Same Old, Same Old

"Steam made an almost incredible difference.  In 1800, one factory installed a 100-horsepower engine.  It did the work of 880 men, ran 50,000 threadwinding spindles, created jobs for 750 people, and turned out 226 times more product than they had before steam.

"People from villages who had never looked at a clock were worked like machines themselves, in unspeakable conditions.  For regular wages.

"And there was a new kind of customer, too, living in the new suburbs.  The up-and-coming middle classes had an appetite for possessions that couldn't be satisfied, thanks to a fellow who practically invented the idea of 'keeping up with the Joneses.'  He was Josiah Wedgewood, potter to the Royal Family.  You knew that, because it was on his bills, letterhead, catalogues, ads and anywhere else he could get it.  Whatever he made ~ vases, medallions, ornamental work ~ he made people want it for 'snob' reasons.  Even tableware.  That's why the biggest seller was called 'Queensware.'  You and the Queen, eating off the same plates.  Get it?

"By the end of the [18th] century, Wedgewood had exhibitions in London, invitation only, gentry only, ads in all the posh papers, travelling salesmen with free delivery and money-back guarantees, clients everywhere from China to the U.S.A., and the first steam-powered factory going night and day to keep up with demand.  By the time he'd finished, if you didn't have Wedgewood, you were nobody.  And for the first time, that kind of middle class thing started to matter, because consumerism had arrived."

James Burke, The Day the Universe Changed, Episode 6 

I was reminded of this sequence by Charles A's late comment on the last post, in which he explains that human behavior in the medieval era was different from now, because there was no mass production and people had "few possessions" and were "very thrifty."  I'm often amused by such things, since we have plenty of evidence to show that wealthy medieval people were anything but thrifty, what with shooting thousands of released pheasants in an afternoon or the King of France and party slaughtering hundreds of penned up wild beasts.  And, of course, the "thriftiness" hardly describes the regimes of the Rajahs in India, or the nobility in China or Japan, or the excess of the Ottomans or the Egyptians, etc.  Likewise, we have to ignore all the other rich cultures, with their own peculiar habits, when food was plentiful and materialism too.  It is so easy to cherry pick one select perspective of human history at a given point in time ~ say, the 14th century ~ and remind ourselves of England or northern Germany ... and utterly ignoring what it was like at that same time in Rome and Moorish Andalucia.

As far as excess goes, Wedgewood's genius would not have worked if the human fascination with materialism was not baked into the human model.  Burke's words, "made people want it," are unfortunate.  He put it in front of them, spoke the words that they wanted to hear and the hormonal response that had been there since Oldevai Gorge came pouring out.  We love, adore, are endlessly fascinated by new things.  The fact that certain groups and cultures throughout history, including hundreds of millions of people right now whose lives consist of picking over garbage heaps, were forced to take what they could get, and couldn't afford to buy new, or that new things simply didn't exist in their worlds, is irrelevant.

The whole new-thing-bragging-rights is purely hormonal serotonin.  My distant ancestor who noticed a bee on a log, turned over the log and found a mass of honey, did not only enjoy the honey ~ he likewise enjoyed the momentary social status of being able to demonstrate to others that HE found it, and not them; that HE was the one providing it, and not them; and that HE was a very important person because of it.  The simple translation of that moment, hundreds of thousands, even millions of years later, into iPhones and being first in line for StarWars, only marks the relative delivery process that produces the serotonin result.  Instead of marching a seven miles across the landscape and coming back with two fist-fulls of honeycomb, I'm standing in line in front of a store.

Charles may, or may not, come rushing back at me with ten arguments about what I'm misunderstanding or what I don't get about this.  It is an old, old argument, one that kept coming up during my Classical History university days, as some profs would cling to arguments that the Romans and Greeks were nothing like us, while other profs would scoff and laugh at the ignorance of their tenured peers to be so insipidly ignorant.  If 19 Classics Profs stuffed together in tiny offices on a single floor of a building built in the 1960s can't agree, I see no reason why people would agree about this on the internet.

I am strictly in the camp that believes that we haven't changed a whit since we began wrapping up our privates.  And if I'm ever in doubt of that, I need only turn to my Juvenal's Satires.  These are, at this moment, located merely 8 feet from my left hand, right here on my bookshelf; and it only takes me a moment to find an example from the 2nd Century A.D., supporting my position.  This is from Satire III:

"All lower class citizens should have marched out of town [Rome], in a body, years ago.  Nobody finds it easy to get to the top if meagre resources cripple his talent.  But in Rome the problem's worse than anywhere else.  Inflation hits the rental of your miserable apartment, inflation distends the ravenous maws of your slaves; your humble dinner suffers inflation too.  You feel ashamed to eat off earthenware dishes ~ yet if you were transported to some rural village, you'd be content enough and happily wear a cloak of course blue broadcloth complete with hood.  Throughout most of Italy ~ we might as well admit it ~ no one is seen in a toga till the day he dies.

"Even on public holidays, when the same old shows as last year are cheerfully staged in the grassgrown theatre, where peasant children, sitting on their mothers' laps, shrink back in terror at the sight of those gaping, whitened masks, you will still find the whole audience ~ top row or bottom ~ dressed exactly alike.  Even the magistrates need no better badge of status than a plain white tunic.

"But here in Rome, we must toe the line of fashion, living beyond our means, and often borrowed credit: every man jack of us is keeping up with his neighbours.  To cut a long story short, nothing's for free in Rome."

So it goes.