The right to feel good has a long tradition; irrefutable progress is the conceit of modernity and inserts itself into every crevice of the culture, from the American novels of Horatio Alger and Henry James, to pop culture and the dominant narrative structures of television and film. A powerful sense of entitlement is compounded by the fading from living memory of war-time horrors and depression-era austerity.
As the capstone to the long boom, the New Gilded Age of the late 1990s seemed to institutionalise a culture of rising expectations: the triumph of convenience and choice over everything else. In this world, waiting is anathema, to say nothing of the restrictions imposed by rigid security and a pervasive fear of public spaces. We prize seamlessness and have come to expect transactions shorn of administrative friction. Our collective pleasure-addiction is famously expressed by an insatiable appetite for over-engineered kitchen utensils, sybaritic drugs and, more democratically, the $5 Starbucks latté. At my local supermarket, impatient queues of Ashtanga-toned matrons clamour for Pierre Poilane bread at £10 a loaf. This is what the late conservative critic, Christopher Lasch, worried about when he inveighed against the hollow promise of a ‘painless progress toward the celestial city of consumerism’.
As never before, optimism and an indelible faith in a better future are built into the syntax of our services-dominated economy. Its symbolic leaders, the intellectual entrepreneurs, joined together through a tissue of interconnections and shared institutions, are increasingly dependent on positive environments to thrive.
Debate as denial
We recall that in late 2001, it was consumers and not citizens who were called upon to lead the recovery. Faced with an interstitial lull in consumer spending, the vacant malls and empty airlines, very little prepared us for the initial shock to our wounded modernity. For weeks we collectively navigated unfamiliar emotional territory.
The shock worked its way through the markets already affected by a cyclical downturn and threatened to expose just how vulnerable our interdependent systems now are. Major airlines, arteries of our new economy, were forced to seek public assistance, their failure potentially compromising dozens of ‘downstream’ industries, jobs and lifestyles. The insurance industry, a long forgotten piece of necessary plumbing, teetered on the brink and was saved only by the absence of repeat attacks and promises of US Congressional support. For weeks, Las Vegas hotels remained empty. In those first months questions remained. Would the airline industry remain insurable? What of tall buildings? The underlying economics of entire industries could be threatened and the fragile public trusts that underwrite them, dangerously compromised.
We rightly came to fear the far-reaching and disastrous unintended consequences of minor incidents – the potential for chaos set off by the economic equivalent of the ‘fluttering of a butterfly wing in a far away rainforest’. Could public confidence sustain another attack in quick succession? Undoubtedly, we would be living in a very different world and partaking in a very different kind of conversation, had the unthinkable happened again.
Undeterred by Jeremiad speculation, the initial talk of an end to the ‘American Way of Life’ was quickly abated. In the ensuing months, we put 11 September in a box. Sanitised, like the site itself, from our consciousness. A memory to be brought out on state occasions and remembered largely out of time and context. 11 September has become dangerously sui generis.
Did we really have to change? We desperately wanted this not to be true and, as if in a collective leap of faith, we held our breath. But the other shoe failed to drop. The anthrax scare was short-lived. To our relief we learned it was the likely work of a deranged loner rather than part of a coordinated campaign of terror unleashed by an unknowable ‘Other’.
For democrats, one of the more sobering realities of the last months has been the exposed fragility of ‘public trust’. Trust in fellow citizens, shoppers and travellers to abide by the rules; trust our buildings will be safe so we remain free of the burden of constantly looking over our shoulders for an enemy within. We know an Israeli-style security is neither palatable nor even compatible with our way of life, our basic ontology. Sadly, I suspect we are only at the beginning of our negotiation between liberty and security (see an earlier article by Konrad Hummler) – a settlement that will have to be updated episodically.
If we are living in denial, then our false sense of security is made more dangerous by our states’ reliance on a compromised language – one where a ‘war on terrorism’ can be won in categorical terms, demanding minimum disruption in the way we live. This frame of ‘war’ is a form of comfort food against the dull alternative of a society of permanently curtailed liberties – a spectre too grim to contemplate.
Spinning to oblivion
The recovery was well on its way by the end of 2001. That was until Enron collapsed. Far beyond its real economic significance, Enron and the accounting scandal it set off, was a touchstone for a public mood already battered by the aftershocks of the technology collapse, impending job losses and a forced confrontation with inconvenient economic truths. Hit hardest were those who elicit the least sympathy – the professional classes who were doubly affected by the falling equities markets and the prospects of a broader slowdown in corporate transactions. Amongst this group, a deep anxiety is setting in. Compounding the disappointment that came with the end of the technology boom of the 1990s and its unrealised promise of professional salvation and unspeakable riches, their wounded self-confidence remains palpable and threatens to engulf the rest of the economy.
While the media may be more a symptom than a cause of an accelerating culture, CNBC and networks like it fill the airwaves with breathless commentary about nothing; a gnats-eye view of up-to-the-minute events shorn of context, often prominently featuring mountainous charts of the last hour of trading of some obscure equity. Successful television demands a sense of urgency or, as Neil Postman points out elsewhere, privileges ‘entertainment’ above all. In this world, CEOs (see an earlier article by Jem Bendell) are tainted celebrities who have given up running companies in favour of the more rewarding task of ‘managing the share price’ on television. It has also led to the fetishisation of indicators, where, pressured by an unbearable uncertainty, we search for totems and avatars – obsessing over the Michigan consumer confidence data, unemployment figures and corporate earnings as if they were god writ.
Fed by what media critic Todd Gitlin calls the media ‘torrent’, shallow pools of public sentiment now slush around with alarming volatility. There are very few places you can hide from the tide of non-news and events of exaggerated importance. The ambient natter of 24-7 news is now the wallpaper of our era. In this spirit of built-in positive expectations, aggressive financial reporting, far from being the work of ‘bad apples’, is endemic to the times.
Governments are also in on the act. They are eager to report ever-brighter figures at every turn, frequently involving statistical confections that publics, like weary spouses, allow themselves to believe. We tell ourselves this positive spin on numbers constitutes not a real lie but benign spin – in other words a form of denial, like lying to yourself about your weight – the impact of having that extra piece of chocolate cake or real financial position. Spiralling credit card debt and low savings bear witness to this principle. Regulators are faced with the daunting challenge of how to change the grammar of the market, a system grown accustomed to positive analyst reports, happy quarterly expectation setting and widespread collusion amongst investment bankers and analysts.
A cautionary tale?
What happens when systems collapse and entire nations spiral into ‘depression’? Following the most recent Argentinean crisis, a journalist friend fresh from Buenos Aires spoke gravely of middle class children not going to school, telling their parents ‘what’s the point – there is no future’.
Once among the richest countries in the world, Argentina suffered from successive generations of diminished expectations. It is now anecdotally famous for having the highest rate of psychoanalysts per capita of any nation. Perhaps it is an example of a type of failed modernity. Proof that unlike on television, not all things end well.
Given the events of the last year and what they portend, we must ask ourselves if we are equipped for the disappointments and disruptions that will undoubtedly accompany a more dangerous world. I think many of us will duck this question.
