Jean-Paul Sartre had it right, though it’s not my intention to appease the cheese-eating surrender monkeys – after all, most of their philosophy is predicated upon the idea that smoking Gauloises is hip. And so is eating compost, mes amis (I speak as one who once lost his sense of taste for 24 hours after smoking trop de French fags … but that’s another story). But good ole JPS (note: cigarette related witticism) said that existence preceded essence and unless you’re a God-botherer, what’s to argue about? Our souls, our selves, are the product of our inherited nature and our experience. ‘Inherited nature’, of course, comes a little before experience in the dictionary of character acquisition but don’t assume you’d end up with much of a personality if you grew up in a barrel – rather we’re talking about the subtle spin your instincts and of course your hormones give to (and here I invent a new philosophical term) wh’appen.
Wh’appen is what shapes you, brothers, and that’s the problem with the new ruling class. The tea-leaf politicians ranted about so eloquently on this site – the bankers and traders – the spin-doctors and other plunderers of the public purse are doing what they were brought up to do – programmed to do. Empowered by the rise of education as a means to advancement (instead of heredity or trade), the former ’middle’ class scooped the jackpot and assumed they deserved it. This they did because the mechanics of getting and spending formed the milieu of their upbringing. The old rich never counted their money – perhaps they weren’t clever enough. But we – ‘cos it’s us, you and me I’m talking about – we were selected, by scholarship and exhibition, tested by examination, honed by university and finally ejected into a world run by our near-peers with the mandate to fill our boots. Our parents had carefully costed their lives; not parsimoniously because they too lived in a time of rising plenty but with that attention to detail that comes from having, in Harold Macmillan’s words, never had it so good. We took that careful accountancy and applied it to the business of making some serious money – as we applied, too, our trained intellects to the same task. Small wonder then, that the complexity of late 20th century financial instruments exceeded anything that had gone before. The clever piggies were taking their turn at the trough.
But the clever piggies lacked insouciance, they lacked a piratical swagger, they lacked a sense of fun. They, above all, had been raised to know the value of money. In the South of England for almost thirty years now the standard topic of dinner party conversation has been the price of things – houses above all, because house price speculation was (is?) a monster source of yet more dosh. The piggies love their houses. And then their cars, their white goods, their furniture …
It’s not an accident that one of my contemporaries at a ‘great’ University was once the highest claimer of expenses among his cadre of Labour MPs. He was a very clever piggy. But I would maintain that he also had, at least to begin with, a genuine sense of obligation, a wish to do his duty for the toiling masses …. except there are, when you look, no toiling masses. Only the uneducated failures upon whom the system which manifestly rewards the deserving (ie, us) has pronounced its verdict. So the piggy shrugs his porcine shoulders and leaves the great unwashed to its drug dealing and drive by shootings, and concentrates once and for all upon that most excellent of causes, himself. And in this he is enabled to go forward without the pricking of conscience, because he has been formed to expect the world’s bounty; to cost it, quantify and enjoy it soullessly, his essence being that of the money changers in the temple, quite unworthy of Paradise.