Over the last week or so I’ve been trying (and failing) to
gather my flat into some semblance of order so that I, along with all my
belongings, can move out – onwards and upwards/downwards to Huddersfield,
Glendale and in September a nice shiny new flat in Edinburgh. During this
process several things have bcome clear to me:
- I probably do not have a glittering career in removals ahead of me
- The amount of needles on my floor is alarming
- The minute I have to move things on foot from one flat to another, the fortnight-long heatwave will break and the heavens will open
- I have a LOT of stuff.
It’s the last one that has been, if not exactly bothering me, then lurking in my brain. I am not a very materialistic person and I certainly don’t
own any wanton luxuries (by this world’s standards anyway). I’ve lived in this
flat for almost exactly one year, hardly a lifetime’s worth of accumulation,
but I still manage to have suitcases full of my belongings, seemingly endless 'miscellaneous' bits and pieces that all seem really, really important if I consider throwing them out, a table, a record
player and a footstool. I got rid of two binbags worth of clothes and one binbag worth of papers I didn’t need.
To be honest I didn’t feel too
guilty about getting rid of them – the clothes went to charity and the papers
in the recycling bin – but there was more than a little itch of guilt about
owning so much crap in the first place. However this is not a post about
first-world greed, materialism, over-production or any of those things
(although watch this space!). Instead I want to perhaps refute the notion that
it is purely greed which motivates
people to constantly be acquiring, keeping and hoarding things.
I
noticed while packing that lots of the things I own carry some sort of
emotional connection or memories – the records I bought when my dad came to
visit before Christmas, the dress I bought for the first party we had in the
flat, the scraps of paper that were once booking confirmation for a bus ticket
to Skye - and even less significant things, small memories, fragments of
conversations, the memory of how something came to be in your possession,
ghosts of days and nights and people and places and moments. I’m glad to be
moving out; this flat is incredibly difficult and expensive to heat, it’s on
the top floor of a filthy staircase, my ceiling periodically caves in and I’m
not sure how much more life my window has in it. But in a way clearing out my
belongings, putting clothes in suitcases and binbags, sorting through old
papers and books feels a bit like the end of an era. And I think that
materialism, hoarding, whatever you want to call it, might sometimes be based
on the human connections that people often perceive through physical objects. I was flicking through
a magazine the other day and stumbled on an article about dealing with grief;
one of the tips it gave was if you feel you’re ready, throw out lots of your
old clothes, because clothes are some of the most emotionally-charged items
there are. I think that applies to books as well – and, in my case, to just
about everything; I have a bad habit of being over-sentimental.
But why is this?
Clothes are just bits of fibre held together. Books are just paper – yes, they
can also be ideas and communication but nothing irreplacable and nothing that isn’t
available online, in the library or at another bookshop further down the line. My
CDs are all on my computer. So what causes this projection of emotion?
It’s my view that, in developed countries at least, we are
encouraged consciously and unconsciously to have fewer and fewer truly
meaningful connections with each other as people. Higher living standards, the
growth of a more individualistic political culture, an increase in urban population
and decline of traditional communities (rural and industrial) have, it is
generally agreed, resulted in a more atomised society. Some people think this
is a good thing; I do not. We are now in touch with more people than ever
before. Whatever age, gender, or social class you are from it is generally
possible through the Internet (social media in particular) to get back in touch
with old acquaintances or meet new people. An increase in professional
specialisation and decline in self-sufficiency means that we now have to have
much more contact with a wider variety of people just to ensure that we eat
(restaurant staff, supermarket staff, takeaway deliveries, individual small
suppliers, street vendors), have somewhere to live (landlords, maintenance
staff, estate agents, lawyers, builders, architects, painters, decorators to
name but a few), have a reliable source of income, that our children receive an
education, that our pets are looked after, that our health is good, the list
goes on.
But if you stop to think, almost all these connections are superficial;
Louis Wirth described how ‘the multiplication of persons in a state of
interaction under conditions which make their contact as full personalities
impossible produces…segmentalization of human relationships…In relation to the
number of people with whom they rub elbows in the course of daily life, they
know a smaller proportion, and of these they have less intensive knowledge.’[1]. Simplified: We meet more people but know less, and those we do know, we don't know well, because our life situations make it very difficult to. The phrase 'segmentalization of human relationships' is also interesting'; the idea that relationships - often considered a private area of life, separate from work or the public arena - have actually also become part of the divisions and organisation associated with modern lifestyles. To me, this carries echoes of E. P. Thompson's theory of 'time-work discipline'. This was the idea that in pre-industrial communities time was divided not by constantly equal units of seconds, minutes, hours and days, but by seasons, tides, the sun, the moon, crop rotations, etc. (Thompson believed that this idea of time had its source in a collective human wisdom, compared with the new system which was solely based around profit and efficiency.)
Have human relationships also fallen prey to this new, unitary organisational system - compared with the (necessarily) closer, more all-encompassing ties of pre-capitalism and pre-industry?
To sum up - or attempt to - in the course of a day we can come across tens or even hundreds of
different people; but how many of those interactions will be meaningful and
life-enriching and how many will be simply ensuring that we can continue living
to the standard to which we are accustomed, with a couple of words and probably an exchange of money? Obviously, most people have at
least one or two close friends, potentially a relationship, family ties, etc. But
I believe that one of the most fundamental changes between what might be termed
pre- and post-industrial society is that
our ‘close’ personal ties (lovers, friends, family) and those people we rely on for survival (providers of food, shelter, childcare) are no longer the same. In the novel Liza’s
England one of Pat Barker’s characters says to another “We looked after
each other. You loved thy neighbour because if you didn’t you’d be dead, and so
would she. We’ve lost that now.”
Obviously it is no bad thing that the crushing
poverty which kept millions living hand-to-mouth has disappeared, at least in
this country. But Max Weber explains the current situation not as a land of
milk and honey but simply as ‘a lack of that mutual acquaintanceship which ordinarily
inheres between the inhabitants in a neighbourhood.’[2] This
can result in increased personal freedom; the individual no longer has to worry about
‘keeping up with the Joneses’ or ‘what will the neighbours think’, he or she
only has to please themselves. But there is a trade-off to be made – the loss
of a sense of belonging to a community, and a feeling of being integrated into
something which is bigger than the sum of its parts. Durkheim calls this the
‘social void’, or ‘anomie’; and this is something which I plan to post on more
in the future. However the basic idea is that when a society goes through
change (urbanisation – industrialisation – war, famine, disaster – economic
depression) the fundamental rules and structures of that society are challenged
and break down. This results in the components of the society (i.e. people)
being unable to function or at least unaware of the social norms governing
their existence, or the expectations that are on them as members of a society.
I believe that part of what motivates materialism is this
social void. I do not deny the existence of greed; nor do I deny that a higher
living standard can make a person happier. However, I feel very strongly that
capitalism has slowly drained away much of what made life more than a rat race;
that through the individualisation and atomisation of society something has
been lost and so we reach out for what we are told will ensure happiness;
material possessions.
In my experience this takes two forms: buying more and
more things to make that ‘buzz’ last a little while longer, and looking for
meaning in inanimate objects because on some level we are aware that the
chances are not good for our life experiences and relationships to be lasting
and meaningful; things that remind us of a happy time should be held on to like
grim death because happy times quickly disappear in a haze of work and money
worries and deep loneliness even when surrounded by people.
To paraphrase
George Orwell (somewhere in 1984…the
book is in a suitcase somewhere…I’ll add a reference later): ‘everything seemed
like it was right, but there was a feeling deep in your own bones that
something was very wrong, that things had not always been this way’.
No comments:
Post a Comment