industrial age such as civic pride and the promotion of domestic, immediate virtues. If, as many say, we are to break our society into city states then we shall have to behave better to those who share our city. They will no longer be as distant as the drowned of Mozambique nor even the denizens of ghettos on the opposite coast, they will be among us and we will have the simple choice before us of further brutalising the alienated or, through generations of patience, bringing them into a condition of mutuality with us. This will require a huge number of small steps, including the physical steps we must take to get closer to all our neighbours, whether we like them or not.
I would have thought that selfishness in an age of permanent and full employment, social security and the occasional economically stimulating war is a luxury that can be got away with in fairly large quantities but even approaching the 100th month of steady economic growth in the USA it might be unwise to reinforce a culture of selfishness to which we might fall victim at any time. If life were as simple as "eat, drink, for tomorrow we die" a certain amount of bad behaviour might be understandable but when the truth is that we might be millionaires for a month and paupers for 3/4 of a century a little more caution is surely called for.
