Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything (9 page)

The same museum also mounted a
Barbie™: The Fashion Experience
exhibit with the help of Mattel, Inc. In the museum’s press release, the Senior Vice President of Marketing was quoted as saying, “For five decades, Barbie has been a symbol of fashion, cultural relevance and aspiration… we are thrilled to bring the brand to The Children’s Museum…This one-of-a-kind interactive fashion and design exhibit allows Barbie fans to engage and experience the brand like never before.’”
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In the economic story, the artist moves from being considered a genius and prophet to being a small cog in the creative economy.
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Creative thinking becomes a “prized, profit-producing possession” for individuals, corporations, and countries.
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Artists become art entrepreneurs, and success as an artist starts to be defined by how well one’s art performs in the market. Artists were once supposed to look like they were above the market — driven to make art because they had to and not because they were trying to please buyers. Those who obviously catered to the market were thought to have compromised their artistic integrity; established British novelist Fay Weldon was criticized for promoting the products of Italian jewelry company Bulgari at least a dozen times in her novel,
The Bulgari Collection
, in return for payment.
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But in the economic story, successful artists aren’t above the market — they’re entrepreneurs and global celebrity brands whose art sells for millions. American artist Jeff Koons, known for his balloon animal sculptures exhibited around the world, is considered the successor of pop art icon Andy Warhol. Koons is said to view art in a capitalist culture as an inevitable commodity; he has industrialized his artistic process and employs over 120 people in West Chelsea, New York, to produce art that bears his name.
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He’s not the only one. Englishman Damien Hirst, considered to be one of the most marketing-savvy artists in the world, is known for work like
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living
— a 14-foot tiger shark preserved in formaldehyde, which sold for a reported $12 million.
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Hirst said, “Money complicates everything. I have a genuine belief that art is a more powerful currency than money — that’s the romantic feeling that an artist has. But you start to have this sneaking feeling that money is more powerful.”
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Japanese artist Takashi Murakami was commissioned by luxury-goods manufacturer Louis Vuitton to create manga- and anime-inspired art for use on the company’s leather goods, rugs, and plush toys. Murakami, who runs an art-making company outside of Tokyo, then created a series of paintings that featured the Vuitton logo and included an operating Vuitton boutique in his show that sold goods specifically produced for his exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. In an interview with contemporary art author Sarah Thornton, Vuitton’s fashion director, Marc Jacobs, explained, “It’s not a gift shop — it’s more like performance art…Witnessing what goes on in the boutique in the context of an art exhibition is as much an artwork as the art that went into the bags.” In other words, where art was once opposed to commerce, in the economic story, art
is
commerce — and commerce is art. For his part, Murakami said, “My concentration is how to survive long-term and how to join with the contemporary feeling. To focus on nothing besides profit is, by my values, evil. But I work by trial and error to be popular.”
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Admittedly, catering to the public makes it harder for artists and organizations to create and exhibit art that will challenge people and make them uncomfortable. But in the economic story, art isn’t meant to do that anyway. Arts organizations begin to focus not on the artist, but on what customers want or need. Cultural experiences become entertainment commodities that are exhibited based on their potential to make money.
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Successful creativity becomes creativity that attracts a large paying audience. The focus in art shifts from the creator to the consumer. If you as the art-buying public don’t like the art that’s in front of you, that’s the artist’s fault, not yours; the artist should have created something more appealing. In the economic story, artistic success is measured not by some aesthetic standard that involves educating the audience in how to experience and understand art, and not in terms of a piece’s contribution to the body of work that came before it, but only by the price the work receives in the market.

And that tentative line that once existed between art and commerce? In the economic story, that line is erased.

Instead of striking out on my own, I had conformed to a way of life and modes of thought that had often seemed alien. As a result, I found myself in a wasteland, an inauthentic existence, in which I struggled mightily but fruitlessly to do what I was told.

—KAREN ARMSTRONG

NOW THAT WE’VE SEEN how the economic story has spread, changing how we think about work, our relationships with others and the natural world, our community, our physical and spiritual health, our education, and our creativity, it’s easy to understand how our non-economic stories become smothered by the master story. A monoculture based on economic values and assumptions develops. As the years go by, we scarcely remember any other way to think, any other way to live. Other stories that represent other ways of thinking and being are lost to one ultimate value: whatever is economic.

As the monoculture aligns our experiences and expectations with the economic story, our life together becomes more at risk. Just as biodiversity embodies many forms of life and signals the health of our ecosystems, value diversity embodies many
ways
of life and signals the health of our social systems. When we lose value diversity, we lose our ability to express ourselves outside of the economic realm. We lose the “languages” we once spoke in distinct parts of our lives — the language of family and relationships, the language of the natural world, of art and spirituality, of health and education, of the public interest and the common good. We learn to substitute an economic language for all of it.

