Doing business in the bedroom

The pervasive values of the market are corrupting not just politics and culture, but also our emotional lives

Madeleine Bunting
Friday October 8, 2004
The Guardian

Every age has its image of parenthood and I fear ours is of the parent, with mobile jammed to ear and child in hand, as they march down the street. How many times we have all been there, interrupted in an exchange with a child to attend to the constant urgency of the adult world. Love and intimacy, I once thought, were unchanging absolutes, innate to human nature, unvarying across cultures and ages. A ridiculously romantic notion, I now see: love, that most private of emotions, is as much moulded by economic, cultural and political forces as any other human interaction. From that point it's a short step to concluding that it is hard to imagine an age less conducive to intimacy than our own.

What we have overlooked is how the pervasive values of market capitalism are corrupting not just the public sphere - our politics and culture - but also the private sphere of our emotional lives, as Martin Jacques made clear on these pages recently. The anti-globalisation movement in the 90s rooted its analysis in how the nation state was being undermined. What it needs to do now is to bolt on to such thinking the way our personal emotions are being distorted to fit a culture in which the values of the market are paramount; perhaps the European Social Forum in London next week will open up this new front.

The distortion takes two paths. First, a marketised society offers its participants only two roles: as worker and as consumer. Value and status revolve entirely around these two identities; the market ideal is someone who works very hard and plays very hard. Working and consuming monopolises time, leaving less for activities that have no market price - being a loving parent, a good friend, caring for someone who is dying. Disciplining the diary may be a necessary act of resistance, but it is not always enough; the concept of "quality time" is a capitalist fraud to get us to work harder. Working and consuming crowd our emotional hard drive. There simply isn't the mental space for those twin qualities of heart and mind critical to intimacy: attention and presence. As we quicken our pace both of work and of consumption, we create lives of such busy-ness that we lose the capacity to listen (an activity which requires more energy than talking) and with that, we lose our chance of ever really knowing someone. When are we ever really present with someone, if our heads are full of what we are planning to buy, the next work assignment or the irritating boss?

The second prong of the assault is more pernicious - it's the enemy within. We have absorbed so deeply the logic of market capitalism that it has infected every form of human interaction; the language we use to describe intimacy says it all. We talk of "investing" in our relationships; we have transferred the language of business - our "partner" - to the bedroom. The model of contractualism, exchange and self-interest now applies to love with all the cynicism that entails: "What am I getting out of the relationship?" "I'm not getting my needs met". Our experience of sexuality is riddled with mutual instrumentality: using others as means to our own end - sexual pleasure. These are all signposts of a banality in our understanding of human interaction, with no access to our deep and inescapable interdependence from which so much true human satisfaction comes.

Until now, this shift in personal relationships has been the territory of the right, and they have applied to it their analysis of moral decline, and resentment against the social changes of the 60s: these, they argue, have contributed to the selfish individualism which is driving the phenomenon. To my mind, this is a dangerous misreading, and one to which Jacques fell victim. The contemporary preoccupation with self is not so much a reflection of the moral decadence of our age as a pitiful search for identity. Our obsessive self-referentialism, our quest for self-aggrandisement is a search for a sense of belonging, purpose and security in an age which offers none of these. Callow 16-year-olds with nothing inside their heads but how to be famous are not selfish, but simply looking to fulfil basic human needs in the only way that our culture indicates they can. Our predicament will not be corrected by a moral renaissance.

How we imagine and describe our intimate relationships spills over into the public sphere. The marketisation of private behaviour is legitimised by the market rhetoric of politicians, and vice versa. The modelling of all human behaviour on the contractualism and instrumentality of the market corrodes any politics of solidarity and citizenship. Yet New Labour has only reflected back to us our pessimistic, marketised perception of human relationships, and reinforced its cultural dominance by its policies and rhetoric.

At every point, it defends policies on the basis of economic merit rather than because they are just or conducive to human wellbeing. There are no higher values to appeal to in New Labour. The brutal instrumentality is most evident in the rhetoric on education and early years: children are an investment in our future pensions.

This may all sound relentlessly grim, but there are reasons to be cheerful. What too often gets overlooked are the many places of resistance - institutions of great inspiration and relationship which manage (just) to get beyond the contractualism of the market to offer unconditional service. I think of the Catholic hospice where my father died and the generous-hearted nurse who nursed him. I see everywhere the struggle of people holding on to their own sense of integrity and authenticity of relationship in a hostile culture; it's rarely reflected in the media and it has little public celebration or endorsement. We don't have language even to describe it to each other, so sceptical and cynical of human motivation have we become, but we all know it when we meet it and it is the greatest of riches. The nagging unanswered question in my mind is whether those places of resistance are the last pockets of rebellion soon to fall, or the beginning of the fight-back.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1322711,00.html