Avarice - Part 1
Avarice, or Greed, as we would call it today. Now
there's a proper vice; one we can all surely identify with, claim, and confess to. I was all ready to dive into Greed, own it and rub it all over me like sun cream, when the thought flashed across my mind that another of the seven Deadly Sins is rather similar. Perhaps in my excitement to acknowledge and engage with Greed, I'd really been thinking all along of Gluttony. For when I hear the word greedy, I think first of food and drink. I think of "greedy guts" and "greedy pig" whose eyes are bigger than their tummies. But all those surely belong more to the fat warthog Gluttony than to hard-eyed Avarice and Greed.
Gluttony, after all, is a physical desire, seen not just in gourmandizing, but in all kinds of addictive behaviours. Whereas Greed comes not from the body, but from the mind. Avarice is, therefore, I think, a better word to describe our altogether darker, meaner, owning, hoarding, grabbing, collecting, acquiring, winning impulse.
So, when we talk of Greed, we'll forget food and wine and concentrate on avaricious Greed. This Greed is the grasping of the money-grubbing miser; the skinflint, cold heartedness of a scrooge; the unquenchable territorial ambition of an empire builder; the venal rapacity of the corrupt official; and a voracious TV evangelist; the limitless need for more and more and more that drives the rapine and monopolistic instincts of the acquisitive hedge funder, and predatory asset-stripping financier. All that seems a world away from a gourmand, a glutton, a drunk, a pot head, a Homer Simpson style doughnut-scoffer, or Monty Python's Mr Creosote and that
one last wafer-thin after dinner mint. Gluttony and I are old adversaries, old friends even. But Avarice, Greed; can I acquit myself of that? The craving for power and possessions? I don't feel it's something I need worry about - do I?
There can't be much question that Greed is very allied to selfishness, which if you listened last time, you will know I chose to be my Deadly Sin number one, deposing the canonical original Pride. Just as Pride at first glance appeared to be closer to a
virtue than a vice - we thought about pride as a booster of self-esteem and a builder of self-belief - so there are those who think of Greed in the same positive terms.
One of
the defining quotations of the materialistic 1980s came from the fictional character Gordon Gecko, the junk-bond pirate played by Michael Douglas in the Oliver Stone film
Wall Street. "Greed" he tells a dinner of fellow financiers, "for lack of a better word, is good."
Gordon Gecko wrote:Greed is right, Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed in all of its forms. Greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind.
It's easy to dismiss this. Your instinct might be to shake your head sadly, or scoff angrily, or snort derisively when anyone defends Greed, and especially dares to present it as a moral good. We are all surely aware that the gap between rich and poor is wider than it ever has been, and that the rhythm of capitalism still rules the world willy-nilly. Disruptive rebel newcomers evolving with bewildering speed into tax dodging corporate titans; jeans and sneaker mavericks morphing into collar and tie moguls; rebellion innovation - initially branded as "for all"- producing monopolistic strangle holds; cool start-ups, becoming bloated corporate fortresses for stockholder benefit only. The same rhythm that turned Henry Ford from an oily rag engineer into a terrifyingly merciless and aggressive corporate tyrant. And Mark Zuckerberg from shiny faced student with high hopes to a loathed symbol of everything that's wrong with the new surveillance economy and its insidious reach into every aspect of our lives.
But let's for the moment think about whether perhaps there may really
be a moral virtue to self-interested self-enrichment; a justification for rejecting altruism, self-listness, and all the other social justice warrior desiderata.
So, for a while I'm going to play devil's avocado and argue for Greed, or at least put the argument for Greed as best I can. “Greed is good” says the Wall Street predator. “Wealth creation is good” says the corporate titan.
Well, they would say that, you might reply. All rapacious billionaires will claim that they are enriching the world; that when they generate wealth for themselves, they generate it for others. That, to quote their favourite aphorism, a rising tide lifts all boats. That they are, if anything, philanthropic. Their Greed - one might say - is part of a virtuous and effective human instinct that burns to know what's over the hill; that labours ceaselessly to find out, for example, how to feed the whole tribe over winter by devising silos and barns for grain storage; that comes up with newer, smarter, and more efficient ways of growing the economy and fattening us all.
