Quality | 2009.05.23
The Age of Entitlement is over. Now it is time for the Age of Regulation | Madeleine Bunting
Bankers and MPs are just the most egregious cases of widespread avarice. A new, green life requires a radical break with the past
In the MPs\' expenses controversy there is plenty to entertain and horrify, but the question that nags away unanswered is a very simple one: how did they feel entitled to make all these claims on the public purse? For a group of politicians who have been meticulously exacting in their calculations of benefit levels or pensions, how on earth did they feel they could extend such largesse to themselves?
Entitlement is the word that persists through the parallel story of the role in the financial crisis of the bonuses bankers awarded themselves. One banker claimed he was entitled to his bonus because of the amount of wealth and jobs he created for the economy. But where does his entitlement stand when the wealth and jobs evaporate?
As the credibility of two major British institutions – politics and banking – collapses, what is coming into focus is not the question of legality, but the creation of a culture of entitlement. It was this culture that enabled bankers and politicians to construct a set of rules for themselves that, when exposed to outsiders, are regarded as outrageous and profoundly unethical. This is more pernicious than greed – that involves a degree of moral awareness; no, this involved no moral qualms at all – what remorse there has been is reluctant and pragmatic.
Two aspects of this are important. The first is how weak individual ethical judgment turns out to be; only a few MPs seem to have looked at the parliamentary allowance system and concluded that it was being abused and they wanted no part in it. What won out was the mentality that if everyone else is getting a piece of the cake, I want it too. The second is that the cultural consensus endemic among MPs and bankers is a version of L\'Oréal\'s advertising slogan – "because you\'re worth it".
This has been the Age of Entitlement in which those lucky or ingenious enough to find a way round the rules have richly rewarded themselves while the rest of us looked on, powerless and humiliated. The L\'Oréal sentiment expresses a kind of dysfunctional meritocracy that has become endemic. It has been implicit in how inequality has been tolerated, and explicit in how a hyper-consumption has taken grip over the last two decades. And what got conveniently forgotten were the obvious questions that the slogan poses: who decides your worth? And at whose expense?
So far, so angry, so smug. I didn\'t buy Stephen Fry\'s argument that we\'d all been on the take. Then I found myself in a discussion on sustainable development. While Westminster reeled, a challenge on a whole other scale was on the table a few hundred yards away. But we might as well have been on another planet given the radical kind of restructuring of society, economy and politics that was under discussion. And central to this was the challenge of dismantling the entire baroque edifice of the Age of Entitlement – the hyper-consumption driving the economic growth that devours the natural resources needed by future generations. The MPs and bankers are only the most egregious examples of a pattern of behaviour evident everywhere: what makes the SUV driver entitled to guzzle petrol? Or the frequent flyer? Or the householder whose fridge is stuffed with food miles? Or anyone whose lifestyle involves spewing out inordinate amounts of carbon?
One would hardly expect a revolution to be plotted in a discussion in Carlton House Terrace, just off the Mall, let alone incubated in a government-appointed Sustainable Development Commission (SDC). But these are times of unprecedented political exhaustion with the mainstream, and with that comes a new and fast-growing appetite for radicalism and an abrupt break with the status quo. At such times political energy and attention move beyond the discredited centre ground in the hunt for fresh ideas. This is both sinister – the BNP could benefit – and refreshing, as the Greens may discover next month in the European elections.
In the latter category is a bold paper, Prosperity Without Growth , by the SDC economist Tim Jackson, which was the subject of the Carlton House Terrace discussion. It asked if we could imagine a capitalism without economic growth. Capitalist economies grow by creating and promising to fulfil new desires; without growth they are plunged into crisis. It has been deeply built into the system as a way to generate rising incomes and employment: growing consumption creates jobs and businesses. All governments see their primary task as growth in GDP – this is perceived as the primary measure of progress. But that cannot continue if we are to have any hope of making the kinds of cuts in carbon emissions to which the UK is committed. There is no credible evidence to suggest that technological ingenuity alone will do it.
This is the kind of politics no mainstream politician dares address. It requires abandoning a half-century of political assumptions: your children will not be better off than you – in fact, in many significant material ways they will be worse off; car use will have to be dramatically curtailed, as will flights; working hours will have to be reordered to share employment; foreign holidays will be rarer; cheap food, a thing of the past. And along with these unpalatable home truths will be the need for intervention in the minutiae of people\'s lives: how much you heat your home or use water; how you move and eat.
The role of state intervention will be huge; people\'s choices will have to be "edited", admits Anthony Giddens in his recent book, The Politics of Climate Change . Leaving individuals to find the moral strength to resist the cultural pressures will simply not be effective (the MPs\' expenses saga would seem to justify this conclusion). Our lives will have to be regulated in ways that we can\'t imagine. Consumer advertising will have to be curbed to prevent it exploiting insecurity and anxiety to create new markets. The fact that the Australian government has banned all light bulbs that are not low energy is a glimpse of what is required.
What will be difficult is the governance of these changes: what kind of state will be required to push these changes through and what powers will it need to do so? Giddens suggests that there will have to be a return to small self-reliant communities and perhaps they will have to have a role in the distribution and monitoring of carbon allocations. Crucially, how will we weigh the loss of personal freedoms against the hope of survival of human beings?
Equally difficult will be the massive cultural revolution required to reorient a set of values rooted in an entitlement to an unfair proportion of the planet\'s resources. The illusion of a good life conceived in terms of individual material advancement has to be exposed as an advertising con; rising affluence has not produced rising levels of wellbeing but a dispiriting scrabble for advantage, argues Tim Jackson.
The light at the end of the tunnel is Jackson\'s insistence that it is perfectly possible to imagine a way of life with less material wealth that could actually be far more sustaining of human wellbeing. The problem is that we need politicians brave and bold enough to start taking us down that long road – and we have discovered that they are riddled with the very disease we need to cure.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]ses-mps-bankers-climate-change
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