Money will always be necessary. But as a measure of worth, it's extremely limited and highly corrupting – as Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists shows
There's something soul-destroying about trudging off to a "family" film at a cinema, with a chubby, trusting, hot little hand in yours, knowing that the movie your offspring is so keen to see will be a boring, cynical, expensive insult to your own intelligence, and also to that of your child. Conversely, it is a happy day indeed when the film in question is made by a trusted purveyor. This Easter, that purveyor was Aardman Animations, with its latest offering, The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists.
Pirates! had great jokes, our favourite being: "Blood Island. So called because it is in the shape of some blood." But, like any really good piece of children's entertainment, it offered a simple, bright and upbeat analysis of the complex adult world. For me, a satisfying film is a film that stays with you. If you find it hard to remember what you were doing last Thursday, and eventually dredge up the memory of a trip to the Odeon, then – however amiably it passed the time – the film you saw was culturally worthless. Pirates! is a keeper.
Its main protagonists are a nice but dim pirate captain, called Pirate Captain, who yearns to win Pirate of the Year by amassing a larger haul of ill-gotten booty than his peers – despite his piratical incompetence – plus Charles Darwin and Queen Victoria. I'm mildly embarrassed to admit that the trio prompted me to think again about neoliberalism, natural selection and inherited privilege. I might have been taking it all a little too seriously. Nevertheless, inspiration without perspiration is always welcome, in whatever bizarre, Plasticine vehicle it may journey to you in. That's what I'm telling myself, anyway.
The stoutest defenders of neoliberalism tend to argue that the strength of unfettered capitalism, red in tooth and claw, is that it recreates natural selection, by encouraging "the survival of the fittest". By "fittest", however, Darwin didn't mean "strongest" – he meant "the most fit for purpose", the best adapted to the immediate environment in which a living organism is required to exist. Introduce money into the equation – which only humans do – and the need to adapt to the immediate environment is obviated. What is human civilisation, really, but a concerted human effort to impose itself on to the environment, in a concerted refusal to let the environment impose itself on us?
Quite simply, the more money you have at your disposal, the more resources you can marshal precisely in order to manipulate the immediate environment to your own needs, rather than adapt to suit it. This is, of course, why the political right is so desperately keen to deny that human activity is behind global warming, and the environmental catastrophe it fosters. It's also why the wealthiest countries have the biggest carbon footprints. In that respect, all human civilisation is a band of pirates in a dangerous adventure with scientists, the most successful pirates being the ones least likely to heed the warnings of settled scientific conclusion.
Unfortunately, capitalism's boast – that it accords with human nature – is actually capitalism's problem: that it rewards the most rapacious aspects of human nature, at the expense of the natural world more generally. Most of capitalism's critics understand this, and find it mightily frustrating that the right carries on regardless with the pillaging. The real problem, however, is that as an alternative to capitalism, socialism is a turkey, far more concerned with equality of distribution of the spoils (or, at the very least, equality of opportunity to have a go at grabbing some) than it is with tackling human dependence on wealth. One could even argue that socialism is even more perverse than capitalism, nothing more or less than its dark and negative mirror. After all, it focuses as obsessively on lack of money, and denial of access to resources, as the system it opposes does on accumulation of money, and access to resources. Capitalism accentuates the positive – wealth. Socialism accentuates the negative – poverty. The supposedly opposing ideologies are merely opposite sides of the same coin. It's because wealth itself confers power that Marxism's logical, unpalatable, unworkable "solution" is redistribution by force – revolution.
Many an idealist has dreamed of humans returning to nature, living self-sufficiently, freeing themselves from the fetters of money, in a return to noble innocence. I'm with Joseph Conrad on this one, though: civilisation may not be all it's cracked up to be, but there's no going back. However, what all current politics lacks – even green politics, which is in all sorts of ways the most commonsense response to where we are as humans now – is a way forward.
The right remains obsessed with creating wealth, the left with redistributing it (though, obviously, redistribution is and will always remain an important aspect of civilised behaviour). The task of redefining wealth, with a view to diminishing the necessity of money itself, is a task that seems impossible. Yet it's no more impossible than the peacefully redistributive dreams of socialism.
"Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day," the old saying goes. "Give him a fishing rod, you feed him for a lifetime." These days, the left is up in arms if you suggest that a recipe for a pasty is more useful than the ability to purchase a pasty from Greggs without having to pay VAT on it. "Equality of opportunity" is really about maximising people's chances of competing in the jobs market, so that they can earn money to buy things, and thus transform their environment. Socialism is, in this crucial respect, just a sucker-punch feeder-system for capitalism.
What people really need is the ability to adapt to their environment, rather than be fobbed off with the promise that if they work hard, they can escape it. There is plenty of skill involved in accessing the many good things in life that are available for next to nothing – practical skills, creative skills, thinking, observing, seeking understanding for its own sake. Technology has the power to make the exploitation of such skills more achievable, not less. Humans need to start seeing money as the problem, not the solution. It will always be necessary. But as a measure of worth, as Pirate Captain learned, it's extremely limited and highly corrupting. Placing it at the centre of human existence is folly, and always has been. Though obviously, the cash expended on going to see an elaborate and expensive children's animation is an investment well worth making.