If they get a few private jets and tropical islands out of it, well, why not? Do you honestly believe communism would deliver greater riches for all? Forget comparisons of equality - look at the reality. Today, more people in the world are dying of
obesity than of malnutrition. Greed has brought largess for all. If we relate riches to height, it's as if we were all once four foot high, but now the Greed of the “achievers” has raised the average height to nearly six foot. So how dare you, if you're now six foot, moan about the billionaires who are eight foot? You are better nourished with more access to knowledge and the world's bounty than the generation that came before. That's what counts. It's not the gap between the rich and the poor that matters, it's the gap between what people
were and what they
are now.
We've all heard this argument and variations of it, not just from Rightists and Laissez-faire libertarian free market zealots, but from those on the Left too, like the Harvard psychologist and linguist, Stephen Pinker, anxious to show how the world has advanced thanks to the values of enlightenment, classical liberal economics and scientific thinking.
Alexander the Great, and all conquerors who came after, may have been pathologically greedy in their conquests - all empire builders, and usually their grateful countrymen - exhibit Greed. But from Julius Caesar to Jeff Bezos, the benefits that accrue; the economies of scale; the trading advantages; the spreading of technologies, skills, languages and cultural capital; the guaranteed security that comes with increasing size, scope, and power; these have advantaged the majority. That is the argument. Until Communism came along to offer another way of doing things, the drive to grow, the Greed to expand, these were all accepted. Glorified even. Communism's short-lived attempt to offer an alternative has since only strengthened the grip of Capitalism. Communism's failure has given Capitalism new courage to be even greedier, and even less apologetic or diluted by social justice regulation and constraint.
We're all aware of it and there seem to be two responses. One is to shrug and endorse - to echo Gecko and believe in the ability of our species eternally to invent new paths to prosperity and growth. The other is to question and challenge the Greed; to repudiate the idea that it is beneficial; to point to how it creates not just inequality, but how it exhausts resources, depletes the soil and threatens the long-term future of the planet.
Fine! say the capitalists.
Do by all means present an alternative that doesn't shackle individual and social liberty and impoverish the many whom you seem so anxious to serve. But if it's revolutionary socialism or communism you're offering, excuse us while we vomit with laughter.
The individual writer and thinker, above all others, who might be regarded as the inspiration for this unapologetic Gordon Gecko point of view; the individual who stands as a heroic intellectual champion to all those who believe that rational self-interest, Greed, the drive to grow, expand, seize, conquer, and devour is desirable ““ good - even
essential; that individual was born to a prosperous middle class Jewish family in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1895. She died in New York City in 1982, and her name - yes, she was a woman - was
Ayn Rand.
At the sound of that name, you might have groaned, or your breath might have quickened, and your ears pricked up like a warhorse at the sound of the bugle. To this day, she inspires levels of devotion and detestation that seem equally intemperate. But perhaps the name is unfamiliar to you.
Ayn Rand left Lenin's now Bolshevik communist Russia, or Soviet Union as it called itself, in 1925 and made her way to the United States of America, where she set about making her name as a screenwriter, novelist, and philosopher. To most lovers of literature, she is - to put it very kindly - very far from what you might call a literary talent. Her hectoring, long-winded, bombastic style is not suited to everyone, yet her two major novels are still
very much in print, adding new fanatical followers amongst the young every year. I travel a fair deal by Tube in London, and rarely a week goes by without me spotting someone reading one of the two major novels. Discounting her very first novel,
We the living, a condemnation of the Soviet Russia she had left, her first success was
The Fountainhead, which was made into a rather good, if peculiar, film starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal.
