The Consequences of Love
OTHERS’ ATTITUDE
SELF-IMAGE
You are a failure
I am a disgrace
You are unimportant
I am a nobody
You are dim
I am stupid
I am worthy
I am significant
I am intelligent
OTHERS’ ATTITUDE
SELF-IMAGE
You are successful
I am worthy
You are important
I am significant
You are bright
I am intelligent
I am a disgrace
I am a nobody
I am stupid
6.
Given the precariousness of our self-image, it should not be surprising that, from an emotional point of view no less than from a material one, we are anxious about the place we occupy in the world. This place will determine how much love we are offered and so, in turn, whether we can like or must lose confidence in ourselves. It holds the key to a commodity of unprecedented importance to us: a love without which we will be unable to trust or abide by our own characters.
II
EXPECTATION
Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon outside the kitchen of the “ Taj Mahal,” at the American National Exhibition, Moscow, 1959
Material Progress
1.
In July 1959, the American vice president, Richard Nixon, travelled to Moscow to open an exhibition showcasing some of his country’s technological and material achievements. The highlight of the exhibition was a full-scale replica of the home of an average member of America’s working class, equipped with fitted carpets, a television in the living room, two en suite bathrooms, central heating and a kitchen with a washing machine, a tumble dryer and a refrigerator.
Reporting on this display, an incensed Soviet press angrily denied that an ordinary American worker could conceivably live in such luxury, and advised its readers to dismiss the entire house as propaganda after mockingly baptising it the “Taj Mahal.”
When Nixon led Nikita Khrushchev around the exhibition, the leader was comparably sceptical. Outside the kitchen of the model home, Khrushchev pointed to an electric lemon squeezer and remarked to Nixon that no one in his right mind would wish to acquire such a “silly gadget.”
“Anything that makes women work less hard must be useful,” suggested Nixon.
“We don’t think of women in terms of workers—like you do in the capitalist system,” snapped an irate Khrushchev.
Later that same evening, Nixon was invited to appear live on Soviet television, an occasion he used to expound on the advantages of American life. Shrewdly, he did not begin his speech by touting democracy or human rights; instead he spoke of money and material progress. Nixon explained that in just a few hundred years, Western countries had managed, through enterprise and industry, to overcome the poverty and famine that had gripped the world until the middle of the eighteenth century and continued even up to the present day to plague many other nations. Americans had purchased 56 million television sets and 143 million radios, he informed his Soviet listeners, a large number of whom did not have private bathrooms or possess so much as a kettle. The members of the average American family could buy nine new dresses and suits and fourteen new pairs of shoes every year, he noted, and some 31 million families owned their own homes. In the United States, houses could be had in a thousand different architectural styles, most boasting greater square footage than the television studio they were broadcasting from. Sitting next to Nixon, an infuriated Khrushchev clenched his fists and mouthed,“Nyet! Nyet!”—adding under his breath, according to one account, “Ëb’ tvoyu babushky” (“Go fuck your grandmother”).
2.
Khrushchev’s protestation notwithstanding, Nixon’s statistics were accurate. In the two centuries preceding his speech, the countries of the West had witnessed the fastest and most dramatic elevation of living standards in human history.
The majority of the population of medieval and early modern Europe had belonged to the peasant class. Impoverished, undernourished, cold and fearful while alive, they were usually dead—following some further agony—before their fortieth birthday. After a lifetime of work, their most valuable possession might have been a cow, a goat or a pot. Famine was never far off, and disease was rife, among the most common conditions being rickets, ulcers, tuberculosis, leprosy, abscesses, gangrene, tumours and cankers.
3.
Then, in early-eighteenth-century Britain, the great Western transformation began. Thanks to new farming techniques (including crop rotation, scientific stock breeding and land consolidation), yields began to increase sharply. Between 1700 and 1820, Britain’s agricultural productivity doubled, releasing capital and manpower that flowed into the cities to be invested in industry and trade. The invention of the steam engine and the cotton power loom modified not only working practices but social expectations. Towns exploded in size. In 1800, only one city in the British Isles, London, could boast a population of more than a hundred thousand; by 1891, twenty-three English cities would make that claim. Goods and services that had formerly been the exclusive preserve of the elite were made available to the masses. Luxuries became decencies, and decencies necessities. Daniel Defoe, travelling around southern England in 1745, noted the proliferation of large new shops with enticing window displays and tempting offerings. Whereas for much of recorded history fashion had remained static for decades at a time, it now became possible to identify specific styles for every passing year (in England in 1753, for example, purple was in vogue for women’s gowns; in 1754, it was the turn of white linen with a pink pattern; in 1755, dove grey was the rage).
The nineteenth century expanded on and spread the British consumer revolution. Gigantic department stores opened throughout Europe and America: the Bon Marché and Au Printemps in Paris, Selfridge’s and Whiteley’s in London, Macy’s in New York. All were designed to appeal to the new industrial middle class. At a ribbon-cutting ceremony marking the opening of a twelve-storey Marshall Field’s in Chicago in 1902, the manager, Gordon Selfridge, proclaimed, “We have built this great institution for ordinary people, so that it can be their store, their downtown home, their buying headquarters.” It was not intended, he emphasised, just for the “swagger rich.”
Central staircase, Bon Marché department store, Paris, 1880
A host of technological inventions helped to stretch mental horizons even as they altered the patterns of everyday life: the old cyclical view of the world, wherein one expected next year to be much like (and just as bad as) last, gave way to the notion that mankind could progress yearly towards perfection. To list only a few of these inventions:
CORNFLAKES, patented by J. H. Kellogg in 1895 (Kellogg had hit upon the concept by accident, when the grain mixture he served to inmates in his sanatorium unexpectedly hardened and then shattered into flakes)