Capitalism is good for the soul
Every year, as we mill around the shops buying presents, commentators warn the ‘true meaning’ of Christmas is being eroded. Queuing at the bottle shop we mutter among ourselves about how Christmas has become ‘too commercial,’ and gorging on seafood and turkey, we chide ourselves for our gluttony. We tell each other how Christmases in the past were simpler, that children nowadays are spoiled, and that we have all become too materialistic.
This sense that we have lost sight of the more important things in life is not new. The Marxist literary critic, Raymond Williams, found that every generation for the last two centuries has expressed a nostalgic yearning for a simpler and more ‘authentic’ past that it thinks was lost just a generation earlier. We tend to feel this ‘loss’ most acutely at Christmas, for at this time we are reminded of the innocence and magic of our childhoods, before we got caught up in the pursuit of careers, money and success.
Williams believed this gnawing feeling of emptiness and dissatisfaction is caused by capitalism’s emphasis on the materialistic aspects of life to the neglect of our own humanity. This leaves us feeling that something important is missing in our lives, and we project this missing humanity onto a romanticized idea of the past.
Williams was not the only critic to argue this way. The guru of the 1960s student movement, Herbert Marcuse, was another. Marxists used to attack capitalism for its inability to provide the masses with an adequate standard of living, but this claim became absurd after the war as working class people started buying cars, houses and foreign holidays. Marcuse therefore turned the traditional critique on its head. The problem with capitalism, he said, was not that it gives us too little, but that it gives us too much. The result is a society of ‘one-dimensional men’ alienated by excessive consumerism.
Forty years later, this critique has become commonplace. In Australia, we find it in Clive Hamilton’s books which attack our preoccupation with the pursuit of wealth. Like Williams and Marcuse, Hamilton claims we are increasingly unhappy and unfulfilled as a result of our materialistic lifestyles. He thinks the pursuit of money is getting in the way of our ability to reconnect with our ‘true selves,’ and he urges us to drop out of the rat race and sacrifice income for a more fulfilling lifestyle.
But is it true that capitalism creates empty and meaningless lives? Capitalism is an easy target because it lacks romantic appeal. Unlike socialism or environmentalism, the capitalist ideal offers no grand vision for the future. It consigns our fate into the hands of billions of individuals interacting in a global marketplace, so there is no place for Utopian societal blueprints or revolutionary heroes (which is probably why intellectuals are so disenchanted with it).
Yet capitalism has performed vastly better than any alternative system. In 1820, 85 per cent of the world’s population lived on today’s equivalent of less than a dollar per day. Today it is 20 per cent. This dramatic reduction in human misery and despair owes nothing to socialist engineering, nor even to ageing rock stars demanding that we ‘make poverty history.’ It is due to the spread of global capitalism.
Capitalism has extended human life. In 1900, the average life expectancy in the ‘less developed countries’ was just 30 years. Today it is 65 years. Capitalism has also released much of humanity from the crushing burden of physical labour. What Hamilton dismissively calls the capitalist ‘growth fetish’ means one hour of work today delivers 25 times more value than it did in 1850. This has freed huge chunks of our time for leisure, art, sport, learning and other ‘soul-enriching’ pursuits denied to our forebears.
Hamilton acknowledges capitalism has improved our lives but insists that excessive materialism became a problem in ‘the last two or three decades.’ But consider what would have been lost if we had abandoned growth in, say, 1980.
There would be no World Wide Web, satellite navigation, mobile phones or cheap inter-continental telephone calls (so much for connecting with each other!). No PCs, digital music, cameras, televisions or DVDs. No hybrid cars and very little solar or wind powered electricity generation. No genetically modified crops to raise yields and reduce the use of insecticides. No human genome map with its potential cures for Alzheimer’s and heart disease. No AIDS treatments or MRI scans.
True, most of us could live without these things. But on what possible grounds could it be argued this would improve our lives?
Surveys find happiness levels have not risen recently, despite economic growth. But this does not mean our lives have not improved. Happiness scores show little change because we factor in improvements as they occur. If we were catapulted back to 1980, happiness scores would plummet. By the same token, happiness scores will doubtless be no higher in thirty years time than they are now, but this does not mean our children will want to sacrifice the improvements they have secured.
The critics are of course correct when they say buying and selling cannot give us everything we need in life. But most people are aware of this. The critics assume consumption pre-empts the pursuit of genuine happiness, but commercial relationships do not rule out other, more enduring, forms of association, like friendships, family ties, voluntary activity or religious worship. Owning a nice house, car or plasma TV does not mean you cannot also build meaningful social relationships.
All that can reasonably be asked of any socio-economic system is that the conditions be in place which enable us to construct happy and worthwhile lives for ourselves. On this test, capitalism passes with flying colours. It delivers necessities like food and shelter, allows people to interact freely, and maximises opportunities to realize our potential through hard work and innovation. The rest is up to us.
Happy Christmas!
Peter Saunders is Social Research Director at the Centre for Independent Studies. His article Why Capitalism is Good for the Soul is in Policy Magazine or online at: www.cis.org.au