Rand wrote the screenplay but disavowed the end product. The story revolves around Howard Roark, a dedicated modernist architect who refuses to compromise his vision. Her next novel,
Atlas Shrugged remains her most popular today, a totemic touchstone for her fans. It most clearly - through the mouth of its hero, John Galt - articulates her credo of individualism. To the majority of critics and reviewers - both contemporary to her and to us - calling
The Fountainhead and
Atlas Shrugged “novels” is akin to calling Hallmark greeting card ditties “poems,” but that isn't really the point. The books served her purpose, which was to dramatise her philosophy, a form of libertarianism or rational egotism that she called objectivism. The enemy of this line of thinking is anything to do with collectivism, statism, dirigisme, government interventionism, call it what you will. Even the mildest form of social democracy, any hint of state subsidy, control or interference. Altruism, sympathy, compassion, and selflistness are contemptuously dismissed. Greed, in other words, is good.
You might see her as coming from a long line of what are known as “classical liberals” - confusing, but that's what they're called. A line that goes, if you like, names from Hobbes and Locke through Adam Smith all the way to Popper and Hayek. In some sense she could trace her heritage back to those who first express the idea that the rights and freedoms of
individuals are more important than those of groups, countries, religions, or any other ideologies or collectives.
Such an idea seems obvious to us because almost all of us will have grown up more or less taking the primacy of individual liberty for granted. But such ideas were initiated in the teeth of outraged ecclesiasticism and monarchical absolutism. These days, Classical Liberalism as a phrase is mostly used when thinking of economics and the idea that without free markets there can be no free people. Ayn Rand took it all much further though, damning even Friedrich Hayek - he was the Austrian Nobel laureate and free market hero of Margaret Thatcher and Reagan. She damned him for his weakness and shilly-shallying in daring mildly to suggest that maybe transport could be provided as a public service. She accused him of all people of being “saturated with the bromides of collectivism” and cursed him even further for his daring to suggest that individual morality might need to be considered to have defined limits.
Oh god damn the total, complete, vicious bastard
she wrote,
This means that man does exist for others.
The idea of
man existing for others was the great abomination to her and ran counter to everything she stood for.
Now, incidentally, woman or not, she always referred to humankind as
man and glowed with pleasure when someone referred to her as “the most courageous man in America.” You can see why Ayn Rand - individualist, anti-statist, apostle of the virtues of Greed and self-interest - appeals not just to financiers and corporate bigwigs, but to the general run of conservatives and libertarians for whom big government, the nanny state, and any suggestion of regulatory breaks, checks and balances are anathema. Her biographer, Jennifer Burns, calls her the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right.
Listen to this from Rand:
Government help to business is just as disastrous as government persecution. The only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off.
That could have come from Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher, couldn't it? Just as the Iron Ladies' famous pronouncement “there is no such thing as society” might easily have emerged from the mouth or pen of Rand. To this day, Rand's adherents are out and proud in the Republican party and in Britain's conservative party too - outer and prouder than ever in fact.
Alan Greenspan - for 20 years head of the American Federal Reserve Bank - counted himself amongst Ayn Rand’s friends and disciples. Many Silicon Valley billionaires quote her with fervent admiration. Since 2008, sales of her books have tripled, which you might think peculiar at just the time of the economic crash when the world surely had most cause to question the value of unfettered markets and call for some kind of regulation - the apostle of non interference, the high priestess of unbridled self-interest began to appeal to more and more people.
The name of
Atlas Shrugged’s hero, John Galt, was seen on banners at tea party rallies and all over America. Baffled tutors and professors were asking each other why their students were suddenly electing to do dissertations on Ayn Rand - a voice that most had believed died with its possessor in 1982. The explanation for this - at first glance - counterintuitive resurgence of interest in Rand can perhaps be found in the plot of
Atlas Shrugged.
In the book, a group of capitalists and industrialists - “achievers” and “producers” as Rand calls them - are growing increasingly alarmed by the way government is encroaching on them; as they see it inhibiting, over-taxing and shackling them, and even daring to redistribute the wealth that they created. Led by the charismatic John Galt, they go on strike; withholding their apparently indispensable genius of enterprise, entrepreneurial daring and wealth creation, and withdrawing to a hidden valley – Galt’s Gulch - from where it is assumed they will build their own untrammelled capitalist paradise.
EDITED to remove the weird characters...