From the beginning of civilization people have made a
distinction between goods that can be freely exchanged in the
market and goods that are too close to us to be bought and sold.
Spiritual goods are tainted or destroyed by the attempt to purchase
them, and if they have a price it is measured by sacrifice and
self-denial. Thus it is with love, happiness, and sacred things.
And thus it is with family, community, and culture. These are goods
that have been ring-fenced against “market forces,” and which we
believe it would be sacrilege to buy and sell. The medieval trade
in indulgences caused such scandal precisely because it sold what
cannot be purchased — namely, redemption. And when people finally
rose in rebellion against this abuse of spiritual values, European
society was turned upside down.
Some goods, like food and clothes, have instrumental value;
other goods, like children and works of art, are valuable in
themselves. Love is priceless, not because its price is higher than
we can pay, but because it cannot be purchased but only earned. Of
course, you can purchase the simulacrum of love, and there
are people who are accomplished providers. But love that is
purchased is only a pretense. Goods like love, beauty, consolation,
and the sacred are spiritual goods: they have a value, but no
price.
Economists don’t like spiritual goods. Such goods are connected
to us not as things to be used, consumed, and exchanged but as
parts of what we are. To lose them is to lose ourselves. Of course
needy people have often sold their children into slavery,
desecrated their loves, and denied their faith. But it is need, not
price, that compelled them. In a world in which religious faith is
wavering and cultural values are insecure, people increasingly
think in economic terms. When goods are priced, you can decide
between them. But this means that they can also be exchanged for
the baubles of the marketplace.
This is what has happened with sex. You cannot buy or sell
sexual love, but you can buy and sell its cheapened substitutes.
Communities have, in the past, tried to protect themselves against
this, recognizing that the future of society depends on protecting
sexual love from the market. They have never been more than
partially successful. But the wall of decency, even if thin in
places and easily undermined, remained in place until recent times,
and parents could be sure that their children would not grow up as
they grow up today, with the view that sex is to be consumed and
exchanged for the sake of pleasure.
Once we raise the question of intrinsic values, however, we
realize that many other aspects of human life are at risk from the
market. Such is the message of the environmental movement — or at
least, the message that we can all agree with. We have allowed too
many things in our world to be priced — the land and the oceans,
the air and the climate.
A century and a half ago John Muir in America and John Ruskin in
England initiated the movement to save our world from spoliation.
They rightly understood that nothing would be saved if we
simply defend it on economic grounds. A valley might be useful as
farmland, but it might be even more useful as a reservoir or an
opencast mine. Only if we recognize the intrinsic value of nature
will it be proof against our predations; hence we should esteem
landscapes and forests for their beauty, for their sacred quality,
for the part they play in defining us and ennobling our
settlements, rather than for their use. Only this will keep the
market at bay and prevent us from consuming our world.
No force has been as strong in protecting human sexual love from
the market as the force of religion, which elevates sex to a
sacrament and forbids its abuse. Likewise, no force has been so
strong in protecting the environment as the religious sentiments
evoked by Ruskin and Muir. Almost everyone feels that there are
places, scenes, landscapes, and townscapes that are threatened with
desecration, and whose integrity and beauty must be respected with
a quasi-religious veneration. It is to this vestigial religious
sentiment that we owe the national parks of America, the lake lands
of England, the city of Venice, and the landscape of Provence —
all of which would long ago have been vandalized had it not been
for those who protected them as spiritual sites.
There is a problem, however. Without the backing of a shared
culture strong enough to unite people against the vandals, our
sense of the sacred is a weak and vacillating resource. Our values
capitulate in the face of “economic sense.” And only the strongest
public spirit is proof against profit. The battle between value and
price is a permanent feature of the human condition and recognizes
no barriers, no territory where it cannot be fought. Even our
deepest emotions are invaded by it. Oscar Wilde defined the
sentimentalist as the one who knows the price of everything and the
value of nothing — in other words, who is disposed to put
everything on sale, emotions and values included. In the end
intrinsic values can be protected only in a culture that supports
them — a culture in which people are able to ignore “economic
sense.”