But language isn’t neutral. As we’ve seen in the last six chapters, using an economic language to tell all of our stories ultimately changes the meaning of the stories themselves. As language structures our thoughts and our thoughts structure our behavior, the monoculture begins to change the decisions we make and how we live.

When the story of education no longer tells us what it means to belong in society, to be a citizen, or how to participate with others in our life together, democracy dwindles. When the story of the common good becomes a story of economic development, the shared good that exists apart from economic development becomes hard to talk about. When the story of religion becomes a story about religious consumption and growth in market share, spirituality that exists outside of a marketing mentality fades. When the story of the creative arts becomes a story about what is economically successful, giving your art time to mature and creating without an intense focus on the market becomes naïve. When the story of work is about securing a moneyed future, following your passion becomes old-fashioned and ridiculous. When the story of your relationships is about out-performing and out-achieving others for a place at the table, our shared humanity is denied and we lose a place in the world where our acceptance and belonging isn’t based on performance.

As the monoculture grows, we also lose something beyond value diversity. We lose the creativity that exists beyond the market, outside the boundaries of the economic story. This kind of creativity isn’t just represented by artistic creativity — it also represents scientific creativity, relational creativity, spiritual creativity, and so on — the creativity that we can embody in all the different parts of our lives.

Imagine two circles that overlap a bit. One circle represents your creativity, and the other represents the economic story’s world of markets. The area where the circles overlap represents creativity that is financially successful in the world of markets. The economic story says the circles should overlap as much as possible — that creativity is about producing something someone will buy. In actuality, the circles never completely overlap, and in an economic monoculture, the creativity that exists independently of the market is never considered to be worth pursuing.

In an economic monoculture, playing with ideas or materials for the fun of it and taking creative risks in any sense becomes viewed as increasingly dangerous. The risk of inefficiency, waste and market failure — of playing in the creative area outside the overlap — becomes too much of a risk to take. Over time, what is deemed creative in every field comes to represent the overlap between the circles — the common denominator, something the largest possible audience can agree on and buy.

But history shows that significant creativity emerges out of a sense of play and often has no foreseeable market application. Richard Feynman, a renowned physicist, became a little disgusted by physics at one point in his career. He remembered that physics had once appealed to him because he had played with it, had done whatever interested and amused him regardless of whether or not what he was doing was even scientifically important. After realizing he was burned out, he decided to play with physics again for his own entertainment.

One day, Feynman was in the school cafeteria and saw someone fooling around, throwing a plate up in the air. He noticed that the plate wobbled on the way up, and that the school medallion marking the bottom of the plate was going around faster than the wobbling. He started figuring out equations of wobbles, for fun. A colleague acknowledged the equations were interesting but questioned their importance. Feynman snorted and said they were of no importance whatsoever, that he was working on them for the fun of it. Slowly, his enthusiasm for physics returned. He said, “It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.”
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It is this creativity that exists for itself, on its own terms, that is at risk in a monoculture. If the link between a creative idea and market success isn’t immediately obvious, as it very often isn’t (J.K. Rowling’s first
Harry Potter
novel was turned down by a dozen publishers), the monoculture rejects it. A kind of conformity takes over. A risk-averse, I’ll-do-what-worked-before mentality, or I’d-better-not-try-that-at-all attitude develops. Consequently, it becomes difficult to develop or find support for a creative idea or expression that is interesting, beautiful or elegant, if it does not also look like it will succeed in the market.

The kind of creativity that emerges from working on what interests you personally, regardless of what anyone else thinks about it, also requires an independent spirit. Joseph Campbell believed that if you follow your bliss, “you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living…follow your bliss and don’t be afraid,” he said, “and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.”
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But that independent spirit is hampered by the monoculture’s demands for conformity. When you conform to the monoculture’s version of who you are and what the world is like, you lose your freedom along with your ability to be truly innovative in terms of your own life. Being able to draw on many different stories, not just the economic one, allows you to creatively and authentically meet the challenges that face you in your life. The monoculture, determinedly single-minded, insists that economic values and assumptions can be used to solve your problems, whether those problems are spiritual, political, intellectual, or relational.

Those pressures to conform to the monoculture aren’t new. They are remarkably similar, in fact, to the pressures experienced by those who lived under communist rule in the ideologically-rigid society of Czechoslovakia, as described by Václav Havel, playwright and first President of the democratic Czech Republic.

