On the First Summery Saturday

This morning I stayed in bed for a long time. F. made breakfast and coffee, brought the paper, and then left for the gym. So I read the paper while through the open door the warmth of this first summery Saturday and the faint sounds of neighbors and their Saturday-morning rituals entered the bedroom. The paper unconsciously brought two opposed worldviews. The first in an article on Asia, claiming that the radical differences in income between the haves and have-nots were smothered by the joint feeling that anyone was better off than their parents. The second about Loïc Wacquant, a French sociologist who, complaining about neo-liberalism, claims that the “lower classes”, which he more or less equates with postcolonial immigrants, only have a choice between unemployment and third-rate jobs and thus turn to criminal, “alternative” economic circuits. What these so called lower classes thus seem to miss is that they too are considerably better off than their parents. There seems to be a yearning for a past in which job-security, solidarity, and good living standards were all the fad. This past, of course, never existed. In the real past the postcolonial immigrants who now live in the banlieus were suppressed by colonial powers or postcolonial dictators and had little to no means to get by—the reason why they emigrated in the first place. And the original lower classes, who now feel threatened by these immigrants, lived in crappy inner city warrens which have only in the 1980s and 1990s been demolished or restored (often, in the latter case, to become popular, thus expensive, urban areas. I should know, I live in one). And they worked in the jobs which are now considered ‘third-rate’. Okay, they weren’t flex-workers who can be ditched at a weeks notice, but on the other hand the working conditions were much worse than those in Europe today. All in all, also in the West, we are generally much better off than our parents. Both in economic terms and in terms of personal freedom.

This is not to say that I am in favor of hugely divergent incomes, either within a society or between different continents. I remember reading earlier this week about a manager cashing 69 million euros in options, which, however innovative or intelligent or economically valuable this man might be, is outrageous when compared to the income of the people who raise our kids or nurse us when we are old (who are arguably less “economically valuable” than the manager, but never 3000 times less so). All I’m saying is that we in the West should not be so insatiable. We’ve never had it better! So don’t complain, but keep up the good work and try to make it even better for our next generation, both here and in less developed countries. The world can be changed by positive action, not by sulking and clinging to a past that never even existed, by staying in bed… So I got up, bought a new frying pan for 50 euros to stimulate the economy and wrote this entry. Sure, its not much, but if I only succeeded in convincing you, the lone, unlikely reader of this banter, in not sulking for one day, well I did accomplish something. And I believe in chaos theory, so who knows where this ripple might lead to…