Weltanschaung

The Philosopher’s Stone

zenothestoic@protonmail.ch

Tag: Inequality

  • Art Prices are Obscene .

    Art Prices are Obscene .

    Art prices at ‘obscene’ levels as Chinese join high-spending elite  says Richard Partington, the Guardian’s economics correspondent.  Apparently, newly wealthy Chinese buyers compete with financiers and Saudi sheikhs to push up prices and “with its $450m price tag six months ago, Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi remains the most expensive painting ever sold”.

    The tenor of the article is that the money could be better spent elsewhere by supporting 10,000 struggling artists for a year or by funding medical research.

    Well, yes, I quite agree.  I agree with everything he says but great art has always been patronised by great wealth and without great wealth great art would not exist. Define “great”: well look at Venice. The Doges were not nice people, not at all. And look at Florence, the same can be said about the Medicis.  Most people who create great wealth seem to be….possibly not very nice people?

    Look at Westminster Abbey and the many Norman churches built or improved after William the First invaded the country, took what he wanted, and killed thousands of the locals.  Read about the harrying of the north.  Genocide no less and yet great beauty emerged from the Normans.  But then the modern Chinese have had their moments: Tiananmen Square was not a pleasant incident, leaving aside the atrocity of Chairman Mao.  Perhaps great wealth from modern China is not untainted especially when you consider the less than attractive lives lead by the industrial workers in the soulless dormitory towns of Shenzhen.  Life is not pleasant for those people and yet their “owners” are the very people pushing up art prices on their ill gotten gains.

    So yes, art prices are “obscene” and it is madness to pay such absurd figures for a mere piece of canvass covered oil.  And yet while we live in a world where factory workers are treated like dogs for the benefit of greedy and vain fatcats, such prices are likely to remain that way.

    It isn’t that I am some crazed revolutionary or hardline Marxist. God forbid.  Who ever benefited from the dystopias created by such monsters?

    But I do yearn for a better world and am not sure where that is going to come from.  Certainly the prospect of obscene art prices on the back of near slave labour is not appealing.  But it’s not just the Chinese who are involved in such benign business practices. It’s every businessman who can get away with it.  Every business man who steals his firm’s pension fund, who sells tobacco which causes cancer, who spies on us and receives our data for free.

    Here is what we need more of: men like American Bishop Michael Curry who wowed the world today with his sermon on love at the Meghan Markle Royal Knees up.

    “When love is the way, poverty will become history. When love is the way, the Earth will be a sanctuary.”

    Here, here Bishop. I’m with you.  It is not just art which is obscene. It is our world. Sadly, I don’t think we ought to hold our breath for better days.

     

     

     

  • Meghan Markle’s Royal Knees Up

    Meghan Markle’s Royal Knees Up

    I am trying to work out in my own mind my exact feelings about Meghan Markle’s Royal Knees Up and the role of the Royal Family in general.

    It’s all a bit muddled in my mind as I have changed my position once or twice over the past 60 odd years but I reckon I now know how I feel.

    As a schoolchild I think I must have been a fervent fan of Royalty.  Certainly I was delighted to be an usher at a couple of Royal Bashes at Westminster Abbey – being at Westminster School in the grounds of Westminster Abbey, we were asked if we would like to help.  The occasions were magnificent, no other word for it.  Princess Anne’s wedding was one such occasion, the other I am ashamed to admit I can no longer recall.  I guess it all arose because the school (with origins before the 12th Century) was re-founded by Queen Elizabeth I in 1560 and there has always been a royal tie.

    By the time of Prince Charles’ wedding to Diana I had become a bit jaded by privilege and wealth since I was having an utterly miserable time as a young banking lawyer at a renowned City law practice.  I vividly recall my first day there – it was like being handcuffed and chained to a desk. So I guess I became grumpy and jealous of those who appeared to lead sybaritic lives of “idleness and luxury” and had flunkies to put toothpaste on their toothbrushes.  What a childish motive I had – and envy is never a laudable trait. Nonetheless I think that is the truth of what I felt at the time.

    I became very disenchanted with the whole Diana charade, the hysteria over the death, Squidgygate, the War of the Wales and the whole silly national mourning fest.

    I was and am saddened by her violent death and her unhappiness but let’s face it she was hardly alone in misfortune. Torture, slavery, child prostitution seem equally grim fates.

    And what of Miss Meghan Markle? Well she is very beautiful and she is of black African descent somewhere along the line.  It seems to me that has to be a good thing, in the same way I was delighted by the election of President Obama for similar reasons. As with Miss Middleton, some of the relatives are a little different to those the Royal Family might be used to but that seems no bad thing.

    And what of Royalty and its role in modern Britain? Well, people seem to like them and they surely to do more good than harm?  I would rather have Queen Elizabeth at titular head of state the the truly awful Donald Trump.  Even if Royalty are un-elected they have no real political power so they can be forgiven the lack of mandate.

    Many make financial arguments – they are a waste of public money at one extreme and at the other they are claimed by some to actually help GDP by attracting tourist revenue. I have no idea where the truth lies.

    If I am to be honest I confess a smidgen of envy still for the palaces, the cars, horses, country estates and flunkeys but equally I could never have begun to do the Queen’s job.

