A Modesty Proposal

With only 12 years left to save the planet and income inequality at staggering proportions, we need another vision for how the world could be.

Maybe you’re thinking of some kind of green socialist utopia where no one is excluded from the family of humanity and we live with the next generation in mind. Not the most original idea, but it has its merits.

There is of course, one little problem. The path to any an eco-collectivist future is currently being obstructed by the minor stumbling block that is the global elite. If they let us radically re-envision the system that got them where there are, they wouldn’t be much of an elite.

Realistically, we’ll have to work with them. We’ll need to conceive of a world order that’s dramatically less wasteful and provides for basic human needs, but with a ruling class in place that isn’t currently interested in either. How can we sell those goals to this grand-bourgeoisie?

My proposal is to appeal to their nature. It’s clear that having more and better than everyone is central to the sense of self-worth of the rich. Conservative media and politicians are incensed about poor people using smartphones and eating lobster— this is outrage-porn for the “I built this” set.

The idea that a man must earn to have, and by extension, if a man has, then he must have earned it, is the implicit crux of neoliberal ideology, at least the Fyre Festival, IMAX-theater-on-a-yacht American version.

So how can our lizard-people overlords scratch that moral-superiority itch while ending poverty and averting climate disaster? My answer to these contemporary problems is a throwback: sumptuary law. Laws abounded in imperial China, medieval Europe and other contexts that restricted the conspicuous display of luxuries to a designated elite.

Dictate to us 99-percenters, that in exchange for a decent and in a livable world, we are forbidden all luxuries. We can have health care, housing, and water that doesn’t light on fire if we agree to forbid ourselves meat, alcohol and the good drugs and dress in some kind of dumpy monochrome. Only the wealthy will be permitted mix up their styles or eat food that isn’t soy paste: only they deserve true luxury.

If the first world redistributed its gains so that humanity could live decently, that would dramatically cut the standard of living of the former. And realistically, without a guarantee that they’d somehow retain their status on the other shore of history, they’d never agree to that absent the threat of some kind of revolutionary bloodbath.

With the lopsided nature of the modern security state, I’m not counting on getting my piece of John Mayer’s Rolex collection.

*The above thought-experiment is just a joke of course. In reality, it’s not just the super-rich who are the problem. We’re all invested in a system that tells you the only source of worth is a big paycheck and that the only way to feel better about not having one is to spend like you do. In such a system, going into debt is a moral failing. Unless we come up with another idea of human flourishing, we have nowhere to go.

Under this imagined sumptuary-law trade-off of austerity for survival, I wouldn’t relish giving up the stuff I like. But a devil’s bargain would at least be a new deal.