Around and around

Oliver James, a populist psychologist, has achieved some degree of public recognition due to the success of a couple of books. The first 'They F*** You Up, was about the effect that parents have on their children, its central premise being, I believe, that parental influence outweighs genetic inheritance in the determination of personality. More recently he has published 'Affluenza', a psychologist's view of global consumerism.

In a recent article in 'Comment is free', he gave an outline of his position. Briefly, his thesis is that runaway consumerism is diminishing the quality of peoples' lives. He dates the fall from grace to 1979 and Margaret Thatcher's accession to power. At that point be believes the post-1945 quest for an egalitarian meritocracy and female emancipation was discarded in a rabid scramble after material possessions. He believes that the current environmental preoccupations, engendered by climate change publicity, will dampen our enthusiasm to own ever more worldly goods while at the same time turning all men into true feminists.

No, I can't quite follow that reasoning either, but I haven't read the book. It would of course be a simple matter to argue the fallacy of this analysis, not least because Mrs Thatcher's success showed that a woman could rise to the highest job in the land on the basis of merit. But, hang on a moment. Was there any a major change in the drive for material possessions after 1979? If so, what motivated individuals to work before then? Is the current preoccupation with the environment, and a concomitant return to the simple life, unique in history, or have we been there before?

Consumerism, as it is understood here, stands for the acquisition of constantly replaced and updated goods as both a measure and a display of status. Its initial theoretical recognition came in the early years of the twentieth century. Thorstein Veblen published his 'Theory of the Leisure Class' in 1899, and Georg Simmel's 'Fashion' appeared shortly afterwards.

They accurately described and explained all the features of what we now recognise as a consumption driven society. So, although consumerism has been around for at least a century, and as we shall see shortly, for far longer, was there anything qualitatively different about the period immediately before 1979 that could cause that year to be taken as a watershed?

Not according to Christopher Booker. His 'The Neophiliacs' appeared in 1969. He saw a revolution in English life as having occurred in the nineteen fifties and sixties. Indeed, the litany of drugs, gun crime, obsession with fashion, gangs, desperate acquisition of cars and other technological hardware, preoccupation with and aping of frivolous celebrity, all of which Booker catalogues as the markers of this particular revolution, has an all too familiar ring.

It is possible to trace these themes further back. The industrial revolution was concerned more with the mass production of consumer goods by Birmingham metal bashers than ever it was with steam engines. Matthew Boulton probably made more money out of the manufacture and sale of buttons than anything else. Wedgewood owed his success not to the artistic elegance of his designs but his single minded pursuit of celebrity customers to act as pathfinders for mass marketing to the population at large.

As an illustration of innovative conspicuous consumption look at this well known painting by Gainsborough of Mr and Mrs Andrews. Note the way that the crop has been drilled in rows. When this was painted around 1750, Tull's seed drill was still viewed with great suspicion by traditional farmers. See the bench that the fashionably arrayed wife sits on. Its rococo styling displays the couple's commitment to modernity and fashion. The gun that Mr Andrews holds is the latest technology available.

This was the Mr and Mrs Beckham of their age proclaiming their status through the display of personally owned, up to the minute, icons of consumption. We could go back further to the 16^th century, and the period which W G Hoskins referred to as the 'Great Rebuilding' when Elizabethan capitalist yeoman farmers lavished money on rebuilding and refurnishing their dwellings as a sign of their burgeoning cash income. And so on and so on.

Yet all these episodes were accompanied by finger-wagging doom-mongers. The Ecologist magazine commenced publication in 1970, as a response to the supposed consumerist splurge of the fifties and sixties. In the England of the twenties and thirties, we can find Professor Joad bemoaning industrialisation and castigating the private car for its role in rural despoliation. Before him, around the turn of the century, we discover Patrick Geddes advocating that economics should take account of biology, physics and psychology while criticising contemporary definitions of wealth as being narrowly materialistic and devoid of any aesthetic component. His ideas chimed with the garden city romanticism of Ebenezer Howard.

We can go back further to Morris and Ruskin's denunciation of factory production in the mid-nineteenth century and further back still to the anti-industrial, anti-urban and mythologised rurality of Wordsworth's poetical propaganda of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The back-to-the-land self-sufficiency of the post civil war Diggers may be seen as a reaction to the capitalist exploitation of land which commenced with the later Tudors.

It is unnecessary to continue this retrospective journey. It is plain to see that the tense pas-de-deux between modernity and the traditional is played out in every generation. Why though do so many such superficial analyses of contemporary England as that of Mr James mark 1979 as the year of the fall from grace? Why does Mrs Thatcher annoy the left so much?

It is I think that she showed that a woman could wield power and yet at the same time repudiate and ignore feminism. She demonstrated that minimising taxation could deliver prosperity to more people than crude redistributive taxation and benefit provision. That less government involvement could provide services at least as good but cheaper. That no entrenched oligarchy, whether trade union or professional closed shop, could not be improved by liberalisation, competition and democracy. How long, I wonder, before that particular wheel turns again.