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The Conservative Party's Age of Austerity seems to particularly chime as the nights draw in. We're running out of light and warmth - we're running out of money. Whether their message maintains its resonance come next Spring when the sky, far from having fallen upon our heads, is breaking in to blue and with it the promise of a brighter future, remains to be seen.
But for now it feels as if time is running out, and as my friend Michael and I walk down Islington's Upper Street, our talk is about money.
Who ever has enough of it? I certainly don't, neither does Michael. But if, I say, I did, I wouldn't necessarily give up work (although, granted, I might take a few more holidays), I would simply have the confidence to work better. I would take more risks, stretch my neck out further. Money would arm me against the consequences. Money would give me power.
But for now it feels as if time is running out, and as my friend Michael and I walk down Islington's Upper Street, our talk is about money.
Who ever has enough of it? I certainly don't, neither does Michael. But if, I say, I did, I wouldn't necessarily give up work (although, granted, I might take a few more holidays), I would simply have the confidence to work better. I would take more risks, stretch my neck out further. Money would arm me against the consequences. Money would give me power.
Power was everything to Friedrich Nietzsche; poor misunderstood, misrepresented Friedrich who rightly, in my view, identified it as a psychic charge that sparks our relationships with others, even with ourselves.
And little embodies that spark more in our society than money - each pound, each penny a small unit of power.
The need to keep a job, which confers security and status, promotes servility to those with the power to remove one from it. Even the most loving relationship risks imbalance if one earns, or spends, more than the other.
This is why Michael and I are anxious - not because we lust for more consumer durables... ok, we probably do, but this is not the source of our angst.
It is fear of losing power, to be forced in to increasing servility, to be less of who we can be, further from Friedrich's ideal of the Superman, a concept so hideously distorted by the Nazis but which embodied in his philosophy the human being unencumbered by powerlessness.
So Michael and I scrape and save and consider strategies and when it comes time to vote next Spring, if we vote at all, we will, I suppose, choose that party which, along with a host of other considerations no doubt, we think will most empower us.
Which, I suppose, brings spirituality back to the economy. But it has always been thus. I believe Jesus saw it clearly: his much-mocked reference to the meek inheriting the earth was not to make a fetish of weakness or poverty, rather in recognition of the manifestations of human power, and its limitations.
By explicitly rejecting these – monied wealth, displays of brute force – he sought to empower his followers with something greater, which he called the love of God.
Over the centuries Christians survived and largely succeeded, although they also suffered mightily.
No doubt about it – Michael and I want to keep our suffering to a minimum, yet as the rain comes and our wander reaches its end, we agree that we too must put our faith in a sense of something beyond the human, and beyond, therefore, pounds, shillings and pence, if indeed we aspire to become everything we can.
Michael’s new book, HOW TO BE AN ARTIST, is available at Amazon.
Categories:
worth
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prosperity
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time
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work
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