THE CONFLICT BETWEEN VALUE AND PRICE has led to one of the many
tensions between Europe and America. American businesses operate at
home in an environment where there are no real aesthetic
constraints, and in which advertising, logos, and branding are
regarded as a legitimate and necessary part of competition.
Wherever they set up shop, the first thought of American businesses
is to advertise the fact, and to make as big a splash as possible
in order to gain a foothold in the market. This is done through
catching the eye, and even if you catch the eye by first offending
it, that too is a part of business. Branding and logos produce
reliable sales, since they erase all differences of place and
time.
The result is the well-known American main street, in which loud
advertisements, garish shop fronts, and childish logos destroy
every architectural façade, and turn what might once have been a
dignified public space into a crowd of brash competitors, each the
representative of a predator miles away. Few people seem to mind,
since, after all, things in America move on, the old main street
was only a passing episode in history, and life is in any case
lived in the suburbs, where all space is private and nothing stands
out as a threat. This means that American towns have not been
protected by a public culture of appearance: they have an innate
tendency to dissolve into logos, shop fronts, and adverts, to lose
their public face and to turn from frail settlements to robust
camping sites.
One of the most important environmental movements in Europe has
been sparked off by the creep of American business. This is the
Slow Food Movement, which began in Rome when McDonald’s proposed to
install one of its restaurants in the Piazza di Spagna. The thought
of the double arches, with their offensive color and childish
shapes, polluting one of the great baroque squares of the Holy City
was too much for the locals, and they began first to campaign
against the plan, then to campaign against McDonald’s, and then to
campaign against the whole culture to which that business belongs.
They successfully protected the Piazza di Spagna from aesthetic
pollution and then decided to spread the message elsewhere. Moving
with the slowness implied in its name, the Slow Food Movement now
has followers across the continent, and local restaurants are
beginning to advertise themselves as selling food by the hour
rather than the kilogram.
The Slow Food Movement is only one expression of a growing
hostility to the American attitude to downtown business. Protecting
the urban environment means protecting it as a public space. But
competition at the international level requires the privatization
of the street, and the replacement of façades that have evolved
from local styles and traditions with garish and standardized
imports that have no respect for the individual townscape or the
indigenous way of life. Hence local conservation societies and
planners identify the logo-branded multinational as their most
important enemy. In France the radical anarchist José Bové, now a
member of the European Parliament, has led a movement to dismantle
the fast food franchises that have been dropped from the skies on
the ancient cities of Europe. Others, inspired by Naomi Klein’s
No Logo, are campaigning for a moratorium on logos and
branding, with the design of shop fronts governed by local
conventions and styles rather than by the aesthetic tastes of
hungry children.
The problem is that aesthetic values are losing their public
grip. When, after the war, the city of Warsaw was reconstructed
from scratch, it was accepted without question that the old town
should be rebuilt as it was, and that signs and facades should
conform to the Renaissance pattern-book. Under the Communists
things did not change, since there were no commercial pressures for
change, and the old city remained as a symbol of public spirit and
stable order amid the moral devastation. Now, however, the rot has
begun to set in, with a Pizza Hut defacing the space beside the
royal castle, and the competition ready to move in. The Poles could
protect this much-loved environment only by legislation; but the
public spirit that existed after the war exists no longer, and the
multinationals have ways of making poorly paid politicians behave
as they wish.
As long as European public spirit was strong, it took a stand
against the branding of the urban environment. Europeans felt at
home in their cities, and ennobled by them. As the public spirit
has weakened, and the new McCity has risen on once sacred
foundations, so has anti-Americanism increased. The old European
sense, that sacred things are not for sale, has been defeated, and,
while eating their food slowly behind ancient façades, the European
elites stare with hostility at their social inferiors crowding into
the McDonald’s and Subways across the street. The problem, as they
know, is that the life across the street is the future, while the
place where they linger over dinner is the past.