In a society grown rigid with ideology, Havel said, you come to accept that you should live according to that society’s values and assumptions. If you were to refuse to conform, there could be trouble. You could be isolated, alienated, reproached for being idealistic, or scorned for not being a team player. You know what it is you are supposed to do, and you do it, not least to
show
that you’re doing it. You go along to get along, he said, and so you confirm to others that certain things in fact must be done if you are to get along in life. If you fail to act as you’re expected to, others will view your behavior as abnormal, think you arrogant for believing you’re above the rules, or assume you’ve dropped out of society. The society grown rigid with ideology gives you and everyone else the illusion that the way things are is the way things are meant to be; the story you hear is natural. It has been told and retold for years. Everyone tells it.
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In truth, Havel said, that story is not natural; there is an enormous gap between its aims and the aims of life. Whereas life moves toward plurality and diversity and the fulfillment of its own freedom, the system demands conformity, uniformity, and discipline. The system, Havel said, “is a world of appearances trying to pass for reality.” That world of appearances operates on a kind of automatic pilot, permeating and shaping the whole society. Though the world of appearances is partly stable, it’s also unstable because it’s built on appearances. Living within that world, you don’t have to believe in it, but you have to
act
as if you do to get along in life.

Sometimes the whole thing seems innocuous enough for you to shrug and say,
What’s wrong with going along with the world of appearances anyway?
You then accept the rules of the game, Havel said, become a player in the game, and so make the game possible in the first place. But that pattern of conformity also helps you hide from yourself that you are relating to the world through a rigid ideology, and the ideology creates the illusion that the way things are is a natural extension of the human order and the order of the universe. By accepting your life in the world of appearances, Havel said, you begin to “live within a lie.” That eventually leads to a profound crisis of human identity: you’re left with no sense of responsibility for anything more than your own survival in the system.
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If you try to live apart from that world of appearances, which Havel described as an attempt to live within the truth, “the bill is not long in coming,” he said. You may lose your position and your promotion, your salary and vacation. Those around you will wonder about you, “not out of their own convictions, but because they want to avoid contamination by association…”
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The cost of living apart from the world of appearances is high because your act has repercussions far beyond the act itself. When you break the rules of the world of appearances, you show it is possible to live within the truth instead of living within the lie. Nonconformity must therefore be snuffed out.

An example may help make the point clear. In Australia, as around the world, the economic story has been adopted in universities, to the dismay of many scholars. Researchers studying the working lives of Australian academics encouraged those scholars to make peace with these profound changes. The authors warned that critique, which has traditionally been central to the role of the academic, was in this case not a way to conserve or increase capital “in a changed game,” and that opposing the changes would have “little effect on how the game is played.” They said, “Undoubtedly there will be people not playing but they won’t be heard amongst the din…It is far more strategic to [compromise and] remain in the game” rather than “sideline themselves and their causes” and make themselves a target for those in power.
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One of the academics interviewed for the research said, “There was another guy who believed as I did over [an] issue…and in the end he resigned…But from his resignation I learnt that a stone can sink without a ripple. His letter of resignation never even made it to the table of the executive officer. And he disappeared without a trace. And that’s the option people who wish to remain pure and take principled positions have: to disappear without a trace.”

The researchers concluded that any discussion about the role of the market in higher education “needs to be clothed in the language of the market, language that has currency,” saying, “a clever sailor can set the sails in such a way as to use the wind to travel in any direction he/she chooses…that is the possibility and the challenge [we] must now grasp: to set the sails so as to ride the winds of the market in ways that enhance the very best of [our] work and…life.”
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Remember, the economic story says you are rational and will act in a way that maximizes your own best interests. As a rational individual, you will choose the course of action that allows you to reach your goals and
costs you the least of your resources to do it.
Because holding to your convictions can obviously
cost
you more than it would to say or do nothing (you too could sink without a ripple), in the economic story it is not in your best interests to hold to those convictions. Instead, it’s in your best interests to keep your head down, to not draw attention to yourself, to not rock the boat.

At the same time, taking a principled stand at key points in our lives is one of the most human things we can do, one of the things our humanity asks of us now and again. So while the decision to count the cost and choose not to pay it is entirely rational and justifiable in light of economic values and assumptions, that rationality is not the whole story. Oscar Wilde put it this way: “The fatal errors of life are not due to man’s being unreasonable: an unreasonable moment may be one’s finest moment. They are due to man’s being logical. There is a wide difference.”
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Life, in other words, no matter how you live it, exacts a toll. Living beyond the economic story is costly, but living within the economic story and the monoculture just costs us in another way. When what we once valued intrinsically — truth, beauty, goodness, justice — becomes just another means to an economic end, and we accept life within the monoculture, we are deprived of our higher-level human needs. When our higher-level needs are denied, we develop what psychologist Abraham Maslow called
metapathologies
: “sicknesses of the soul.”
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