In last week’s post, I spoke about standardization as ubiquity- the notion that wealth is and ought to be freely available to everyone. The second dimension of standardization is the normalizationof luxury so that it ceases to lose its status as privileged or confined. Put another way, to standardize something is, in the main, to make it the same across the board for everyone. Thus, when it comes to the portrayal of opulence, ‘standardization’ describes the expectation– more than just hoping for or ambition towards- wealth amongst large chunks of the youth population. I sum all of this up in the term inevitability. It is the feeling that to be wealthy is not only possible but also, to use an oxymoron, contingently inevitable; the contingency lies in the fact that one must work ‘hard’, or ‘smart’ etc. Thereafter, the wealth will, must, has no choice but to be yours. This normalization of wealth signals an important and subtle shift: whereas wealth used to be a spectrum along which one could move up and down, it is now an object in and of itself. Hence it is possible to have your own reality show simply and exclusively because you have access to luxury (Think ‘Rich Kids[1]’ and publications like the Forbes Rich List[2]).
Another way to characterize this shift is to say that wealth as a social category has shifted from a means (say, to happiness) to bean end in and of itself. This plays itself out in novel and strange ways: in a clip, I was shown, a woman is approached by a stranger and offered hundreds of thousands of U.S. Dollars to sleep with a man she has never met before. When approached, she is walking with her husband. Upon hearing the offer, she initially refuses. Her husband, however, urges her to consider the drastic change in fortune that this could be for them, and the woman winds up accepting the offer without much qualm.
Now, to point at the many questionable- even abominable- moral and cultural transgressions in this scenario is not why I’m mentioning it; that is too easy and misses the ultimate point. I want to take it a step further. I am arguing that the very conditions under which such a proposal can even be thought of are such that wealth itself must be seen as a goal, the goal. It is the goal that supersedes that of the sanctity of marriage in this case. I don’t think it would be accurate or complete to simply diagnose this scenario as a symptom of increasing immorality. Man has done abominable things right through his history both from a cultural and a religious perspective. My point, instead, is that even those things which man does that are deplorable by any measure of his time indicate something about that culture, or shifts within or away from it. Nothing happens in a vacuum. What the aforementioned proposal reveals about our time, once we get over the moral repulsiveness, is precisely this shift in how we relate to wealth.
Thus far I have addressed the standardization of wealth in terms of a) its perceived availability and b) inevitability, that is, the expectation-not just hope- of its attainment. The third and final sense of standardization I want to tease out is that of uniformity. It is not only that wealth is portrayed as always available, and that it is (but not quite) inevitable, but also that it manifests in exactly the same form everywhere and for everyone. It has a seemingly uniform aesthetic so that an Instagram post of a multimillionaire’s mansion in Tokyo can hardly be distinguished from that posted by his counterpart in New York, Johannesburg, or in Abu Dhabi. Whereas up to the 19th Century a tycoon in China had a different dress sense and choice in a motor vehicle than one in Sao Paulo, today one would be hard-pressed to tell that they are from different regions. Again, I want to resist the low-hanging fruit- that their sameness is more a function of ‘globalization’ than anything else. No doubt the world has been compressed by the availability of the same products all over the globe, but that does not account for why one would choose a certain range or style over another. For that, we need to consider cultural hegemony (‘westernization’), the psychological tendency toward the exotic, the innate drive for belonging, and so on. But over and above those traditional factors, I am putting forward as a variable the deliberate and systematic homogenization of the look and feel and smell of luxury.
Now I must arrive at the normative or didactic value of the topic. Having addressed the ‘what’ (the three senses in which wealth is standardized), and hinted at the ‘how’ (the underlying and concurrent shift in how we relate to material abundance), I must address the ‘why’. This I will do in next week’s post.
[1] It is easy here to contend that fame because of riches is no new thing because, as we’ve seen on shows like MTV Cribs, famous people show off their assets all the time. But of course, this would be missing the point that this works only because the celebs are famous in the first place. The fame comes first, then the riches, then we are interested in seeing the riches. My argument here is that in recent times, the riches are precisely why the fame is acquired.
[2] The shift in how we relate to wealth (seeing it as an aspiration in and of itself as opposed to it being one aspect of the human experience) was evident even in the 1980s, when Forbes began publishing their list of ‘400 Richest Americans’. This gave way, in 1987, to the now staple Forbes Rich List. As financial journalists Peter Bernstein and Annalyn Swann note, the 400 list represents “a powerful argument- and sometimes a dream- about the social value of wealth in contemporary America”. Their formulation is instructive in that it points to what I am at pains to show in this article- namely, that wealth isn’t merely an avenue by which human beings can attain, maintain, and/or retain what they value, but that it now is a value, an end in and of itself.
Zama Moyo lives in Johannesburg. He completed his honours in international relations at Wits University. While busy with his honours, Zama was selected as an intern at the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA). He completed his MA in ideology and discourse analysis at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom. Zama has always loved words and penned a number of reflective essays on his personal blog Thought Box. He has also written on a broad range of issues related to current affairs. In 2013 he was selected as a finalist in the Global Human Rights Essay Contest which focused on ‘Human Rights Cities’. He is currently working on his doctoral thesis – On the intersection of ethics and public policy – at the University of Pretoria.
