Where there's a will, there's a won't

Despite its centrality to their lives, people have difficulty understanding money.  Most seem to think they simply want more. For the truly impoverished this is perfectly right. But beyond a certain point - the yuppie level - the power and meaning of money shifts subtly. 

Money begins to scale.  Twice as much gives you the same real spending power because the value halves.  Similarly the perception threshold of money - the smallest sum which you are aware of as a conscious act of spending - rises in direct proportion to the amount of money you possess.  The widow's mite bites back.

This impotence has occurred throughout history.  Whenever a ruling class attains a critical level of material wealth, it loses the ability to appreciate absolute value.  The commonest response - a consequence of habit - is to seek ever more money in the mistaken belief that there is further threshold beyond which money regains its pristine power.  Hence the limitless rapacity of those already rich beyond most people's conception, and the larger urge to empire.  Ancient Rome, imperial Spain, and Victorian England all maintained its favoured classes in sybaritic luxury.  And in all of them, the result of this superfluity was first ennui, then a gradual slipping into excesses - usually sexual - followed by terminal decline and eclipse.

The most recent manifestation of this recurrent historical process is America.   The high level of material comfort has meant that for many people possession is but a signature on a credit card slip away.  Already the first two stages of ennui and excess have set in.

Americans are bored with the materialism they strive for so obsessively.  The foreign cars, large-screen colour TVs, jacuzzis and personal computers have become the basic starting point not the goal.  As a result, the nation is totally at the mercy of fads and crazes.  However absurd, novelty seems to offer the possibility of new satisfactions, though inevitably transitory ones.  For the same reason, Americans acquire fur-lined cars or inlay diamonds in their teeth.  They are all attempts to widen the boundary of acquisition.  It is the original frontier spirit driven mad by running out of frontiers. 

The group worst affected are the yuppies.  They have been brought up on the credo of wanting equals getting.  They are the conspicuous achievers; but the rose of their success is cankered.  They have not only attained the critical level of wealth where money loses its power and pleasure, they have achieved it young.  They have nowhere to go, and half a century in which to get there.

And so we are beginning to see the ultimate irony of a generation predicated upon desire and its fulfilment lose the ability to want.  Everything has been too easy.  It is like living in a cursed castle where every wish is granted: soon it is too much effort even to wish.  A generation which began as gilded youth has become gelded.  All we can do now is stand back and wait for the messy backlash.

(15.2.87)

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If I were a gnat

I sometimes wonder what it must be like to be a gnat.  Leaving aside the fact that as a gnat my brain would be too small to be able to answer the question, and assuming even more unreasonably that I knew what it felt like not to be a gnat and so could make comparisons, my main impression would presumably be like swimming in treacle.  For we tend to forget in such anthropomorphic fantasies that the world has a scale built into it, and that effectively the laws of physics would seem very different if we were a thousands times smaller – or bigger.

For example, ants are often cited as immensely strong for their size since they can lift many times their own weight.  Sometimes this is expressed in some such striking form as to say that if an ant were as big as a cow it could throw a combine harvester over its shoulder.  In fact it couldn’t, simply because its legs would buckle and break under the weight.  The strength of its body is defined by the material, and this does not change when you scale up the size.  So what is immensely strong when insect-small becomes as weak as any other organic material when the size of a human.

Another manifestation of this effect is to be found among the dinosaurs.  One reason why the very largest of them like the Brontosaurus are likely to have spent most of their time wallowing in shallow pools is that the stuff of their leg bones – which is the same in giant dinosaurs as it is in dainty gerbils – would probably have shattered under the immense pressure caused by propping up several dozen tons of Brontosaurus meat.  The animal simply would not have been viable without the auxiliary support obtained by partially floating in water.

The effects of scale can also be seen in much more homely surroundings.  When tiny children fall over with an apparently enormous impact, they often get up with almost no ill-effects.  Had an adult fallen in a similar way they might well have sustained serious damage.  In part this is due to the design of the child’s body: it is by nature very soft and supple, and the bones themselves are far less brittle.  But the scaling effect of physics also contributes: for children the impact is indeed less serious than for an adult simply because they are smaller.

Scaling can also be temporal.  Our personal sense is partly defined by the total time elapsed, or the total time remembered, which will obviously be less.  So, very roughly speaking, for a two-year-old child to wait six minutes is the equivalent of a twenty-year-old having to wait an hour.  Even though the scaling will not be exact, it does at least suggest why two-year-olds’ attention spans are so short.  Moreover, it also goes some way to explaining the converse slowing down of time for the old.  For an octogenarian an hour passing is like only fifteen minutes passing for a twenty-year-old, at least in terms of its relative weight in their life’s duration so far.

Thus whatever rulers and clocks try to tell us to the contrary, scales change.  We start near to the gnat, and finish near to the dinosaur.  Pity that in between we forget to make allowances for both.

(24.12.91)

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