    On balance I wish the whole lot of them well and particularly, on this their wedding day, I wish happiness and health to the young prince and his bride.

    There, I have said it.

     

  • Class War in Journalism and Politics

    Class War in Journalism and Politics

    Class War in Journalism and Politics is alive and well.  It is business as usual in Parliament and the news papers.

    It is unfortunate that some columnists in the Guardian are still looking to the outdated concept of class war as the answer to all their ills. It is a great shame that polarization still plagues our politics both on the right and the left. If you read some columnists in the Daily Mail or the Telegraph, everybody in the Labour Party is a communist and would send us all to the Gulag. If you read some columnists in the Guardian, every person in the Tory party is a ridiculous anachronism or a fascist.

    What we need is politicians and journalists who eschew narrow tribalism and espouse a new way for political action which looks to the good of everyone and not to demonise a perceived enemy. Enmity and class hatred have no place in a better, kinder world.

    It is very easy to be bitter, to become bitter. I should know – I have often felt that way over the past few years but at least I can see the error of my ways and battle against my negativity and nihilism.

    Columnist John Harris states:

    “where there were high levels of degree-educated people, the Conservative party lost support between 2010 and 2017”

    So we are to assume that those who vote conservative are ill educated and backward.

    Such divisive statements are simply not helpful and are certainly not conducive to the atmosphere of co-operation we need to ensure a better future for our children.  In politics we need to move away from division.  We need to move away from class war, from race war, away from divisive polarisation.

    We need to move from a system of party politics and enmity to a system where we stop bashing our perceived enemies and realise that we are all human.  We are all stuck on the same planet and suffer from the same enemies and fears.

    Our enemies are disease, poverty and yes, fear itself.

    It is time to work with each other, it is time to stop fighting.

  • The Absurdity of Land Ownership

    The Absurdity of Land Ownership

    How has it come to pass that a tiny handful “own” the vast majority of this tiny spaceship we call the Earth?

    We live on a rock rotating at 1,000 miles an hour on its axis and circling a nuclear furnace we call the sun at around the same speed.  We have no means to escape to another planet (even assuming we could find something suitable) and we are bunched up like 7 billion rats in a cage cutting each other’s throats for food, light, shelter and water.

    It is reckoned that two acres of land would suffice for self sufficiency and there are estimated to be 16 billion acres of habitable land on earth.

    So given that spaceship earth has to provide sustenance for us all how come we have let a small minority own the vast majority of land on earth?  Is private ownership of our very means of survival a defensible proposition?

    And how about water? And energy?  How come the means of production and supply are in private ownership? How does it make any sense at all that the few should hold the many to ransome?

    Well I guess it is all about ethnic cleansing across the millennia.  “They” have what “you” want and so you exterminate them. In the old days extermination was free for all and quite the way to go: the Norman Conquest, the indigenous North and South American Indian and on and on…….

    Nowadays we in the West tend to frown on actual extermination (at least in our own back yard) but we allow death by commerce instead. Amazon destroys the little guy with a corner shop, factory farming screws the peasant, oil and timber companies evict the natives in the rain forest. So its business as usual.

    What will happen when we conquer space and find some green and pleasant land in the sky? The same old thing of course: the Robber Barons will own Mars and every other planet.

    Down with greed and violence (physical and commercial).  It is time to reform and re-organise our society.

  • Poverty in an Infinite Universe?

    Poverty in an Infinite Universe?

    Scientists tell us that the universe is infinite and contains infinite matter and yet we are still faced with overwhelming poverty and suffering on a global scale. How can this happen?

    The universe is a giant Lego set: everything is made of the same building blocks and we are rapidly learning how to create different materials from scratch by combining atomic structures in new ways.  Equally we now know that the alchemist was correct: we can turn any form of matter into any other form by re-arranging the lego blocks.  Eventually we may even be able to turn the lightest elements in the Periodic Table into the heaviest: hydrogen to gold or plutonium.

    So there you have it: you can take hydrogen (the most common element in the universe) and turn it into a loaf of bread or a kidney dialysis machine.  If the futurists are right, then at some stage in the hopefully not too distant future, we will have the ability to satisfy the hunger of every empty belly and cure every disease and ill.

    But look what science and industry has so far achieved for us. Yes, there has been a trickle down effect but we have inequality on an obscene, epic scale.

    The problem is that our economic and political systems have taken Darwinism as their model. Survival of the fittest; grab all you can for yourself.  So every time a new paradigm opens up before us, it swallowed by sharks whose power, greed and ambition ensures that it will be patented and owned by a tiny minority.

    The internet should have helped to spread peace and prosperity: instead it gave us Amazon and Facebook and a repressive bunch of clowns in countries like China who smothered it or perverted it for their own gain.

    Blockchain was devised by a crew of idealists who assumed a distributed ledger would put the man in the Congo on a par with the man in Silicon Valley.

    Instead Blockchain is being monopolised by the usual genre of greedy and venal “entreprenooooors” and “thought leaders” to line their own pockets.

    And so it will continue until we grow a whole new ethos, a whole new economic and political model.